D-Day Girls

As Nazi Germany seemed unstoppable in 1942, Britain's Special Operations Executive broke with convention and recruited women to become spies and saboteurs behind enemy lines in France. D-Day Girls follows three of the thirty-nine who answered the call: Andrée Borrel, a streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo in pursuit; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married mother seeking a way out of domestic life; and Lise de Baissac, an unflappable aristocrat who became one of the network's key organizers.

Drawing on newly declassified files, diaries, and oral histories, Sarah Rose reconstructs how these women destroyed rail lines, ambushed German forces, and gathered the intelligence that helped make the D-Day invasion possible.