Special Operations Executive
Based on Wikipedia: Special Operations Executive
In the summer of 1940, as Nazi Germany swallowed nation after nation and Britain stood increasingly alone, Winston Churchill gave a new organization one of history's most evocative orders: "And now go and set Europe ablaze."
The organization was the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. It would become Britain's secret army of spies, saboteurs, and resistance coordinators—a clandestine force that operated in the shadows of occupied Europe for six years. By war's end, SOE would directly employ more than thirteen thousand people, including over three thousand women. Both men and women served as agents behind enemy lines, parachuting into hostile territory, blowing up railways, and organizing resistance fighters in ways that conventional military thinking had never imagined possible.
But before SOE could set anything ablaze, it had to be born. And its origins reveal something fascinating about how governments prepare for wars they hope will never come.
The Three Mothers of SOE
SOE didn't spring fully formed from Churchill's imagination. It emerged from the merger of three existing secret departments, each with its own peculiar character, and each already doing the ungentlemanly work that proper British officers weren't supposed to discuss.
The first was a propaganda outfit. When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938—the Anschluss that signaled Hitler's expansionist ambitions—the Foreign Office dusted off an organization from the First World War called the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. During that earlier conflict, it had operated from a building called Crewe House and counted among its section leaders none other than H.G. Wells, the science fiction author. Now, under Canadian newspaper magnate Sir Campbell Stuart, it moved to Electra House in London and became known simply as that: Electra House.
Stuart ran his new department from the offices of his telegraph company. This was not mere convenience. The Electra House building on the Victoria Embankment sat directly atop the telegraphy cables connecting every foreign embassy in London to the outside world. Stuart's staff monitored them all.
Where the old Crewe House had focused on leaflets and printed materials, Electra House embraced the full spectrum of modern media: film, radio, newspapers, even strategic gossip. But Stuart drew one firm line. He refused to produce what intelligence professionals call "black propaganda"—materials that disguise their source or attribute false statements to the enemy. For that darker work, other departments would have to be created.
Section D: Destruction
Later in 1938, the Secret Intelligence Service—also known as MI6—formed something called Section D. The "D" apparently stood for "Destruction," which gives you a sense of the organization's remit. Under Major Laurence Grand, Section D was tasked with investigating sabotage, propaganda, and what official language delicately termed "other irregular means to weaken an enemy."
Grand was exactly the sort of officer you'd want for this work. He'd served in guerrilla operations in the Far East and on the Indian North West Frontier, where he'd developed what some colleagues considered an ungentlemanly imagination. When he discovered that Pathan tribesmen were stealing British ammunition, Grand didn't try to secure the supply lines. Instead, he ordered that every tenth round be packed with high explosive instead of the usual propellant. The next tribesman to fire a stolen bullet would have the rifle blow up in his hands.
Some officers were scandalized. Admiral Hugh Sinclair, however, saw precisely the kind of ruthless ingenuity Britain would need against future enemies. He made sure Grand got his new department.
MI(R): The Guerrilla Thinkers
The third stream feeding into SOE came from the War Office. In autumn 1938, the military expanded an existing research department called General Staff (Research), appointing Major J.C.F. Holland as its head. The mission: study guerrilla warfare. By early 1939, it had been renamed Military Intelligence (Research), or MI(R).
Holland's fascination with unconventional warfare had very personal origins. During World War I, he'd worked on an operation with T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia himself—experiencing firsthand how small groups of irregular fighters could tie down vastly superior conventional forces. About eighteen months after that formative experience, Holland was shot in the chest in a pub by the Irish Republican Army during Ireland's War of Independence.
You might expect this would leave Holland bitter toward the IRA. Instead, he developed a profound professional respect for their methods. He would later write that the IRA had made guerrilla warfare "a science in the modern age." He studied them intensively and urged British Military Intelligence to create an organization with similar effectiveness. As a side project—the kind of thing you might do on a slow Tuesday—he also created the British Commandos.
Childhood Friends and Ungentlemanly Warfare
Here the story takes an almost novelistic turn. Holland and Grand, the two majors leading Section D and MI(R) respectively, were childhood friends. Separated by only nine months in age, they'd grown up together at Rugby School and later attended classes together at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Now, as Europe careened toward catastrophe, they found themselves running parallel secret departments devoted to the same dark arts.
They knew each other's work and shared information freely. They agreed to a rough division of labor: MI(R) would research irregular operations that could be undertaken by regular uniformed troops, while Section D would handle truly undercover work—the kind where officers couldn't acknowledge each other in the street.
Holland found this secrecy culture entertaining. Section D operatives were so paranoid, so committed to their cover, that Holland sometimes couldn't resist walking up behind them and shouting "boo."
Holland's secretary at the time was a woman named Joan Bright Astley. She would later be revealed as one of the primary inspirations for Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond novels—a small reminder that the fictional world of Bond, with its gadgets and secret agents, drew heavily from this very real wartime organization.
