There are at least two Britains. One is cricket and public schools and the old boys network. The other are hard bastards who ruled the world through merciless force applied to vulnerable places: knives in kidneys, windpipe strikes, kicking them while they're down. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is about the latter Britain, an oddly balanced account of the Special Operations Executive during World War 2.

Milton makes his protagonists come alive, particularly Colin Gubbins, with his faith that a good saboteur could do more destruction in a single strike than a fortnight of bombing raids. Gubbins organized a secret army that blended the bored children of the nobility with street toughs and patriotic exiles from occupied Europe. They truly did set Europe ablaze!

Milton has a breezy and delightful narrative style, which comes through strongest on the accounts of the great raids: destroying the docks at St. Nazaire, the attack on the Norwegian heavy water plant vital to the Nazi A-bomb, and my new favorite, Operation Postmaster, a piratical cutting-out operation against a spy ship near the African Island of Fernando Po. Milton also has a love of the back office, and the madcap inventors who designed limpet mines, sticky bombs, precision time fuses, and all sorts of specialized Q-branch sabotage devices. I have to give credit to a ploy to replace the lubricant on an SS division's tank transporter rail cars with carborundum right before D-Day as an exceptional use of applied science.

This is a popular history, not a comprehensive work, but it's delightfully written and a worthy addition to anyone's library of dirty tricks. And for disclosure, I won this book in a Goodreads contest.