Tom Keene

They were Britain’s Second World War ‘Band of Brothers’, a secret army of fifty handpicked, cross-Channel raiders who carried the fight to the enemy shore long before D-Day. Created after the fall of Dunkirk, they commandeered a Brixham fishing boat and planned clandestine attacks on German warships in the Channel. But not all their enemies wore German uniform. Thwarted by rivals working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the unit sailed to West Africa where, as part of Special Operations Executive (SOE), they carried out an audacious top-secret raid on neutral shipping. Returning to Britain in triumph and feted now by Churchill himself, they expanded into the Small Scale Raiding Force. In almost twenty daring missions for Combined Operations, whilst operating from a secret manor house in Dorset, they raided German outposts, kidnapped sentries, ambushed patrols and shot prisoners, all the while sowing fear and havoc along the rim of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Britain’s Band of Brothers is their story of courage and comradeship, of patriotism, tragedy and dawn-cold courage, told here in full for the first time.