No Small Achievement: Special Operations Executive and the Danish Resistance, 1940-1945 (review)

No Small Achievement is a one-volume English edition, a purported "condensation" of, a two volume study in Danish based upon only recently accessible (if partially vetted) SOE documentation from the Public Record Office in Kew. It also draws upon a literature of truly monumental proportions published in Denmark. While no exception can be taken to the tome's English syntax and prose style and the work is handsomely produced, the reader will be left irked and indeed baffled by its prolix recitation of the actions of an equally vast dramatis personae, a situation much exacerbated by the author's addiction to "quotitis," even in the abbreviated version of the book. (It actually weighs four lb.!)

Because the presentation of the material is so diffuse, it is virtually impossible to gain a clear understanding of the SOE's performance in a country that distinguished itself for a substantial period of time by official collaboration—theoretically a policy of "neutrality"—with the foreign, Nazi occupier, by widespread public inertia and only toward the end of the Second World War by a wave of popular resistance supported by weapons parachuted into Denmark by the RAF at the SOE's behest. While there were in fact from the very outset noteworthy instances of courageous behavior by the SOE's Danish agents in opposing the Germans—whether by means of straightforward sabotage, indirectly by the distribution of subversive propaganda tracts, or by preparing paramilitary forces in advance in order to forestall chaos and to seize power once the Allies had succeeded in beating Hitler elsewhere in Europe, the overall impression that arises is one of constant rivalry and infighting between a congeries of competing Danish factions. In London these factions included still active, if hobbled, army and navy officers living in exile from the homeland, a prewar domestic political establishment, and diverse groups of "normal" civilian residents.

This bizarre potpourri of resisters, evidently spiced by the proverbial Danish trait of obduracy, appears to have been particularly exasperating for the British officials entrusted with the task of attempting to control the Danes in the interest of the U.K.'s and the Allies' broader objectives, both military and postwar political. To be sure, the last of the SOE's "chief organisers" within Denmark, Ole Lipmann, was more successful than his predecessors although he too is depicted in a somewhat equivocal manner. Another crucial factor was nonbelligerent Sweden's toleration of extensive SOE plotting on its soil. While Jespersen does provide some explanatory information in several appendixes, it is of scant help in grasping the intricate web of events. Synopses of the careers and deeds of the more important personages and of the sequence of developments in Denmark would have served to prevent the obfuscation deriving from the unduly discursive textual account. For example, much is made of the "rising" of 29 August 1943, yet the Anglophone student of the SOE is left entirely in the dark about what actually occurred on that day. The fallacious presupposition seems to be that SOE cognoscenti, whether Danes or not, will know anyway. Parenthetically, it is striking that while there is frequent reference to the countermeasures of the Gestapo, there is but a single citation of a somewhat cryptic primary source in German plus one published work. Although the reviewer has not studied the work of the SOE in the Danish setting, he finds it hard to believe that there are not more German language data concerning the (for Danes) shameful Nazi interlude in the kingdom's history.

In sum, this fundamentally abstruse volume, which less sensitive non-Danes may perceive as a kind of ethnocentric apologia...