S.O.E.: an Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940-46

by M.R.D. Foot

S.O.E.: an Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940-46 reads just as well now as it did when it was first published by the BBC in 1984 to coincide with a television series--not least because its author, M.R.D Foot, was appointed the official historian to the SOE just after World War Two and has had access to its archive.
The SOE was hastily cobbled together in 1940 to wage subversive campaigns behind enemy lines and, by and large, it made up the rules as it went along. It recruited where and when it could. The senior ranks generally came from the echelons of the public schools, the City, the business world and the armed services, but its agents were a bizarre mix of eccentrics and mavericks from all over the world--including North American newspaper editors, South American businessmen, Spanish smugglers, Abyssinian tribesmen, Norwegian mountaineers, schoolchildren, Dutch printers, Greek outlaws, Slovene peasants, Malayan rubber workers, Siamese noblemen, Naga hillmen, Polish and Czech railway guards and Chinese tycoons.
SOE's total strength never exceeded more than 10,000 men and 3,200 women; the women were treated as equals of the men, which was quite a novel concept in the 1940s. Often the training was crude and the operations were ill-thought out and, as a result, many failed; but this only serves to make those that succeeded against such long odds all the more impressive. Occasionally, such as its attack on the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjukan, SOE's operations were critical to the outcome of the war, but, for the most part, its successes owed more to the longevity of attrition rather than any immediate outcome.

The SOE spent alot of time engaged in diversionary activity. It was said that each day Hitler spent at least half an hour considering Abwehr reports on SOE activities and that he was never entirely sure of their place in the overall framework of Allied plans. But perhaps the greatest success of the SOE was the way it managed to foster a mentality of resistance in all areas occupied by the Nazis. Populations that might otherwise have settled for an easy life were galvanised into a permanent state of mini-rebellion, thereby ensuring that the occupying forces could never relax for a moment. Foot is the ideal guide to walk you through this outfit, of which much has been spoken but little is known, sorting out fact from fiction, and still finding ample room for storytelling. Your perspective on World War Two will never be quite the same again after reading this. -- John CraceI have edited this synopsis: Gary Barnes.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Espionage, War, Military Fiction, Historical

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Michael Richard Daniell Foot, CBE, TD, known as M. R. D. Foot — was a British military historian and former British Army intelligence officer and special operations operative during World War II.

The son of a career soldier, Foot was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he became involved romantically with Iris Murdoch. He joined the British Army on the outbreak of World War II and was commissioned into a Royal Engineers searchlight battalion. In 1941 searchlight units transferred to the Royal Artillery. By 1942, he was serving at Combined Operations Headquarters, but wanting to see action he joined the SAS as an intelligence officer and was parachuted into France after D-Day. He was for a time a prisoner of war, and was severely injured during one of his attempts to escape. For his service with the French Resistance he was twice mentioned in despatches and awarded the Croix de Guerre. He ended the war as a major. After the war he remained in the Territorial Army, transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1950.

After the war Foot taught at Oxford University for eight years before becoming Professor of Modern History at Manchester University. His experiences during the war gave him a lifelong interest in the European resistance movements, intelligence matters and the experiences of prisoners of war. This led him to become the official historian of SOE, with privileged access to its records, allowing him to write some of the first, and still definitive, accounts of its wartime work, especially in France. Even so, SOE in France took four years to get clearance.

Foot left the Labour Party while his namesake Michael Foot — to whom he was very distantly related — was leading it, and joined the SDP (Social Democratic Party).

Foot was the great-great-great-grandson of Benjamin Fayle who built Dorset's first railway, the Middlebere Plateway in 1806. Fayle was the great-great-grandson of William Edmunson, the First Irish Quaker.

He was at one time married to the British philosopher Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), the granddaughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. Foot's second was wife was Elizabeth King, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In 1972 Foot married Mirjam Romme.

M.R.D. Foot was appointed a CBE in 2001. He also received the Territorial Decoration for Long Service in the Territorial Army.

See also his obituaries at:
1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu... accessed 26 May 2012.

2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/... accessed 26 May 2012.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

A good factual overview of SOE operations, notably less sensationalist than many more recent ones, and very well written: it crams in a lot of facts and names but remains highly readable.

Foot, of course, was an intelligence officer who actively served with the French Resistance, and his own feelings come across in moments when he refers to the "pornographers" who dwell on extensive descriptions of Gestapo tortures, or casually notes in an otherwise academic paragraph that the concentration camp guards were "the scum of the earth".

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just read Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which was a short but exciting book about SOE and many of its characters and missions, I was looking forward to reading this more comprehensive history, written by M.R.D.Foot, a man who, though not in SOE, had rubbed shoulders with them, had participated in missions during World War II and had been interrogated by the Germans, so knew what he was talking about.

