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Special Operations Executive

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The Special Operations Executive (SOE), often called "the Baker Street Irregulars" after Sherlock Holmes's fictional group of spies, was a World War II organisation initiated by Winston Churchill and Hugh Dalton in July 1940 as a mechanism for conducting warfare by means other than direct military engagement. Originally designated as 'Section D' of MI6, the mission of the SOE was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as a focal point for the formation of a vestigial resistance movement in Britain itself (the Auxiliary Units) in the possible event of an Axis invasion. Known also as Churchill's Secret Army and charged by him to "set Europe ablaze"

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, 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.

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

SOE were 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, S.O.E. 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 S.O.E. 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 raids in 1941 was Operation Archery), their best known raids were probably the Norwegian heavy water sabotage. Communication lines with London were gradually improved, so that in 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 setup radio communications and met the next drop of agents. 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 such as arms and sabotage instructors, couriers, circuit organisers, liaison officers, and radio operators.

SOE was dissolved officially in 1946, and much of its sphere of influence reverted to the Secret Intelligence Service, 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 in public by its cover name, the Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB).

Agents

Amongst SOE's agents can be numbered:

Numbered stations

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

  • Station VI - Bride Hall, the weapons acquisition section.
  • Station IX - The Frythe estate near Welwyn Garden City, which began as a wireless research unit (Special Signals), then became a weapons development & production centre, then a research and development station. Now a factory belonging to Smithkline Beecham. [2]
  • Station X - Bletchley Park, a radio station, now more famous for its subsequent use as a code breaking centre. The radio station moved to Aston House when code breaking activities took over.
  • Station XI - Aston House near Stevenage, a research and development station.
  • Station XII - also at Aston House, the radio station that started at Bletchley Park.
  • Station XIV - Briggens, near Roydon, Essex, contained the forgery section.
  • Station XV - Thatched Barn - on the Barnet bypass at Borehamwood, Hertfordshire - camouflage section, for development of booby traps.
  • Station XVA - Kensington, London - prototypes.
  • Station XVB - A training centre for agents and Demonstration Room for briefing officials, at the Natural History Museum in London. [3]
  • Station XVC - photographic and make-up section.
  • Station 53a - Grendon Hall in Grendon Underwood, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire - cryptology centre. Now a prison.
  • Station 53b - Poundon, Buckinghamshire, near Bicester. - radio listening and transmission station.
  • Station 53c - Poundon, Buckinghamshire, near Bicester. - Training American forces in SOE communications techniques. 53b and 53c were physically separate establishments but close to each other. Some of the 53b staff were transferred when 53c opened.

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 [4]
  • Henley-on-Themes - quartermaster
  • Fawley Court, Henley on Thames - S.O.E. Signals section training facility
  • Bellasis, at Box Hill, outside Dorking
  • Brickendonbury Manor - sabotage

See also:

Bibliography and filmography

  • The Secret History of SOE - Special Operations Executive 1940-1945, (BPR Publications, 2000), Professor William Mackenzie. ISBN 0953615189
  • Secret Agent - The True Story of the Special Operations Executive, (BBC Worldwide Ltd, 2000), David Stafford, ISBN 0563537345
  • R.J.Minney wrote the book "Carve Her Name with Pride" in 1956, telling the story of Violette Szabo. A film of the same title was made in 1958 starring Paul Schofield and Virginia McKenna.
  • William Stanley Moss wrote the book "Ill Met by Moonlight" in 1950, giving his first-hand account of an SOE operation in 1944 to kidnap Major General Heinrich Kreipe, the German divisional commander on Crete. The film "Night Ambush", based on the book, was made in 1957, starring Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring.
  • Jerrard Tickell wrote the book "Odette: The story of a British agent" in 1949, telling the story of Odette Sansom-Hallowes. The film "Odette", based on the book, was made in 1950, starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard.
  • Jean Overton Fuller wrote the book "The Starr Affair", telling the story of John Renshaw Starr.
  • The Heroes of Telemark is a film, made in 1965, based on an SOE operation to sabotage the heavy water plant at Rjukan, Norway in 1943.
  • A French/Norwegian black and white docu-film from 1948 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.”
  • "Nancy Wake Codename: The White Mouse" is a 1987 docudrama about Nancy Wake's work for SOE, partly narrated by herself.
  • "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks, 1998; Marks was the Head of Codes at SOE and this book is an account of his struggle to introduce better encryption for use by the field agents
  • "Mission Scapula SOE in the Far East" by Arthur Christie, ISBN 0954701003 A true story about an ordinary soldier seconded into MI5 and sent on a mission to Singapore just before it fell. With Freddy Spencer-Chapman.
  • "Operation Daybreak" is a 1976 film, 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 protege, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, aka. The Butcher of Prague. The mission succeeded, but with tragic results.
  • "Bridge on the River Kwai" is a well-known classic British-made war-drama 1957, 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 fictious 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 S.O.E., who indeed had wartime jungle-training facilities in Ceylon at M.E. 25 - Horona.
  • Fictional versions of SOE turn up as the organization in charge of occult activities in Tim Powers' Declare and Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archive.

Miscellany/trivia

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