SOE in the Marches

Some readers in the Marches may have never heard of the Special Operations Executive. It was a top-secret subversive organisation set up in July 1940 with the aim of 'setting Europe ablaze by sabotage'. Its officers were engaged in intelligence gathering, paramilitary warfare, clandestine warfare, weapons, explosives, sabotage, propaganda, forgery and camouflage. It also employed thousands of men and women from all walks of life and of many nationalities, trained them in the art of ungentlemanly warfare and infiltrated them behind enemy lines by plane, boat and submarine. It supported resistance organisations by supplying them with arms and equipment. Bernard O'Connor's 'SOE in the Marches' uses contemporary documents, histories and websites to investigate the wartime experiences of Stanley Alfred Buckmaster, Alexander Lindsay Binney, Harry R e, Harold Hardy Jackson, Penelope Torre Tore, George 'Val' Myer, Victor Albert Gough, Thomas Cecil Pearson, Charles Thomas Milnes-Gaskell, George Robert Paterson, John Maurice Cotterill, Oswald Arthur Brown, Maurice Henry Cardiff, Violette Szabo and Rita Campbell. These people either lived or worked in Shropshire and Herefordshire and who were employed in various ways with the SOE. It also details Peaton Shadow Factory which supplied fuel tanks for Stirling bombers, the planes used to parachute supplies to resistance organisations in occupied Western Europe.