Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War

Abstract

Spies, fictional and real, have attracted readers and filmgoers for most of the last century. Between the SOE's Madeleine, Odile and Aristide, who became objects of fascination even before the Second World War had ended, and the Cold War Bonds, Wormolds and Leamases, in the last seventy years popular, and sometimes academic, interest in spies and espionage has been regularly fed. More work still has appeared since the release of important National Archive files, to join the substantial number of autobiographies, biographies, films, broadcast documentaries and works of academic history—most notably the pathbreaking ones by M.R.D. Foot. Juliette Pattinson's book humanises the story of F Section (agents sent by Britain into France) by investigating the experience of agents themselves, notably from a gendered perspective. It follows male and female operatives from recruitment, via training, to their lives working under cover in France, and in German captivity. The last chapter explores their return to civilian life. Pattinson is predominantly interested in passing, and how agents transformed themselves, under highly gendered regimes, into people they were not in order to advance anti-Nazi resistance. Much of the material is presented in recruits’ own words recorded by the author in timely interviews conducted towards the end of their lives, as well as those available from broadcast sources and the Imperial War Museum's invaluable (but occasionally frustrating) store of materials.