Flames in the Field, Rita Kramer
Flames in the Field, Rita Kramer
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
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Flames in the Field
The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France

Author: Rita Kramer

Narrator: Kate Reading

Unabridged: 12 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/04/2020

Synopsis

This is the true story of four brave women secretly sent into the darkness of Nazi-occupied France to carry out Winston Churchill’s plan to “set Europe ablaze.” Caught in a web of deception surrounding the preparations for the D-Day invasion, their mission ended in betrayal and sacrifice. An engrossing history based on firsthand interviews with agents of the Special Operations Executive and revelations about the secret organization and the courageous women who served it.There was the French working-class courier who helped downed pilots and escaped POWs on their way to freedom; the fashionable parisienne who returned thinking she could outwit the Gestapo; the upper-crust English member of the Auxiliary Transport Service who volunteered to join SOE because she loved France; and the Romanian Jewish refugee who told her mother, “If we don’t help ourselves, no one will help us,” and fell in love with the leader of her resistance group.Each of them, the men they worked with under cover of darkness, and the enigmatic woman who saw them off into the unknown, was a remarkable character, their stories told here in vivid detail for the first time.

About Rita Kramer

Rita Kramer is the author of Maria Montessori: A Biography, At Tender Age, Ed School Follies, and When Morning Comes. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, American Heritage, Commentary, the American Spectator, the Wilson Quarterly, City Journal, and other magazines and anthologies in the US and abroad. She lives in New York City.

About Kate Reading

Kate Reading, named an AudioFile Golden Voice, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks across many genres, over a thirty–year plus career and won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. Among other awards, she has been recognized as an AudioFile Magazine Voice of the Century, Narrator of the Year, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and winner of an Publisher’s Weekly’s Listen-Up Award. She records at her home studio, Madison Productions, Inc., in Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Phrodrick

Ms Rita Kramer’s Flames in the Field is a solid if occasionally stodgy history of England’s Secret Operations Executive (SOE) in World War II occupied France. The title is aptly taken from the technique of using fires to layout clandestine, nighttime landing fields for the insertion and removal of s......more

Goodreads review by James

While this has lots of fascinating information about SOE Operations in France in WW2 it needs a better editor. The nature of the story, primarily of the secret operations in German occupied France in 1943 and the SD penetration of the SOE network, is one of many parallel threads and the uncovering o......more

Goodreads review by Kathryn

Although the title suggests this to be the biography of four female agents of Special Operations Executive (the British WWII espionage organization), Kramer delves deeper into the subject and asks why these women -- along with many other SOE agents -- were captured by the Germans. "Flames" is the cu......more

Goodreads review by K. A.

By far the most professional and most thoroughly researched of all the books on the women of SOE's F section that I've read thus far. The writing was clear and engaging, and not in any way sensationalised, which I'm realising is a rare treat in books on this subject. The back half of the book that l......more

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