This book is certainly more comprehensive than the one mentioned above, but owing to the secrecy surrounding SOE, the political angst that seemed to dog it throughout the war, the competing factions within SOE and between it and the army, the navy, the air force, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and its relationships with the exiled Continental governments, quite a lot of this book is taken up with those machinations, which get a bit heavy at times. Then, just when you get into the exciting bits – the descriptions of missions and how the agents operated, you find that the missions are not described in any detail, which I found disappointing.

This narrative, however, has a much wider scope and covers much more ground, so inevitably cannot go into too much detail about individual missions. It describes a good deal about an agent’s life and the difficulties they faced and also gives far more information about the mistakes and failures that led to so many arrests and several German successes against SOE, as well as its own successes against the Nazis. The most detail concerns activities in France and the Low Countries, though it also gives an overview of SOE’s activities in Scandinavia, Poland, the Balkans, Greece and the Far East.

SOE’s relationships with established guerrilla networks is also examined, and its rationale for seemingly inexplicable contradictions explained. For instance, in Greece SOE avoided helping Communist groups, recognising that their main desire was to take power, not to destroy Nazism. In Yugoslavia, however, SOE supported Tito’s Communist partisans rather than Mihailovic’s Cetniks, mainly because Tito’s men fought the Nazi occupiers regularly and with spirit, causing them problems, whereas Mihailovic was more passive, with more than an eye to the future, when he could use his troops to wipe out Tito, though ultimately he failed in that. Churchill summarised for one officer why this was so – he said that SOE’s mission was to seek out people who were killing or wanted to kill Nazis and to help them kill more – whatever their own political leanings.

I do have an issue with how this book is written – at times it is not very well constructed, which means I had to re-read a few sections to understand what Foot really meant. I recognise, however, that his task in writing a comprehensive history of SOE, its methods and operational experience, was an enormous and incredibly complicated job, particularly as he did not have access to all of the archive when he first published the book – and much of the archive had been destroyed at the end of the war.

Overall, this is a good book and well worth reading if you are interested in the history of this fascinating organisation. If your main interest is in detailed descriptions of the missions, other books do it better and in more readable form.
Four stars.

[Fingon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book on a to-read list prompted by History Channel (or Viasat History, never sure when one of them is serious and when talk about aliens and conspiracy theories), this one by the series Secret War. This book gives rather detailed insight into the way SOE operated and with what equipment. However, when it comes to the action - missions and agents themselves - the TV series are much more detailed (not surprising, perhaps, since the book was first written in the 80s).

All in all, fine, though at moments very slow read.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather disjointed book, names and events just seem to appear out of any context which makes it somewhat difficult to follow.
I also found the author's style rather less than flowing, I found myself having to re-read sentences to get their meaning.
That said, the story is a fascinating one and well worth the effort to read.

