SOE in France

Preface

 

It was long British government policy that the archives of SOE, the wartime Special Operations Executive, must remain secret, like the archives of any other secret service. The reason for this is not, as followers of Commander Bond's adventures might imagine, that SOE carried on its work after the end of the war, for it was wound up early in 1946. Nor is it true that irresponsible staff officers made such fearful errors that there is a whole discreditable story to be hushed up. There were certainly hair-raising mistakes of several kinds; so there always are, in any service and in any war. A number of writers have fastened on one or two of these mistakes, which bore on less than five per cent of SOE's effort in France, and inflated them ...