The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War

Special Operations Executive, 1940-1946

Neville Wylie, Neville Wylie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134166497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This fascinating new collection of essays on Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) explores the 'non-military' aspects of British special operations in the Second World War.

It details how SOE was established in the summer of 1940 to 'set Europe ablaze', as Churchill memorably put it. This was a task it was meant to achieve by detonating popular resistance against Axis rule, and nurturing 'secret armies', which might be capable of providing military and other forms of assistance for British forces when they were once again able to return to the offensive and conduct land operations in Europe.

The importance of the collection, however, goes beyond merely illuminating aspects of SOE's work which have largely been overlooked in previous scholarship. More significantly, by situating SOE within the context of Britain's broader political needs, the essays demonstrate the extent to which SOE came to epitomise and embody the range of skills that are found in today's secret service organisations. SOE showed itself capable of operating on a global scale and developing the necessary expertise, equipment and personnel to conduct activities across the whole spectrum of what we have come to know as 'covert operations'. By bringing SOE's activities into sharper focus and exposing the scale of its involvement in Britain's wartime external relations, the essays echo current thinking on the place of the so-called 'secret world' in international politics.

1 ‘Of historical interest only’
The origins and vicissitudes
of the SOE Archive

Duncan Stuart

The two most authoritative descriptions by historians of the condition of the SOE Archive as they found it at different dates are those of William Mackenzie in the Preface to his History of SOE, written for the Cabinet Office in 1948, and of Michael Foot in his Appendix on Sources (A (i)) to SOE in France, published in 1966.¹ Both are accurate within the limits of contemporary security inhibitions. The latter is more informative in its detail. But I quote the former for its succinctness:

This material is in great confusion. Partly through inexperience, partly for reasons of security, SOE began life without a central registry or departmental filing system. Each branch kept its own papers on its own system, from the Minister down to the sub-sections of the Country Sections; if a paper existed in a single copy, it might come to rest anywhere in this hierarchy of separate archives. The original confusion was made worse because in 1945, when the end was in sight, SOE made a resolute attempt to impose on the existing chaos a proper system of departmental filing by subject. This was an immense task which was scarcely begun when the department officially came to an end: the registry staff was kept in being for some time, but the work was eventually stopped on grounds of economy when it was about a quarter done. One has therefore to cope with two superimposed systems of filing, both radically imperfect.²

These two descriptions are essentially confirmed by a third, the report on the Archive written in late 1974 by a professional archivist from the PRO, Bernard Townshend, after he had spent five years reorganising the files into their present form: the third superimposed system. When he started work, he found that the Archive consisted of

the surviving files of a collection of files of which we have documentary evidence that at least 87% were destroyed in London between 1945 and 1950. They are in a confused state as a result of a number of ill-conceived attempts at their reorganisation by, for the most part, inexperienced archival staff with neither the time nor the knowledge to successfully complete the task . . . The only list of SOE files available in January 1970 was that contained in the SOE Subject File Index, a list which did no more than describe the files by the 1945 subject headings.³

If the processes which produced this ‘confused state’ were lamentable, they are not hard to understand. From its inception, SOE was a poor record-keeping organisation by the standards of normal government departments. It inherited the administrative and operational attitudes of its predecessors, Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the War Office’s Department MI(R). Sections worked independently and were led by action-orientated individualists with a keen appreciation of the operational needs for close control and restrictive security but little concern for filing systems. There was, initially at least, no infrastructure of experienced bureaucrats, and support staff were at a premium. And the bugles were urgently sounding. As Foot puts it: ‘security married with haste to beget filing by Country Sections or even smaller sub-divisions, who all kept their papers in separate places, classified on individual plans’.⁴ In the judgement of a later archivist, ‘some of these [filing systems] were good, some were appallingly bad’.⁵

There were also institutional biases, common to most secret services, against more than minimal record keeping and in favour of the destruction of all papers judged operationally inessential. SOE’s security regulations were quite explicit on these points⁶ and, among other SOE veteran writers, Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker recalls them in his Setting Europe Ablaze, where he writes of the Massingham (Algiers) Mission: ‘by standing orders and sensible self-protection as our base was on a deserted sea-shore, records were minimal and destroyed as long as they were no longer of immediate use’.⁷ I have sometimes suspected that a degree of prudent self-censorship may have prevented details of some more sensitive operations from being committed to paper at all.

