In the west cloister of Westminster Abbey a modest plaque is about to be unveiled. It will be a memorial to the volunteers of our Special Operations Executive, otherwise forgotten, who were killed in action between 1939 and 1946, murdered by the enemy after capture, or failed to get home again. It is fairly much a private occasion and has taken some time to come about: the wonder is that it has come about at all. Fifty-eight years have passed since Major Lawrence Grand launched his 'Section D' in a niche of the old War Office, which had concluded, quite privately in the wake of the Munich sell-out of the Czechs, that a war with Hitler's Germany would be unavoidable, in which case several European countries east of Germany would be overrun by the Wehrmacht, and steps should now be taken, even at these many minutes after midnight, to discover and support friends in those countries who might continue resistance - but the word came into use only with the thing itself - after invasion. So it was proposed, and was going to be done.

LRB 22 August 1996 | PDF Download