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Britain, 16th July 1940.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill sees his Minister for Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, at one of the PM’s many midnight meetings. Whitehall’s upper echelons abound with urgent talk of a new, top-secret organisation, the purpose of which is, in the Prime Minister’s words, to Set Europe Ablaze.
France has collapsed. The tattered remains of an army have arrived from Dunkirk. British troops are gone from the Continent, save for Gibraltar. Dalton, after the War Cabinet’s approval on 22d July, finds in his hands a charter drafted and signed by Neville Chamberlain. He begins picking a team, using the “old boys’ network” to select men from Courtalds, Slaughter & May, myriad City firms, and various parts of His Majesty’s Government, including the Foreign Office and the War Office. Sir Frank Nelson, as Executive Director, sees the fledgling SOE from a hastily-assembled tangle of men into something resembling a real team. Brigadier (later Sir) Colin Gubbins is selected as director of Operations and Training, from whence he will later become Executive Director, and lead SOE to its greatest triumphs.
In October, SOE moves its offices from the St Ermin’s hotel on Caxton Street to 64 Baker Street, nigh to Holmes and Watson’s famous abode. There it shall remain, and its staff will come to call themselves “Baker Street Irregulars,” after Holmes’s ragtag group of urchins, until it is disbanded in 1946.
In the meantime, it begins planning and conducting operations in pursuit of its goal: to create havoc in Hitler’s Europe, by supporting, training, equipping, and acting in concert with groups of resisters in all the occupied countries of Europe.