An old luger sits on a bookshelf at home, pulled by a friend from a riverbed in northern Albania. Rusted solid but clearly recognisable, the German Second World War pistol doubtless has a story, though one I shall never know.

It joins a variety of memories and souvenirs from the visits I made to Albania in the late 1990s. In a box of dog-eared photos is a snapshot of a psychotic Albanian clan chief who looked after some friends and I, in an uneasy fashion, on the northern border in 1999. He later died in a blood feud that claimed the lives of every male in his family.

I also remember a strange night in Tirana in 1997 during a particularly anarchic period in Albania's recent history, when a small group of heavily armed, well-trained British roughnecks knocked on my hotel room door and encouraged me to drive a car for them on a mission to rescue two UK subjects trapped by fighting in central Albania. It was ever a wild place, full of good craic and bad surprises.

Of all those memories though, none ranks close to a meeting I had 17 years ago in the English countryside with the venerated warrior David Smiley. In his service during the Second World War with the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, it seemed that Smiley had fought almost every hostile nationality possible: Germans, Vichy French, Italians and Japanese.

He admitted to the difficulties of screaming nightmares, caused by the stress of operations, among hidden men sleeping so close to enemy positions. And he told me of the night, frozen in Albania's mountains, when he had eaten Italian. Not pasta or pizza, but part of a soldier stewed by his retreating and starving comrades, chanced upon by Smiley and his guerrillas. (I think he said the stew tasted like rabbit, though that may be a trick of memory. Either way, it had to be better than eating German.)

Those memories have been reignited by the recent publication of Roderick Bailey's beautifully written and impeccably researched book The Wildest Province, of which Smiley and his comrades are the subject. Charting the wartime Albanian missions of some of Britain's finest German killers, a disparate group of swashbucklers including Smiley, “Billy” McLean, “Trotsky” Davies and the actor Anthony Quayle, it is a compelling work and by far the most comprehensive yet undertaken on the subject.

Using interviews with survivors, diaries and recently declassified documents, Bailey follows the progress of the SOE in Albania between their initial deployment in 1943 and their withdrawal in early 1945.

Formed in 1940 by Churchill to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines, the first SOE operatives were sent to Albania as part of a wider mission to destabilise German and Italian occupation of the Balkans.

However, unlike Yugoslavia, the SOE men in Albania discovered to their intense frustration that there was scant local cohesion or appetite for armed action against the Axis troops. The communist Partisans could be relied on from time to time, so long as they were not preoccupied attacking their indigenous rivals, Nationalist fighters who collaborated with the Germans. The climate of brooding fear, internal division and overwhelming poverty ensured that most civilians preferred to acquiesce to German occupation rather than suffer the consequences of joining the insurgents.

Bailey constructs a masterful study of this riven attempt to ignite a wide-scale guerrilla war, which was no less dangerous for its ultimate failure. Horrific winter conditions, enemy attack, betrayal, disease and solitude take their toll among the colourful SOE fighters. Sixteen of the first fifty parachuted into Albania were either killed or captured. And there can be no starker a vision of the battle of the human spirit against adversity than Bailey's description of Lt-Colonel Arthur Nicholls, separated from his men during a retreat, both feet mutilated and gangrenous with untreated frostbite, dragging himself through the snowy mountains for weeks until rescue, then death.

The Wildest Province is a must-have acquisition for anyone remotely interested in the region, the war, its politics, or the experiences of the men who fought there. I devoured the book quickly, after which there was only one place to put it. It sits on the bookshelf beside the Luger in the hope of a silent trade in secrets.

The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle, by Roderick Bailey
Cape, £25

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