Special Operations Executive

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The Special Operations Executive (SOE), sometimes referred to as "the Baker Street Irregulars" after Sherlock Holmes's fictional group of spies, was a World War II organization initiated by Winston Churchill and Hugh Dalton in July 1940 as a mechanism for conducting warfare by means other than direct military engagement. It is estimated that, worldwide, SOE had about a million operatives.

The organization was formed out of three existing secret departments: Section D, a sub-section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6) commanded by Major Lawrence Grand; a department of the War Office known as MI R headed by Major J.C.Holland ; and the enemy propaganda organisation called Department EH ran by Sir Campbell Stuart. The propaganda section would later be broken off from SOE to form the Political Warfare Executive. There was a certain amount of rivalry between SOE and SIS, which hindered cooperation.

The mission of the SOE was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as the core of a resistance movement in Britain itself (the Auxiliary Units) in the possible event of an Axis invasion. SOE was also known as Churchill's Secret Army and charged by him to "set Europe ablaze."

In April 1942, Sir Charles Hambro of the banking firm was appointed as head of SOE. He had been a close friend of Churchills before the war and had received the Military Cross for his efforts in the great war. However, in August 1943, Charles had an argument with a fellow agent. Hambro believed that SOE should remain a separate body and not become part of the British army. He felt that this loss of control would cause a number of problems for SOE in the future. Hambro often said that "it was not good for democracies to know what their governments did in times of war." When the decision was taken to encorporate SOE into the British army against Hambro's advice he resigned from his position.

Head of the SOE from September 1943 was Colin Gubbins (1896-1976), a soldier who rose to the rank of Major General.

The headquarters of SOE were at 64 Baker Street. Another important London base was Aston House, where weapons and tactics research was conducted.

Under the cover name ISRB (Inter Services Research Bureau) SOE set up an establishment where development of equipment for use in the secret war could be undertaken. Called Station IX this was situated at the Frythe - a former hotel, outside Welwyn. Here ISRB developed radios, weapons, explosive devices, and booby traps for use by agents and clandestine raiding forces. Among products produced at Station IX were a miniature folding motorbike (the Welbike) - for use by parachutists, a silenced pistol (the Welrod) and several miniature submersible craft (the Welman and Sleeping Beauty). A sea trials unit was set up in West Wales at Goodwick, by Fishguard (station IXa) where these craft were tested. In late 1944 craft were despatched to Australia to the Allied Intelligence Bureau (SRD), for tropical testing.[1]

SOE's operations in France were directed by two London-based country sections. The F Section, under British control, recruited agents who were not prepared to accept the leadership of General De Gaulle, while the RF Section was linked to de Gaulle's Free French operations. As well, there were two smaller sections: EU/P Section, which dealt with the Polish community in France and the DF Section which was responsible for escape routes and coordination. During the latter part of 1942 another section known as AMF was established in Algiers.

The initial training centre of the SOE was at Wanborough Manor, Guildford. The SOE included a number of women (who were often recruited from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry); its F Section (France) alone placed 39 female agents in to the field, of whom 13 did not return. The Valençay SOE Memorial was unveiled at Valençay in the Indre département of France on May 6, 1991, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the despatch of F Section's first agent to France. The memorial's Roll of Honour lists the names of the 91 men and 13 women members of the SOE who gave their lives for France's freedom.

SOE was highly dependent upon the security of radio transmissions. The development of high quality radios, secure transmission procedures, and proper ciphers took considerable time. Leo Marks, SOE's chief cryptographer, was responsible for the development of better codes to replace the insecure poem codes.

SOE was particularly active in the following countries: France, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Greece, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Through cooperation with the Special Operations Executive and the British intelligence service, a group of Jewish volunteers from Palestine were sent on missions to several countries in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1943 to 1945.

From early 1942, SOE also contributed to the Allied war effort in South East Asia, and by the latter part of the war, covered resistance and covert operations throughout the region. This part of SOE adopted the name Force 136.

In March of 1941 a group performing commando raids in Norway, Norwegian Independent Company 1 (NOR.I.C.1) was organized under leadership of Captain Martin Linge. Their initial raid in 1941 was Operation Archery, the best known raid were probably the Norwegian heavy water sabotage. Communication lines with London were gradually improved so that by 1945, 64 radio operators were spread throughout Norway.

On May 5, 1941, Georges Bégué (1911-1993) became the first SOE agent dropped in France who then set up radio communications and met the next agents parachuted into France. Between Bégué's first drop and August 1944, more than four hundred F Section agents were sent into occupied France, to serve in a variety of functions including arms and sabotage instructors, couriers, circuit organisers, liaison officers, and radio operators.

In 1944, a plan was worked out to assassinate Hitler, under the codename Operation Foxley, but never put into practise.

SOE was dissolved officially in 1946, and much of its sphere of influence reverted to the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, better known as MI6.

See SOE F Section timeline for a list of significant events in the history of F Section. See also SOE F Section networks for details of the individual networks operated by F Section.

SOE was known publicly by a cover name: the Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB).