[Rob McMinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m currently in the middle of a long overdue deep dive into the SOE rabbit hole. This has been a long time coming, since I have always loved the espionage genre in fiction, and my favourite book Declare imagines a future for SOE beyond the official 1946 cut-off date.
Prior to this, I’d say my focus on espionage centred around the Cold War, and I’ve never nurtured much interest in the live-fire version in WW2. I suppose I considered it messier, wetter, less cerebral.
M R D Foot is, I think, the official historian of SOE, and published a number of books about it and related matters prior to his death in 2012. Just like Pippa Latour, he has a very interesting back story and was himself in the SAS and parachuted into France after D-Day.
If I was a television comedy writer, I’d be using the rich material of multiple secret organisations operating at the same time in occupied France. You’ve got your SIS, your SOE, your SAS, which is before you get to the different branches within SOE: according to this book there were no less than six different groups within SOE operating in France around D-Day. Officially, there was F section, but then also RF section, and then a group of Polish exiles, and “Jedburghs”, and so on. Confusing, chaotic, and clashing.
Because they did all kind of hate each other. De Gaulle’s official Free French RF Section was operating independently of the British-run F section. In September 1944, De Gaulle went on a tour of France telling the Brits to get the hell out of his country.
As for SIS, the rivalry and conflicting priorities were stark. SIS wanted to operate in complete secrecy, keeping things quiet and gathering intelligence. SOE wanted to do a bit of that, but at the same time made a lot of noise, blowing stuff up, sabotaging vehicles, train lines, and factories, undermining the enemy’s morale and ensuring that they had to deploy troops in out of the way places on guard duty.
At the end of the book, Foot asks the key question: how effective was it? Because it operated in secrecy, the impact of SOE was very little known until long after the war. But there are lots of indications here. The clever sabotage of a Peugeot factory near Montbeliard, which was making military equipment. The disabling of train carriages used for tank transport down near Toulouse, which delayed Nazi reinforcements following D-Day by over a fortnight. The gathering of intelligence about enemy positions and movements, blowing up bridges, repeatedly damaging the same targets, all of it seems to have been useful.
On the other hand, there are tales of incompetence and stupidity that boggle the mind. These are the kind of details that Tim Powers picked up on for Declare. A key example is the playback of agents who had been captured, along with their radio sets. There were measures in place for this: pass phrases designed to verify that a message was genuine. But SOE back in London ignored, over and over again, the fact of missing or incorrect code phrases, and carried on regardless. The whole of the Netherlands operation seems to have been blown, and quite a lot of the French. One agent even sent the code groups CAU and GHT but London failed to recognise it!
The fog of war, etc.
Agents could come unstuck for the most trivial of reasons. Asking for butter with a croissant. Looking the wrong way when crossing the road. Meeting up with another agent and speaking English in public. It was almost as if some of them wanted to get caught. The number of people who parachuted in and got caught almost immediately was really quite remarkable.
Anyway, for my purposes, I’m mainly interested in what went on in France, but this book covers the whole gamut of global operations, from what was then called Abyssinia to the Far East. If I’d known this was the case, I might have bought his other book: SOE in France, but no matter. I have another book on the go that covers that.
When I was a kid, my grandad gave me a book called something like Greatest Secrets of World War 2. I don’t remember the exact title. Given that this was probably published some time in the 1960s, I don’t think that many of the actual secrets of WW2 were in that book, but I suppose it sparked an interest. As it happens, my grandad worked at Bletchley Park during the war (I’ve no idea in what capacity), but like a lot of these people, he never talked about it.

[David Charnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone ready to use the word ‘turd’ in a textbook gets my vote: an item of ‘wayward genius’ was ‘an explosive turd: imitation horse, cow, camel or donkey droppings with an explosive filling fired by a pressure switch’. This is followed by the explosive rat in the chapter headed ‘Devices and methods’. The chapter is a detailed overview of the SOE’s equipment, much of which required great ingenuity, but included also the development of more regular items such as the Sten submachine gun.

This is a very thorough study of the Special Operations Executive from a variety of angles. It’s not a chronological study, which would be extremely difficult to do. One of the things you learn quickly once you start looking into the complex world of covert activity is how multi-dimensional it is. So Foot’s approach is to take different strands in the SOE’s development and to give each a chapter.

Inevitably this means doubling back, and there’s plenty of cross-referencing. But better that than a narrative which moves forwards by jumping from place to place. Of the book’s eleven chapters, only one – Chapter Ten, admittedly a much longer one than the others – deals with the activities of the SOE in the field. The rest detail other aspects of the organisation such as questions of control, how agents were recruited and trained, and what equipment was devised, as mentioned above.

Foot’s original edition appeared in 1984, and though much information on the SOE has been released subsequently, his work remains a very useful introduction to the subject. Certainly there seems to have been a good deal of information available to him at the time, irrespective of official papers coming into the public domain. Foot refers extensively to others’ works published already which give a lot of the necessary detail. But it’s his understanding of the nature and character of the SOE which brings this material together into a valuable study.

Foot may not have been with the Special Operations Executive, but he served during the war with the Special Air Service. He knows from first-hand experience how covert military operations worked – or failed to work – at the time, and this gives his study authenticity. The reader gets the sense that a revised edition would add more incidental detail, but could not improve on the overall picture given in this study.

In the final chapter, Foot asks what the SOE actually achieved. This is a difficult question to answer, since the often improvised nature of SOE activity and the shifts of political emphasis and control in the many theatres of operation mean that success and failure are well mixed up in the story. But for Foot, the SOE provided a foundation for covert activity, and it enhanced the activity of resistance to the Axis forces across Europe and into Asia.

Moreover, by providing ‘a series of sublime examples of how men and women can behave right out at the margin of endurable existence’, the story of the SOE has the positive result of having ‘enriched the human stock of brave and noble ways to behave’.

While therefore it is impossible to ask for instance whether the SOE provided value for money, in today’s way of measuring success, it certainly proved a useful presence. Indeed, it might have gone on to provide a foundation for covert activity during the Cold War had it not been for Clement Attlee and his fears of ‘a British Comintern’.

