SOE and British Moral Responsibility for Resistance

Abstract

After the fall of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, London became the resistance capital of Europe. Britain sponsored, stimulated and financed European resistance movements. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created in July 1940 by Winston Churchill with the instruction to ‘Set Europe Ablaze’. Its original objectives were expressed by the first head of SOE, Hugh Dalton, on 2 July 1940:

We have got to organise movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland … to the Spanish Irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington’s campaign… This ‘democratic international’ must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.³

The moral aspect of what SOE was doing has received scant attention.¹

Philip Knightley

The whole concept of secret warfare, embracing espionage, counterespionage, guerrilla warfare, secret paramilitary operations, was an anathema to some. Such secret activities involved varying degrees of illegal and unethical methods which would violate normal peacetime morality and would not only be improper but often criminal … acts of violence, mayhem and murder.²

Jack Beevor, Assistant to Sir Charles Hambro: Chief of SOE