Cassell Military Classics: The White Rabbit: The Secret Agent the Gestapo Could Not Crack

by Bruce Marshall

Book Overview

It became a bestseller, garnered sterling critical reviews, and inspired a film: this harrowing story of a captured British agent in World War Two, his refusal to crack under horrific torture, and his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B007245UXO
• ISBN13: 9780304356973
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Cassell
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Hard to put down

After a very slow and ponderous start, this book takes you in its grip and compels you to keep reading. Just as you can't help look as you pass a serious car accident, so you cannot help but read on through the horrific imagery of this book while your rational mind screams at you to put it down and walk away. That humans are capable of such cruelty and barbarism toward other humans is almost mind numbingly incomprehensible, yet Marshall lays it out for all to see through the eyes of a man that did whatever it took to survive and return home. I recommend this book to anybody who thinks that missing a bus, having an unwanted pickle in their burger, or getting luke-warm water at the restaurant is the end of the world. Through the depravity of war, this book has given me a new appreciation of how fortunate we are to even see the end of each day.

Almost Autobiographical

Tommy Yeo-Thomas fell out with Bruce Marshall. This book was based on Yeo-Thomas' own manuscript but loaded with Marshall's religious imagery. Later, long after Tommy's death another book was written "Bravest of the Brave" by Mark Seaman ISBN-13: 978-1854794109 Tommy entered the RAF - Polish Air Force "Krakowski" 306 Squadron and then joined SOE "RF" Section under De Gaulle and the Free French. When Jean Moulin was captured by Klaus Barbie, Yeo-Thomas - Le Lapin Blanc - Yeo-Thomas took over. It was he who saw Churchill personally to get him to supply arms to the Maquis. Captured in France he was tortured in Avenue Foch by the SD and sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp where 16 of his fellow officers were executed on meat hooks and cremated, including Captain Desmond Hubble RA captured on Operation Citronelle near Revin, in France. Tommy had recruited Hubble to SOE, and now he escaped from Buchenwald as a typhoid-ridden corpse bringing Hubble's chess-set as a memento for his dead friend's children. Tommy was in his 40s when all this took place and escaped Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a physical wreck living with the consequences until his early death in 1964. After a man has survived all this, how does he fit into a peacetime society with its strong desire to forget ?

True patriotism!

This is a thrilling account of one British officer's determination to survive and, even more, do everything possible to help win the war. The things this man experienced are almost incomprehensible, yet he endured it all with spirit and never let his fellow men down. It's one of the better-written post-war memoirs I've read, and one of the most enthralling.

Well worth reading...

When World War II began, Frederick Yeo-Thomas was running the Paris fashion house of Molyneux. At his age, he could have easily sat out the war, parachuting into occupied France as an agent of Britain's Special Operations Executive. He was one of Britain's most heroic secret agents, and played a major role in the growth of the French Resistance. He survived the war, but just barely.Readers of Leo Marks' "Between Silk and Cyanide" will recognize Yeo-Thomas...he was a man for whom Marks had intense admiration.The writing style of "White Rabbit" is craftsmanlike but not exceptional.

An incredible account of a soldiers perseverence.

This book reads stranger than any fiction I can recall. The events that take place for this covert operator in WWII france will make a man doubt his own ability to confront adversity of a similar kind and to indure torture and a certain expectation of a gruesome death. An Iron will, indomitable spirit and some good fortune add up to the survival of a man who was a member of the greatest covert organization to ever exist in the free world. I personally know the son of one of the characters in the book and after talking to him about his fathers comments on The White Rabbit I can reassure you that as amazing as this story is, it is true.