Michael Richard Daniell Foot TD (born 14 December 1919) — known as M. R. D. Foot — is a prolific British military historian and former British Army intelligence officer and special operations operative during World War II.
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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 life-long 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, acccounts of its wartime work, especially in France.
Foot left the Labour Party while his namesake Michael Foot — to whom he is not related — was leading it, and joined the SDP (Social Democratic Party).
M. R. D. Foot is the great-great-great-grandson of Benjamin Fayle who built Dorset's first railway in 1806 . Fayle was the great-great-grandson of William Edmunson, the First Irish Quaker .
Books and monographs
Book reviews