Part I The Special Operations Executive and its Records
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British covert operations service fonned in July 1940 by the amalgamation of three bodies which had been created shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War: Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which had studied the subject of sabotage and already had some resources in the field in Eastern Europe; EH (named after its headquarters, Electra House, on the Embankment), a semi-secret propaganda section of the Foreign Office set up in 1938 which was later to form the nucleus of the Political Warfare Executive; and Military Intelligence, Research (MIR), which had developed out of the research section of the War Office's general staff and which made a study of guerrilla warfare. l SOE was a secret, independent auxiliary service. Departmental responsibility for its work lay not with the Foreign Office, but the Ministry of Economic Warfare, in order to maintain SOE's independence from any of the orthodox services. Its headquarters were at 64 Baker Street, separate from the Ministry in Berkeley Square, and its fIrst Chief Executive Office was H M Gladwyn Jebb (later Lord Gladwyn), a member of the Diplomatic Service. When Jebb returned to the FO in 1942, Sir Frank Nelson became head of SOE, followed by Sir Charles Hambro
and then Major General (Sir) Colin Gubbins. SOE's task, memorably expressed by Prime Minister W S Churchill to the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, was to 'set Europe ablaze': to coordinate action against the enemy by means of subversion and sabotage, including propaganda on behalf of the Allied war effort. It had first to identify, train, supply and coordinate the efforts of Resistance groups in Occupied Europe. It had then a twofold purpose: ultimately, to raise secret armies to rise in concert with the eventual Allied invasion; in the meantime, to carry out a programme of sabotage detrimental to the enemy's fighting potential. SOE was divided into three branches: SOl (propaganda), S02 (active operations) and S03 (Planning). Its focus of activity was Europe, but it also operated in Africa and the Middle East and in the Far East including India. The specific nature of SOE activities varied according to the
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A fuller account of the origins and structure of SOE is given in MRD Foot., SOE in France (HMSO, 1966). 3