SOE / OSS

I dont but I bet Martin does. Lots of funny little named villages around where I used to live with attached airfields. Many used by OSS and SOE. The SOE training HQ camp was located nearby..Bedfordshire Woburn Abbey and park were used by SOE too. And in the conspiracy theory world...Hess was supposedly interrogated in the area...Lots of happenings in the area with Hanslope and Bletchley within easy driving distances too.

 

I was Reading a piece in the Daily Mail about 'The Man who never was' and I was thinking for ages what the department was called which planted Agents for dirty tricks and the like behind enemy lines......It was SOE I was thinking of ! ....By the way I've seen the Film carve Her Name....Very emotional.What is the Best Book about SOE ?

 

Anything by M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of SOE. His books tend to be a bit pricey, and, no offense to our cousins across the pond, but his writing style is purely Brit. They love to use last names only and a flood of acronyms with little explanation. If you can get through it without slitting your wrists, Foot is the authority on SOE.

Greg C.

 

It's o.k I'm a Limey myself Cousin

 

list of ww2 airfields back then,obviously not many used for soe/oss mission, but just an idea of how many were used in ww2,amazing number..

Map of wartime airfields in England, Scotland and Wales

 

oss and the london free germans..

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v46i1a03p.htm

oss secret training films..

http://www.realmilitaryflix.com/public/department61.cfm

 

here's a nice link to airfields,quite a lot of them with pics showing them today,and info too,plenty to thumb thro.click on airfield to open colletor
World War Two Airfields of Great Britain (T of A-Z)

another link I posted last yr..

UK Control Tower & airfield photographs of WW2 enjoy..ray..

 

You can visit on selected days by pre-booking. Some of the old buildings remain & there is a small, rather dusty museum and a lot of the old runway & Peri track remain along with Gibraltar Barn, the last point before departure where the agents were checked for any incriminating English items, such as bus tickets etc.

(Excuse the bike, it kinda got in the way of the pics )

 

nah! this is a bike!!! 10 Daily Things » Blog Archive » Weird Machine: German tank bike weights 9,480 pounds (4,740 Kg)!

 

Two peoples separated by a common language. Glad to meet you mate.

Greg C.

 

espionage and intelligence

Museum of WWII -- Virtual Tour -- The Resistance, Espionage and Intelligence

 

Two other books about SOE: Set Europe Ablaze by E.H. Cookridge and Forgotten Voices of the Secret War by Roderick Baily.
Tempsford Airport was a base for many secret flights. See www.wwIInorge.com - Tempsford Taxis.

geoff09

 

I'd recommend Mark's Between Silk & Cyanide' Marks was a cryptnanalyst assigned to train the SOE agents and radio operations in properly encoding and decoding messages. Most of the volunteers for missions in Europe had little talent for encoding messages & routinely garbled them. While not a overview of SOE operations Marks provides a interesting inside view of SOE operations from 1942.

 

There are plenty of other SOE agents' stories, some more fanciful than others but often constrained by the Official Secrets Act when first written. A picture of the beautiful Australian Nancy Wake was posted above - there's a biography of her by Russell Braddon. Interesting to compare her story to that of Dennis Rake in "Rake's Progress" - often two different versions of the same incident!

Other agents/authors to seek out - Peter Churchill, Ben Cowburn, Harry Ree, Edward Yeo Thomas, Noor Inayat Khan. For a really harrowing read, try Christopher Burney's "Solitary Confinement".

The air operations are well covered by Hugh Verity's "We Landed by Moonlight".

I also have "Spies of the OSS" by Robert Hayden Alcorn: a bit sensationalist, but a lot of OSS people went straight into the CIA after the war, so never wrote or talked about it.

 

I have not read this book, but have heard very good reviews.

Greg C.

 

Review

'An exciting story... Christine was cool, fascinating, graceful, secretive, alternating a vivid warmth with remoteness, a lover of freedom and a law unto herself' Daily Telegraph 'This biography, stark, earthy, uplifting and bloodstained, deserve

Product Description

Christine Granville, G.M., O.B.E. and Croix de Guerre, one of the most successful women agents of the Second World War and said to have been Churchill's 'favourite spy', was murdered, aged 37, in a London Hotel in 1952. Her actions as a British secret agent in Poland, Hungary and France were legendary even in her lifetime and she repeatedly risked her life to undertake dangerous missions. Her exploits began after the fall of Poland when she became a British agent; organising the escape of British prisoners-of-war, Polish pilots and refugees and returning to Poland, her homeland, to set up escape routes and report on German troop movements. Her capture by the Gestapo led to a dramatic escape from Budapest in the boot of a car followed by travels through Turkey and Syria to Cairo. Christine is an inspiring and unforgettable true story.

 

Part of Marks insider view were his recollections of training several of the agents in encoding practices. Some were so bad at it Marks found it necessary to train the communications clerks in the same methods as used for breaking unkown codes. Until then the practice had been to ask the agent to repeat the message until he got it right. The advatages to the German signal intel is rather obvious. Marks also notes a senior member of SOE was adamantly opposed to the use of onetime code pads for the SOE agents and teams. It was policy that issuing all the agents same code system with only minor variations was not only secure but more efficient as it required fewer code clerks on the receiving end and less training for everyone. The result of that policy came to the fore when the German intelligence station in Holland broadcast a 1 April 1943 message encoded in all current operating codes used by the SOE agents in the Netherlands and northern Belgium.