https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Mi...+warfare&psc=1

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton

A superb book on the history of SOE's sabotage campaign against the Nazis during WWII.

"She had been hired to work for a top-secret Whitehall department known as Section D. The "D" stood for destruction and Grand and his staff had been tasked with conceiving a wholly new form of warfare. In the event of conflict with Hitler's Nazis, a small band of specially trained agents was to be dropped behind enemy lines in order to engage in murder, sabotage and subversion."

The goal was to destroy the infrastructure that supported Hitler's war machine, and they did a superb job of it. A great narrative that integrates the value of detailed intelligence on targets that only human intelligence can provide; the story of technology development that enabled the sabotage at a strategic level; and the unparalleled value of highly fit, intelligent, and dedicated operators committed to the defeat of Hitler who knowingly volunteered for missions that were likely suicide missions.

Those in U.S. Special Forces, at least the older breed, will recognize that the SOE is clearly the father of many our tactics, techniques, and procedures when it comes to guerrilla warfare, subversion, and sabotage. They invented the Limpet mine (also used with great effect against factories, trains, etc.) and the shape charge, among others weapons still in use today.

Operations covered in detail include sabotaging Hitler's effort to obtain heavy water from Norway to develop the atomic bomb, the destruction of the Peugeot factory (and many other factories), destroying the rail and communications systems in France delaying the movement of a potentially decisive SS armor division to the beaches of Normandy for days, destroying the world's largest dry dock at St. Nazaire (which also neutralized Germany's largest battleship), and many more. The story of how the various weapons were developed is fascinating also, and how many of the weapons designed by Section D were also employed by British and U.S. conventional forces, and one firing device was used to solve the problem for detonating the second atom bomb dropped on Japan, while another weapons was employed by the U.S. navy to destroy several Japanese submarines.

In comparison to the British Bomber Command, the SOE effort proved to be much more efficacious. Gubbin was the key leader of the effort, and his saboteurs "crippled niney Nazi-run factories - factories essential to Hitler's war machine - and put them completely out of action 'with a total load of explosives that was less than that carried by one light bomber'."