The SOE Phenomenon

Abstract

Midway through Greenmantle, John Buchan's second Richard Hannay adventure, the hero reflects on the failure of the American intelligence agent, John Scantlebury Blenkiron, to penetrate the secret of the Kaiser's nefarious plot to set the Muslim world alight: 'He had been the professional with the best chance. It would be a good joke if the amateur succeeded where the expert failed.' The joke comes off. Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, the gentlemen amateurs enlisted by the Foreign Office, both scupper the Germans' plans to raise a false prophet and save their ineffectual American colleague from his wounds and his ulcers. During the second world war it was Britain which, having been ejected from the continent, sought to set occupied Europe ablaze. The organization so charged was the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It provided a host of young and not so young men reared on Buchan's tales with the opportunity to serve their country while living out their fantasies. One who served, Richard Usborne, has written that, 'Practically every officer I met in that concern, at home and abroad, was, like me, imagining himself as Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot'.' Others have confirmed the prevalence of this selfimage. Another source of inspiration was T. E. Lawrence, though it is likely that it was Lawrence's demonstration of the possibilities of irregular warfare that particularly attracted SOE's progenitors, not the messianism that accompanied it or the voluptuary prose that succeeded it. Sandy Arbuthnot's own Lawrentian guise in Green-