S.O.E. by M R D Foot

Author:M R D Foot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448104017
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

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VIII

Politics

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WAR AND POLITICS cannot clearly be separated from one another. SOE was a tool for making war, often a sharp tool, sometimes a faulty one; it could not help getting entangled in politics as well. It was intensely political: it could do nothing that did not impinge on current and postwar politics alike. It affected the ease, or the difficulty, with which the peoples of axis-occupied countries lived with their occupiers – this might unsettle the daily lives of tens of millions. It exercised a constant impact on the standing of staff officers and ministers in the small but vital sphere of the regimes in exile from axis tyranny, and helped to set the bounds for postwar politics in much of Europe and part of Asia.

British domestic politics it hardly affected. As we have seen (here), Dalton was put in to head it in the belief that the Labour Party was entitled to have charge of one secret service; but its stance in home politics was necessarily neutral, quite unconcerned with party. For at the moment of its foundation the War Cabinet laid down that parliamentary questions about it ‘would be very undesirable’;1 Parliament played no part in the conduct or the criticism of its work. Chamberlain, who drafted its charter, was an elderly imperialist, son of a greater; Dalton, its first political head, was a strong socialist; Selborne, its second, even more of an imperialist than Chamberlain, came from the opposite – anti-Munich – wing of the same Conservative Party. None of these three let home politics affect SOE’s work, though Dalton could now and again be heard grumbling about his reactionary subordinates from the City, and Selborne did not always see eye to eye with earnest young leftists.

One future lord chancellor, then Quintin Hogg, served in MI R, but soon left to join his regiment in the desert. Several personalities in postwar parliaments came from SOE: Julian Amery, (Sir) Douglas Dodds-Parker, (Sir) Walter Fletcher, Sir Neil Marten, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Neil (Billy) Maclean, and C. M. Woodhouse were – like Hogg – Conservative MPs, while (Sir) Frank Soskice (later Lord Stow Hill) went straight from SOE’s security section to the post of solicitor-general in the great Labour government of 1945–50, in which Dalton held for over two years the leading post of chancellor of the exchequer. Indeed, since the war only the Labour cabinets of 1974–9 have not had one minister at least from MI R, SOE, or PWE; and they included, in the present writer’s namesake, the son of a member of the security executive and the brother of MEW’s under-secretary. SOE’s postwar influence has been much greater abroad than at home.

All through its short life SOE stuck to one primordial political rule: it was anti-Nazi. Therefore it opposed the Nazis’ friends and allies, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan. The Foreign Office’s prewar concept that Italy could be coaxed away from alliance with Germany had no shred of support in SOE, which was

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