Customer Reviews

CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE (Pen & Sword Military Classics)

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I first read a "children's" edition of this when I was about 11, and was so taken by it that for years I searched for an unabridged version. Sadly, it was out of print for years; now Pen and Sword Military Classics have published the unabridged version, and it was well worth the (decades-long) wait.
Violette Szabo, French-born of British and French parents, and living in London during WWII, joined the SOE (Special Operations Executive) in 1943, after the death of her French Foreign Legion husband and the birth of their daughter. She underwent rigorous secret agent training and was eventually sent into France in support of various French Resistance groups. Her second operation saw her parachuted into Limoges on June 7th, 1944 (D-Day +1), where she was to co-ordinate various Resistance work in the area.
Szabo and her Resistance liaison were ambushed and she was eventually captured, although not until she had secured the escape of the Resistance liaison. She was initially interrogated in Limoges, and was then sent to Gestapo HQ in Paris for further interrogation and torture. From Paris, Szabo was sent to Ravensbruck, where she and several other English spies were eventually executed, possibly to avoid the prospect of these women implicating the Ravensbruck command structure in systematic torture of prisoners. Szabo was twenty-three at the time of her death. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre.
Notwithstanding the somewhat more formal biographical style of the 1950's, R.J. Minney reconstructs and recreates with elan the short and intense life of Violette Szabo. This is an extraordinary tale of courage and deserves to be widely read.