Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War. With its original interpretation of a wealth of primary sources, it examines how these ordinary, law-abiding civilians were transformed into para-military secret agents, equipped with silent killing techniques and trained in unarmed combat. This fascinating, timely and engaging book is concerned with the ways in which the SOE veterans reconstruct their wartime experiences of recruitment, training, clandestine work and for some, their captivity, focusing specifically upon the significance of gender and their attempts to pass as French civilians.

Of the Allied generals who caught the headlines in the Middle East and Europe in WWII, two predominate - both achieved outstanding successes on the battlefield, both went out of their way to court the headlines and both made serious mistakes that attracted adverse publicity - their names were Bernard Montgomery and George S Patton, Jr - this book summarises and compares their lives and careers.

The German armoured divisions in the Second World War were the iron fist of the Blitzkrieg. Broken down by key battle or campaigns within each theatre of war, this book shows the strengths and organizational structures of the Third Reich's armoured forces campaign by campaign, building into a detailed compendium of information.With extensive organizational diagrams and full-colour campaign maps showing the disposition of units, this is an easy guide to the German panzer forces, their strengths during key campaigns and battles, and details of where they served throughout the war.

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 charing cross road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. In "Between silk and cyanide", his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents, who dropped into France including Violette Szabo and 'the White Rabbit', and why he wrote haunting verses including his "The Life that I have" poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself; and how and why he broke General de Gaulle's secret code. Both thrilling and Poignant, Marks' book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.