The SOE emerged from several related bodies – the Foreign Office-tied ‘Department EH’, the Secret Intelligence Service’s ‘Section D’ and the War Office department MI(R). In July 1940, the SOE was created under the leadership of then Minister of Economic Warfare, Labour MP Hugh Dalton, who was famously instructed by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”. The SOE’s initial headquarters were in two flats near Baker Street in London, and Major-General Colin Gubbins, who would become SOE director in 1943, ran training and operations. 

Support for those lighting these flames was not always forthcoming from the top. Known to some in the corridors of power as the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”, disagreements would arise between the SOE and the armed forces, though Dalton was keen that it be seen on equal footing; “Subversion should be clearly recognized by all three Fighting Services as another and independent Service”, he would declare.

The SOE carried out its work across Europe and beyond, and British-trained agents came from across the globe: from France, Canada, Switzerland, Greece and Poland, to America, Ireland, Slovakia, Hungary and New Zealand, and many, many more places beyond. It established headquarters in numerous countries, including: Egypt, to coordinate Middle Eastern and Balkan activities; southern Italy, following Allied invasion; Algiers, following Allied landing in North Africa; Singapore, before its capture by the Japanese in February 1942; and India, before moving to Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) in December 1944. Moreover, many SOE agents based in the UK had themselves escaped to the island following the Nazis’ advances. Reconnaissance, sabotage – destroying vital infrastructure such as trains and factories – and subversion – fostering resistance in enemy and enemy-occupied nations – were central tasks of the SOE. This is reflected in three training booklets written by Gubbins and widely used in SOE operations: The Partisan Leader’s Handbook, The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, and How to Use High Explosives.

Its agents were the likes of Odette Sansom from Somerset, who after responding to a call for family photographs of the French coastline mistakenly addressed them to the War Office instead of the Admiralty, and was scouted by the SOE in the process. She would go on to work as part of the SOE ‘Spindle’ network in France, setting up radio networks, organising parachute drops, and arming resistance fighters. Though captured and later sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, she revealed nothing despite enduring extensive torture. She survived, and following the war her testimony was used to convict Ravensbrück camp commander Fritz Suhren and other SS officers of war crimes.

The SOE also trained resistance fighters, such as the 316 ‘Cichociemni’ (“silent and unseen”) Polish guerrilla fighters parachuted into occupied Poland from 1941 onwards. Of these, a number served as leaders of the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the largest armed resistance movement against the Nazis at its peak. It included the likes of Aleksander Tarnawski, the last living Cichociemni. A chemistry student at the outbreak of the war, he fled to join the free Polish forces in France before its occupation and his later escape to the UK. He underwent training in Scotland, Manchester and Essex, and once dropped back into continental Europe, he took part in a number of missions, including the liberation of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Though caught by the Soviet secret police, he escaped and hid his past whilst living in communist Poland.

Despite such heroic efforts, the SOE did not become the force that Churchill had first envisioned. His ‘detonator strategy’, that he held as late as December 1941, was that the UK’s efforts to foster resistance abroad would see “the uprising of the local population[s]” to such an extent that they would supply the bulk of “the liberating offensive”. Yet as the historian Evan Mawdsley writes in his analysis of the SOE, despite its efforts “The war was certainly won by ‘armies of the classic type’”, not any hidden army of this sort. Nonetheless, Mawdsley adds that the SOE’s work to foster resistance did “play a significant auxiliary role” when it came to sabotage and intelligence gathering, and none of this discounts “the great political and moral (and propaganda) importance of the resistance, and the role that it came to have in collective memory”.