SOE – date to be confirmed

One of the series of Guild webinars, given by Bob Shaw, will take place in May – date to be confirmed.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created at Churchill’s orders in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’.  Partly information warfare from the BBC and D Branch of MI6 (SIS), it trained male and female operators to insert into occupied Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.  The operators created resistance circuits, carried our covert reconnaissance and direct-action tasks, which tied down hundreds of thousands of German troops which could have been deployed elsewhere to more effect.  Of the thirteen thousand personnel, three thousand two hundred were female (or identifying as such) with an average life expectancy in the field of six weeks.  Disbanded in 1946, elements of the aptitude tests and training of those operators still carries on today in the Ranger and Special Reconnaissance Regiment.  So ,who were they?  How were they trained, what did they do and how successful were they?