The Women of the Special Operations Executive. (SOE)

It seems so far fetched that before the Second World War, women played the domesticated role, looking after house and family.

But the war changed all that, the lack of man power left the factories empty, this was where the housewives stepped, but this was not the only job that women took on, the middle class young ladies, who were highly educated and well travelled, were the perfect candidates for the special operations executive, whose missions were highly dangerous and always behind enemy lines.

These women, well actually they were girls being no older than mid twenties, and unlike the youth of today, they were innocent in life and love. Attention to detail was the priority, even down to the clothes and other personal effects that the agent would take into France with her.

Clothes were borrowed from families and even from immigrants who were lucky enough to leave mainland Europe before the war had really got under way. These clothes were needed to enable the staff of SOE to take them apart and produce a pattern to make others, as the styles of France and Britain were completely different, and an agent wearing British clothes would be spotted immediately as they walked around the French countryside, this practice went to such extremes that even the name on the zip fastener was grinded out with a dentists drill to completely disguise the origin of the zip and its wearer.

The Agents main job was to make contact with the resistance and act as radio operator between the British, who wanted to co-ordinate the resistance’s actions with the allied attacks & plans and they also arranged air drops of supplies and specialist agents, the resistance reported on troop movements and anything else of interest to the British.

The radio operator’s job was not an easy one, as the Germans had some sophisticated detecting equipment that could track down a radio transmission, many of these agents were captured by the Germans, who tortured and eventually executed them as spies.

So much for a young well educated, middle class girl who had all her privileged life ahead of her, but who chose to go into the middle of a war zone and spy for her country and pay the ultimate price, death!

These agents were just a few of the many that paved the way for the Allies to defeat the Germans and bring some sanity back into the world, if only they knew how the world would have turned out, would they have bothered if they did.

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