Author Event - Kate Vigurs Talk & Signing
Mission France
Venue: The Collection Auditorium
Ticket Prices: Standard: £7 Single including book: £24 Couple including book: £27
Date: Wednesday 28 July 2021
Time: 7pm (doors open at 6.30pm)
A pre-event bar will be available.
Kate Vigurs joins us to talk about and sign copies of her new military title, Mission France, The True History of the Women of SOE.
This is the full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France, revealing for the first time how their fates contrasted and intertwined. Ordered by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’, the Special Operations Executive formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance and to link up with resistance movements – primarily the French Resistance – in the fight against the Axis powers in occupied countries. The organisation’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. While the achievements of some female agents are now widely recognised, all these brave women are worthy of our attention. Tracing their journeys from early recruitment to work undertaken in the field to evading the Gestapo, Vigurs shows just how greatly missions varied. Some agents were adept at parachuting, others at shooting. Some missions lasted for years, others less than a few hours. Some agents survived; others were murdered. Placing the women in the context of their work with the SOE and the wider war, Vigurs reveals their differences in abilities and attitudes, while showing how they nonetheless shared a common mission.
Dr Kate Vigurs is a freelance historian, academic advisor and consultant. She regularly appears on TV and radio, gives lectures and talks, works as a tour guide on the Western Front battlefields, Berlin and Krakow/Auschwitz and runs the historical interpretation company ‘History’s Maid.’