Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy for review.

This was such an enjoyable and informative read about a part of WW2 that is honestly, vastly overlooked when one talks or reads about the war. I was completely enthralled by the story of Lees, Farran and their motley crew of Italian partisans, and the wide variety of people that joined their fight in the Italian mountains. I didn't realize just how much guerilla warfare took place during WW2 but there was quite a bit. By the time we start this part of the war Lees and Farran had both amassed a slew of hit-and-run operations at quite young ages. That was another, slightly mind blowing fact, most of these guys had huge reputations at the ages of 20 to 25 years old.

I really enjoyed the way Lewis set out the story as well. It honestly read more like a story than just straight out facts with dry statistics. You really feel yourself pulled into what these guys were going through. I for one, am definitely intrigued and will be checking out a few of the books mentioned in the bibliography that go into more detail of each of these individuals wartime lives.

Thanks Net Galley

It must kill the Brits to read of what they once were but that may apply to all of us?

Still, I love these stories because men were just different back then, and so were the countries they came from.

Fantastic job

CHURCHILL'S HELLRAISERS is a very apt title for this fascinating book on a little-known aspect of WWII in Europe - - - the actions of fearless volunteers and brave resistance fighters to cause chaos behind the German battle lines. This book focuses on a few key members of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which Churchill and the military leaders would sometimes refer to as the "Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare." This group of special British Army volunteers were placed in dangerous positions behind enemy lines in the European theater, and their job was to hook up with local resistance fighters against the Nazis. Working together, their job was to provide vital tactical information of enemy positions and movements, as well as to blow up lines of communication and transport --- and generally to cause as much damage, chaos and misinformation as possible to cause the enemy to retreat and to give up their strategic positions as the Allies advanced further into the European continent.

Damien Lewis is an acknowledged expert on World War II in Europe, and has done a masterful job in gathering information on this top secret group of men - and women - who daily risked their lives to help save even more Allied lives as they fought through Italy and France on their way to Germany. By the very nature of their secret work, and the fact that there are very few living survivors of these operations, Lewis has done a masterful job of placing the reader in the heat of the action. As I read this book, I felt myself caught up in the tension and stress of what the formidable odds that these brave fighters regularly faced, and came away with much gratitude and pride in the sacrifices made by these people 70 years ago to keep the Western world free. For anyone interested in military history, and for new insights into an aspect of the War in Europe that has been rarely addressed, this book will be an eye-opener and a treasured history. Most highly recommended!

I was pleased to receive an advance copy of "Churchill's Hellraisers", by Damien Lewis, for review purposes. It is being published under the Citadel Press imprint. The book is narrative history and reads like a somewhat disorganized novel. It eventually focuses on a singular raid on a German headquarters in 1945. This raid is used to examine the ways in which SOE and SAS interacted with Italian resistance movements in the last months of World War II. Anyone familiar with the many factions that emerged in Italy as fascism collapsed can well imagine the challenges this posed to Allied units dedicated to promoting and coordinating resistance to the German occupation. It is a story marked by courage, a failure of command and control, and in some sense betrayal. Several of the leading characters in the tale were later discarded and disavowed for their apparent eagerness to lead partisans into combat against their occupiers. The colorful cast of characters include British operatives cut from the same cloth as people like Orde Wingate, Chinese Gordon and Lawrence of Arabia. Unfortunately, like their predecessors, they did not play well with others. The very characteristics that made them effective in the pressure cooker of partisan warfare kept them from functioning as the sort of paper pushing colorless men who actually ran the large military and political organizations which threw them under the bus whenever the political winds shifted and then worked hard to neutralize their effectiveness. The book is longer than it needed to be, and the first half lacks focus, seeming to meander in a disjointed fashion until the central event, the attack on a German headquarters near the end of the war is finally set up. The author, at one point, seems to admire Mark Clark, and this alone gave me pause as to the depth of his understanding of events on the Italian front, but he quickly returns to his tale. If you want to read a rousing description of partisan warfare (more tactical and operational than strategic) on the Italian front, this book offers many useful insights once you get into it.