Jul
17
5:00pm
Virtual Lecture: The Contribution of the RAF's Special Duties Squadrons to the "Secret War," 1940-1945
By RAF Museum
On Thursday 17 July 2025 at 6pm, Mark Seaman will discuss the contribution of the RAF's Special Duties Squadrons. This lecture will be hosted virtually via Crowdcast.
Talk Outline
The history of intelligence and special operations in the Second World War remains a constant draw for writers but some vital features remain overlooked or misunderstood. One such element is the RAF’s efforts to provide transportation and air supply facilities to the British secret services. Some precedents existed from the First World War, but techniques had been forgotten with the passage of time. The German occupation of most of western Europe in the summer of 1940 required the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to create new partnerships with the Air Ministry and RAF to secure the clandestine means of inserting agents into enemy territory. The greater number of personnel would be delivered by parachute although, where possible, light aircraft were deployed to land and collect agents from improvised airstrips.
The challenges were immense. Senior figures within the RAF opposed the diversion of aircraft and aircrews from the strategic bombing offensive while SIS and SOE were in constant dispute over who held primacy for the limited resources. New techniques of air dropping, navigation and communications had to be devised and advanced aviation skills acquired to deliver agents and supplies to resistance groups the length and breadth of Europe with the menace from German air defences fully arrayed against them.
The Special Duties squadrons’ contribution was essential to the success of the ‘Secret War’. Without their endeavours, intelligence networks and resistance groups would have been denied key personnel sent from England and, latterly, liberated North Africa and Italy. Meanwhile an ever-growing number of supply drops of arms, ammunition, explosives, wirelesses and money provided the wherewithal for resisters to take the fight to the Nazi occupier.
In short, British secret service work in Nazi-occupied Europe was scarcely sustainable without the work of the RAF’s Special Duties squadrons.
About Mark Seaman
From 1980 to 2002 Mark Seaman was an historian at the Imperial War Museum, specialising in intelligence and special operations. He then served in the Cabinet Office for twenty-two years where his duties included assisting in the publication of official histories of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the authorised history of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He has written two biographies of SOE agents and edited several works on special operations/intelligence topics including three for the National Archives. In 2015 he was awarded an MBE for services to the history of espionage.
He has studied the work of the RAF’s wartime Special Duties squadrons for some forty years and has lectured on the subject to RAF personnel at Lyneham, Brize Norton, Benson and Waddington. Abroad, he has spoken on the topic at conferences in France, Belgium, Denmark and the Czech Republic. He has contributed chapters on Special Duties work to ‘Britain and Norway in the Second World War’ (1995) and ‘Exile in London: The experience of Czechoslovakia and the other occupied nations 1939-1945’ (2017). He wrote introductions to Freddie Clark’s ‘Agents by Moonlight’ (1999) and Robert Body’s ‘Runways to Freedom’ (2016).
He coordinated a project that resulted in the erection of a Special Duties Squadron plaque at St Clement Danes in 2013.
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