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men, with none of the obedience and none of the honourable feelings of the soldier.” It may be argued that Arnold’s idealised view of warfare was rendered anachronistic by Hitler’s tyranny, and by the need to mobilise every possible means of undoing it. Arnold, indeed, qualified his own assertion by saying that, if an invader breached the laws of conflict, “a guerrilla war against such an invader becomes justifiable.” But nowhere, even in Yugoslavia, did resistance operations avert the need for regular forces to defeat those of the Nazis. France would not have been liberated one day later had the maquis never existed. The case for resistance, though by no means a negligible one, rests upon its contribution to the historic self-respect of occupied societies, to national legend.

The most baleful consequence of resistance was that it represented the legitimisation of violent civilian activity in opposition to local regimes, of a kind which has remained a focus of controversy throughout the world ever since. Not only the Germans, but also many citizens of occupied countries, endorsed the view that “one man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s terrorist.” It is useful to recall that such a man as Portal perceived the SOE’s personnel as terrorists. Though British agents were seldom directly concerned in the more ruthless actions of local groups, it was endemic to the nature of the struggle that partisans armed by London shot prisoners, sometimes wholesale; murdered real or supposed collaborators and members of rival factions; and often supported themselves through institutionalised banditry. A precedent was set by the wartime democracies’ support for irregular warfare which could never be undone.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the SOE enabled dissident elements of several societies to overthrow their traditional social orders. The collapse of the Balkan monarchies was inevitable, cause for lament only to a Victorian sentimentalist such as the prime minister. In western Europe anti-Communist governments, decisively assisted by the presence of Anglo-American armies, were able to prevail in 1944–45. But the impact of the SOE’s aid to resistance movements was significantly greater upon postwar societies than on military outcomes in the struggle against the Germans. Churchill came to recognise this. David Reynolds notes the remarkable fact that915, in the six volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs, the SOE is mentioned only once, in an appendix. “‘Setting Europe ablaze’ had proved a damp squib,”916 says the historian. It was fortunate for the peoples of many occupied countries that this was so.

SEVENTEEN

Overlord

IN THE FIFTH YEAR of Britain’s war, all those concerned with its direction were desperately tired: “It’s not the hard work, it’s the hard worry,”917 said Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the Political Warfare Executive. To the British public, the wait for D-Day, the decisive milestone in the war in the west, seemed interminable. The Ministry of Information, in one of its regular opinion surveys, described domestic morale in the spring of 1944 as “poor,” not least because of public apprehension about invasion casualties. “Spirits remain at a low level,”918 reported the ministry’s monitors on April 14. More and more workers flaunted disaffection. Industrial stoppages soared. February found 120,000 miners on unofficial strike in Yorkshire, 100,000 in Wales, and several hundred thousand more elsewhere. Even the president of the miners’ union suggested that Trotskyite agitation was playing a part.

Miners’ strikes abated in April after wages were increased, but there were also stoppages among gas workers and engineering apprentices. Some 730,000 man-hours were lost in one Scottish aircraft factory. At another firm in August 1944, 419,000 hours were lost when workers rejected a management proposal that women should manufacture textile machinery—the firm’s normal business—while men continued to make aircraft components. On April 8, 1944, the British embassy in Washington reported to London about American public opinion: