Book Review: X Troop (2021). Leah Garrett.

This is another story from the endless byways of World War II, and the many different individual and collective experiences of it.  Garrett’s book reveals the existence of a small but highly effective and lethal unit of Jewish commandos in the British army in World War II, made up exclusively of young refugees from Europe.  

I was expecting that this book might be a real-life “Inglorious Basterds” story, and there were elements of that, but the most important and disturbing part had to do with how they ended up as elite special operators for the British.  The unexpected story there, which I had never heard before, was that many of the Jewish children and young adults who escaped from European countries to Great Britain in the early years of the war were initially treated as “Enemy Aliens” by the British.  

Despite their hatred for Hitler and fascism, they were put into individual family homes and children's’ detention camps, where they lost communications with their families in Europe and the outside world, were often treated harshly as possible Nazi sympathizers, and were sometimes imprisoned in close quarters with real Nazi supporters who were also being held as enemy aliens. 

Several groups of these young Jewish refugees (who were basically regarded as prisoners of war by the British government) were sent to other Commonwealth countries.  One of the worst of these forced deportations of young Jewish men took the form of a hideous voyage on a freighter full of young European “enemy” refugees, taking them to detention camps in Australia.  On this particular long passage to the south Pacific, the young Jews aboard the ship were tormented and subjected to harsh abuse not only by Nazi-sympathizing fellow “enemy aliens”, but also by the sadistic and anti-Semitic English ship captain.  

Even when Great Britain finally decided that perhaps these angry young Jews might add something to the fight in Europe, for more than a year they were limited to serving in a nonmilitary support organization, until the Churchill government finally realized they had a group of determined, well-educated and tough young Jewish survivors, with extensive knowledge of European cultures and languages, that could be put to effective use in the armed struggle against Hitler. 

The second half of the book recounts the combat and intelligence exploits of some of the most prominent members of this group, which were heroic, but similar to the war stories and experiences of many other Allied special operations fighters and spies.  Recommended.