Women Of The Special Forces The stories of women who help keep us safe

Women have always performed a vital role within the covert and highly skilled teams protecting our national security…

The Special Forces are an essential aspect of Britain’s national security and military operations. Drawn from the British Armed Forces, five elite military units have distinct expertise; the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), Special Forces Support Group (SFSG), Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) and 18 (UKSF) Signals Regiment.

Recruitment to all units opens to female soldiers in 2019, although some women already perform skilled roles within them – just as they’ve done since wartime years.

The Special Forces originated with commando units and the Special Operations Executive founded in 1940, a covert army on a mission to work with resistance forces in enemy-occupied Europe and Asia and mainly tasked with sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. 55 women were recruited to this clandestine, mainly male domain, the only women allowed to perform a combat role in the Second World War.

“The attitude to women in the SOE was quite varied,” explains Dr Kate Vigurs, historian of The Special Operations Executive, describing their role in The Special Forces: In The Shadows exhibition at the National Army Museum.

“A lot of instructors really didn’t like the women so as they were going through their training th ere would be some very negative, patronising. But somehow those reports got overridden and the

women did end up going into the field. And when you listen to the post-war interrogation, the debrief when people came back, they say they couldn’t have existed without these women, that they did very good work. ‘They had a cool and lonely courage,’ someone said, and that they managed to work incredibly well, undertaking roles that maybe men couldn’t.”

Two female SOE agents are profiled in the exhibition. Violette Szabo was recruited and trained for undercover work in occupied France, where she helped to organise local resistance networks and sabotaged German lines of communication. After attempting to escape from a German road block she was finally captured and taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp and executed in 1945, aged just 23.

Noor Inayat Khan was recruited as a wireless operator and flown to occupied Paris to transmit communications between London and the Resistance. She was forced to go on the run when her team was betrayed by a double agent and evaded capture for months, sending important information back to Britain and helping Allied airmen shot down in France. After capture, brave Noor was executed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944.