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Sabotage and Subversion

The SOE and OSS at War

The History Press

OSS AND SOE – What Were They?

The Special Operations Executive was formed on Churchill's orders in July 1940 from three smaller organisations: Section D, part of the Secret Intelligence Service which dealt in sabotage; EH, a semi-secret Foreign Office department which handled propaganda; and an obscure branch of the War Office known as MI(R). Its objective was, in Churchill's well-known phrase, to 'set Europe ablaze' – the prime minister's order to Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, who was SOE's first political head. Its inspiration were the Fifth columnists who were supposed to have been so active throughout Europe, including Britain, and were much feared at the time (although except for the examples of Volksdeutsche activity mentioned in the introduction, they proved to be largely a myth). It was, of necessity, a secret organisation. By that is meant that it was not one that the government would officially acknowledge as existing.

Being new, SOE had its difficulties with the other two long-established British secret services. These were the Security Service, which was primarily responsible for the security of the United Kingdom (counter-intelligence), and the Special Intelligence Service, whose business was the gathering of information in enemy-occupied territory by spying (intelligence). Both were numbered as being part of the Military Intelligence Directorate – MI5 and MI6 respectively – though, in fact, the former reported to the Home Office and the latter to the Foreign Office. SOE, on the other hand, was responsible to the Ministry of Economic Warfare, or the Ministry of Un-gentlemanly Warfare as its first political minister, Hugh Dalton, called it.

SOE's differences with MI5 were minor, but with MI6 it had a fundamental problem in that spies need anonymity and a tranquil, unsuspecting enemy; the whole object of sabotage and subversion is to create mayhem and confusion. This fundamental difference in approach was one of the reasons that made cooperation between the two organisations difficult. Having different political heads was another. Nor was their early relationship made easier by the fact that until April 1942 SOE had to rely on MI6's radio network. Initially, it also had to rely on MI6 to supply it with the necessary forged documents for agents entering the field. As MI6 calculated, not unreasonably, that the risk of a forged document being discovered was in direct proportion to the number in circulation, SOE found it difficult to obtain any.

One senior SOE staff officer, Bickham Sweet-Escott, even hinted that inaccurate documents were deliberately foisted on to SOE. 'There were one or two ugly cases', he wrote after the war, 'where our people were arrested because they said the papers they had been given were not in order. In the end we were forced to break 'Z's' [MI6] monopoly and do our own forging, but our right to do so was not won without a tremendous campaign of mutual vilification.'

During the course of the war SOE survived several crises of confidence in it, and numerous clashes with rival organisations and with the armed forces. Initially it was organised into three parts: SO1 (propaganda), SO2 (operations), and SO3 (planning). SO3 was soon absorbed into SO1, and in August 1941 SO1 became the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), controlled by the Foreign Office.

This new arrangement did not prevent SOE from continuing to take an active part in 'black' subversion. This often provoked angry confrontations with the PWE – a secret department of which took over the dissemination of 'black' propaganda and 'black' broadcasts from SO1 – and the Ministry of Information (MOI) which disseminated 'white' propaganda. A good example of these clashes is illustrated in a letter sent to a member of SOE in India in July 1944 by a London staff officer when the former proposed creating a 'black' propaganda station to broadcast to the Japanese.

'You were, I think, in London when some at least of the great Middle East radio SOE versus PWE uproar was going on,' the staff officer wrote, and went on to explain that that débâcle was similar to the position in India in that there had been a definite need for propaganda broadcasts in the Middle East and SOE had been the only organisation on the spot with the technical and political knowledge, and the skilled personnel, to do it. So, while accepting that it was for the PWE to initiate policy – described by the writer as 'wishy-washy directives' – SOE went ahead with its propaganda broadcasts. When the PWE sent their own representatives out to Cairo and demanded that SOE relinquish control of the stations, however, 'a tremendous battle of words and paper followed'. Telegrams flew between Cairo and London in abundance and the Foreign Office even joined in on the PWE's side, with the ambassador to Greece wiring the Foreign Office from Cairo. The upshot was that the PWE took the credit for everything that went well, and the SOE took the blame for everything that did not. SOE was also accused of interfering in policy which was none of its business, of promoting an attitude in various Balkan peoples which flew in the face of Foreign Office policy, and of misinterpreting directives. All this reached ministerial level, and even Churchill, which did SOE no good at all. Such conflicts, the writer concluded firmly, 'must not occur again'.

