View source for Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943 - 1945 by David Stafford

{{infobox1
|title=Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943 - 1945
|author=David Stafford
|reviewer=Richard T Watson
|genre=History
|rating=3.5
|buy=Maybe
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=978-0099531838
|pages=416
|publisher=Vintage Books
|date=March 2012
|summary=David Stafford's Mission Accomplished is a fair and official compilation of the efforts of the Special Operations Executive in wartime Italy, which describes successes without shying away from failures. It strives to present the bigger picture but isn't always successful.
|cover=0099531836
|aznuk=0099531836
|aznus=0099531836
}}
The work of the secret services is always going to be shady, dark and murky. Books like David Stafford's ''Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943 - 1945'' make an effort to shine a light on the shadows and bring the facts into view. Stafford's admirably honest introduction claims that he has 'done [his] best to ensure that what appears here is accurate and truthful', but reminds his reader that 'history is indeed intrinsically messy'; even more so when his sources were writing with secrecy in mind.

This is the story of Italy and the British Special Operations Executive (a sabotage and insurrection unit which grew out of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6), from September 1943 until June 1945. SOE's objective was to harass Nazi troops in occupied territories by inciting civilian populations against them.

Mussolini's Italy had joined Germany in the war during 1940, but fared badly and the king, Victor Emmanuel II, surrendered in September 1943. Italians loyal to their king over Mussolini switched sides, but found themselves living in German-occupied territory. Italy fractured like a chipped windscreen; political faultlines turned the country into a treacherous theatre of war where all combatants had half an eye on their own political positioning post-victory. Both the Allies and the Fascists used as agents Italians whose primary loyalty was primarily to themselves and their own nation. 

SOE worked with local partisan fighters to liberate Italy through a guerilla campaign of sabotage and resistance. Allied troops fought their way up from the south, assisted by the efforts of SOE and their trained agents, but always following the Allied grand strategy of detaining as many German troops as possible in Italy; SOE, as Stafford reminds his reader time and again, was caught between two conflicting (and mutually-exclusive) goals: getting the Germans out of Italy, and keeping the Germans in Italy. It's a complicated picture, and agents had to keep their wits about them.

David Stafford describes many characters of the conflict. One is Signor Almerigotti, appearing like a spider at the centre of a tangled web, striving to untangle it all and present a clear picture of Italy to his superiors. I like to imagine Stafford in much the same way; pulling the fragmented and isolated threads of Italy's intelligence war into some sort of coherent narrative, and offering it up to his reader.

Stafford covers SOE's mistakes as well as its successes (as he points out in the introduction), and doesn't give us a rosy picture of an organisation following a coherent strategy. Instead there's a process of organic evolution in response to circumstances like the weather, the strengths and weaknesses of soldiers and partisans, enemy activity, and a changing political landscape.

While his research is undeniably broad, in-depth and extensive, his success at presenting that narrative is more questionable. This is a history of broad strokes, which tends to skimp on detail. So, while it's full of colourful characters and their potted personal histories, there's very little on the actual nature of the missions in questions. It isn't until Chapter Four that Stafford gives his reader any detail about what a sabotage mission entails. Geographical information also tends to be presented in fairly general terms. Though there are a pair of maps at the start, the reader might be able to make greater sense of the story and gain a greater understanding of the bigger picture if there were more maps and more detail on them.

Where Stafford does succeed is in giving us vivid glimpses into the dangers of World War II espionage. ''Mission Accomplished'' is packed with the daring exploits of men dropped behind enemy lines on secret night-time flights, or from small boats where the crew hold their breath while rowing within metres of enemy patrols. Equally fraught with danger are the return trips back across the front lines. But putting those individual stories together into an overall story, trying to see how they fitted in with Allied strategy for the Mediterranean, is more difficult.

David Stafford has compiled the story of the SOE and Italy, and of documenting events that were crucial both to the war and to the redemption of Italy after Fascism. ''Mission Accomplished'' is a fair and honest account. But – as is the nature of war – it's hard to make out the overall picture and to place all of those events in their right context.

Stafford's extensive and comprehensive notes give plenty of reading suggestions.  The Bookbag has also reviewed Matthew Cobb's [[The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis by Matthew Cobb|The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis]], which gives an account of the resistance movement in occupied France. 

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