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Thursday June 19th -
Special Operations
Executive (SOE)
Monica
Maxwell addressed us on 19th
June about her role in the Special Operations Executive
(SOE), the organisation formed in 1940 from the merging
of three branches of military intelligence,
carrying
out Churchill's mandate to “set Europe alight”. After an
official secrets silence of 30 years she was finally
able to to spill the beans on an extraordinary secret
life, from an encyclopaedic memory for people and
details in no way dimmed by the passage of time.
Initially a 1943 volunteer in
the Women's Transport Service First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY) she had no inkling of the ultra secret world of
intelligence she was about to enter. Mysterious
interviews led to a high-pressure training in Morse
communication and other dark skills at anonymous schools
in country houses scattered through the kingdom.
Finally, as one of several hundred trained
operators, she maintained clandestine radio contact with
agents dropped behind enemy lines who were seeking
intelligence, supporting the Resistance and hindering
German activities by sabotage. She operated from Grendon
Underwood where reports from agents were passed to SOE
HQ at Baker Street and probably Bletchley Park. Coming
with this was the anguish of not knowing whether a
broken transmission from an agent meant that he had been
discovered by the Gestapo. Unfortunately there were
double agents in the organisation thought to have been
responsible for the arrest and execution of many of our
own agents.
Monica
was privy to the date of the D Day invasion three months
ahead of its time. Among other fascinating details of
SOE
locations,
communications and devices, we learnt that Hardy Amies,
a fluent German and French speaker was a skilled SOE
agent and instructor, along with other subsequently
famous persons such
as Anthony
Quayle and Malcolm Muggeridge.
On her display was a biography of the legendary
agent “Odette”, signed by Odette for Monica herself, - a
poignant reminder of those extraordinary times so
vividly described.
After the summer break, at our meeting on
September 18th, Trevor Hewitt will talk about
“Liberators and their Crews”.
Ray
Jones
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