The Global Infrastructure of the Special Operations Executive

Derwin Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138749900
• eBook ISBN: 9781351718332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

During the Second World War, the British government established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) for the purpose of coordinating 'all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas'. Although the overseas operations of this branch of the British Secret Services are relatively well known, few studies have explored the 'backroom sections' of this organisation. This book draws together the infrastructure developed to support an agent's 'journey' from recruitment to despatch to the field.

At the start of the Second World War there were few existing facilities established within the UK to support clandestine operations. As the conflict progressed, in parallel to learning the operational procedures of their trade, SOE also had to rapidly expand their support infrastructure around the world. The organisation could effectively support their agents only by establishing facilities dedicated to training, research and development, supply, transportation, communication, and command and control. By predominately focusing on the organisation's 'agent facing' infrastructure, this book provides a backdrop to the brave men and women who conducted operations abroad. In addition, it gives an overview of the facilities in which SOE's backroom staff lived and worked.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology, history and war studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315180106-1

In 1940 the British Government established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to ‘co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’.¹ From the time of its creation, SOE has been one of the most controversial of Britain’s secret services,² historians regularly debating its military impact and political effect.³ The focus of this book, however, is SOE’s agent-facing global ‘infrastructure’.⁴ Although this is not the first work on the ‘backroom sections’ of this organisation, this study has brought together into a single book a discussion of the world-wide facilities that supported agents’ ‘journeys’, from recruitment to despatch to the field. It is the aim of this book to provide the context in which the backroom staff operated.⁵

SOE was one of several branches of Britain’s secret services during the Second World War. Its sister organisations included the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), the Secret Service (MI5), the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Although each organisation had a different function, they often came into conflict owing to overlapping interests. SOE was formed by the British Government to operate in a manner similar to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland and Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. Inspiration was also taken from the Spanish Irregulars who fought alongside Wellington.⁶ In order to function, SOE was provided funding through the ‘Secret Vote’ of Parliament⁷ and by April 1942 their expenditure was approximately £2,500,000 per annum.⁸ Although operational for only six years, SOE grew to employ a maximum of 10,000 men and 3,200 women. Of these, one in four men and one in eight women were of officer status.⁹ Under their control were tens of thousands of resistance fighters operating on a global scale.¹⁰

Contextualising the study of SOE’s agent-facing infrastructure

Since the end of the Second World War, the gradual release of classified documents into the public domain has transformed the study of the SOE.¹¹ The first attempt at writing a history of SOE occurred prior to its disbandment: as the war came to an end, a series of ‘in-house’ histories was commissioned,¹² the purpose of which was to ensure that SOE’s hard-learnt lessons were not forgotten. They also provided a historical record of the organisation’s achievements.¹³ The task of combining these accounts together into an ‘official’ history was allocated to William Mackenzie.¹⁴ To aid him in his work, Mackenzie was granted complete access to SOE’s surviving archive¹⁵ and was given the authority to request any document that he could not locate within SOE’s files from other governmental departments.¹⁶ On the completion of his monograph, it remained classified until finally being published in 2000.¹⁷

The public appetite for tales of clandestine operations meant it was inevitable that agents’ ‘accounts’ rapidly appeared in press after the war. Even before Germany had surrendered, the War Office had cleared the first of these for publication. George Millar’s Marquis, written shortly after he returned from operations in France, eventually ran to 70,000 copies.¹⁸ Such memoirs are, however, not always entirely truthful: minor inaccuracies were sometimes incorporated as a result of misinformation or as a way to build suspense.¹⁹ Many of the early accounts of SOE were characterised by courageous stories that both appealed to the public’s desire to read about adventures and helped book sales.²⁰ Post-war British culture was inundated with tales of daring that have done much to shape public perception of SOE.²¹

The post-war period coincided with increased public scrutiny of SOE’s activities in France. During the mid-1950s, reporters found that articles on controversies relating to the organisation sold newspapers, and features and exposés, therefore, began to appear regularly in the popular press. As a result of controversies appearing in the press, Whitehall commissioned Michael Foot to write the official history of SOE in France. Despite having access to the organisation’s archive, his attempts to undertake interviews with key figures were severely restricted; nevertheless, the monograph, published in 1966, was the first publicly available scholarly study of SOE.²²

