Dr Martin D. Brown will be presenting a paper at the forthcoming conference

16/09/2006

Dr Martin D. Brown will be presenting a paper at the forthcoming conference :

RESISTANCE, REBELLION AND REVOLUTION IN CENTRAL EUROPE: COMMEMORATING 1956, to be held at the School Of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Thursday 21 September to Friday, 22 September 2006.

His paper will be entitled: “Setting Europe ablaze?”: The Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) attempts to foster resistance in Central Europe and its relations with the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, 1940-1945.

Details of the conference can be found here:

http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/1956.htm

The conference program, Thursday 21 September to Friday, 22 September 2006, is here:

http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/1956programme.htm">

Dr Brown, biog:

http://www.richmond.ac.uk/faculty/dr-martin-brown.aspx

Paper Overview :

“Setting Europe ablaze?”:
The Special Operations Executive’s (SOE) attempts to foster resistance in central Europe and its relations with the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, 1940-1945.
Dr Martin D. Brown

On 16 July 1940, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, invited one of his Cabinet Ministers, Hugh Dalton, to take command of a new secret organisation called the Special Operations Execution (SOE), tasked with stimulating resistance across Nazi occupied Europe. According to Dalton’s account of this encounter, ‘I accepted the Prime Minister’s invitation with great eagerness and satisfaction. “And now”, he exhorted me, “set Europe ablaze.”’ [H. Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs, 1931-1945, London, 1957, p.366.]

These three words have since come to dominate academic, official and popular understanding of SOE’s activities. However, the organisation’s tasks were far more complex, contradictory and politicised than Dalton’s dramatic recollections might at first suggest. Moreover, the lack of access to SOE’s archives, they were not released until 1993, and the political imperatives of the Cold War have subsequently distorted our understanding of the executive’s work in central Europe.

This paper will begin by detailing the historiography of SOE; it will then examine the organisation’s strategic objectives, and finally, explore the progress of SOE’s relations with the Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, led by Dr Edvard Beneš.

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/117.aspx