Foot’s study is thus a painstaking assessment of the Special Operations Executive from all the angles the reader might wish. Certainly it repays return visits, and provides the springboard for further, more specialised research. His style is accessible, and there is much to enjoy in his descriptions and commentaries. Though it’s crammed with detail, it’s by no means a dry work.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

MRD Foot’s SOE is an historians overview of the secretive Special Operations Executive. Coming into existence in 1940 and being shuttered in 1946, the SOE oversaw a multitude of covert operations of irregular forces, local resistance fighters and partisans. Based in London with region HQ’s across the globe from Cairo, Ceylon, to Brisbane.

SOE was so secretive that many in the British High Command were not even aware of its existence, and those that did often felt it was staffed with renegades up to no good, ungentlemanly warfare. In reality, it was largely staffed by officers schooled in the British public school system and populated with a list of characters drawn from the old boys network including Eton and Oxford.

Foot, himself an experienced clandestine warrior of which includes service in the SAS, does a very good job of collecting and condensing extremely hard to find source materials (locked up in secret for at least 50 years) and embellishing the somewhat dry fact of matter archive materials with personal accounts drawn from numerous interviews with those who were there.

Whilst small in number, the SOE trained, equipped, armed and inserted countless warriors and patriots into occupied France, the lowland countries, the Balkans, Italy, Burma and as far abroad as China, Malaya and Indonesia.

This account covers the establishment of SOE, the key leaders and then goes into further detail about the basics of spy craft, a number of key operations and their outcomes as well as a description of SOE operations and effectiveness during the war.

It provides an excellent overview and introduction to SOE and references a number of detailed accounts by other historians and former operatives. One particular anecdote sums up nicely how indeed irregular SOE operations and agents were. In this case, two young girls aged 16 and 14 drained the grease from the axles of rail cars used to transport the SS Panzer divisions tanks. In this case they inserted carborundum liquid which resulted in the axels ceasing. The net result was the delay of an SS Panzer division by 17 days to enter the battle to resist allied forces after D-Day.

[Eric Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few people knew as much about the highly-secretive SOE - whose task, according to Churchill, was to 'set Europe ablaze' - as M.R.D. Foot. This short book is an introduction to the work of the estimated 15,000 SOE operatives, many of them female, who fought a secret war against Germany, Italy and Japan across three continents. In his attempt to be both comprehensive and brief, Foot clearly struggles. Most sections of the book, especially the final chapters detailing SOE operations across the various war zones, feel too brief. He complains about how much remains secret (the book was published in 1984), how much was destroyed and how much information was never committed to paper. Years after this book appeared, there were new revelations, some spectacular ones too, including the secret plan to kill Adolf Hitler. One wonders what other secrets lay hidden in the archives, or which were buried with the men and women who carried those secrets to their graves.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considered an authoritative voice on the program, this volume is a broad overview of the formation and missions of the Special Operations Executive. Foot was one of the first historians to be granted access to the files that documented the wartime efforts of the SOE. These brave men and women played a vital part in the war effort, and their collaboration with American forces (the OSS) led to the eventual formation of the CIA.

Definitely a good place to begin, because the more you read the more you'll want to investigate.

[Katia M. Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact this book is mostly twenty years old and the author was not privy to material now released, it was a pretty thorough account of the SOE. There is a good section on the development of the SOE at the start. The remainder is divided by section and theatre to give a history of SOE's activities during WW2. It finishes with the disbanding. I enjoyed the read, the politics was a little boring but that is just my personal taste. I would recommend to anyone with an interest in WW2 and clandestine warfare.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such an odd book.
The subject is fascinating but the writer often failed to engage me. I ended the book feeling unsatisfied but not able to put my finger on exactly why. It may be that it is because I took so long to read it - I tended to pick it up before bed and read for ten or twenty minutes - and the fact that I had to keep referring to the glossary to remind me what each acronym or set of initials stood for maybe broke the flow of the narrative. Whatever it was, I feel that I will have to read it again in the near future and, possibly, amend this review.

[Paul Lindstrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a lot of biographies about or by former SOE agents, and I'm always impressed and inspired by those brave women and men. Reading Foot's book, humbly called "an outline" of the history of S.O.E. offers a great depth to when reading about individuals in the resistance work. I can whole heartedly recommend it. Michael Foot writes personally and often with a witty humour.

[M.J. Webb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a little dated for me, being too detailed and hard-going. Lots of facts and figures around how SOE operated, personnel and equipment etc. but lacks that human element; individual stories, sacrifice...

[M.K. Aston · Rating 2 out of 5]

An informative read if not an entertaining one.

[Ben Vos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great.

[Jack Elvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit long but kinda interesting.

[Larry Loftis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book ... maybe the best on the SOE, its founding, training, and operation. Loved it.