Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation
4/5
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About this ebook
Published to rave reviews, this is the never-before-told story of two brilliant young Canadians who became unlikely soldiers. Ken Macalister was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Frank Pickersgill was a doctoral student in classics at l’Université de Paris. Together, they volunteered for the British SOE and soon found themselves being trained to kill. On June 15, 1943, with false identities, they parachuted into the Rhone Valley, but there were double agents within the Resistance; too soon Macalister and Pickersgill were captured, tortured and put on a train for Germany.
Vance has written a brilliant, heartbreaking book about heroism, betrayal and sacrifice, capturing the promise of a generation of young men who went to their deaths for a greater cause.
Jonathan Vance
JONATHAN F. VANCE is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture. His books include High Flight, Building Canada and Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, which won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the C. P. Stacey Award and the Dafoe Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail and a reviewer for The Beaver, Vance is on the advisory committee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He lives in London, Ontario.
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Reviews for Unlikely Soldiers
5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unlikely Soldiers, by Jonathan F. Vance, tells the true story of two Canadian men who, through extraordinary circumstance, become undercover agents in Britain's Special Operations Executive, a subversive unit working to infiltrate the Nazi regime in World War II. Unlikely Soldiers, though laden with facts and research, reads like a novel. The story is fascinating, and Vance proves without a doubt that these two men should be called Canadian heroes.