It is not surprising that with infighting on such a scale SOE's first executive head, Sir Frank Nelson, became a victim of overwork and was replaced in April 1942 by his deputy, Sir Charles Hambro. After a disagreement with his political boss, Lord Selborne (who replaced Dalton in February 1942), Hambro was himself replaced in September 1943 by his deputy, Major-General Colin Gubbins who remained SOE's executive head until the organisation was disbanded in January 1946. The executive head was always known by the initials CD.

Initially, SOE came directly under the supervision of the heads of the three armed services which formed the Chiefs of Staff, a committee which advised Churchill on military strategy and directed commanders in the field. Later – with the exception of Poland – its organisations in the field were responsible to the relevant commanders-in-chief.

Dalton tried to make SOE a fourth service but this was quickly squashed and the lack of sympathy and understanding with which SOE was regarded by the conventional military was as serious as any of its clashes with rival organisations, particularly when it came to the allocation of resources. For example, in early 1941 the RAF's chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Portal, widely acknowledged as having one of the most brilliant minds, remarked of one SOE operation that 'he thought that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated ... there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins'. With attitudes like that to overcome, and they were far from uncommon in the military establishment, it is not surprising that SOE had extreme difficulties in acquiring the aircraft it needed to mount its operations.

From November 1940 SOE's London headquarters were at 64 Baker Street; by the end of the war it had grown to such an extent that it occupied much of the office space between Portman Square and the Baker Street tube station as well as many flats in Berkeley, Chiltern and Orchard Courts, and in Bickenhall Mansions. Its operational organisation for Europe was based on sections, each of which administered an individual country, though France, because of its proximity and political complexity, had no less than six separate ones. SOE's Cairo HQ worked on the same system for the Mediterranean, Balkans, and North Africa.

Elsewhere in the world – and there were few places SOE did not cover – it had missions, such as the Indian one, or the Oriental one based in Singapore, or it adopted a cover name, such as Force 136 which was what the India Mission was known as after 16 March 1944, It also ran and financed Special Operations Australia (see Chapter 8), though by the end of the war this had become an Australian organisation. In the Western Hemisphere SOE was represented by British Security Co-ordination in New York.

SOE also acquired various establishments outside London for training (see Chapter 2), called Special Training Schools, and stations for developing and manufacturing special weapons and devices (see Chapter 3). Its total numbers have never been officially calculated, but by mid-1944 its estimated strength was 13,200 men and women. Nearly half the men, and some of the women, served as agents in occupied or neutral countries. The casualty rate was high. For example, SOE's F Section (seeChapter 12) was one in four.

Unlike SOE, which was formed entirely for the purposes of sabotage and subversion, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was structured more like the Abwehr, the departments of which performed different clandestine roles but were responsible to the same head. The OSS was formed in July 1942 from the Office of the Co-ordinator of Information (COI), the co-ordinator being General William J. Donovan, and by the end of the war had grown to a total of 26,000 men and women.

The COI had been created the previous July as part of the Executive Office of the President. Its official charter was to collect, analyse and correlate all information and data that might relate to national security. But its secret, unwritten agenda – simply covered by the charter as 'supplementary activities' – was, as the official OSS history expressed it, to wage unorthodox warfare in support of the armed forces. Such unorthodox warfare would include not only propaganda and intelligence but also sabotage, morale and physical subversion, guerrilla activities and development and support of underground and resistance groups.

To give him guidance in forming the necessary branches within COI Donovan was in close contact with the British who had had two years' start in gaining experience in clandestine warfare, and he also received advice from William Stephenson, the Canadian head of British Security Co-ordination. Donovan's first move was to form, among other branches, one for Research and Analysis.

'The functions of R & A', the official OSS history states, 'were so broad and complex as to resist precise definition', but broadly speaking it was responsible for the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information, intelligence, and data. SOE had no equivalent organisation. It proved to be of great assistance not only to the operational branches of OSS when they came into being, but to agencies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and others.

Another early COI branch was the Foreign Information Service (FIS) which was responsible for disseminating propaganda in the Eastern Hemisphere. After the USA entered the war the FIS successfully fought against being put under military supervision. Instead, its functions became part of a civilian agency, the Office of War Information, when this was formed in June 1942.

