AMERY, Julian. Sons of the Eagle: A Study in Guerrilla War. London: Macmillan. 1948. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in gilt to the spine with Albanian eagle motif to front board, in the dust jacket. Map endpapers, frontispiece of the author, with three maps, two folding, plus numerous illustrations, all present. A very good book. The cloth clean and bright, the spine foot faded from exposure, the binding tight and very slightly rolled. Some light spots to the textblock edges, light offsetting to half-title and terminals, with ink ownership inscription of Scottish author, Bruce Marshall to map front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped (21s net), the spine slightly faded, with loss to foot. Corners and tips gently rubbed and toned.
A scarce volume being ‘a major treatise on the art of revolt and guerrilla war’, chronicling the author’s experiences while serving as a Special Operations Executive officer in Albania. Like his father—Leo Amery, close contemporary of Winston Churchill and Secretary of State for India during the War—Julian threw himself into the pantheon of conflict immediately after graduating from Balliol College, working as a War Correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. His magnetism for information caught the eye of the British government who installed him as their man in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia. On the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF but was soon transferred to the British Army. By the spring of 1940, he was thrust into the Special Operations Executive, entrusted by the Secret Service to prepare resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Albania to revolt. In 1944, he parachuted into Albania and reconvened with resistance group commanders as well as British SOE agents, David Smiley and Neil McLean (the three of them dubbed ‘The Musketeers’). Herein lies the contents, a detailed account of his guerrilla training and conditioning. He later operated in China before the end of the war, carving a long and illustrious career as a politician postwar. Amery was an interesting man beyond all this—he had a brief romantic relationship with Barbara Pym while an undergraduate; he married the daughter of Harold Macmillan; and he seldom accepted the existence of his brother, John Amery, the British fascist and Nazi collaborator who was hanged for high treason six months after the end of the war. Perhaps the leading account on SOE activities in Albania. The provenance here is an interesting one; Bruce Marshall was well in with SOE higher-ups, and though an amputated leg from wounds in the First World War prevented him from physical clandestine activity, he worked with the SOE behind the scenes first with the French resistance, and later in Austria. He also wrote the authoritative biography of the exploits of Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, the legendarily unbreakable SOE agent named by the Gestapo, and used as the title of Marshall’s book, ‘The White Rabbit’. Scarce.
AMERY, Julian. Sons of the Eagle: A Study in Guerrilla War. London: Macmillan. 1948. 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s red cloth lettered in gilt to the spine with Albanian eagle motif to front board, in the dust jacket. Map endpapers, frontispiece of the author, with three maps, two folding, plus numerous illustrations, all present. A very good book. The cloth clean and bright, the spine foot faded from exposure, the binding tight and very slightly rolled. Some light spots to the textblock edges, light offsetting to half-title and terminals, with ink ownership inscription of Scottish author, Bruce Marshall to map front endpaper. The dust jacket unclipped (21s net), the spine slightly faded, with loss to foot. Corners and tips gently rubbed and toned.
A scarce volume being ‘a major treatise on the art of revolt and guerrilla war’, chronicling the author’s experiences while serving as a Special Operations Executive officer in Albania. Like his father—Leo Amery, close contemporary of Winston Churchill and Secretary of State for India during the War—Julian threw himself into the pantheon of conflict immediately after graduating from Balliol College, working as a War Correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. His magnetism for information caught the eye of the British government who installed him as their man in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia. On the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF but was soon transferred to the British Army. By the spring of 1940, he was thrust into the Special Operations Executive, entrusted by the Secret Service to prepare resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Albania to revolt. In 1944, he parachuted into Albania and reconvened with resistance group commanders as well as British SOE agents, David Smiley and Neil McLean (the three of them dubbed ‘The Musketeers’). Herein lies the contents, a detailed account of his guerrilla training and conditioning. He later operated in China before the end of the war, carving a long and illustrious career as a politician postwar. Amery was an interesting man beyond all this—he had a brief romantic relationship with Barbara Pym while an undergraduate; he married the daughter of Harold Macmillan; and he seldom accepted the existence of his brother, John Amery, the British fascist and Nazi collaborator who was hanged for high treason six months after the end of the war. Perhaps the leading account on SOE activities in Albania. The provenance here is an interesting one; Bruce Marshall was well in with SOE higher-ups, and though an amputated leg from wounds in the First World War prevented him from physical clandestine activity, he worked with the SOE behind the scenes first with the French resistance, and later in Austria. He also wrote the authoritative biography of the exploits of Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, the legendarily unbreakable SOE agent named by the Gestapo, and used as the title of Marshall’s book, ‘The White Rabbit’. Scarce.
