Monika Siedentopf Absprung über Feindesland. Agentinnen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Female Agents In World War II: Dramatic Careers In The Secret Service) Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, December 2006, 216 pp ISBN: 3-423-71187-6 Odette Churchill, Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan (nicknamed 'Bang Away Lulu' because of the vigour with which she attacked her Morse transmitter and whose misunderstanding of the technical term 'file a report' led to fatal consequences for her colleagues and herself) - have these and the other heroic women members of the French section of SOE during the war not now been sufficiently written about? The answer is an emphatic no, first because their nerve, guts and bravery can never be sufficiently celebrated, and secondly because more facts are still being discovered about them. But there is a third justification for the appearance of this particular book. Not only has it been published to acquaint a German audience with its subjects' activities, but it is also a superb example of condensation and compression - all the essential facts, exposures and discoveries summarised in no more than 178 vivid pages. To most readers under forty-five, in Britain as elsewhere, the past here described will be quite literally a different country. They will find it a fascinating one. The author's stated aim is to rescue her selected characters (some two dozen in all) from their role as romanticised film or fiction heroines. She shows them as widely varied in age, background and character, recruited haphazardly by personal connections and often unknown to each other. Subject to rigorous training and in constant danger in the field they all too often met with imprisonment and torture and, in many cases, a gruesome death. Their wartime exploits are inspiring. The sequel, onwards from 1945, is shameful, disgraced by backroom political intrigues, postwar diplomatic rivalries, distorted interpretations of so-called official secrets acts, and the difficulty of proving, according to law, the relative villainies of Nazi war criminals and collaborators on both sides. The SOE, and especially its French women's section, did not receive due acknowledgement - De Gaulle for one saw to that. And as for preposterous egotisms and power games, coupled with a number of heartless and cold-blooded betrayals only now being brought to light, Le Carré's fictions are amply supported by the factual revelations in this book. Siedentopf's study is an admirable achievement and an English translation as soon as possible after German publication would obviously make sense.