The Merger
By mid-1940, with France fallen and Britain facing invasion, the time for bureaucratic niceties had passed. On June 13th, at Churchill's instigation, Lord Hankey persuaded Section D and MI(R) to coordinate their operations. On July 1st, a Cabinet-level meeting arranged for the creation of a single sabotage organization. On July 16th, Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, was given political responsibility for it. And on July 22nd, SOE was formally born.
Dalton, like Holland before him, looked to the IRA for organizational inspiration. If a ragged band of Irish guerrillas could fight the British Empire to a standstill, perhaps similar methods could be turned against Nazi Germany.
Sir Frank Nelson, nominated by MI6, became the first director. In the peculiar language of British intelligence, he was known by his initials: "CD." Campbell Stuart departed. Major Grand was returned to the regular army. At his own request, Major Holland also left to take up a conventional engineering command. Both men would eventually attain the rank of major-general, but their fingerprints were all over the new organization.
Colin Gubbins, who had been Holland's deputy at MI(R), returned from command of the Auxiliary Units to become SOE's Director of Operations. He would come to dominate the organization's history—and its historical memory.
A Historian's Revenge
There's a darker footnote to this founding story, one that reveals how history gets written and rewritten by the victors—even when the victors are on the same side.
Gubbins wrote the first official history of SOE after the war. In his telling, bitter animosity existed between Holland and Grand. Modern historians have noted this appears to be revisionist, motivated by Gubbins's personal dislike of Laurence Grand. Gubbins thought of Holland as something of a father figure—Holland had recruited him, after all—but Grand was another matter.
The source of Gubbins's resentment was bureaucratic. He didn't appreciate that MI(R) was limited to guerrilla warfare in a strictly military sense, while Section D was authorized to conduct irregular activities beyond conventional warfighting. In the competitive world of secret organizations, such distinctions mattered enormously.
After the war, Gubbins cultivated friendships with historians like M.R.D. Foot and Nigel West. He used his influence to diminish Grand's legacy, dismissing Section D as merely a "think tank." The reality was quite different. When Section D was absorbed into SOE, it employed around three hundred paid officers and had contract agents throughout Europe. It had established smuggling routes from the Shetland Islands through Norway—routes that would become the famous "Shetland Bus" operations. It had bureaus in Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, Romania, Greece, and elsewhere. Grand and Section D had also established the D School training house at Brickendonbury, where the first batch of SOE officers would be trained—ironically, by Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, both later revealed as Soviet double agents.
If anyone deserved the "think tank" label, it was actually MI(R), which under Holland had always aspired to be a research organization producing pamphlets, technical handbooks, and new weapons rather than running agents in the field. Holland was the driving force behind MI9, the escape and evasion organization, and MIR(C), which developed innovative weapons. Lord Hailsham once described MI(R) as "a clearing house for bright ideas."
Yet even as Holland wanted to keep MI(R) focused on research, Gubbins pushed for more "kinetic" action—military parlance for blowing things up. Gubbins commanded MI(R)'s Guerrilla Field Services and constantly sought opportunities for direct action. This internal tension meant MI(R) ended up involved in operations like forming the Independent Companies for the Norwegian campaign and establishing the Auxiliary Units—stay-behind commando units that would resist if Germany invaded Britain.
The Real Work Begins
With SOE formally established, the organization could finally focus on its true mission: supporting resistance movements across occupied Europe, conducting sabotage, gathering intelligence, and preparing for the eventual liberation.
One department of MI(R) remained independent. MI R(C), which developed weapons for irregular warfare, became a separate body codenamed MD1. Under Major Millis Jefferis, it operated from a country house called The Firs in Whitchurch, Buckinghamshire. Churchill took such personal interest in its work that it acquired the nickname "Churchill's Toyshop."
The overlap between these organizations—the propaganda specialists of Electra House, the saboteurs of Section D, the guerrilla theorists of MI(R)—would define SOE's character. It was never a purely military organization nor a purely intelligence service. It was something new: a weapon designed to weaponize occupied populations themselves, turning farmers and factory workers and shopkeepers into the cutting edge of British power.
A Memorial to the Shadows
SOE was dissolved in 1946, its mission accomplished. The men and women who had served in its ranks—the wireless operators and saboteurs, the couriers and resistance organizers—melted back into civilian life, many unable to speak of what they had done for decades.
In 1996, the Queen Mother unveiled a memorial to SOE on the wall of Westminster Abbey's west cloister. In 2009, a statue was erected on the Albert Embankment in London, depicting Violette Szabo, one of the agents who had given her life in the service. The Valençay SOE Memorial in France honors 91 male and 13 female agents who died working in that country alone. In 2013, the then-Prince of Wales unveiled the Tempsford Memorial in Bedfordshire, near the site of the former RAF Tempsford—the airfield from which so many agents had departed into the darkness, never to return.
These memorials commemorate people who fought a different kind of war. Not the war of great armies and decisive battles, but the shadow war of railway bridges exploding in the night, of coded messages tapped out in attics, of ordinary people doing extraordinary things because someone in London had whispered in their ear and handed them a pistol.
Churchill told them to set Europe ablaze. Against all odds, they did.