The Women of the SOE

"Set Europe ablaze," Winston Churchill instructed them. They were the women of the Special Operations Executive.

The Special Operations Executive was a British special force founded in 1940 to assist civilian resistance movements in Europe. All in all, thirty nine women bore arms in the SOE, and they were the only women in the Allied powers to do so.

They ranged from mature mothers to girls barely out of high school, working-class women to aristocrats, from the prim and proper to the loose cannons. They only had only one thing in common: they all spoke French. They were deployed to aid the French Resistance.

Virginia Hall

Hall was a spunky, redheaded, American spy. As a result of a prewar hunting accident, Hall had an artificial foot, an injury that would have been enough to get any man out of front-line duty. It didn’t keep Hall back. She made her way to London and, despite being a citizen of a neutral country, was recruited by the SOE.

Within a few weeks of joining the SOE, she went undercover as a journalist, basing herself in a southern section of France that was occupied by the Nazis. She helped put in place drop zones for bringing in new agents, supplies, money, and weapons and proved to be exceedingly good at the work. The Germans referred to her as "La Dame Qui Boite," the "Limping Lady," and issued orders to capture her. She fled back to London and began training all of their operatives as radio operators, knowing that as the war continued, communication was going to be key.

Noor Inayat Khan

Khan was a poet, a considerable musician, and a published writer of fairy stories for children; but when her family found refuge in London in 1940, Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and became a wireless operator. Fluent French and training as a wireless operator was an irresistible combination of skills for the SOE recruiters.

While her colleagues were being arrested, Khan remained at large for months, the only active SOE radio operator in the Paris area. Changing addresses on a daily basis, carrying her radio from one safe house to another, she evaded capture with a little bit of both luck and cunning. Khan was betrayed and imprisoned in the Gestapo HQ in Paris. Later she was kept shackled and in solitary confinement in a prison in Germany. In Dachau, after being stripped and hideously beaten, she was shot. Inayat Khan died, so one of the witnesses reported, with a single word, liberté, on her lips.

Nancy Wake once said, "I hate wars and violence but if they come then I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas." The women of the SOE did not knit balaclavas. They set Europe ablaze.