A Schoolmaster's War
Harry Ree - A British Agent in the French Resistance
Edited by Jonathan Ree
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Price: $22.00
May 8, 2020
192 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
24 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300245660
Hardcover
A school teacher at the start of the war, Harry Rée renounced his former pacifism with the fall of France in 1940. He was deployed into a secret branch of the British army and parachuted into central France in April 1943.
Harry showed a particular talent for winning the confidence of local resisters, and guided them in a series of dramatic sabotage operations, before getting into a hand-to-hand fight with an armed German officer, from which he was lucky to escape.
This might seem like a romantic story of heroism and derring-do, but Harry Rée's own war writings, superbly edited and contextualized by his son, the philosopher Jonathan Rée, are far more nuanced, shot through with doubts, regrets, and grief.
“Harry Rée, teacher, pacifist, defender of liberty, was a great man, dear to his family and friends, a hugely respected educationist, and a quiet hero. This important book is long overdue. Read it and be inspired by a life well and bravely lived.”—Michael Morpurgo
“This is the real thing. As an account The Schoolmaster’s War scores highly in terms of detail and reliability. It lacks any sense of myth making, concealment or boasting — qualities quite common in many SOE memoirs.”—Sebastian Faulks
“A beautiful collection of writings by schoolmaster-turned-secret agent Harry Rée … Memoirs, postwar broadcasts and letters from French comrades combine to paint a picture of everyday heroism, treachery and tragedy.”—Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance
“Anyone interested in occupied France or British special operations during the Second World War needs to read this book … Rée emerges as a man who acted as though he was a character in a story by G.A. Henty but thought and wrote as though he was a character in a novel by Iris Murdoch.”—Richard Vinen, author of The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation
