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SOE: everything you wanted to know
00:51:56
Dr Kate Vigurs answers listener questions on the clandestine missions of Special Operations Executive (SOE)
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Dr. Kate Vigers
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- [02:05]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. From parachuting into occupied France to silent assassinations and sabotage tools like exploding rats, many missions of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War sound like the events of a high octane spy thriller. In today's episode, Dr. Kate Vigers, author of books on SOE including Mission France and Mission Europe, answers listener questions on the men and women who were trained up to take on dangerous secret missions in Nazi occupied Europe. She was talking to Eleanor Evans.
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Eleanor Evans
Today we are talking about soe and we are in such safe hands for this episode because we are joined by Dr. Kate Vigers, who is the author of many books, including her latest To Mission Europe which is about the women of soe. Kate, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [03:04]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
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Eleanor Evans
Me too. We've got some really great questions, but to kick us off, let's start with the very basic one of what was SOE and how was it formed?
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Dr. Kate Vigers
So SOE stands for Special Operations Executive. There has been a lot said about it being Churchill's secret army and all this kind of stuff. So there were forebears of soe, there were various organizations that had already been around that were kind of sucked up into it, including Section D, who were responsible for destruction. There was a lecture house who did black propaganda. And it's also worth saying already at this point, that the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, were already in existence. So they were already there with their intelligence gathering and spying that been around since before the First World War. SOE erupts onto the stage, really, after the fall of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, in May of 1940. The idea is being bandied around the War Office, and when Winston Churchill comes to office, it's kind of expedited. And the official stamp is given on 22 July 1940, with the remit of sabotage and subversion and to set Europe ablaze. It's a wonderful expression. I've never found it written anywhere official, but that's reputedly what Churchill said. And SOE lasts as long as Churchill is in office. So it starts in 1940. By the beginning of 1946, it's gone. Their remit is different from that of the Secret Intelligence Service. And for that reason, there's a little bit of tension you find throughout the war, actually quite a bit of tension. SOE are over there blowing things up and shooting things down, and SIS are going, shh, we're spying over here. So there is this kind of tension that builds up. SOEs start off by recruiting agents, they're only male, to start off with, to go and work in enemy occupied territory. The idea is to bolster the Resistance, to find out what the Resistance are up to as well, and to really start to. To work out how they can sow the seeds for D Day. Obviously, they don't know D Day is going to be the 6th of June 1944. They don't know it's going to be in Normandy, but they do know that an Allied invasion will happen somewhere at some time and that Europe needs to be prepared for that. And it's also about slowing down the German war effort. It's really, you Know, we don't want them making these things, going to these places, slow them down as much as possible. So, in a NutShell, that's what SOE is. The official recruitment of women comes about April 1942, and that happens because men are rounded up, or at least put on a census for a forced labor program, the Service du Travail Obligatoire. It means it's easier, not easy, but easier for women to move around occupied territory than it is for men. And they work wherever there's an occupying force. It's not just France, it's all over occupied Europe and through into the Far east as well.
- [06:19]
Eleanor Evans
Brilliant. That's a great introduction and plenty we'll be getting our teeth into in terms of, you know, the beef between these organisations and women who recruited as well. But let's stay on the recruitment broadly, I guess, at the start, how much can you say about who was recruited and how. How much is known about the tactics of who they were pursuing and why?
- [06:37]
Dr. Kate Vigers
So recruitment, to start off with it was a matter of who you knew, not what you knew. So it was the old boys network, primarily, so they would seek out men who they maybe served with before, possibly even in the First World War. Businessmen, people with a knowledge of the area they were going into. That's terribly important. It's not just a military background that's important. You need to be able to land in a chunk of Belgium and walk around like you've lived there your whole life. So they needed to be familiar with the territory, with the way of life, with the language. Language is incredibly important, but there's no denying that to start off with it is. It's kind of the old boys network. Men are recruited because they know one another and so on. It becomes a bit more random when they start to recruit women. There is no old girls network. And also the qualities they were looking for would be slightly different as well. In the women. My favourite story about a woman being recruited is she's at a party. It must have been a really dull party is all I can think, because she dropped a book, picked it up. Not only did she start reading it, she started reading it out loud in French. She's overheard by somebody who says, oh, you speak French? And before she knows it, she's at an SOE interview with women as well. There were particular. And men, I guess, too, there were particular attributes they were looking for. Maybe if you'd already worked in the Resistance or on the escape lines, you had an experience of life in occupied territory that others wouldn't have women in the auxiliary services, the Women's Air Force, for example, women, Williams Auxiliary Air Force, who had wireless skills, Morse already, that kind of stuff. So it's a bit random, but there is method to the madness when it comes to recruitment.
- [08:21]
Eleanor Evans
That gives us a bit of an insight into the sort of work that they're going to be doing in these occupied territories. We will. We'll come to that in a little bit. But after the sort of tap on the shoulder if you're in this old boys network, or the nod, or if you choose to drop a book at a party and begin to read it out loud, what's the training like? Is there any sort of consistency there, or are we talking about a very varied picture for these agents?
- [08:42]
Dr. Kate Vigers
So the training changes as the war goes on. I mean, that would be a whole lecture in itself, but let's just look at sort of the overarching picture of the kind of training that should be received. So you would go through your interview process and it's not just a case of turning up for one interview, there could be several. Even at the end of the interview process, you still might not know what you're being recruited into. Again, it's different for men and women. So for men, it could be a bit more straightforward. They could be going into the intelligence corps, they could be coming wireless operators, or they could be considered for the commandos, which had just been formed, so it seems a lot more plain for the men. Women wouldn't have had a clue really what they were being recruited into. Sometimes they told them, sometimes they didn't. So once you've passed your training, you would be put into uniform. So a woman would be put in the uniform with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, if she wasn't already uniformed by waaf. This gave them a cover while they were training, because you can't really say to your mum, I'm off to train to be a secret agent, I'll see you in a bit. They were off to be ambulance drivers or something like that. They had a uniform and they had a salary and arguably they had a rank, although it is an auxiliary unit. Men would retain the uniform that they were already in and they'd go off a preliminary training. This was usually at one of two houses in Surrey, Wanbram Manor or Winterfold House. Now, one of the jokes was that SOE actually stood for Stately Ooms of England, because they're all beautiful requisition manors. They're not slumming it by any stretch of the imagination. At preliminary Training, it's pe, basic firearms, basic Morse code, basic demolitions. It's all basic because it's really to weed out unsuitable recruits. It's to find out whether they're good enough to move on to the next thing. They were taught in the language of the country they'd be going into. They were told the course was held under commando cover. So, as I said, for the men, that would make sense. They could potentially be going on to be recruited into the commandos, but there were no female commandos. One of my favorite stories is Odette Wylan turning to Pearl Witherington, and she said, I don't know why I'm here, because I answered an advert to be a bilingual secretary. And as they said, you know, they were blowing things up, shooting things down, crawling around on their bellies, climbing assault courses, climbing up fireman's ladders. There's a lovely story of Nancy Wake saying, I've been fighting the Germans in Marseille and not once had any of them timed me while I ascended a fireman's ladder. But, you know, this was all part of the training. An interesting part of the training here as well is the drinks cabinet, which was always open. And they were actively encouraged to get pickled, because loose lips sink ships and all that. You might talk. You might talk a lot more when you're drunk. And they needed to know that now, rather than risking it in occupied territory. So if you pass, you go to the paramilitary training schools in Scotland. If you fail, you also go to Scotland to a place called Invalair Lodge or the Cooler, and it's like a wartime garden leave, because you've learned stuff that no ordinary civilian should know. So pop you away for the rest of the war with Rudolph Hess for Company. That's where Hess was taken as well. Obviously, the two didn't meet. So, paramilitary training, the west coast of Scotland. We've got 10 shooting lodges. I'm spending a lot of time up there at the moment. It is beautiful countryside, but my God. God, it is raw. It's tough countryside, even in, you know, you think you're going for an average walk and you're not. Mountains, lochs, woods, everything that you might encounter if you're living in the wilds, in France, in Norway, wherever. And part of the training here was very unique in that they were trained in something called silent killing. This was how to kill using your bare hands. Pearl Witherington said to me, it's not how hard you hit them, my dear, but it's where you hit them that counts. So they were taught basically martial arts, how to use their bare hands. And bare hands is brilliant because if you're caught with weapons, you've got to explain it away. If you know how to do a good karate chop or kick to the cods, you know you're doing well. And men and women could do this because size didn't matter. They taught instinctive shooting. So rather just bang, bang, bang at a target. You're looking around, where's the danger coming from? Making sure you're, you're striking at the enemy and doing it effectively, maybe through the pocket of your coat. Even so, instinctive shooting and close combat using something called the Fairbairn Sykes knife. And it was Fairbairn and Sykes who were responsible for all of this. Two former Shanghai policemen and they oversaw all of this training. So that's Scotland. It's brutal, it's tough. And it depended where you were going. If you were going into Norway, you would have ski instruction as well, that kind of stuff. So obviously if you're Norwegian, you're born on a pair of skis, but you know what I mean? Then if you were going to be a wireless operator, you would go to have your wireless training and the length of that would reflect how good you were. So someone like Yvonne Cuomo, already an expert wireless operator in the waf, only took her six weeks to get through the training. Parachute training, not for the faint hearted. That was at Ringway, which is now Manchester International Airport. They had to complete a set number of jumps to get their parachute wings. Some from a stationary balloon, some from an aircraft and a night jump as well. And things can go wrong, very badly wrong. There's a Polish guy whose parachute failed to open and he just smashed into the ground and died straight away. Violet Szabo very famously twisted her ankle while she was landing. Elsabeta Zavaska damages her ankles when she's in parachute training. You could smash your face on the hole. It was dangerous, it was difficult, every agent said it was hard, it was unnatural, I was told. But it's a means to an end. You've got to get back into occupied territory and parachuting may well be the only way. And then finishing school at Beaulieu in the New Forest, where agents put the finishing touches to their cover stories. So they were taught what to wear, how to wear it, what to eat, how to eat it, rendezvous and little things they needed. So if you're going into France, women don't get a cigarette ration anymore. So it's not normal to walk through the streets Smoking anymore, rationing, all that kind of stuff. And learning about collaborators as well. There's a lot of those. It was a long process. It was. It changed as the war went on because they realized that things needed to improve. I always admire SOE for this. They change as they realize that things need to be improved. So you're talking an ideal of six to nine months. That's a heck of a long time. But they prepared them as best they can. Sometimes the training was extended if the agent needed more help, and sometimes it was shortened if they showed a particular aptitude for something. So it always reflects the agent's capabilities.
- [15:56]
Eleanor Evans
I mean, it sounds like all eventualities were covered. And I'm not sure personally, I'd even fancy the training, let alone some of the missions. Can you take us a bit closer to some of the figures in SOE leadership? Who are the names that we really need to recognise in this history?
- [16:08]
Dr. Kate Vigers
There are lots of heads of section, but I think the one who's discussed the most is the head of F Section, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. So he oversaw operations into France. He was actually a salesman with a great knowledge of the area. But it was him who was responsible for missions and agents being sent into France on behalf of F Section.
- [16:29]
Eleanor Evans
Let's turn to the missions. My question, I guess, on this is who was setting the missions or what forms did they take? Was it sort of they were given all these tools and then let loose to set their own agenda and choose the paths that they thought best once they were on the ground?
- [16:43]
Dr. Kate Vigers
I think it's a combination of both, because you're relying on local knowledge to know what needs to happen in an area. And there's a factory that's churning out parts, I don't know, let's say for tanks or. Let's go with the Peugeot factory in Socho. It had been turned to use from the. For the German war effort producing armored cars. It needed to be destroyed. Now that information was fed back from the Resistance from SOE in location, back to London. And they said, okay, great, we will. We'll blow it up. And they sent over the RAF and the raf, unfortunately, on this occasion, missed the target and they caused civilian casualties. At which point SOE on the ground, Harry Ray, the agent there, said, I'm going to do it another way. And he went in and blackmailed Monsieur Peugeot. I don't really know what he was called, but I always call him Monsieur Peugeot and said, I want to blow up your factory. And Mr. Peugeot said, sorry, what now you want me to Destroy my own factory. And Harees Ray says, yes, you let me in or I'll send the RAF back. It's your choice. At which point he goes in and blows it up from the inside. But then you also have operations that are much bigger part of the picture. The destruction of the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen's a really good example of this. They had thousands of files on members of the Resistance. Those files had to be destroyed if the Resistance was going to continue to succeed. So SOE fed information back, and when I say fed information, it's done over the wireless, sent information back saying the shell house needs to be destroyed. And don't forget, you can exfiltrate agents out as well. So you could have an agent on the ground in Copenhagen, for example, who could then be brought back to London, give all the knowledge and intelligence they have and then be sent back. This happens several times. So with the shell house, it's very clear that that has to be an RAF raid. It was called Operation Carthage in the end. And decisions have to be made about awful things. I mean, the expression collateral damage is foul. It's awful. We're talking human lives. But they had to decide if the destruction of the shell house and the files was worth a few resisters lives and they go ahead and bomb it. A few things go wrong, which I won't go into now, but this is for the greater Allied cause, if you will, that this needs to happen. So it very much depends on what it is as to who makes the decisions and if they approve of it or not. So the SOE would have to tell London what they were planning and London would say, actually, don't do that. And then this conflict with SIS comes in as well. Because sometimes you have the two organisations going for the same target and because they're not speaking, they don't know.
- [19:33]
Eleanor Evans
Well, let's stay on this rivalry a bit then. How does this actually manifest? You've mentioned obviously this conflict over this particular mission with the shellhouse, but broadly, what does that look like? Are the sort of like organisational leadership going at each other or is this, you know, agents sort of failing to collaborate? What's happening?
- [19:50]
Dr. Kate Vigers
It's really convoluted. Denmark's a good example. Denmark don't really know that there are two organizations. The sort of head of the Resistance known as the Princess aren't made aware. And a woman called Juta Gru, who works for SOE doesn't bother letting them know either. So she's like, oh, no, no, there's just this one this one agency, and it's us, it's soe. But then SIS infiltrate an agent called Tommy Sinum and it all gets really complicated on the ground because nobody knows which organization's which. And even better, they sent it with Norwegian money instead of Danish, which is cracking on behalf of sis. And he had escaped Denmark. He'd gone out in a biplane with handfuls of films of stuff he'd taken photographs of, but he thought the allies needed and SIS bodged the development of the film. So he risked his life. Photographs never came to fruition. Operationally, SIS actually controlled SOE's wireless traffic for the first. I think it's two years. And they made decisions on which wireless messages would be relayed back to SOE headquarters and which wouldn't. And now that's got to cause operational conflict. And financially there's this sort of conflict that one thinks the other's getting better money, better resources, better agents and so on. There's a lot of conspiracy theories that abound that say something like the destruction of the Prosper Network, which was the SOE network in Paris. Everybody was rounded up and incarcerated. Some people believe that that was SIS who caused this destruction of the network. I personally can't find the evidence. I. I know there isn't evidence for this. And these are just sort of conspiracy theories. I don't think they would sacrifice human life in that way. I hope not. And maybe I'm a bit of an idealist, but I've not found the evidence. So, yeah, it just does seem to be a conflict of interest, a conflict of personnel and a conflict of sharing information or keeping it to yourself. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. You know that purple shop pay button.
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- [23:03]
Eleanor Evans
A very real rivalry. Nonetheless, even if there is room for conspiracy in that to turn to a listener question, then it might be a difficult one to answer, potentially, given that you've said a lot of this was happening clandestinely and in tandem, but Max Quigley has asked on Instagram, what was the first successful mission? Is that possible to pinpoint off the.
- [23:22]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Top of my head, no. I can tell you about the first agent who I would say would be the first successful mission because of the stuff that he comes up with. So I'm going to do a typical politician's answer and say, I don't know exactly. But I can tell you something I do know. A guy called Georges Begay was infiltrated in May of 1941. He's the first F Section agent to go in. He parachutes blind. This means he has no reception committee. Nobody knows he's going. It also makes me laugh, and it shouldn't. His wireless set was above him on the parachute line. And if you work out the law of gravity, he's a wonder he survives and didn't get brained by his own wireless. But he's in wireless contact within a few days. This is a mission, actually, because he's going in there, he's going to work out what resistance there is, what's going on, what can he harness that's already there that he can then use to SOE's benefits. And what he does harness is used throughout the whole war and it helps the success of every SOE mission. It's called the massage personnel on the BBC. So after the evacuation of Dunkirk, a lot of French servicemen come to the uk, have no way of communicating back home. So through radiolondres, the BBC service going back into France, service personnel could send a message back home. So Claude sends Francine his love. Or, you know, I can't think of another French name Now, Georges is safe, this kind of thing. And Becky says, this is brilliant because we could make up a message and we can send it. And all the resistance have to do is listen to the wireless and if that message is played, is their go to go and blow up the factory or their parachute drops on tonight. And the codes are brilliant. There's a Facebook page for them. My favourite is the dog sneezed on the curtains. Aunt Maud has flu, the donkey wears pyjamas. They're just brilliant. So the agents in France would be warned that that would be their massage personnel. You hear it on the wireless, off you go and do your job. You don't hear it. You don't. And this is the way that the message is relayed for D Day they use a poem by a man called Verlan and they are told it's going to be the first two lines of the poem for your standby, the next two lines for the action. So it's not a successful mission, but in a way it was a mission because he was there to work out what he could harness, what he could use to ensure the success of SOE in the future. And I personally, I think it's brilliant. That's my politician's answer to that question.
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Eleanor Evans
What a great answer. And what eccentric phrases as well. I love the idea of the donkey wears pajamas. Oh, they're triggering some kind of. Yeah, it's a really serious and vital mission unleashed by this phrase. You've already covered a few of the missions that our listeners might well be going to Google after this. I hope they are. But aside from those, could you take us through some famous missions and successes for SOE and any that you'd like to be better known as well?
- [26:22]
Dr. Kate Vigers
I think probably the most successful mission was Operation Gun aside, which happened in Norway. So the Germans were producing an element called heavy water, which was a component for what would become their atom bomb. It was being produced at the Norsk Hydro plant in Vermork in Norway. Intelligence is gathered about this being a target. There's a lot of operations that have to go on before to enable that this can just happen. There's Operation Grouse, which sends agents in ahead to kind of sow the seeds and lay the land. Gun aside is the actual mission where they go in and they lay explosive charges underneath the heavy water. It's an amazing story. I can't get into the nuts and bolts of it, but there's locked doors, there's bribing of guards, drugging of guards, that kind of thing. But eventually they go in, they lay the explosive under the cylinders, producing the heavy water. And the story goes, they also left a Sten gun behind, which is synonymous with. With British resistance, because they didn't want. Want the locals to be caught up in this. It blows up, successfully blows up the. The heavy water plant and they ski away. It's a great film called Skis against the atom made in the 50s. They ski away and even though the Germans are after them, every single one of them survives. They get away. It is quite phenomenal. However, some of the heavy water survives the blast and the Germans then move it onto a ferry called the SF Hydraulic, which is on one of the fjords, and they're going to try and get it to safety. So the agents had to make a decision. Do they blow up the ferry, sink the ferry, thereby getting rid of the last trace of heavy water, or do they leave it because they don't want to incur civilian casualties? Very, very difficult decision. They decide to sink the ferry, but to give the civilians as much notice as possible before the boat goes down so they can get to the sides and get away to be rescued. So the heavy water's destroyed and the Germans don't produce it again. Germany was not as close to producing the atom bomb as they would have liked to think they were. However, the SOE historian MRD Foot said that humanity owes a debt to these men for doing this particular mission. Another very, very successful mission is the destruction of the Gorgopatamas viaducts in Greece, not least because it managed to unite the Greek resistance in a way that nobody else had managed, because there are a lot of Greek factions who worked against one another. And SOE kind of went in and went, right, just for now can we just fight the Germans and then we'll come back to this later. So they managed to unite the resistance into blowing up the Gorgopatamas viaduct, which is basically the main route out for a lot of tanks and a lot of German transportation. So that's a really successful mission, but there's lots of little ones that should be better known. Tony Brooks blowing up the locomotive turntable, for example, in France, using a 14 and a 16 year old girl to help him. I mean those two girls, they deserve more than just to be called a couple of teenage girls Helping Tony Brooks. Who are they? What did they do? What did they go on to do? So these smaller missions, and I really think D Day is underestimated. What the Resistance did for D Day, we could have been pushed back into the sea if the Resistance hadn't done what they did. 960 Acts of sabotage against the French railways the night before D Day. It's phenomenal. So there's lots, there's lots and lots go and read about them because they're amazing. Brilliant.
- [30:08]
Eleanor Evans
Well, yeah, it sounds like there are plenty of stories to be told there and some of them are in Your book Mission Europe, which covers women in soe, now glowing. Dani on Instagram has asked how many women were in soe? Given the nature of the operations, is there a number to be found?
- [30:24]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Now, this is interesting, because my thought on this is starting to change. So I can tell you categorically, for F section, there were 39. However, one of those was a locally recruited agent called Sonja Olcheneski. And the reason she's been counted amongst soe's number is because of the dreadful way that she was caught up with everything and executed. So we say there are 39 women for F section. There were 11 women for De Gaulle's section, there were two women in the Netherlands. However, there were other women training to go into the Netherlands. However, the war ended before they could be infiltrated, or one of them was infiltrated, but she broke her leg and she didn't manage to do anything. And this is where it starts to get a little bit more sort of frayed around the edges. Didn't we talk about women who were recruited locally but didn't come back to the UK for training? Are they SOE agents? Can you count women who had SOE training but then were on missions for other organizations like MI9 Escape and Evasion? Or is 9 Intelligence School 9, which is part of MI9? And my answer is yes, you can count them. They encountered soe, they worked with soe, and some of them would have their training, their infiltration and the beginning of their mission covered. Can we find a number for that? I don't think there is a finite number yet. We know 3,200 women were listed as SOE. They weren't active agents. Don't get me wrong, that that would be silly. There's a lot of people working behind the scenes. Even got two tea ladies. I'm dying to pull their files, trying to know what the tea ladies overheard. So, yes, you can answer it and no, you can't. All in the same breath. And I'm really starting to consider what accounts as being soe. And then of course, you've got, I say I sus women as well, but we'll never know because their files are under lock and key. So it's a yes and no answer. And I'm hoping I'll find out yet more stories and be able to tell you yet more amazing women who did these things.