During the period in which SOE was making newspaper headlines, there was a gradual deterioration of relations between East and West. This was a time when the Comintern was threatening a global workers’ revolution and British troops were being regularly deployed to conduct operations against communist forces.²³ Techniques and procedures that had been perfected by SOE were now threatening British global interests.²⁴

By 1950, Basil Liddell Hart, a leading figure on military strategy, was condemning British support for the European Resistance during the war. It was his belief that it had a ‘wider amoral effect on the younger generation as a whole to defy authority and break the rules of civic morality’.²⁵ It was inevitable that an organisation that had supported, equipped and trained radicals would become the focus of criticism when the new threat became Soviet revolutionaries. Within this new geopolitical environment, intelligence became an increasingly important commodity, and the promotion of SOE as an irresponsible and amateurish organisation enabled other branches of the secret services to justify their own existence in a post-war world.²⁶ Indeed, in 1969 Richard Deacon stated that ‘in achievements, in professionalism, and in organisation it [SOE] never matched up to SIS; in many respects it was downright inefficient, wasteful, and even damaging to the war effort’.²⁷ At the time, a number of historians believed SOE to have been in a constant state of disorder, overworked at headquarters, inefficient in the use of wireless and amateurish.²⁸ Writing ten years later, David Stafford²⁹ advocated a far less critical assessment. Although he accepted elements of the ‘bumbling amateurishness of the British public school tradition, the muddling through, the inefficiency, the eccentricity … [this was a] strategic disguise for what was in reality the clandestine arm of a determined attempt to further British interest in Europe’.³⁰ Stafford felt SOE functioned efficiently within the paralysing limits imposed by the Foreign Office and the SIS, and had accomplished their role as effectively as any other branch of the British war effort.³¹

The second official history of SOE was commissioned in 1980 and Charles Cruickshank published SOE in the Far East three years later. In 1986 it was followed by Cruickshank’s official history of SOE’s work in Scandinavia.³² Deliberations by Foot during the early 1980s over whether SOE was any good were eventually answered ‘with an emphatic Yes’.³³

Since 1993 SOE’s files have gradually been released into the public domain, leading to a proliferation in the quantity and quality of popular and academic studies of the organisation. The archives, however, are unlikely to provide all the answers, as those files capable of offering a comprehensive assessment of SOE’s strategic value have been destroyed.³⁴ By 2005 Neville Wylie thought that ‘the amateurishness for which SOE was routinely maligned had probably as much to do with any innate or institutionalized incompetence as with the legendary informality of the organization and the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” nature of the warfare it espoused’,³⁵ while Mark Seaman was of the opinion that, although ‘short-lived and frequently (and inappropriately) labelled “amateur” by its detractors, SOE nevertheless acquired a prominent position in most theatres of operations and exerted British influence on a truly global scale’.³⁶

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of work on SOE hitherto has focused on the ‘glamorous’ exploits of the organisation’s agents abroad,³⁷ and research into SOE’s Country Sections is so firmly entrenched in the mentality of SOE scholars that there is a danger that topics that do not fit into operational boundaries will be overlooked. It is, however, only with a comprehensive overview of an organisation in its entirety that a balanced assessment can be made: greater attention has to be given to the non-geographical sections.³⁸ Although lacking the prestige of acts of sabotage, SOE’s global support infrastructure was vital to the operation of the organisation. These sites facilitated the organisation’s training, research and development, supply and transportation networks, communications, and command and control, prepared the men and women for their operations and supported them in carrying their tasks out. An analysis of SOE’s global network of bases will thus provide context to the work of SOE’s agents abroad.

One of the greatest challenges faced by scholars of the secret services is the fact that

unless a secret service remains secret, it cannot do its work. As it has to remain secret, it ought not to keep any sort of records in the field. Even at its home base, security risks are not needlessly m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Place names
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Training
• 3 Research and development
• 4 Supply
• 5 Transportation
• 6 Communications
• 7 Conclusion
• Index