Eisenhower’s Guerrillas

In this work, Benjamin F. Jones, professor at Dakota State University in Madison, presents a detailed overview of the campaign code-named Jedburgh, led in occupied France in the months preceding the Normandy landings. The value of this work lies in the fact that it gives an insight into one of the Second World War’s least-known events. This operation, led by the Allied forces, aimed both to coordinate the actions of the French Resistance’s Maquis groups with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s plans, and to equip resistance fighters to enable them to pin down Axis forces far from the coast at the time of the Normandy landings. The author highlights the complex organisation of the coordination between British and American Special Forces and the French Resistance, alongside the political and military considerations that this entailed. Men from the British Special Operations Executive, the American Office of Strategic Services and the French Bureau central de renseignement et d’action de la France libre were parachuted behind German lines to carry out sabotage and guerrilla operations. In this sense, the Jedburgh commandos were the forerunners to today’s Special Forces. The author nevertheless demonstrates the tension between the different players. He writes that the French Resistance fought ‘with the Allies militarily but against them politically’, as it pursued its own French political goals. Indeed, the author demonstrates that ‘the French Résistance successfully achieved all its aims, often despite Britain and America’.

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