ABSTRACT
In the German-occupied countries, SOE’s revolutionary purpose necessarily varied with the previous type of government. In the democratic monarchies the object was simply to re-establish them. In Czechoslovakia the object was to reinstate Benes, and reinvigorate the republic he and Seton-Watson had founded under the great Masaryk in 1918. Elsewhere, where prewar regimes had been farther to the right, political objects were correspondingly uncertain. In Poland for instance, for whose sake Chamberlain’s Britain had originally gone to war, the original aim was presumably to restore the colonels’ republic divided between Germany and Russia at the fourth partition; or at least that aspect of it represented by the ‘London Poles’. This led eventually to a bitter and tangled dispute with the USSR in which the ‘Lublin Poles’ gained the day and British diplomacy received a decisive check. In Italy policy varied with the waxing and waning of Mussolini; SOE had a voice, though not a loud one, in his fall. In Greece and in Yugoslavia SOE sought to back any anti-German bodies of resisters, and thus accidentally came to pursue opposite policies simultaneously; supporting the exiled king and all that he stood for in one case, and Tito’s partisans with their communist aims in the other. Now
France was and had been for centuries a country of much sophistication in politics, as in many other fields; and the French case was in a class by itself. For while Pétain turned out to provide an equivalent to the Quisling regime in Norway, the question of who the French equivalent of King Haakon was remained open – legally, at least – till after France had been freed, and was indeed the subject of a first-class political dispute between Churchill and Roosevelt.
