The Thorns of Memory

Peter Kemp is one of the 20th century's great adventurers. His business, since the 1930s, has been the wars of the world, his enemy communism. This is a comprehensive account of a life spent in the frontline of battle. His career began unfashionably with his enrolment in the ranks of Franco's Carlist forces in the Spanish Civil War; invalided out in 1938, he joined what was to become SOE at the beginning of World War II. After various hair-raising raids on the coast of northern France, he was dropped into Albania in 1943, briefed to organize resistance against the Germans. After the invasion of France in 1944, there was barely a corner of the world that Kemp did not visit for secret military operations - Poland, Thailand, Vietnam. He was a journalist in Hungary in 1956 and journalism took him at later dates to Indochina and Central America.