Sir Colin McV. Gubbins, former director of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), explained in 1966 to a Danish audience that it is much easier to pronounce a new organization than to actually create it. This dissertation examines the processes whereby SOE was created, including how its doctrine was formulated and subsequently disseminated, both to its own agents and to its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Traditional narratives, which imply that SOE had no precedents, fail to appreciate that Gubbins and his colleagues consciously looked to past and contemporary examples for inspiration. This dissertation follows Gubbins's career, examining his experience of unconventional warfare in the Allied Intervention in Russia, in Ireland during the Irish Revolution, and in India. To personal experience was added the experience of colleagues and the knowledge he gained by study of several other historical and contemporary conflicts. Pragmatically synthesizing this information, Gubbins authored two brief guides in 1939: the Art of Guerilla Warfare and the Partisan Leader's Handbook. In 1940 Gubbins joined the new SOE and was given charge of both operations and training, allowing his ideas to shape SOE's agents and form their thinking. Even before the entry of the United States into the Second World War, OSS turned to Britain for training in intelligence and sabotage. SOE played a substantial role in this process, propagating Gubbins's ideas even further. Although the Americans drew upon their own sources of inspiration as well, SOE and Gubbins's doctrines were significant, arguably central, to American thinking.

The intention of this thesis is to investigate the circumstances and background surrounding the early development and deployment of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain's clandestine secret service created by Winston Churchill in 1940 to 'set Europe ablaze.' It will examine the climate in which SOE was created, the feasibility of the tasks it was expected to perform and the relationships it established with Churchill, the Cabinet Office, the Chiefs of Staff, the Foreign Office, the Admiralty and Army, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and Combined Operations. It will examine how these organisations succeeded or failed to work towards a common wartime objective. The focus of the thesis is concerned primarily with the political moves and counter-moves in London that dominated the early years of SOE's six year existence. It will concentrate therefore upon 1940-1942, the critical early years before planning for the Second Front 'militarised' SOE's clandestine role. There is thus little reference to SOE in The Balkans, in Holland or the Middle East or to the actual deployment and modus operandi of SOE agents in the field. Their stories of courage and betrayal, of penetration, capture or evasion are mentioned only in so far as they illuminate the struggle to establish a wider SOE credibility in London. The single exception to this is Operation Frankton, the 'Cockleshell Heroes' raid on Bordeaux shipping in December 1942. The planning, execution and result of this raid were determined by Combined Operations' relationship with SOE and led to an outcome that was shaped by SOE's sense of secrecy, rivalry and political encirclement. This thesis will attempt to unravel those critical and complex relationships.

Commando Country assesses the nature of more than 30 special training centres that operated in the Scottish highlands between 1940 and 1945, in order to explore the origins, evolution and culture of British special service training during the Second World War. These locations were chosen by virtue of the utility of the physical environment of the highland estate, strongly influenced by associated ideas about the challenge of that environment, individual character and the nature of irregular warfare. By virtue of its Scottish geographical perspective, Commando Country diverges from the existing literature by looking across the training establishments used by different organisations, principally Military Intelligence, the Commandos, and Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose histories tend to be considered in isolation. The book investigates the development and function of each category of training centre, the relationships between them, and their place in the broader framework of British and Allied special operations. Based on research in official documentary sources, unpublished and published memoirs and on fieldwork and interviews with surviving participants conducted by the author, Commando Country also presents rare unpublished photographs from public and private sources and artefacts assembled for the exhibition of the same name held at the National War Museum, Edinburgh in 2007. The resulting thesis is that the philosophy and practice improvised at the original school of irregular warfare at Inverailort House in the summer of 1940 permeated the culture of the training centres that developed thereafter. Close attention is accordingly given to the circumstances, organisation and instructing personnel that created the Inverailort syllabus, and the backgrounds and skills brought to bear, some drawn from civilian professions. The application of similar methods to the newly formed Commando forces is then traced. In this context the original operational purposes of individual aspects of the training became standardised into a general test of fitness and character designed to control admission of volunteers into the Commandos, the raiding and assault units that regarded themselves as a new military elite. Simultaneously, the approach pioneered at Inverailort was adapted to form the paramilitary training element of SOE, the organisation that coordinated and supported Resistance organisations in enemy-occupied countries. Particular attention is paid to the dedicated training establishments for Polish and Norwegian SOE units based in Scotland. The book concludes by considering how techniques and philosophy were applied more widely as conventional military training itself evolved, extending influence even into postwar civilian outdoor recreation.

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