SOE

SOE (Special Operations Executive) was a British secret service intended to promote subversive warfare in enemy-occupied territory. It was formed in July 1940 by joining together a small sabotage branch of MI6, section D; a still smaller research branch of the war office, MI(R); and EH, a semi-secret propaganda department of the foreign office.

Politically, it came under the minister of economic warfare— Dalton until February 1942, Lord Selborne thereafter—but was quite separate from his ministry in Berkeley Square; its headquarters were in Baker Street, Marylebone, close to the rooms of the fictional Sherlock Holmes. It wrapped itself in a dense veil of secrecy, and an air of unreality has stuck to it.

Strategically, it came under the Chiefs of Staff; at first directly, later in the war (Poland excepted) through Cs-in-C in the field. Diplomatically, its chief executive officer, Gladwyn Jebb, kept its policies roughly in step with those of the foreign office, to which he had belonged, till he returned to diplomacy in mid-1942; thereafter there were sometimes wide divergences. Under the minister and Jebb, its directing heads were in turn Frank Nelson, Charles Hambro, and Colin Gubbins.

SOE was founded on a misapprehension—the belief that the Germans' successes in overrunning Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in such short order in 1939–40 had been primarily due to the work of fifth columnists lodged behind their victims' lines before ever a shot had been fired. There was nothing—or almost nothing—in this, in fact, but the myth, fostered especially by the British minister who had narrowly escaped from The Hague in May 1940, was widely believed in high circles as well as low.

The total strength at its largest, in mid-1944, consisted of some 10,000 men and 3,000 women; nearly half the men, and a few of the women, worked for short or long spells as secret agents in enemy territory or in neutral countries. SOE's scope was indeed world-wide; only in the USSR did it have no influence at all. (It had a mission there, kept on a tight rein by the NKVD, which told it nothing and made sure it kept out of mischief.) It should be noted that it also absorbed most of the work done by some 40,000 airmen in the special duty squadrons allotted to help clandestine activity by the RAF.

Recruiting for SOE was done mainly—in the early stages, had to be done entirely—on ‘the old boy network’, those in it from the start invited to join them friends they had known before the war, on whose loyalty and devotion they knew they could rely. It accumulated several characters with personalities like sledgehammers, men and women of enormous energy and originality, who evolved as they went along doctrines of effective clandestine behaviour, and found the agents and invented the tools with which these doctrines could be applied. Not surprisingly, SOE was exceedingly unpopular in Whitehall and in some parts of the older secret services.

With MI6 it often got on particularly badly, partly for an excellent professional reason—SOE's agents sought to create social mayhem, thus attracting police attention, while MI6 's agents desired utmost police somnolence—and partly because of clashes of personality. Relations were more smooth with MI5, which provided SOE with useful advice and staff.

Jebb and Nelson toured Whitehall together, explaining to permanent secretaries that there was now a new secret service which needed to be handled with diligence and care. They were fortified by a treasury minute which laid down that all SOE's demands were to be met without question; the secret service fund covered running costs.

A fearful political battle in Whitehall, which awaits its historian, resulted in the separation from SOE of its political warfare branch, known as SO1. Dalton had advocated from the start the uniting of all forms of subversive warfare under a single head; the rest of the civil service was not ready for so sweeping a change. In August 1941 SO1 became the Political Warfare Executive, a separate body under the foreign office's wing again. SO2, the more operational part of SOE, got on with its work.

SOE was organized in two main branches, one to provide facilities, one to act. The former provided money, clothing, forged papers, training, weapons, ciphers and signals, the latter was made up of a number of country sections. Paramilitary training, after a preliminary course at a country house in south-eastern England, was mostly done on a remote part of the west coast of Scotland, arranged by Gubbins (a Highlander by origin) with a pre-war neighbour. Agents who qualified there then went to the New Forest, where Beaulieu House, which belonged to a cousin of Churchill's (it now houses the Montagu Motor Museum) held the staff who trained potential agents in how to behave secretly. One of the most successful tutors here was the Soviet agent, ‘Kim’ Philby till he left to join MI6 in September 1941.

Other training arrangements, usually rougher, were made at some of SOE's overseas bases. There was a large camp near Toronto (seecamp X) popular, after the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed, with American visitors. Those attending it enjoyed the training in unarmed combat by an expert who had learned it in the Shanghai police. There was also a school on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, from which—with the help of one of the staff, who defected to them—the Haganah stole their first machine-guns, and one in Singapore which taught future members of the resistance in Malaya the rudiments of sabotage and guerrilla warfare.

