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The Wild Province Roderick Bailey (Jonathan Cape, £25)

"Set Europe ablaze" cried Churchill and thus the Special Operations Executive was born. Its mission: to cause as much havoc as possible in the territories occupied by Hitler. That meant the Balkans, where highly-trained operatives, inventive and destructive, landed to give support to the partisans in the region. What they found, particularly in Albania, was not much to their liking - they were "lazy, liars and thieves" wrote one British officer. "We hate the country and hate the people."

There was some justification for this, since the locals looted the bodies of British airmen whose planes had crashed. Bailey's book reveals a minefield of difficulties for the exotic raiders who made up the SOE, whose eccentricity matched their explosive power. Inevitably, this triggered reprisals from the Germans, who killed, burned and plundered with ruthlessness, raising a controversy today as challenging as the bombing campaigns over Europe.

A second controversy that Bailey raises is the use of weapons to seek political control of Albania after the Germans left - which brought Hoxha into power for the next two decades of savage communism. This is a valuable book on the bravery of the SOE in the "wildest province" and in resurrecting this half-forgotten terrain, Bailey has done great justice to the history of Britain's involvement in the Balkan battle against the Germans.

12:05pm Thursday 8th May 2008

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