The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British secret service, formed in 1940 to encourage underground resistance to Hitler's Germany. This book, based on a mass of official and hitherto unavailable material, presented for the first time an account and analysis of SOE's work in France. Foot provides some background to the origins and nature of the SOE and describes the operations of agents who worked on French soil. He concentrates on the work of the 'independent French' section, though he also covers SOE's five other sections operating mainly in France. The six sections despatched over 1,800 clandestine agents who between them changed the course of the war. In chapters on strategy and politics Foot discusses the comparative value of SOE's effort and of more normal methods of war. As part of the HMSO History of the Second World War series, the text is highly authoritative and supported by plates and four coloured maps.