Sarah Rose (1)

This is a very readable history of the women who were recruited into the Firm, the name attached to Churchill's Special Operations Executive,and the training they went through before being dropped into France by parachute, boat or plane. Their role was to organize an underground resistance to the Germans by training French men & women in weapons use, sabotage, radio and signaling skills and how to keep themselves and their activities secrete from the Nazis and the Vichy French.

Many of these agents were arrested and tortured with some being turned by the Gestapo to be counter agents for the Nazis. This in turn led to many other agents being arrested to the point in1943 that the Resistance structure was almost completely wiped out. Only the persistence and clever efforts of some of the women kept the movement viable. General Eisenhower acknowledged that their efforts probably was the equivalent of 15 Divisions and shorten the war by six months.

All the incidents covered in this book have been verified by research in available documents.… (mehr)

I think I appreciate the idea of this book more than the book itself. It sells pretty hard on the title, but it just didn't hit the mark.

I think it would have benefitted from a bit of a narrative to pull us through the stories of the women. It kind of jumped from woman to woman abruptly, and bounced back and forth between them. It lacked depth, not only in the impact these women had but also in the women themselves. It didn't really dive into these women as individuals, so I never felt connected with them or their stories. As opposed to Radium Girls, where I felt connected and sympathetic to the women of that story, and I was eager to keep reading to find out what they went through and how it affected the nation. I finished Radium Girls feeling satisfied. I finished D-Day Girls wishing I had read a more detailed and researched book.

Also, the audiobook was narrated by the author, and it wasn't great. At times I was very distracted by hearing her breaths before each line.… (mehr)