Greg Lewis - Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the Oss and Soe

W ORLD WAR II WAS the first time in history that women were trained as combatants and secret agents to be parachuted behind enemy lines. This was the war in which old gender rules changed, as intelligence agencies created specific training and roles for women. It was the war in which spy chiefs realized womens potential as couriers, wireless operators, spies, saboteurs, and even Resistance leaders. British prime minister Winston Churchill had rung the changes when he gave the order in July 1940 to set Europe ablaze. The unit charged to do this was the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, a different kind of intelligence agency. Churchill called them members of my underground army who collaborate and fight in the shadows.

They were spies and saboteurs trained as cryptographers, cartographers, analysts, and experts in recruiting, communication, and leadership to guide the resistance and partisans in the tense days of action in every theater of the European war.

In the United States, on June 13, 1942, six months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the formation of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The presidents pen paved the way for American women to operate behind enemy lines along with the SOE.

These agents ranged from girls barely out of high school to mature mothers, from working-class women to the daughters of aristocrats, from the plain to the beautiful, from the prim and proper to wild high-livers.

Each of them was trained to blend in with the local population and even to disguise herself if necessary, by walking with a limp or wearing glasses. Burglars taught them how to pick locks and blow safes. Specialists showed them how to use rubber truncheons, tommy guns, Smith and Wesson automatics with silencers, and the killing knife with its polished and blackened blade. They were taught to throw grenades, jump from a fast-moving train, and plant a bomb on the hull of a ship. Those trained as wireless operators learned how to send secret messages and arrange for weapons to be dropped for the resistance fighters they would work with. All knew that torture and death were the price of failure.

They were brave and resourceful women, ready to place themselves in harms way in order to serve their country. They worked undercover and carried out their assigned missions, sometimes with high-tech gadgets but none that could replace their own intelligence and determination. Their average age was twenty-fivesome were younger, others older.

Their femininity could be a resource in itself, making the Germans less likely to search or arrest them if they were acting as message couriers or wireless operators. It also meant they were often in a position of making great self-sacrifice. For many of these women, going on active service meant leaving babies and children at home. Many paid the ultimate price for their bravery. All have individual stories that deserve a special place in the history of British and American intelligence during the Second World War. The clandestine war, and therefore the war itself, would not have been won without the courage and contributions of these shadow warriors.

On the same day Churchill gave the order to develop the SOE, Adolf Hitler made a speech in Berlins Reichstag boasting that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. To thunderous cheers he reminded his audience that already in a matter of months the German blitzkrieg had conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and now France. Only England remained. In the skies over London the Royal Air Force fought a courageous battle against the Luftwaffe while thousands of citizens huddled in bomb shelters and subways at night, and when they emerged in the morning hundreds more wounded bodies and corpses lay in the rubble. Not since the Great Fire of 1666 had London burned so fiercely.

Britain stood alone, guarding its coast as the threat of invasion cast a dark shadow over the country.

Churchills speech to the House of Commons outlined his vision of the future and ended with him saying:

I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation, our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.