In the summer of 1944, the leadership of SOE began seriously to consider what was likely to happen to the Service at the end of the War and how best to set about preserving its experience in forms which might be of use in future conflicts. In mid-August 1944, General Gubbins’ Deputy and Director of Staff Duties and Administration, M. P. Murray (D/CD),⁸ issued an instruction to all Directors, Regional Heads, Section Heads and Heads of Country Establishments to conduct a survey of documents ‘so as to decide what is to be retained permanently, what can be given a more limited “life”, and what can be moved immediately to a Central Archives Section’.⁹ A follow-up circular dated 19 August 1944 defined the categories into which documents for retention or destruction should be placed according to the degree of their historical significance or future utility. It went on to describe how the survey should be conducted, acknowledging that it would be ‘a long and tedious occupation for all concerned’.¹⁰

On 29 August 1944, the SOE Council considered a paper by Col. Dick Barry (CD/S), which outlined proposals for the preparation of a Handbook of SOE Work, or ‘Manual of Subversive Warfare’, and a History of SOE. In discussion, Gubbins emphasised that distinctions should be made between the SOE Handbook, the Official History and ‘any history which might be written for public consump- tion’, giving as an example of the latter ‘the story of the French Resistance’.¹¹ There was further discussion of all these initiatives in subsequent Council meetings.

The survey of documents continued into the autumn of 1944 and, in parallel, sections were winding up and preparing material for the Handbook and for their Section Histories. The requirements of the sections and of the future Central Archives Section were thus to some extent in conflict: both presupposed use of the same documents. So progress towards the actual creation of the Central Archives Section was not rapid.¹²

Nevertheless, on 25 October 1944, in a letter to Brig. Latham of the War Cabinet Offices, Murray was able to outline the steps already taken and those planned ‘to centralise our historical records and to ensure that, after use for current operational and security purposes, they are available for research and are then finally housed in proper conditions’. He envisaged that, after the operational sections had sorted their material and ‘written up certain portions of it before memories fade’, the records would gradually be centralised and would then be indexed to help a future official historian. Simultaneously, syllabuses for future training purposes would be laid down and material in the Handbook and the History would be crossreferenced for the use of future instructors. He did, however, admit that the records were not yet in a convenient form for an external historian, adding ‘we are indeed less conversant with them ourselves than we would like to be. We are also uncertain as to what will be destroyed’; and that ‘the ultimate disposal of the records depends to some extent on the future of this organisation’.¹³

While preparatory work continued on all these fronts, minds and responsibilities became clearer as the nature and size of the problems to be faced became more apparent.¹⁴ In January 1945, the Central Archives Section was launched with an initial staff of six under S/Officer Jean Woollaston (C/A). Its mandate was to create a Central Archive ‘for the needs of any future SOE and the official Historians’. This was to be achieved by putting all SOE paper thought worth keeping into a central system of filing, indexed and designed to satisfy any requirement laid on it.

The new filing system was designed from the top down. It required the physical transfer of papers from their existing files to fresh ones newly specified by deduction from general SOE experience. The papers were to be carefully studied by readers and then marked to be sorted first by countries; next to one of forty main subject headings; and finally to specific subjects. Each paper was to be marked with a threefigure reference (e.g., 3/210/11 = France/Air Operations, Dropping/Successful) which established its place in the new filing universe, but provided no indication of its provenance. Among the, presumably unintended, consequences of this reorganisation was that the bulk of the Directorate files disappeared altogether, as also did most of those of the Specialist Sections; and there remained a great number of files containing material for which no subject heading had been allotted.

The method was reasonably sound, if over-systematic and over-ambitious: it demanded a large staff and a longish period of time before results became apparent. In its first nine months, the staff of the Section grew from six to nearly sixty. At first, papers came in from the Country Sections rather slowly, since they were finishing their own histories. But, towards the end of 1945, with the end of the war in Europe followed by that in the Far East and the consequent rapid disbandment of SOE, the Section began to diminish in size (to thirty staff by the end of December 1945), while the volume of paper handed to it greatly increased.

As SOE’s overseas missions were about to be closed, instructions were issued for all their surviving papers to be sent home after first being weeded of ephemeral material. Townshend later commented: ‘It is to be feared that some officers took advantage of the instructions to dispose of material which they thought would prove unduly sensitive should their contents ever be disclosed.’¹⁵ Whatever the truth of this unsupported comment, there were known end-of-war bonfires of virtually all the records of the British Security Organisation in New York (carried out at Camp X in Canada) and of the Records of the Special Training Schools in the UK. There were certainly others both in the UK and overseas.

Thoughts of incendiarism lead naturally to the far-famed fire at Baker Street. There seem to be no surviving contemporary documents about this. Townshend wrote in 1974 that it ‘destroyed an unknown quantity of records the subject of which it has been impossible to trace . . . some maintain that only finance files were destroyed (and certainly these are conspicuous by their absence)’ but he added that Col. H.B. Perkins, the former Head of the Polish Section, complained after the war that ‘a g...