- [32:34]
Eleanor Evans
Well, our listeners will be able to hear more in our episode on Mission Europe. So do search in the channel for this other conversation with Dr. Kate Vigers, but just for this episode. Kate, can you give us a very brief sense of the type of work that women were doing? You know, is it still wireless operation? Is it what, what kind of roles were they playing as agents and behind the scenes as well.
- [32:54]
Dr. Kate Vigers
So as agents, women were primarily given two roles. It would be wireless operator or courier. No woman was sent into the field to be a leader. That sometimes happened by chance. Say the leader was arrested, but they were never chosen. In fact, a lot of the reports say they'd make a very good subordinate. So somebody who takes instructions. So wireless operator, a very, very lonely job. Your wireless set was hidden inside a suitcase. A lot of women try to use lookouts to help protect them. Because once your wireless set is open, your headphones are on and the aerials up, the Germans are out there listening. They had something called a direction finding fan, which could triangulate in on a signal in 20 minutes, which is, it's nothing. And then they would start door to door searches. At the height of the war, the life expectancy of a wireless operator was six weeks before they were captured or could be captured. And there's a lot of security around this. There's a lot of coding, for example, hiding of your wireless set. Don't keep your messages, memorize everything. And it was a very lonely job as well because the wireless operator was so special, because they took so long to train. They were such a unique part of the organization, they really needed to be protected as much as possible. The other main role women would have would be a courier. So let's use France as an example. It was kind of divided up like a patchwork quilt. Each patch is a circuit. There's a circuit leader who's male, a wireless operator and a courier. They can be male or female, it doesn't matter. However, women could move around more easily because they weren't on the census for the forced labour program. So women could go around on their bicycles or walk around the streets without necessarily attracting attention. So the role of a courier would be to take messages, to carry equipment, basically to move around, be the moving cog within the circuit. So those are the two main roles that women were given. And then we find some exceptions to the rule. We've got our female explosives instructor, Jeanne Boek, for example. But that's the exception, not the rule. Very much so definitely.
- [35:04]
Eleanor Evans
Well, as I said, you can hear more about Boek and other women doing extraordinary roles in the other podcast we have recorded. So search on the channel. But turning to. Well, a very sad aspect, I suppose you touched on it with the Amount of women recruited, it's very difficult to pin a number on. I imagine this question might be the same. But a most popular question put to Google about this topic is, do we know how many SOE agents were killed? Is it possible to know this?
- [35:29]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Yes, it is. Especially for F Section. Just as the war was coming to a conclusion, a woman called Vera Atkins said missing, presumed dead is not good enough. She was the second in command of F Section, and she took up on herself to get out into Europe and find out what had happened, not only to the women, but to the men who had gone missing. She had a list of 118 agents who had gone missing. She found 117. She discovered their fates. The one she didn't find, they think absconded with the money he parachuted in with and lifted up in the casinos in the south of France. I'm being a bit glib because it is such a disgusting, awful story that she finds 117 agents who had been executed or who had died while on service. Now, with the women, there are 13. One of them died of natural causes. She died of meningitis in the field. The other 12 were in the concentration camp system and were either executed or died as a result of their treatment. So Yvonne, Rue de La is transported from Ravensbruck to Bergen Belsen. She's on the register when Belsen is liberated, but she disappears from the register about a week later. So she's one of those casualties after the liberation. We've recently seen the 80th anniversary of the liberation of a lot of the camps. So a lot of names have sort of been going around on social media and on the Internet. But I've been quite taken with the fact they only refer to F Section. So, for example, we know at Mauthausen that 48 SOE SIS agents were murdered from the Netherlands as a result of something called the Englundspiel, which is basically when every agent was caught. We can work out the numbers. That's not to say. And it kind of goes back to my earlier answer. What counts as an SOE agent in the first place. We kind of need to have that framework in place to then see what happened to these agents. But Vera did the most amazing job. But some people slip through the net. When I was researching from the very beginning, really, the executions at Ravensbruck, I kept coming across a file saying four women had been hanged. But then it seemed to get convoluted and mixed up with the three women who were shot. And I thought someone's memories playing tricks with Them. Something's gone wrong. Four SOE women were hanged at Ravensbruck, but they're not well known because they're RF Section, not F Section. They were executed. They were wireless operators for rf. They were caught, and actually they were asking for better conditions at the camp, and they said, we'll give you better conditions, and executed them. So if you're looking for a finite number, possibly not, but we do have most of the evidence in place.
