Codenamed Dorset

This gripping history details the remarkable exploits of a Commando and Special Operations Executive operative during the Second World War. It is a story of extreme courage and a revealing portrait of a man who ultimately gave his life for the liberation of France. This is the first time his story has been told in full.

Colin Ogden-Smith was among the first to volunteer for the newly created Commandos. In 1942 he transferred to the SOE and joined the elite Small Scale Raiding Force to carry out raids across the Channel. He participated in Operation Branford, a raid to the island of Burhou, just north of Alderney, on 7 September 1942, and then,later in the year, Operation Basalt, a Commando attack on Sark

With the approach of the D-Day landings, Ogden-Smith volunteered for a new, clandestine group known as the Jedburghs – which represented the first real cooperation in Europe between SOE and the Special Operations branch of OSS. The Jedburghs were small teams of personnel from British, American, French, Dutch and Belgian forces that were inserted into Occupied Europe from June 1944 onwards to link up with the local Resistance groups and conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the Germans.

In July 1944, under the cover of his code-name Dorset, Major Colin Ogden-Smith parachuted deep behind enemy lines as the leader of Team Francis. Three weeks later he was dead, killed in action fighting German troops alongside his French comrades so that others could make their escape. Seventy years on, the French community still remembers the gallant Major Anglais.