Why, during the Second World War, did Britain arm communist guerrillas in occupied Albania so extensively, helping condemn that country to half a century of communist rule? Had colleagues of the Cambridge spies led Churchill and British policy astray, by penetrating the headquarters of Britain's Special Operations Executive, the secret organisation tasked with encouraging resistance behind enemy lines? These questions are at the heart of one of the most emotive and conspiracy-laden debates to surround SOE's wartime record. Drawing on recently declassified files, the recollections of protagonists and other hitherto untapped sources, The Wildest Province provides the answers. By 1944 the Balkans had become a major SOE theatre, with dozens of small teams of elite British soldiers dispatched to support local guerrillas against occupying Axis troops. Everywhere these teams found their job to be far more complex than they had expected. Many guerrillas, their eyes fixed on securing post-war political power, preferred killing each other to killing Germans. In Albania victory went to the communist Enver Hoxha, the former schoolteacher who had commanded the Albanian partisans throughout the war. Why had the British backed Hoxha? Was it, as several veterans asserted, because communist moles were at work at SOE headquarters? In this groundbreaking account, Roderick Bailey draws on interviews, personal diaries, private memoirs and declassified records to give the fullest story yet of one of SOE's most remarkable campaigns. Missions sent to Albania suffered appalling casualties.

The survivors endured extreme conditions, plagued by lice and frostbite, under constant threat of capture and death. Bailey looks in detail at the experiences not only of men like Julian Amery, the future MP and Minister, who wrote famous accounts of the campaign, but also of other SOE officers, like the actor Anthony Quayle, whose extraordinary stories have gone untold. And by shedding light on what was going on at headquarters, Bailey settles once.