"Lonely Courage - the story of the SOE Heroines in Occupied France"

A talk by Rick Stroud on Wednesday 11 April 2018 in The Kincaid Gallery, The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum.
The French Resistance began almost as soon as France surrendered to Germany. At first it was small, disorganised groups of men and women working in isolation but by 1944 around 400,000 French citizens (nearly 2% of the population) were involved. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up in 1941 saw its role in France as recruiting and organising guerrilla fighters; supplying and training them; and disrupting the Germans by any means, including sabotage, collection of intelligence and dissemination of black propaganda.
Infiltrated into France and operating in Resistance circuits the basic SOE unit was a team of three: a leader, a wireless operator and a courier, many of them women. This is the story of those women, their selection, training, dropping into occupied France and their attempts to survive on a daily basis whilst being hunted by the Gestapo. Some survived by luck through the war, whilst others were captured, tortured and executed before the Nazis final capitulation.
Rick Stroud is a writer and television director who has directed such actors as Pierce Brosnan, John Hurt,and Joanna Lumley. He is the author of several books including Rifleman, the story of Vic Gregg, ex 2RB. He is currently working on a book about the kidnapping by the SOE of General Kreipe from his headquarters on Nazi occupied Crete.

[@petermcculloch4933]

I have so much admiration for people like Odette, Violette Szabo, Christine Granville, Nancy Wake, Noor Inayat Khan etc. right through to Sophie School.

[@elliottg.1954]

A very interesting talk that deserves to be heard more widely.

[@Beverley617]

Enjoyed this very well presented talk about these brave men and women of soe

[@henryjohnfacey8213]

Thank you for sharing this. I've read many books on the subject, over the years. A lot here that I didn't know about. I shall be reading up many of these brave brave people. Double Cross perfected by the British secret service. I read about Buckmaster. Dercourt in the books I read it was suggested a traitor, but now due to further research much more has been revealed. Again thank you.

[@johnweir1217]

"The first casualty of war is truth"

[@williamwright9874]

???

[@denisross2923]

One important role of the French resistance was destruction of the German telephone and courier communications forcing German units to try and communicate orders by radio that easily was monitored by the Allies

[@LilyTheCat151]

The world those people operated in wasn't what it is today. The fact is they were learning on the job. It was rushed and was always going to be farcical at times. It would only get better with time and experience, and even then, those on the ground were working in an environment that was chaotic and dangerous. They would have been making decisions that couldn't be debated with others. They flew by the seat of their pants and things went wrong. Radio operators often worked under great pressure and not getting their procedures on the button would have been quite common. There's also the human element where people just don't want to believe things have gone wrong. Accepting that an agent was compromised meant abandoning them to their fate. That is abandoning someone, on their own, who isn't afforded the safety of rules that keep them from serious harm. Also, in relative terms, there just weren't that many people doing the job at times. It's one thing getting lost on a night out. Another entirely being left to fend for oneself in that position. Thre's also the small matter of just how useless the French Resistance groups actually were. We often hear of these groups as if they were a huge problem for the Germans. They weren't. More often than not, they were more dangerous to those being sent to help them. Saying that, it's entirely unfair and inappropriate to judge these groups as we would in the same terms as a military operation. Hindsight really is twenty-twenty in this case. It's easy to criticise, but one must remember that these people really were amateurs, to begin with. They didn't have a clue. They didn't have communications like we do today. They had to make decisions trusting that everything was ok on the ground. Even in military operations today, with all the technology we have, things still go wrong. Information gets garbled. I think we need to judge these events differently than we would in a way we would judge it if it happened today.

[@tombristowe846]

This is all a bit of a stumbling rambling muddle.

[@endeavour356]

Too much told too flippantly about a desperate time