The British SOE & Secret War Tour spends three to five days touring the Midlands and Southern shires of England. Covering Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Buckinghamshire, Sussex, Hampshire and more.
Trained in country estates from the south coast of England to the Highlands of Scotland SOE, SIS, OSS and Resistance agents were sent into occupied territories to recruit, organise, train and supply local resistance units for sabotage against the enemy. For others it was intelligence gathering and/or political manoeuvring. Some agents were wireless operators, trained to engage in important, crucial and incredibly dangerous work by establishing communication with the UK – some never returned. This tour gets right to the heart of WW2 espionage and secrecy in the UK and many of these sites and accounts were unknown until more recent times when the Official Secrets Act allowed papers and information into the public domain.
The tour visits the top secret airfields in the Midlands where the Royal Air Force 138 and 161 Special Duties Squadrons and USAAF ‘Carpetbaggers’ flew their missions to drop agents and supplies by parachute. Also to RAF Tangmere on the south coast where agents were taken by RAF Lysanders and Hudsons, landing onto clandestine airstrips in the fields of occupied France. View the aircraft that were flown and the equipment they used. The tour visits country estates where the agents trained for their missions – and cottages where they spent their last hours prior to departure.
There are many very interesting sites, memorials and museums to visit and this tour also includes Bletchley Park where the WW2 codebreakers beavered away cracking enemy signals and playing their highly secretive but oh so important part of the war. Depending on individual interests I can also tailor this tour to include radar and signals technology which also played a large part in the secret war.
This is an excellent tour that gives a comprehensive view of how the Allies operated their secret agents during WW2 whilst at the same time visiting picturesque areas of the UK. Fantastic stories of courage and genius are interwoven with politics and strategy. One cannot help being immensely moved by the subject matter.
This tour also acts as a very good pre-cursor to my SOE and Resistance Tours in France and Belgium.
As with some of my other tours I’m afraid I no longer put detailed itineraries on the internet because other companies and guides have been stealing them so please contact me for further details.
Beaulieu House and it's grounds was used for SOE Training
Bletchley Park House and Lake
Staff of Bletchley Park
Vera Atkins in office with war crimes investigators, including Stephen Stewart (back right), Bad Oeynhausen, 1946.
Gibraltar Farm at RAF Tempsford
Westland Lysander at The Shuttleworth Collection
Tempsford SOE Memorial commemorating women agents
The places we were taken, the carefully researched and meticulously linked stories we were told, the actual photos, gravity and repercussions of every event....this tour and tours like it should not be missed by every able person wanting to connect to the horrors and sacrifices so many brave people from our not so distant past made, so each of us can enjoy lives that would have been outside the realm of possibilities at the time. This is an experience that is just plain priceless.