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M.R.D. Foot

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Born: December 13 1919

Died: 1717 02 20122012

Michael Richard Daniell Foot, CBE, TD — known as M. R. D. Foot — was a British military historian and former British Army intelligence officer and special operations operative during World War II.

The son of a career soldier, Foot was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he became involved romantically with Iris Murdoch. He joined the British Army on the outbreak of World War II and was commissioned into a Royal Engineers searchlight battalion. In 1941 searchlight units transferred to the Royal Artillery. By 1942, he was serving at Combined Operations Headquarters, but wanting to see action he joined the SAS as an intelligence officer and was parachuted into France after D-Day. He was for a time a prisoner of war, and was severely injured during one of his attempts to escape. For his service with the French Resistance he was twice mentioned in despatches and awarded the Croix de Guerre. He ended the war as a major. After the war he remained in the Territorial Army, transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1950.

After the war Foot taught at Oxford University for eight years before becoming Professor of Modern History at Manchester University. His experiences during the war gave him a lifelong interest in the European resistance movements, intelligence matters and the experiences of prisoners of war. This led him to become the official historian of SOE, with privileged access to its records, allowing him to write some of the first, and still definitive, accounts of its wartime work, especially in France. Even so, SOE in France took four years to get clearance.

Foot left the Labour Party while his namesake Michael Foot — to whom he was very distantly related — was leading it, and joined the SDP .

Foot was the great-great-great-grandson of Benjamin Fayle who built Dorset's first railway, the Middlebere Plateway in 1806. Fayle was the great-great-grandson of William Edmunson, the First Irish Quaker.

He was at one time married to the British philosopher Philippa Foot , the granddaughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. Foot's second was wife was Elizabeth King, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In 1972 Foot married Mirjam Romme.

M.R.D. Foot was appointed a CBE in 2001. He also received the Territorial Decoration for Long Service in the Territorial Army.

See also his obituaries at:
1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu... accessed 26 May 2012.

2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/... accessed 26 May 2012.

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M.R.D. Foot

M.R.D. Foot

Books from M.R.D. Foot

SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944 (Government Official History Series)

Six Faces of Courage

MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939-1945

SOE in France

British Foreign Policy since 1898

Revolt to revolution: Studies in the 19th and 20th Century European Experience

The Historical Encyclopedia of World War II

The Fourth Dimension of Warfare: Volume I- Intelligence/Subversion/Resistance

Holland at War Against Hitler: Anglo-Dutch Relations 1940-1945

Report on Experience

Resistance

SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940-46

Secret Lives

SOE IN FRANCE: AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF THE BRITISH SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE IN FRANCE 1940-1944 History of the Second World War

The Gladstone Diaries Volume One: 1825-1832

S.O.E.: An outline history of the special operations executive 1940 - 46

The Gladstone Diaries Volume Two: 1833-1839

SOE: The Scientific Secrets

Memories of an SOE Historian

Secret Flotillas: Clandestine Sea Operations to Brittany, 1940-44