Bureaus of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Comparing the Roles of Women in the Special Operations Executive and the Office of Strategic Services During World War II

Bureaus of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Comparing the Roles of Women in the Special Operations Executive and the Office of Strategic Services During World War II

Oral - Textual or Investigative

At the dawn of World War II in the summer of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorized the creation of a Special Operations Executive to “set Europe ablaze.” The organization was notable for its role as one of the first government agencies to recruit and train women as spies, and the women of the SOE demonstrated great valor in their accomplishments. Nearly one year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States commissioned a similar organization, the Office of Strategic Services, which also employed women. The two organizations approached the concept of female agents differently, with the United States’ OSS maintaining most female staff stateside in offices like the Research & Analysis branch. Additionally, the women who served as field agents were often foreign women, recruited and trained within their own countries to assist American male agents with their work for the OSS. Meanwhile, the SOE generally recruited female French expatriates and Britons with required fluency in other languages to go abroad, as their presence in everyday life would cause less suspicion than the men of Nazi-occupied territories who were being conscripted to the German military. Though relatively small, the differences between the use of female agents in the OSS and the SOE allow historians to understand the roles of women in espionage and the differences in U.S. and British involvement in World War II.