Remembrance Day II: Behind Enemy Lines

Behind Enemy Lines is the second book in the trilogy Remembrance Day and covers the period from September 1943 to March 1946. Now an SOE agent and a military intelligence officer, Duvalier is suddenly confronted with a terrible setback as his networks in the Low Countries are unravelled by German counterintelligence. As a result, under strict orders from the War Cabinet and his new Director at the SOE, Major General Gubbins, Duvalier is dropped over Belgium together with a fellow agent and radio operator, Keith Paisley, an important person in his future life. Both agents become first-hand witnesses to the round-up of SOE’s networks on the ground, but under dramatic circumstances they manage to set up a new, safer network under Duvalier’s command in Dutch Limburg, one free of Nazi infiltration.
The second book thus describes some of his resistance operations on the ground as well as the thorough preparations in September 1944 for the large Allied operation, Market Garden, in which he fights and almost dies, saved only in the nick of time by a Guardsman, Harry Simmonds. In the last phase of the war in Europe, in April 1945, Duvalier returns to the Netherlands to find out what actually happened to his first network, the one that had been rounded up. His investigation in the Netherlands, recently liberated, becomes a shocking eye-opener as he discovers the complexity of war, the politics and the betrayals, but also the unexpected help from a few former enemies, now captured. Eventually, against all odds, he locates a man, a Jewish concentration camp prisoner, who holds the most vital data he needs to ultimately tie up the loose ends and unravel the secrets that up till then had been nagging deeply at him.