RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations During the Second World War

Inspirational individuals

Andro Linklater on Roderick Bailey's history of special operations during the Second World War

My 85-year-old neighbour bows to passing magpies, casts spells, and gleefully claims to be ‘a mad old bat’. Eccentric you might say. But she also speaks Mandarin Chinese and sports on her desk a photograph of herself in 1945 carrying a rifle on a hillside above Kunming in southern China where she helped SOE run one of the most successful blackmarket operations of the second world war. So it would be truer to say that she has never cared much for being one of the crowd. Egregious is really the word.

Reading this oral history of the Special Operations Executive, it is clear that being egregious was the one quality that everyone who served in SOE had to possess. Almost all other forms of warfare involved merging individuality into the unit. ‘There was the regimentalness, you know’, one agent remarked of his career as a soldier. ‘I thought it was terrible actually. It’s not my kind of life.’ Brought into being in July 1940 by Churchill’s injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’, SOE provided a means of fighting singly, as a saboteur, a resistant, a terrorist. It’s why these stories, though they have been told in scores of other books, remain utterly compelling. This is what it is like to be solitary, expelled from society’s comforts and conventions to live in a hostile world.

Whatever other qualities SOE looked for — ‘We were to be gangsters’ one male recruit suggested, ‘but with the behaviour, if possible, of gentlemen’ — the basic requirement was the ability to react individually. A classic SOE test for recruits was to crawl across ropes suspended between trees at different heights. Crossing on the lower ropes was compulsory, the highest was optional, but that was the one you had to cross to pass the test.

Told through interviews recorded by the Imperial War Museum, Forgotten Voices traces the familiar pattern of the discreet invitation for ‘hazardous duties’, the discommoding interview at 64 Baker Street where applicants might be questioned about their flair for foreign languages or a tendency to wet their beds, followed by sabotage training based in one of the many stately homes that SOE commandeered, then a survival and assassination course in the Highlands, and graduation in parachuting. Within a matter of months, a bored soldier or bilingual shop assistant might be dropping out of a small bomber into France, or Norway, or Poland, and, as the war developed, into Burma, Borneo or China.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved