The Wildest Province
  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446499542
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
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The Wildest Province

SOE in the Land of the Eagle

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EBook
31 Oct 2011
Paperback
15 Mar 2009
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The full story of Britain's Special Operations Executive in Albania and the extraordinary challenges and conditions they faced.

In 1943, small teams of elite British soldiers began parachuting into the mountains of Axis-occupied Albania. They were members of Britain's Special Operations Executive, and their task was to find and arm bands of local guerillas and harass the Axis as best they could. None had been to Albania before, or knew what awaited them.

Trying to survive in extreme conditions and formidable terrain, these young Britons lived in constant danger of capture and death, and were plagued by illness, lice and frostbite. Casualties were appalling and most guerillas keener to kill each other than fight Italians and Germans. In his extraordinary new book, Roderick Bailey draws on interviews with survivors, long-hidden diaries and recently declassified files to tell the full story of this remarkable corner of SOE history and finally settle the question of whether or not British communists in SOE, perhaps even colleagues of the Cambridge spies, had conspired to betray British interests.
  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446499542
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Roderick Bailey

Born in 1974, Roderick Bailey is a graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and a former Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. His PhD looked at SOE operations in the occupied Balkans and in 2003 he was appointed to run a major project to acquire new material for the Imperial War Museum's SOE collections. He is the author of The Wildest Province: SOE in the land of The Eagle, Forgotten Voices of D-Day and Forgotten Voices of the Secret War.

Also by Roderick Bailey

Forgotten Voices of the Victoria Cross
Forgotten Voices of D-Day
Forgotten Voices of the Secret War
See all

Praise for The Wildest Province

[Bailey's] accomplished account makes grim reading

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

A tremendous work of scholarship

Daily Telegraph

A tribute to average men with the guts to be extraordinary... The author's research is monumental

Sunday Express

An admirable work of erudition

Scotland on Sunday

Authoritative... More than a decade's study and an impressive range of archival and oral sources has allowed him to weave a complex but engrossing story

Times Literary Supplement

Beautifully written and impeccably researched... a compelling work and by far the most comprehensive yet undertaken on the subject...The Wildest Province is a must-have acquisition for anyone remotely interested in the region, the war, its politics or the experiences of the men who fought there. I devoured the book quickly

The Times

Reminiscent of John Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps... Extreme stuff

Daily Mail

Thanks to the excellent investigative work of Roderick Bailey we now have this gripping account of the British soldiers who fought with the partisans in occupied Albania... tells in pacy details the considerable hardships in their struggle to survive... this is an unknown but important chapter in war history, which has now found a fine chronicler'

Denis MacShane (Minister for the Balkans 2001-2005), Financial Times

This is a gripping account of two wars...a rich and rounded account...he has mastered a mass of complex material, and analysed it with great clarity and fairness...it is hard to imagine the task being done better than this... History more breathtaking than any thriller

Sunday Telegraph

What makes Bailey's book so readable is not only his grasp of strategy but his hold on tactics and personalities.... The Wildest Province...establishes him as a modern historian of great skill... Anyone interested in human nature under stress, or problems of counter-insurgency, or sheer adventure, will read it with profit

Literary Review