WAR IN THE SHADOWS

RESISTANCE, DECEPTION AND BETRAYAL IN OCCUPIED FRANCE

PATRICK MARNHAM

Oneworld, 400pp, £20

Some 20 years ago, soon after publishing The Death of Jean Moulin, about the French Resistance hero, Patrick Marnham received an anonymous letter that set this hare running. The letter suggested that there was more to the story of Moulin’s death than met the eye. ‘It is an artful beginning worthy of Sherlock Holmes,’ wrote Roger Boyes

in the Times. ‘The letter writer, clearly English, elderly and with connections to the intelligence service, was a tease. Was it mere coincidence, he suggested, that Moulin was arrested by the Gestapo on the same day – June 21, 1943 – that Prosper, another Resistance network, the largest Special Operations Executive (SOE) collection of agents in France, was crushed by the Germans?’

This book is ‘full of underhand trickery’. The ultimate question the author asks is ‘did the British betray the French Resistance as part of a smoke-and-mirrors deception? Some Resistance veterans certainly thought so after the war, and Marnham, who has produced in every sense of the word an intriguing book, plays with the idea. He smells conspiracy where perhaps there is none. In the end he leaves it up to the reader to join the dots.’

Marnham is ‘painstakingly forensic in his search for the jewel’, wrote Allan Mallinson in the

Spectator, ‘and his pen is no less thrilling than that of Le Carré or Forsyth: “Bodington [a member of SOE’S F-section] terminated his trip to Paris at the first opportunity, leaving on the third night of the August moon…” This is a masterly analysis, impeccably presented.’