It was part of Donovan's policy to form branches which could work closely with their British counterparts, the PWE, MI6 and SOE (the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, was approximately the US equivalent of MI5, but it was not part of Donovan's remit). However, while the USA remained neutral it was not politically possible to form such branches openly though on 10 October 1941 a section designated 'Special Activities K and L Funds' was established in the Co-ordinator's Office which was responsible for espionage, sabotage and subversion, and guerrilla formations. Soon after the USA entered the war in December 1941, this section was divided into two: the Secret Intelligence Branch under David K. E. Bruce, known by the initials SA/B (Special Activities/Bruce), and the Special Operations Branch which was known by the initials SA/G when Colonel M. Preston Goodfellow became its head in January 1942. When OSS was formed from the COI these sections became the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Special Operations (SO) branches which were roughly the equivalents of MI6 and SOE respectively.

In 1943 the West European sections of SO and SOE became a joint organisation, based in London, but SI never had the same close links with MI6. As SO, and the other OSS branches mentioned below, were the principal OSS branches involved in sabotage and subversion only their operations are covered in this book.

An agreement between SOE and OSS to co-operate in the field was concluded in June 1942 just as OSS was being formed from its predecessor, the COI. This agreement, confirmed in September 1942, allotted each organisation certain geographic spheres within which all operations were the responsibility of either SOE or OSS. (Incidentally, where military operations were in progress or were being planned, both organisations always worked under the overall control of the local theatre commander.) Initially, SOE was the responsible agency for France, the Low Countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, most of Norway, and the Balkans, and OSS was responsible for Finland and, later, Bulgaria, Roumania, and the northern tip of Norway.

During 1943 the two organisations worked towards forming a joint headquarters to support and direct resistance groups in the occupied countries of western Europe. Between March and September 1943 SOE's Planning Section held a series of meetings with OSS SO Free French personnel to draw up plans for the use of the French resistance before, on and after D-Day. Eight separate plans were originally conceived, but these were later boiled down to three, all of which were successfully implemented.

'Vert' covered the destruction of all railway communications to isolate areas and prevent all German movement to, from or through them. As many key German personnel as possible were to be killed at the more important rail centres. 'Tortue' covered the laying of ambushes on all roads that would prevent, or at least delay, German armoured and infantry reinforcements reaching the beachhead. It was to be supplemented by other sabotage activities such as misdirecting traffic. 'Violet' dealt with the severing of Wehrmacht telecommunications system so as to isolate certain areas from the remainder of France, and from Germany.

In January 1944 SOE and SO in London were formally integrated with the title SOE/SO, and SO personnel became part of many of SOE's country sections, though the shortage of suitable OSS agents meant that SOE always predominated in the field. Nevertheless, 523 members of the SO and OG branches of OSS fought behind German lines in France during the course of 1944, 85 of whom were SO agents and radio operators working with SOE's F, RF and DF Sections, 83 were Jedburgh (seeChapter 15), and 355 made up 22 Operational Groups (see Chapter 14). Their casualties were 18 dead, 17 missing in action or made prisoner, and 51 wounded.

In preparation for the invasion of north-west Europe Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) delegated its responsibility for the control and supply of all resistance forces in France, to SOE/SO which on 1 May 1944 was designated Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ). The same month a joint SOE/SO headquarters, Special Project Operations Center (SPOC), was established at Algiers, to conduct operations on behalf of SFHQ into southern France. It was these two organisations which were responsible for dropping the different groups of special forces into France on and after the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944 to implement 'Vert', 'Tortue', and 'Violet' and to help supply, train, and co-operate with, the French resistance. (Although separate chapters of this book have been devoted to the sabotage activities of the OGs and the Jedburghs, and to those of SOE's F Section, they all co-ordinated their operations with one another – or at least attempted to do so – and with the Inter-Allied Missions and the teams of SAS which were also parachuted into France.) From 1 July 1944 all Allied clandestine forces working into France came under the overall command of the staff of de Gaulle's French Forces of the Interior (FFI) commanded by General Koenig.

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Excerpted from Sabotage and Subversion by Ian Dear. Copyright © 2010 Ian Dear. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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