Rake's Progress
By Denis Rake (1968)
1. Winston Churchill set up the Special Operations Executive in 1940 to launch an onslaught of sabotage and spying activities in Nazi-occupied Europe. Since finding secret agents for these near-suicidal missions proved unsurprisingly difficult, SOE had to cast its net wide. In so doing it enlisted the former music-hall artiste and child circus performer Denis Rake, who was “scared to death” of loud bangs and refused to handle a gun yet emerged as one of the most “coldly courageous” of all SOE field officers. His account of his adventures in wartime France—hiding in the fusebox of an electric train, escaping from prison in a stinking garbage pail, living in domestic bliss, in Paris, with an aristocratic German officer—rarely falters. Facing imminent arrest by German troops, he tells of trying to flush incriminating papers down the lavatory; when that failed, he had to scoop them up “with a silent prayer” and eat them. Rake was, unusually for the time, openly gay. When a heavily perfumed fille de joie offered the war hero her services for free, he explained that neither she nor any woman was qualified to “console” him. After the war, when Rake could find no work, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. took him on as his butler-valet.
No Cloak, No Dagger
By Benjamin Cowburn (1960)
2. A burly engineer from the north of England, Benjamin Cowburn cut a conspicuous figure on his four SOE missions into wartime France. He took part in an astonishingly risky operation to exfiltrate a dangerous double agent—a notoriously sex-mad Frenchwoman—though all concerned knew the Germans were watching. Afterward, Cowburn gave his pursuers the slip during five nail-biting days and nights traveling the length of France. This exemplary agent (rated by the renowned spy Virginia Hall as SOE's best in France) is modest about his prowess. He's also candid—cursing himself as a “clumsy ass” over a slight mistake made as “zero hour” approached on one of his missions. Cowburn takes the reader with him through the night, past the patrols and, later, in a rare quiet moment, for a drink at the bar.
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