Some readers in Shropshire may have never heard of the Special Operations Executive. It was a top-secret subversive organisation set up in July 1940 with the aim of 'setting Europe ablaze by sabotage'. Its officers were engaged in intelligence gathering, paramilitary warfare, clandestine warfare, new weapons, explosives, sabotage, propaganda, forgery and camouflage. It also employed thousands of men and women from all walks of life and of many nationalities, trained them in the art of ungentlemanly warfare and infiltrated them behind enemy lines by plane, boat and submarine. It supported resistance organisations by supplying them with arms and equipment.
Bernard O'Connor's 'Shropshire's Wartime Secrets' uses contemporary documents, histories and websites to investigate the wartime experiences of ten people who either lived or worked in Shropshire and were employed or connected with the SOE. They are Stanley Alfred Buckmaster, Alexander Lindsay Binney, Harry Rée, Paul Edward Dehn, Harold Hardy Jackson, Penelope Torre Tore, Charles Thomas Milnes-Gaskell, John Maurice Cotterill, Oswald Arthur Brown and Rita Campbell. The book also details Shropshire's 'shadow factory', Peaton Hall Farm, Diddlebury, which supplied parts for the Stirling bomber, one of the planes used to carry SOE's secret agents into occupied Western Europe, and nearby Sutton Court, a property reported to have been used to provide intensive foreign language training.