Among the most important of the lessons learned at these schools were the techniques of industrial sabotage worked out by G. T. Rheam at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire. Rheam taught his pupils how to look over a factory, and spot in it the few machines on which the work of the rest depended; and then how to put a vital machine out of action, perhaps by a method as simple as hitting its cast-iron base once, hard, with a hammer. He trained them also in the use of time pencils, developed by SOE from a model brought back from Poland by Gubbins in 1939, to detonate a pre-laid charge of plastic explosives after a fixed time limit (which varied from ten minutes to 30 hours, according to the colour marked on the pencil). Plastic explosive had been invented in England just before the war began and SOE was its first large-scale user. It had all sorts of clandestine advantages: it did not smell, it was readily mouldable into any required shape, and it was stable—it did not go off when jolted by anything less than a detonator (one or two agents, who ate it by mistake, survived).

Even more critical to SOE's successes than methods of sabotage were methods of signalling, which Gubbins described in a post-war lecture as absolutely critical. At first SOE had to depend entirely on MI6, for cumbrous equipment and infantile codes; but from June 1942 it manufactured its own more compact and more efficient short-wave transceivers (see also radio communications) and shortly thereafter introduced one-time-pad ciphers, then at least unbreakable. Almost all its effective groups of secret agents at work included at least one wireless operator; and it was through their wireless operators, readily enough detected by direction-finding, that most of such groups as came to grief were caught. The best wireless operators, like the best agents, kept on the move as much as they could and evaded arrest altogether.

Next to signals, transport into the field was the critical problem for SOE. Transport by sea was seldom possible, though submarines could occasionally be spared to put a very few agents ashore, or collect them; and a few sailors in the free Polish navy ran a successful small boat line between Gibraltar and the south coast of France in 1941–2. There was also a frequent small boat service, known as the Shetland Bus, between the Shetlands and Norway, and there were other interesting small-boat operations in the Mediterranean. But the way most agents had to take into occupied territory was by parachute, and there were seldom enough dropping aircraft available. The Chief of the British Air Staff, Portal, used to say that his bombers were a gilt-edged investment, while SOE only represented a gamble on which he resolutely refused to stake too much of his effort. Competition with MI6 and MI9, who also occasionally required secret drops, made further complications.

The first agents always had to drop ‘blind’, with no one to meet them, hoping that their pilots had taken them close to the exact spot they had chosen beforehand. Once some organization had been started up on the ground, drops—sometimes aided by the Eureka homing device—could be made to reception committees, gatherings of resisters who would break curfew, meet arriving agents, and collect and hide arriving stores of arms. This was doubly risky work, not only because breaking curfew might be regarded by the occupying forces as a serious offence, but because every effort was made by the Axis police to get double agents on to reception committees, so that they could find out what was going on.

Both in North and in South America SOE had agents standing by, in case Axis fifth column activities broke out. The agents' existence in South America was kept extra secret, though the FBI knew (see USA, 6); the need for them to be active fortunately never arose.

In northern Europe, SOE managed in co-operation with the navy to extract some special steels and ball-bearings by sea from Sweden (see blockade runners)—a small but vital contribution to the British armaments industry—and played a leading part in helping the Norwegians to organize and arm their resistance movement. One nine-man SOE party succeeded in dislocating entirely the Nazis' plans to make an atomic bomb with heavy water from a Norwegian plant (see Vemork): this coup alone provides justification enough for SOE's existence. In Denmark, resistance developed comparatively late; SOE helped to stimulate it, and armed it extensively. SOE was also made responsible by MI6 for securing military intelligence from Denmark; this task was usually outside its remit.

Poland was close to Gubbins's heart; he had visited it both shortly before and at the start of the war in 1939, and had excellent relations with the Polish intelligence staff in exile in Paris and later in London. It was to Poland that SOE made its first successful clandestine parachute drop, in February 1941; but distance made it extra hard for SOE to help the Poles, because the USSR forbade RAF aircraft on secret duties to land in its territory. With SOE's help, the Poles carried out extensive sabotage of German rail traffic towards the Eastern Front, putting some 6,000 locomotives out of action. Into what had been Czechoslovakia SOE only mounted one operation of importance, but that disposed of Heydrich—at a ghastly cost in reprisals at Lidiče and elsewhere.

SOE got some of its earliest field experience in the East African campaign, in the winter of 1940–1, when it provided an irregular expedition, Gideon Force, to escort Haile Selassie, the exiled emperor of Abyssinia, back to his throne in Addis Ababa.

In Cairo SOE had a large branch headquarters, constantly revised, often inefficient; so bent on secrecy that its cipher clerks once fell three weeks behind in clearing even most immediate messages. It nevertheless supervised some useful activity in the Balkans (see Force 266). In Greece SOE's Force 133 armed several thousand guerrillas, only to discover that those of them under communist domination were using the arms, not against the Germans, but against fellow guerrillas who were anti-communist, a few of whom SOE was able to rescue. Some useful railway sabotage was also accomplished.

In Yugoslavia, SOE was at first ordered to back Mihailović's Četniks. Later, it was switched to support the communist-led partisans under Tito, who, with substantial SOE backing, secured control of the country as the Red Army swept past it. In Albania, too, SOE tended to support the communist-dominated partisan movement rather than more right-wing forces.

