Mark Seaman - Saboteur: The Secret War of Tony Brooks, SOE’s Youngest Agent

The card issued to Antoine Brvin (Tony Brooks) by SNCF, the French national railway company, in January 1944; with this, he could buy train tickets at half price.

I first met Tony Brooks in 1983. At the time I was an historian at the Imperial War Museum and engaged on mounting an exhibition about European Resistance in the Second World War. Given that it was less than forty years since the end of the conflict, our team was able to draw on the support of many Resistance veterans, of whom Tony proved to be one of the most engaged, lending his time, his advice and an impressive collection of personal documents and artefacts for display. I held responsibility for the overall historical content of the exhibition, so in the light of this task initially knew Tony as but one of a constellation of heroes and heroines whose stories were featured in the displays.

The exhibition served as the catalyst that transformed an interest in the Resistance into a preoccupation. Following the conclusion of the project, I studied and wrote about the subject and enjoyed close contact with wartime veterans and, in particular, members of the British secret service that worked intimately with the Resistance the Special Operations Executive (SOE). On both a professional and social level I absorbed insights offered by the SOE alumni: the latter permitted my getting to know these remarkable men and women as people; the former translated into a major project to make the IWM a centre for the study and commemoration of their history. Tony Brooks was one of this group who befriended me and, after several years of weighing me up, one day he asked me to write his story.