The story of the Special Forces in World War II has never fully been told before. Information about them began to be declassified only in the 1980s. Known as the Jedburghs, these Special Forces were selected from members of the British, American, and Free French armies to be dropped in teams of three deep behind German lines. There, in preparation for D-Day, they carried out what we now know as unconventional warfare: supporting the French Resistance in guerrilla attacks, supply-route disruption, and the harassment and obstruction of German reinforcements. Always, they operated against extraordinary odds. They had to be prepared to survive pitched battles with German troops and Gestapo manhunts for weeks and months while awaiting the arrival of Allied ground forces. They were, in short, heroes.

The Jedburghs finally tells their story and offers a new perspective on D-Day itself. Will Irwin has selected seven of the Jedburgh teams and told their stories as gripping personal narratives. He has gathered archival documents, diaries and correspondence, and interviewed Jed veterans and family members in order to present this portrait of their crucial role — a role recognized by Churchill and Eisenhower — in the struggle to liberate Europe in 1944-45.

This is narrative history at its most compelling; a vivid drama of the battle for France from deep behind enemy lines.

The operation known as “Market Garden”—made famous in the book and film A Bridge Too Far—was the largest airborne assault in history up to that time, a high-risk Allied invasion of enemy territory that has become a legend of World War II, even as it still invites criticism from historians. Now a thrilling and revelatory new book re-creates the operation as never before, revealing for the first time the full adventures of the bold “Jedburgh” paratroopers whose exploits were almost unimaginably risky and heroic.

Kicked off on September 17, 1944, Market Garden was intended to secure crucial bridges in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by a parachute assault conducted by three Allied airborne divisions. Capture of the bridges would allow a swift advance and crossing of the Rhine by British ground forces. Jedburgh teams—Allied Special Forces—were dropped into the Netherlands to train and use the Dutch resistance in support of the larger operation. Based on new firsthand testimony of survivors and declassified documents, Abundance of Valor concentrates on the three teams that operated farthest behind enemy lines, the nine men whose treacherous missions resulted in deaths, captures, and hair-breadth escapes.

Here in unprecedented detail are the heat and stench of fuel, oil, and sweat in the troop carriers going over, the remarkable (and misleading) initial success of the daylight parachute landings, and the deadly, brutally effective German response, particularly by crack SS armored units in the blood-soaked town of Arnhem. Abundance of Valor portrays with stunning verisimilitude the experiences of Lt. Harvey Allan Todd, who fought from a surrounded position against overwhelming numbers of the enemy before surviving capture, near-starvation, interrogation, and solitary confinement in German POW camps, and Maj. John “Pappy” Olmsted, who made a hazardous journey, in disguise, from safe house to safe house through enemy territory until finally reaching friendly lines.

With piercing criticism of the mission’s ultimate failure from faulty use of intelligence—and Field Marshall Montgomery’s distrust of the Dutch underground—Abundance of Valor is a brutally honest and truly inspiring account of fighting men in a noble cause who did their jobs with extraordinary honor and courage.
 


From the Hardcover edition.

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most pleasure loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights, feel that it can never be the same. -from The City That Was A hundred years ago, San Francisco was devastated by earthquake and fire, and immediately after, reporter Will Irwin of the New York Sun, and formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an elegy for that shattered city that is suddenly heartbreaking anew, as the United States as a nation comes to terms again with the loss of another fabled metropolis. Reprinted from the Sun, where it appeared on April 21, 1906, this unabashedly loving and tender essay celebrates the food, the fashion, the weather, the nightlife of the foggy city by the bay. But most poignantly, Irwin laments for the people for whom "hospitality was nearly a vice" and to whom the city itself "a gateway to adventure." In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans, this century-old essay is tragically fresh. American journalist WILL IRWIN (1873-1948) is also the author of The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant (1910).

"A compendium of tall tales, wild adventures, and satire, 'The Picaroons' follows the adventures of a band of down-and-outers in San Francisco. Staked by a sympathetic cockney restaurateur named Coffee John to the most meager of working capital, each adventurer sets out to make his fortune via a get-rich-quick scheme, each more audacious than the next."--B & N.