Step inside the covert WW2 spy network that trained women to kill with their bare hands

Its mission, as captured in a famous quote often attributed to Churchill, was to “set Europe ablaze.” With ambitious sabotage attempts including the successful Operation Postmaster – a 1942 mission to undermine and disrupt Axis supply lines in the Gulf of Guinea – it arguably lived up to its objective.

Formally established on 22 July 1940, SOE would go on to support resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe, destabilise enemy supply lines and gather intelligence crucial to Allied victories.

But it also did something few wartime agencies had previously considered. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Dr Kate Vigurs explains how it trained women to kill with their bare hands.

The birth of SOE

SOE quickly became a thorn in the side of Nazi occupation forces. It operated separately from, and often in tension with, Britain’s more traditional intelligence agencies. Such rivalries were particularly acute with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which prioritised quiet observation over action.

• Read more | The Special Operations Executive: Churchill's secret army

SOE’s remit was “different from that of the Secret Intelligence Service. SOE are over there blowing things up and shooting things down,” explains Vigurs, “and SIS are going, ‘Shhh… we're spying over here.’”

This rivalry reflected a deeper tension in Britain’s war effort – between conservative, hierarchical thinking and the need for unconventional, often improvised resistance. SOE leaned hard into the latter, both attracting and targeting mavericks and risk-takers from across the waning British empire.

But by some distance, among its most radical innovations was the inclusion of women as combat-trained field agents.

How SOE trained its female agents to kill

Unlike most wartime organisations, SOE trained its female recruits for the same kind of dangerous missions given to men. Women were taught sabotage techniques, marksmanship, wireless operation and deadly close-combat methods designed for silent execution.

“They were trained in something called silent killing… how to use their bare hands,” says Vigurs. “Bare hands is brilliant because if you're caught with weapons, you've got to explain it away. But if you know how to do a good karate chop or kick to the cods, you know you're doing well.”

• Read more | Your guide to the Blitz

This deadly skillset was taught in remote country houses across Britain, including Arisaig House in the Scottish Highlands, where agents underwent weeks of physical and psychological conditioning.

Size or strength was irrelevant to the skills being taught, explains Vigurs, meaning that men and women could play an equally deadly role. What mattered was the element of surprise and decisive precision.

As former agent Pearl Witherington told Vigurs, “It’s not how hard you hit them, my dear, but it’s where you hit them that counts.”

A different style of spy network

SOE began as an informal club. Many of its early male agents were recruited through personal connections or public-school ties. But as the war expanded, so too did its approach.

Women often entered through less conventional means, with skills such as knowledge of foreign languages qualifying them to join the ranks.

“My favourite story about a woman being recruited,” says Vigurs, “is she's at a party... she dropped a book, picked it up... started reading it out loud in French... before she knows it, she's at an SOE interview.”

Once recruited, most women were trained for two of the most perilous roles: wireless operator or courier.

• Read more | Think James Bond's pure fantasy? His creator's real WW2 missions were more outrageous than you'd believe

“Wireless operator; a very, very lonely job... the Germans are out there listening,” Vigurs explains. “They had something called a direction-finding van, which could triangulate on a signal in 20 minutes... the life expectancy of a wireless operator was six weeks.”

Because women were generally excluded from census lists for forced labour in occupied countries, they could move more freely, making them invaluable as undercover agents. But their work was no less dangerous. Many had to carry false identity papers, miniature explosives and radio sets disguised as suitcases or farm equipment, increasing their risks should they be stopped and searched.

And Vigurs also states that these women didn’t necessarily know what organisation they were being recruited into – a tactic used to retain the secrecy of the organisation. “Sometimes they told them, sometimes they didn’t.”

Exploding rats and hatpin daggers

Complementing its alternative methods, SOE’s wartime toolkit featured an incredible array of devices.

“SOE produced a wild and wonderful catalogue of weaponry and explosives… Underneath the Natural History Museum, they had a collection of all this stuff. The heads of state and potential agents could go and look at and pick [from].”

Among its more bizarre inventions, says Vigurs, was the exploding rat.

“Take a rat, scoop out its insides, stuff it with plastic explosive... leave dead rat lying around. No one's going to think twice... you might pick it up, throw it into the furnace — boom.”

Other gadgets included incendiary cigarettes, daggers hidden in hatpins, and the Wellrod pistol, a silent weapon fitted with rubber wipes to muffle the shot – ideal for assassinations.

These reflected SOE’s core philosophy: that resistance to the Nazi occupation of Europe required ingenuity and a willingness to embrace unique ideas.

The death and disbandment of SOE

The risks that many SOE agents took were immense, and many vanished during their missions. As the war ended, Vera Atkins, a senior intelligence officer in SOE’s French ‘F-Section’, made it her personal mission to trace the fate of these unaccounted-for agents.

“She had a list of 118 agents who had gone missing. She found 117,” says Vigurs. “With the women, there are 13... 12 were in the concentration camp system and were either executed or died as a result of their treatment.”

Among those lost were Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom: women who had survived brutal training, parachuted into occupied France, and coordinated resistance cells before being captured, tortured or executed.

SOE was formally disbanded in 1946, months after Churchill left office. Its work was deemed too secret and too politically sensitive to continue outside of wartime.

But from the planning of D-Day to the empowerment of local resistance fighters across Europe, SOE left behind a string of impressive strategic victories, as well as a legacy of female heroism that has long gone unrecognised.

Ultimately, though the story of SOE is often “perceived as glamorous,” says Vigurs, there’s much more work to be done in telling the stories that have been hidden from view that obscure great adversity and sacrifice. “Sometimes what you find can be uncomfortable. It can challenge the received narrative of the last 80 years.”

Dr Kate Vigurs was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation. She is the author of Mission Europe: The Secret History of the Women of SOE (YUP, 2025)