Special Operations Executive

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), often called "the Baker Street Irregulars" after Sherlock Holmes's fictional group of spies, was a World War II organisation initiated by Winston Churchill and Hugh Dalton in July 1940 as a mechanism for conducting warfare by means other than direct military engagement. Originally designated as 'Section D' of MI6, the mission of the SOE was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as a focal point for the formation of a vestigial resistance movement in Britain itself (the Auxiliary Units) in the possible event of an Axis invasion. Known also as Churchill's Secret Army and charged by him to "set Europe ablaze" (A mission also given to Churchill's other brainchild, the Commandos), the existence of the SOE was not made available to the public at large until many years after the cessation of hostilities.

Bibliography and filmography

• The Secret History of SOE - Special Operations Executive 1940-1945, (BPR Publications, 2000), Professor William Mackenzie. ISBN 0953615189
• Secret Agent - The True Story of the Special Operations Executive, (BBC Worldwide Ltd, 2000), David Stafford, ISBN 0563537345
• R.J.Minney wrote the book "Carve Her Name with Pride" in 1956, telling the story of Violette Szabo. A film of the same title was made in 1958 starring Paul Schofield and Virginia McKenna.
• William Stanley Moss wrote the book "Ill Met by Moonlight" in 1950, giving his first-hand account of an SOE operation in 1944 to kidnap Major General Heinrich Kreipe, the German divisional commander on Crete. The film "Night Ambush", based on the book, was made in 1957, starring Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring.
• Jerrard Tickell wrote the book "" in 1949, telling the story of Odette Sansom-Hallowes. The film "Odette", based on the book, was made in 1950, starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard.
• Jean Overton Fuller wrote the book "The Starr Affair", telling the story of John Renshaw Starr.
• The Heroes of Telemark is a film, made in 1965, based on an SOE operation to sabotage the heavy water plant at Rjukan, Norway in 1943.
• A French/Norwegian black and white docu-film from 1948 titled "La Bataille de l'eau lourde"/"Kampen om tungtvannet" (trans. "The Fight Over the Heavy Water"), featured some of the ?original cast?, so to speak. Joachim Rønneberg has stated; "'The Fight over Heavy Water' was an honest attempt to describe history. On the other hand 'Heroes of Telemark' had little to do with reality.?
• "" is a 1987 docudrama about Nancy Wake's work for SOE, partly narrated by herself.
• "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks, 1998; Marks was the Head of Codes at SOE and this book is an account of his struggle to introduce better encryption for use by the field agents
• "Mission Scapula SOE in the Far East" by Arthur Christie, ISBN 0954701003 A true story about an ordinary soldier seconded into MI5 and sent on a mission to Singapore just before it fell. With Freddy Spencer-Chapman.
• "Operation Daybreak" is a 1976 film, based upon a true, dangerous operation in May 1942 to drop a small group of Czech S.O.E. agents into their own occupied country with the singular deadly mission to assassinate Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler's protege, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, aka. The Butcher of Prague. The mission succeeded, but with tragic results.
• "Bridge on the River Kwai" is a well-known classic British-made war-drama 1957, set in Thailand during WW2, during the construction of the Siam - Burma railway through virgin jungle and endless hills and gorges, using malnourished, mistreated allied prisoners of war. A counter-story in the film, which collides with the main story at the climax, relates to a mission to destroy the newly-constructed railway bridge by a fictious cloak and dagger sabotage organisation called 'Force 316', whose training base is in Ceylon. In fact, this is a thinly-disguised reference to the real-life Force 136, part of S.O.E., who indeed had wartime jungle-training facilities in Ceylon at M.E. 25 - Horona.