- [38:21]
Eleanor Evans
What remarkable work by Atkins there as well.
- [38:23]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Absolutely.
- [38:24]
Eleanor Evans
Obviously, a debt is owed to women and men like her who made an effort at the time to detail these records and bring things together like that. But is it right, Kate, that there are still some significant challenges facing historians who are looking into the history of SOE now?
- [38:41]
Dr. Kate Vigers
There are challenges. There are a lot of challenges for any historian of anything. You've got to go back to the primary sources. You can't just read a book and think, okay, that's it. As a historian, of course, as a reader, that's what we all want you to do, and I've done that work for you, hopefully. But go back to the primary sources. Don't just regurgitate the same stuff. And sometimes what you find can be uncomfortable. It can challenge the received narrative of the last 80 years or so. You also have to be very, very careful with oral archives. SOE is. It's perceived as glamorous, it's perceived as this fantastic thing and, oh, wow, soe. And some people will claim that they were members of SOE or did things in the war that they didn't do. And that's my job as a historian, to dig deep and to find out. So, you know, years of research goes into this and knowledge. But something will ring an alarm bell. I jumped out of a Lysander. And you go, oh, you didn't, though, because you don't jump out of Lysanders. And that sends you digging. And you do find stories of people who've exaggerated or who are even fantasists, which is quite frightening because it means the history could become convoluted. So there are huge challenges, primary sources all the way. And you even have to be careful of oral archives, too. But, yeah, there's all sorts of challenges for us every day, and particularly with.
- [40:07]
Eleanor Evans
Records after the war. Is there a particular sort of history there that we need to be aware of?
- [40:14]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Yeah, there is with SOEs. So they had thousands and thousands and thousands of files, and what are they going to do with all of them? I go into significant detail as to how many filing cabinets and files in Mission France. I don't remember it exactly off the top of my head, but there was a process of weeding and I listened to an interview of a woman who was one of the readers and she said, I counted out nine files, kept the 10th, didn't even look at what it was. So we have personnel files surviving, but we know that some major files disappeared. Leo Marks, for example, the codemaster, wrote a 200 page document on the Netherlands and it just disappeared. Don't know where it is. Then to add insult to injury, there was a fire at Baker Street. This has always fascinated me, this fire. So I did a bit more digging. It was bad enough that one person was injured and sent to hospital, but that destroyed several of the files as well. And sometimes you can put a file in the archive, it's a little bit singed down the edge. It survived the fire. We're looking at approximately 85% of records destroyed. However, that in itself is hard to quantify and historians are looking into it all the time. But that presents a challenge, a very big challenge.
- [41:29]
Eleanor Evans
So who knows what stories are still out there waiting to be told. Really intriguing. And you mentioned the perceived glamour of these roles as the organisation. And I've probably skipped over a really fun part that people would like to hear more of the sort of unique and more covert weapons of war that some of these agents were equipped with. Can you take us into this world of sort of wartime Q, for example?
- [41:51]
Dr. Kate Vigers
Yeah. And it is, isn't it? It's Q's workshop. In fact, it was Q's workshop because underneath the Natural History Museum, they collection of all this stuff that heads of state and potential agents could go and look at and kind of pick. So I'm pretty sure that's where the idea comes from. So SOE produced a wild and wonderful catalogue of weaponry, explosives, things to hide. I think probably the most famous is the exploding rat, whereby you'd take a rat, it's like Blue Peter, this. Take a rat, scoop out its insides, stuff it with plastic explosive. It needed a detonator and a time delay fuse and then the time delay could be a couple of hours. Leave dead rat lying around. No one's going to think twice about a dead rat in the middle of occupied Belgium or the Netherlands. You know, it's the least of your worries and, you know, you might pick it up, throw it into the furnace, boom. Or wait for the device itself to go off. They also concealed weapons and explosives. So exploding cow dung in Western Europe, exploding camel dung, if you were in The Far east incendiary cigarettes, which had an explosive at the end of the cigarette. So you could either use this to blow up somebody you didn't particularly like or flick the butt of the cigarette when you've smoked it to start a fire. All kinds of knives as well. Very interesting collection of knives for close combat or self defense. You would never go out as an SOE agent to start a fight. This was always about if the Germans started a fight with you. My favourite is a hat pin dagger, because ladies would always wear a hat, have their hair and their lovely rolls pinned through to, you know, stop your hat blowing off in the wind. All you've got to do is galvanize that pin, make it a bit stronger and a bit sharper, and that's going to ruin somebody's day if they come to the wrong side of it. Weapon guns, for example, there's a wellrod pistol, which was a silent pistol. I always used to call it suppressed, but was told recently, you can categorically say it is silent. It had rubber baffles all the way through it, so it took out the sound of the bullet. Unfortunately, it also takes out the speed. But a proper assassin's weapon, there's loads. There's something called the SOE handbook and, you know, on a boring rainy afternoon, it's a great thing to flick through and marvel at all the things they came up with.
