This gripping history details the remarkable exploits of a Commando and
Special Operations Executive operative during the Second World War. It
is a story of extreme courage and a revealing portrait of a man who
ultimately gave his life for the liberation of France. This is the first
time his story has been told in full.
Colin Ogden-Smith was among the first to volunteer for the newly created
Commandos. In 1942 he transferred to the SOE and joined the elite Small
Scale Raiding Force to carry out raids across the Channel. He
participated in Operation Branford, a raid to the island of Burhou,
just north of Alderney, on 7 September 1942, and then, later in the
year, Operation Basalt, a Commando attack on Sark.
With the approach of the D-Day landings, Ogden-Smith volunteered for a
new, clandestine group known as the Jedburghs - which represented the
first real cooperation in Europe between SOE and the Special Operations
branch of OSS. The Jedburghs were small teams of personnel from British,
American, French, Dutch and Belgian forces that were inserted into
Occupied Europe from June 1944 onwards to link up with the local
Resistance groups and conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the
Germans.
In July 1944, under the cover of his code-name Dorset, Major Colin
Ogden-Smith parachuted deep behind enemy lines as the leader of Team
Francis. Three weeks later he was dead, killed in action fighting
German troops alongside his French comrades so that others could make
their escape. Seventy years on, the French community still remembers the
gallant Major Anglais.
