D-Day Girls - Saboteurs, Spies, Resistance Fighters: the true story of Churchill's secret women agents

1942. The Allies are losing the war; Germany seems invincible. Churchill, convinced that Great Britain faces an existential threat, creates a secret agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose agents are trained in every kind of technique, from sabotage to precision shooting. Their mission: to "set Europe ablaze". With most men on the front lines, the SOE embarks on something unprecedented: it recruits women. Thirty-nine women answer the call, leaving their lives and families behind to become saboteurs in France. One in two will be captured; one in three will not return.

American journalist Sarah Rose draws on archival documents, personal diaries and testimonies to tell the story of three of these women. Odette Sansom, a young mother who sees the war as a means of escape from a suffocating domestic life; Lise de Baissac, an unflappable aristocrat and natural leader; and Andrée Borrel, who organises the Parisian Resistance through her streetwise instincts. They will derail trains, set up weapons caches, destroy telephone lines, sabotage high-voltage power lines and gather crucial intelligence to carry out the SOE's most important mission: preparing the operation that would decisively tip the balance of the war – the Normandy Landings.

Elegantly written and rigorously documented, this account of British women agents in France is above all a portrait of female figures prepared to sacrifice everything to fight a destructive ideology – three models of courage, selflessness and tenacity.