- [44:12]
Eleanor Evans
There's some remarkable stories, obviously we haven't been able to cover in this podcast, but bringing our episode to the beginnings of a close, can you talk a bit about how SOE was disbanded and how can we quantify the effect they had on the war's victory?
- [44:26]
Dr. Kate Vigers
So it was disbanded in 1946, but some agents, as their. The villages where their circuits were, were liberated, you know, found themselves with nothing to do. You'll find an expression in their files which says overrun means the Allies got there, there's no more work to be done. Some of them move on to do other work in other circuits that haven't been liberated yet. Elaine Madden joins an organization where she helps to work with the liberation of the camps, prisoner of war and concentration camps. But really SOE is no longer needed once the war has ended. It lasts as long as Churchill does and it's disbanded. And you'll find letters in the files literally saying, from such and such a date, this office is no longer functional. Direct your queries somewhere else. We won't be here anymore. So it just goes. Some of the agents may go on to other work in sis, for example, But I can't tell you that because the SIS files are shut, so no idea. And some of them just go back to their everyday lives. How you quantify it is a very difficult question. Eisenhower had a very good go at this. He said, without the Resistance, the liberation of France would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves. So even Eisenhower try to quantify it, but it's hard. It's hard to quantify. And it's also hard to justify the amount of death, both of the agents and in reprisals. It's a difficult subject to try and understand and to accept what happened as a result of SOE activity.
- [46:02]
Eleanor Evans
Well, there are plenty of great histories doing that work and trying to tell a lot more of the stories that might allow a bit more of that understanding of SOE's impact during the war, yours included. But there are also lots of representations in popular culture. And, Kate, before we wrap up, I wondered if you could point listeners to what, in your opinion, are maybe, you know, the best or most well represented in popular culture of soe.
- [46:26]
Dr. Kate Vigers
I think there was a documentary made a few years ago, and it was called Churchill Secret Agents. And they took members of the public and trained them up using SOE training. And it was brilliant. It was really well done and probably the best representation we can get of the training, because obviously it wasn't filmed. That said, it was. Now It Can Be Told, which was released in 1946, has to be the best because they're all in it. Buckmaster's in it, Jacqueline Nairn, Harry Ray, they're all in this film showing what SOE training was like. It's glorious fun and well worth a watch. And in terms of more recent representation on the big screen, it's difficult because they all have their foibles and you've kind of got to overlook them in some ways. But the recent A Call to Spy with Virginia Hall, Noorini at Khan and Vera Atkins. Okay. Has agents meeting who would never have met. But it's a. It's a nice representation. But if anybody wants to option Mission Europe and turn it into a film, you know, I'm not going to argue. There's lots of great stories to be told, but, yeah, there's some great stuff out there. It's fun as well. And some of the films made in the 50s, they're heroes of telemark skis against the atom. You know, they're worth the watch. They give you a sense of the time and help immortalize these people, which is the most important thing.
- [47:48]
Eleanor Evans
Wonderful. Well, plenty for the reading and watch list. Is there anything else, Kate, you'd like to leave our listeners with, point them towards on this topic or just give a bit more food for thought as we sort of look at this organisation 80 years after it existed?
- [48:02]
Dr. Kate Vigers
I think in terms of food for thought, it's just worth digging. If it's a subject that interests you, dig around, have a look. Don't just get stuck on France. There are some amazing, amazing stories in other countries and I'm still finding them. I'm just back from Norway and I'm all inspired to go and find out more about SOE in Norway, for example. There's lots of stuff out there that can really get you interested. There are trips you can go on. You know, you can go and visit these places. You could go and immerse yourself in it. And I really think it's worth doing if it's something that floats your boat. And the main thing to remember is they were just like you and me. They were ordinary people who were given the opportunity to do something absolutely extraordinary and for that they deserve to be remembered. That was Dr. Kate by speaking to Eleanor Evans. You can hear a previous episode in this podcast feed on Kate's latest book called Mission Europe that tells the stories of lesser known women who worked in espionage across wider Europe from the Netherlands to Poland. Search for women secret agents in Nazi occupied France, wherever you get your podcasts to bring that up.
- [49:25]
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