"Five Star Review. A thrilling, stirring story, well-told."

Daily Telegraph

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"Gripping...relight(s) the lamps of the past so they glow anew."

The Times of London

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"Garrett’s excellent new book corrects the record by fully recounting the X Troopers’ exploits and accurately reflecting who they were. The survivors all went on to live different kinds of lives, but they were united in one fundamental way."

The Times of Israel

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"Author Leah Garrett must be congratulated for pulling all these stories together by bringing praiseworthy attention to these young Jewish resisters of Nazism who became among the most noble and courageous of liberators during World War II. Not all of the X Troopers survived the brutal combat, but regardless of whether they lived or died, their service is no longer a secret and deserves widespread recognition, thanks to this beautifully constructed book."

New York Journal of Books

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"This dramatic, previously untold story of extraordinary covert valor and victory takes readers all across the European front, culminating in the shock of the Terezin concentration camp. This tale of profoundly motivated and capable men of action on a noble mission, each profiled in condensed biographies, is a rousing and redefining portrait of an, until now, overlooked group of dedicated warriors who played an outsized role in defeating the Third Reich. Garrett has added a crucial chapter to the always relevant and ever-deepening history of WWII and the Holocaust."

Booklist

 

"A lively, expertly researched history of an obscure WWII unit whose heroism deserves recognition." 

Kirkus Review

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"Garrett recounts in this dramatic and deeply researched history the WWII exploits of X Troop, a British commando unit made up of Jewish refugees from Austria, Germany, and Hungary. Garrett folds vivid profiles of Lord Mountbatten, Lord Lovat, and other prominent military figures into the story, and skillfully draws from war diaries and interviews with surviving X Troopers. This scrupulous history shines a well-deserved spotlight on its heroic subjects."

Publishers Weekly

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"Based on declassified military records, wartime diaries, and interviews with commandos and their families, X Troop vividly charts the special unit’s missions, from storming Pegasus Bridge on D-Day to successfully liberating a trooper’s parents’ from the Theresienstadt concentration camp to capturing escaped Nazis after the war." Smithsonian Magazine

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“Garrett has a keen, cinematic eye for the human moment that speaks a much larger truth. And she’s an exceptional writer with a rare gift—no doubt helped by her immersion in classic American accounts of war—for conveying the fear and adrenaline-fueled anarchy of combat. Her account of the D-Day landing, seen through the eyes of her protagonists, is vivid and starkly unsentimental. . . . It is sometimes hard to look, but Garrett draws us in, and X Troop’s 368 pages move very quickly indeed."

Jewish Review of Books

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“Stunning—a book about 87 Jewish commandos, an unlikely band of brothers, who together played a decisive role in defeating the hated Nazis . . . Garrett is fiercely passionate about X Troop and telling their story is for her clearly, intensely personal. . . . Thank you, Leah Garrett, for bringing us this incredible moving story of Jewish heroism.”

The Jerusalem Report

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"Leah Garrett's X Troop is brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees—a top-secret band of brothers—who waged war on Hitler."

Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The Longest Winter, The Bedford Boys, and The Liberator

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“This is Inglorious Basterds—but much better. Because it is the real story of clandestine Jewish fighters wreaking havoc against the Nazi war machine.”

Norman Ohler, New York Times best-selling author of Blitzed and The Bohemians

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"Part history and part mystery, X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II tells a compelling and little known story about an improbable group of “British” soldiers who made an important contribution to the war effort.  Their transformation from interned “enemy aliens” to soldiers with high security clearances is fascinating."

Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Antisemitism Here and Now

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"Drawing from recently declassified British intelligence records and personal archives of former X Troopers, Garrett's detective work is stunning, and her story-telling is masterful. This is an original account of Jewish rescue, resistance and revenge from within the Reich and at its edges,  starting with the boys flight to England and ending with their brave return as they spearheaded the Allied invasion at Normandy, fought to defeat the Reich, and remained in British service to denazify Germany and Austria."

Wendy Lower, author of Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Killing Fields

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"A masterful work.  Combining the skill of a superb storyteller and the precision of a first-rate scholar, Leah Garrett's new book tells a tale -- truly stranger than fiction -- of Jewish youth dispatched to the safety of England by their beleaguered German-Jewish families who volunteered for some of the most perilous of all anti-Nazi missions.  An extraordinary portrait of heroism, of human decency amid horror."

Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

 

"This is the best kind of history: highly original, deeply researched, beautifully written, with more than a touch of personal pathos. The men of X Troop went from stateless refugees of Nazi oppression to highly trained British special operations soldiers whose courageous actions did much to hasten Hitler's demise. Kudos to Leah Garrett for telling their amazing story with the authority of a scholar and the immediacy of a novelist!"

John C. McManus, author of Fire and Fortitude: The U.S. Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943

 

"Impeccable research gives the bravest of the brave the limelight they deserve.”

Ian Dear, author of Ten Commando

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“X Troop reads like a page-turning thriller. Cinematic in their scope and rich description, these are the heretofore unknown stories of young European Jewish emigres clawing their way out of Nazi-occupied Europe and finding refuge in the UK, only to be interned as enemy aliens in horrific camps in Canada and Australia, before being recruited by Churchill and Lord Mountbatten for their brains, brawn, languages, and anti-Nazi zeal. In Garrett’s brilliant telling, based on original interviews and deep-dive archival research, their return to the continent as elite Allied super-commandos is both heart-stopping and heart-breaking.”

James Young, Founding Director Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies and author of The Stages of Memory

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