Hello everyone welcome back to warfare I'm your host James Rogers and in this episode we have the brilliant Kate Viggers who has spent the last 20 years researching, interviewing and uncovering the history of the women of the Special Operations Executive.

That's right, the SOE, those who operated behind enemy lines in France.

She's written a new book, Mission France, The True History of the Women of SOE, and she interweaves

the stories of 39 female agents tracing their journey from early recruitment to rigorous training and the work they undertook in the field.

That involved evading capture on a daily basis from the Gestapo and undertaking those vital,

brave, insanely daring sabotage missions in France in the run-up to D-Day.

This is a fascinating history with a brilliant historian, so here it is, Kate Vigiggers on the women of SOE. Hi Kate, thanks for coming on to warfare. How you doing? I'm good thank you. Thank you for having me.

Not a problem at all. Great to have you on the podcast. Now it actually is amazing to hear the

history that you have unearthed. 39 female members of the

SOE who until now have been pretty much unknown. So let's start with the

basics. What was the SOE and what role did women play in it?

So the SOE is short for the Special Operations Executive. It was set up in July of

1940. There'd been a series of letters and memos going around the war

office but really in the wake of the fall of France it was decided that an

organization was needed that could coordinate and bolster resistance in

enemy occupied countries so that they could move towards the liberation eventually.

So when we talk about SOE, a lot of people think it was just France,

but actually it's all the way across Europe

and even into the far east.

Pretty much anywhere that was occupied by the Nazis had an S.O.E.

branch associated with it.

It is said that Churchill said to Hugh Dalton, who was the minister for economic warfare,

...