Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Abundance of Valor: Resistance, Survival, and Liberation: 1944-45

By Will Irwin

A thoroughly enthralling book for serious students of World War II, this is the labor of love of a Special Forces veteran with a rare talent for writing and research. He tells the story of the handful of small Jedburgh Teams dropped into the Netherlands to lead local resistance groups in offensive action. They immediately got sucked into the disastrous failure of Operation Market Garden, better known as the Arnhem operation (see Cornelius Ryan's classic A Bridge Too Far, 1974). After that mismanaged affair crumbled, they faced survival against long odds in the ranks of the hard-pressed Dutch Resistance, death at the hands of the still resilient German occupation troops, and in one case survival by a hair's breadth as a POW endured not only confinement but also grueling marches from east to west ahead of the advancing Russians. For exhaustive studies of little-known episodes that add much to general WWII knowledge as well as provide enthralling reading, this book is hard to beat.

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