Command, Rather than Consultation
| Author | Christopher J. Murphy |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076709347078 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Command, Rather than
Consultation
Organizing Special Operations – the Case of SOE
Christopher J. Murphy
University of Salford, UK
Abstract This article explores the lack of a collegial organizational ethos within the
Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. It charts
the development of a decentralized body that placed its operational Country
Sections in a position of dominance within the organization. The sections
responsible for providing operational support – intelligence, special devices,
etc. – were expected to carry out instructions issued by the Country Sections,
and given little opportunity to contribute their own expertise in a collaborative
manner during the operational process. The article goes on to explore the
difficulties these sections faced in carrying out their respective roles, and
the strategies they adopted to help facilitate their support work. The article
concludes by considering why SOE chose to adopt, and maintain, such a
formal, strict organizational structure over a more fluid one.
Keywords intelligence, internal organizational conflict, security, special operations
The Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret British organization estab-
lished in 1940 in order to encourage and stimulate resistance throughout, and
beyond, occupied Europe during the Second World War, provides an example of
a part of the British intelligence community that was run with a profoundly anti-
collegial organizational ethos. This sets it strikingly at variance with other aspects
of the community, most notably the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), from which,
in large part, SOE originated (Davies, 2004, pp. 336–9). This prevailing attitude
on the part of the management of SOE is clearly illustrated in discussions concern-
ing the desire to introduce operational decentralization in late 1941–early 1942.
Beyond the necessary considerations of secrecy, decentralization was favoured
DOI: 10.1177/0952076709347078
Christopher J. Murphy, Lecturer in Intelligence Studies, School of English, Sociology, Politics and
Contemporary History, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT, UK.
[email: C.J.Murphy@salford.ac.uk] 67
© The Author(s), 2010.
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on account of its perceived ‘hands off’ nature: centralization was associated with
collaborative working arrangements that would have allowed for greater opera-
tional input from SOE’s non-operational Support Sections, and it was felt that such
input would have negative consequences for operational speed. For SOE to work
effectively it was felt necessary to place the geographically-defined operational
sections – the Country Sections – in a dominant position: command, rather than
consultation, was considered necessary in order to most effectively ‘Set Europe
Ablaze’. This attitude was responsible for considerable tension within the organi-
zation, and made for difficult working arrangements. Yet any notion of organiza-
tional conflict within SOE is rarely, if ever, found within existing studies of the
organization, which tend to present SOE as a body unified against other Whitehall
departments, engaged in interdepartmental, rather than intra-departmental, con-
flict. The exploration of such internal conflict, and competing notions of how SOE
should be organized, is made possible largely through the study of the behind the
scenes ‘Support’ Sections, which have hitherto formed a missing element to the
study of SOE, the literature having focused almost exclusively upon the opera-
tional activities of its Country Sections. When the Support Sections are brought
into the study of SOE, it becomes possible to explore the tensions that arose as a
result of decisions taken over how their contribution to the organization was to be
managed.
A widely-accepted staple of the literature on SOE concerns the dominance of
its Country Sections. Responsible for conducting special operations in a given
geographical area, these are widely viewed as the heart of the organization. The
adoption of this organizational form appears to have been an accident of inherit-
ance, rather than the product of deep thought, as SOE was guided by the structure
of its two immediate predecessors, Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS) and the War Office department MI(R). As Bickham Sweet-Escott later
recalled, SOE was ‘no more than a hopeful improvisation devised in a really des-
perate situation’ (Sweet-Escott, 1975, p. 5) – the evacuation of British troops from
Dunkirk and Hitler’s onslaught on Western Europe. Under the aegis of the Minister
of Economic Warfare, Dr Hugh Dalton – ‘Dr Dynamo’ – SOE was led by some-
one who insisted that action was more important than organization: ‘machines
and hierarchies don’t matter, it’s the men that count’ (Jebb, 1942). Two of SOE’s
official historians offer different perspectives over whether Section D or MI(R)
had the greatest impact upon SOE’s organizational structure. Mackenzie notes
that ‘the main framework was inherited from D Section. Its “country sections”
were retained, and Colonel G.F.Taylor . . . remained as CD’s Chief Assistant’
(Mackenzie, 2000, p. 80). Alternatively, Foot notes that Taylor, ‘following an obvi-
ously useful system of MI R’s . . . set up separate sections, each to look after an
individual country’ (Foot, 1999, pp. 52–3). Regardless of their ultimate origins,
the significant point is that the Country Sections did not immediately assume a
position of central importance in the organization. While Country Sections were
present from SOE’s ‘birth’, there has been little acknowledgement of the fact that
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