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Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation

by Jonathan F. Vance

Unlikely Soldiers, by University of Western Ontario history professor Jonathan F. Vance, is the story of two young Canadians, Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, who perished in the Second World War as agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British spy service.

The SOE was tasked with organizing and equipping resistance members in occupied Europe. Macalister and Pickersgill were supposed to work with a resistance network in northern France, but just days after parachuting in, and before either could conduct any missions, they were captured and imprisoned, and were executed at Buchenwald 15 months later.

Unlikely Soldiers provides a succinct account of resistance activities in France, but it is more biographical than historical. Fully a third of the book is devoted to an extensive biography of the two men prior to their recruitment. References in the book are uneven, ranging from pedantic footnotes to great swaths of text that have no references at all. Further, the text includes incidents that have clearly been imagined by the author: “[General] Vanier, his mind far away, slowly put the notebook and pencil back in his pocket.…”

Macalister and Pickersgill are positioned in the book as heroes, prompting in this reader an unintended meditation on the nature of heroism. At the very least, the fact that both men were captured before they were able to employ their skills creates an enormous tension between the book’s content and its subtitle. If someone dies without achieving anything, what kind of hero are they?

The book is of less interest to a resistance or espionage specialist – or even a military history generalist – than to a biography lover who at least appreciates the flavour, if not the facts, of the lives of two martyrs to a just cause.

 

Reviewer: Michael Clark

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 288 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-0020-0735-5

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2009-1

Categories: History