SOE could get nothing useful done in Italy before 1943, but then by a stroke of luck provided the channel through which Eisenhower could arrange with Marshal Badoglio, the Italian prime minister, the conditions for Italy's unconditional surrender; and thereafter it took part in organizing and arming partisan activity against the occupying Germans. Here the communists were persuaded to join in a common anti-fascist front with all the rest, with valuable results.

In France, on the other hand, the communists tried to keep aloof from other resisters, though they made approaches to de Gaulle, who brought communists on to his French Committee for National Liberation. In France SOE did not have its usual single country section, but no fewer than six separate sections, four large and two small: F, the independent French section run by Buckmaster, which worked directly for the Chiefs of Staff; RF, which supported General de Gaulle; AMF (the largest), which worked out of Algiers into southern France after the North African campaign landings in November 1942; and the ‘Jedburgh’ teams, who provided a steel core for several groups of maquis after the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 (see OVERLORD); as well as DF, a secret escape service, and EU/P which worked among the Polish minority in the French coal-mining areas. With the RAF's help, SOE provided arms for nearly half a million Frenchmen, whose effort Eisenhower said was worth half-a-dozen divisions to him.

SOE's work into Belgium, hampered by incessant quarrels with the government-in-exile in London, turned out almost without effect, because the campaign swept across the country so fast in September 1944. There had been some useful sabotage meanwhile, and resisters captured Antwerp docks all but intact: a splendid gift to the invading Allied forces, which they were slow to exploit.

In the Netherlands there was a catastrophe in 1942–3: the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA), co-operating, succeeded in capturing almost all of the first 55 agents SOE sent in, unknown to the staff in London (see Englandspiel). Two escaped, and turned up in Switzerland in November 1943 to report their companions' fate. By this time it was almost too late to get the arming of Dutch resistance, which might have been formidable, properly organized; a little, but only a little, could be done in the eastern Netherlands in the spring of 1945.

In Australia SOE formed Special Operations Australia and in the Far East it was active also during the last two years of the war; sometimes in co-operation, sometimes in acute rivalry, with OSS. It operated under the codename Force 136. Its head was Colin Mackenzie (1898–1986), a Scottish textile manufacturer who had a secret commission as a maj-general—useful for securing places on aircraft during his constant voyages round his command—and a strong grasp of security and of politics.

Force 136 operated extensively in Burma, rather less so in Thailand and French Indo-China, and with difficulty in Malaya. SOE's best agent in Malaya, F. Spencer Chapman (1907–71), had done his extraordinary work before the codename was adopted. In Burma the force was somewhat, in French Indo-China it was extensively, and in Thailand it was extravagantly, at odds with the OSS: the two services' work was nothing like as well co-ordinated in Asia as in Europe. Each was unnecessarily suspicious of the other's aims. With the help of the regent of Thailand, SOE was able to do something towards getting the Japanese to relax their hold on the country; in French Indo-China its attempts to assist Free French subversion came to nothing, while the OSS was then working with the Viet Minh.

In Burma it undertook, against the European rules and indeed its own charter, a good deal of intelligence-collecting work, for which the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, could provide no facilities on the spot; it also organized some formidable bodies of guerrillas, particularly in the Karen Hills. These guerrillas killed nearly 17,000 Japanese troops in the closing months of the war, and Slim bore witness to them in his final report as ‘a most valuable asset’. Force 136 moreover persuaded the Burma National Army (seeBurma Independence Army), organized by the Japanese as an armed gendarmerie, to change sides in April 1945 and work against their Japanese occupiers instead of for them.

Force 136 also sent two missions into China, where SOE was specifically forbidden to operate. One, under Walter Fletcher (1892–1956), was a purely personal venture—not, Fletcher assured everybody, an operation—which cleaned up £77,000,000 profit, partly from dealings in foreign exchange and partly from smuggling. The other, extra secret (for knowledge of it had to be kept from Chiang Kai-shek as well as from the Americans) offered Mao Tse-tung's Eighth Route Army advice on sabotage methods acquired by SOE in western Europe.

SOE was disbanded in January 1946, its work done. It had done a great deal to sustain morale in occupied Europe, and to justify a remark made by one of its agents in Abyssinia: ‘Perhaps God fights on the side of the great hearts and not of the big battalions.’ Moreover, thanks to Fletcher's achievement, it ended with its accounts in the black, and paid over a profit of several million pounds to the treasury with its expiring breath.

M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

Cruickshank, C. F. , SOE in the Far East (Oxford, 1983).
Foot, M. R. D. , SOE in France (Frederick, Md., 1984).
Foot, M. R. D. , SOE: An Outline History (London, 1994).
Gubbins, C. , ‘Resistance Movements in the War’, JRUSI, xciii.210 ( May 1948).
Mackenzie, W. J. M. , Secret History of SOE (London, 2000).
Marks, L. , Between Silk and Cyanide (London, 1998).
Richards, F. B. , Secret Flotillas (London, 1996).
Stafford, D. , Britain and European Resistance 1940–1945 (London, 1980).