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Hue returned to England in August 1944, and wrote several hundred pages of notes. At the end of August he was parachuted back to France and although the notes were typed they have not been published until now. Lieutenant-Colonel Hue, aged 80, did not feel able to publish this book himself and he was fortunate to have secured the help of Ewen Southby-Tailyour, himself a retired lieutenant-colonel of the Marines, the author of several books of military history. Professor M. R. D. Foot, the historian of SOE, has written a preface, not only because he approves of this account, but also because he was, as he puts it, on the edge of it, having, as an intelligence officer, aided the Resistance movement in Brittany and having organised air support for the battle of Saint-Marcel.
This book comes therefore under the best auspices. The story begins with the adventures of a 16-year-old boy who is a trainee purser on board a ship that is sunk, near La Rochelle, on 17 June 1940. His father, who died when he was 14, was French, but he was born in Swansea, his mother being English. She had gone to live in Le Havre, and in the autumn of 1940 he and his elder half-brother travelled from Marseilles to see her (a journey to Casablanca that had stirred the idea of travelling to Spain and thence to London and de Gaulle having failed). At Le Havre they were told that their mother had taken refuge in Guer to the north-west of Malestroit. While his half-brother found employment as an electrician and soon went to Paris, André Hue was forced to work in the forest, officially as a lumberjack. But nearly a year later, thanks to a recent friendship, he got a job working as an assistant to the German station-master in Guer. The line from this station supplied the German base at Co
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