Contents

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Agents

Some of SOE's agents:

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Numbered stations

SOE operated several "stations" located in country houses and elsewhere. These were given numbers, such as:

Others, whose code numbers are unknown, included:

  • Gaynes Hall near St Neots in Cambridgeshire - Norwegian section.
  • The Firs - Whitchurch, near Aylesbury - explosives testing.
  • Arisaig, Inverness-shire - finishing school (STS21 to STS25c) [4]
  • Henley-on-Themes - quartermaster
  • Fawley Court, Henley on Thames - S.O.E. Signals section training facility
  • Bellasis, at Box Hill, outside Dorking
  • ISRB Workshops - Inverlair, Inverness-shire. Also known as "The Cooler"
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See also:

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Bibliography

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Official publications / academic histories

  • The Special Operations Executive 1940-1946 (Pimlico 1999 ISBN 0712665854) Professor M.R.D. Foot.The best book to read for an overview of SOE and its methods. MFD Foot won the Croix de Guerre as a SOE operative in Britanny later becoming Professor of Modern History at Manchester University and an official historian of the SOE. All his SOE books are well worth reading.
  • SOE in France (orig. 1966, Government Official Histories, pub Frank Cass revised edition 2000, further edition 2004 ISBN 0714655287) Professor M.F.D. Foot. Written with access to F Section files, (according to Ian Dear, see below) later revised
  • The Secret History of SOE - Special Operations Executive 1940-1945, (BPR Publications, 2000), Professor William Mackenzie. ISBN 0953615189 Written at the end of WW2 for the British Government’s own use without any intention of publication - in effect a confidential “official history”
  • Secret Agent - The True Story of the Special Operations Executive (BBC Worldwide Ltd, 2000), David Stafford, ISBN 0563537345 Professor David Stafford has written several books on resistance and the secret war, and contributed the foreword for MFD Foot's book.
  • SOE – the Scientific Secrets (Sutton Publishing 2003, ISBN 0750940050) Frederic Boyce & Douglas Everett.SOE had it’s own laboratories and workshops inventing and developing new weapons, explosives and sabotage techniques.
  • SOE Syllabus: Lessons in Ungentlemanly Warfare World War II (Secret History Files, National Archives 2001 ISBN 190336518X) Denis Rigden (Introduction).Authentic training manuals used to prepare agents covering the clandestine skills of disguise, surveillance, burglary, interrogation, close combat, and assassination. Also published as “How to be a Spy”.
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First-hand accounts by those who served with SOE

  • "Between Silk and Cyanide" (Harper Collins 1998 ISBN 0002559447) Leo Marks.Marks was the Head of Codes at SOE. He gives easily comprehensible introduction to codes, their practical use in the field, and his struggle to improve encryption methods. Engaging accounts of Noor Khan, Violette Szabo, and a great deal of information on his friend Yeo-Thomas.
  • The Next Moon (Viking 2004 ISBN 0670914789, Penguin 2005 ISBN 0141015802) Andre Hue. Foreword MRD Foot.First hand story of agent dropped into Brittany to organise resistance activities before and after D-Day.
  • The Jungle is Neutral (Chatto and Windus 1949) F. Spencer Chapman. Chapman set up first jungle warfare school and operated in Malaya behind Japanese lines. Key figure in SOE in Far East.
  • Eastern Approaches (Jonathan Cape 1949, Penguin 1991 ISBN 0140132716) Fitzroy Maclean. Author witnessed SOE’s campaign with Yugoslav partisans as Churchill’s representative to Tito.
  • Ill Met by Moonlight (Harrap 1950) William Stanley Moss.First-hand account of Moss and Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s kidnapping of Major General Heinrich Kreipe, the German army commander on Crete.
  • Undercover (Routledge, Kegan Paul 1980 ISBN 0710005733,Phoenix Press 2000 ISBN 1842122401) Patrick Howarth.Covers the stories of a number of operatives, many known personally by Howarth, who was one of SOE’s founding members responsible for sevearl years for organising agent training in UK. Invaluable seven page bibliography of histories and memoirs.
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Biographies / popular books by authors without personal SOE experience

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Filmography (in order of release date)

  • The Fight Over the Heavy Water (1948) A French/Norwegian black and white docu-film titled "La Bataille de l'eau lourde"/"Kampen om tungtvannet" (trans. "The Fight Over the Heavy Water"), featured some of the ‘original cast’, so to speak. Joachim Rønneberg has stated; "'The Fight over Heavy Water' was an honest attempt to describe history. On the other hand 'Heroes of Telemark' had little to do with reality.”
  • Odette (1950) Based on the book starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard.
  • Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) The Powell and Pressburger film Ill Met by Moonlight (released as Night Ambush in the States), based on the book, was made in 1957, starring Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring.
  • Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a well-known classic British-made war-drama set in Thailand during WW2, during the construction of the Siam - Burma railway through virgin jungle and endless hills and gorges, using malnourished, mistreated allied prisoners of war. A counter-story in the film, which collides with the main story at the climax, relates to a mission to destroy the newly-constructed railway bridge by a fictitious cloak and dagger sabotage organisation called 'Force 316', whose training base is in Ceylon. In fact, this is a thinly-disguised reference to the real-life Force 136, part of SOE, who indeed had wartime jungle-training facilities in Ceylon at M.E. 25 - Horona.
  • Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) A film of the same title was made in 1958 starring Paul Schofield and Virginia McKenna.
  • The Heroes of Telemark(1965) is a film, made in 1965, based on an SOE operation to sabotage the heavy water plant at Rjukan, Norway in 1943.
  • Operation Daybreak (1976) based upon a true, dangerous operation in May 1942 to drop a small group of Czech S.O.E. agents into their own occupied country with the singular deadly mission to assassinate Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's protégé, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor (representing the Nazi protectorate over the Czech puppet-state) of Bohemia and Moravia, hated as The Butcher of Prague. The mission succeeded, but with tragic results.
  • Nancy Wake Codename: The White Mouse(1987) is a docudrama about Nancy Wake's work for SOE, partly narrated by herself.
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Miscellany/trivia

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External links

fr:Special Operations Executive nl:Special Operations Executive no:Special Operations Executive nn:Special Operations Executive pl:Special Operations Executive

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