When Winston Churchill christened the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940, Britain had spent the previous decade appeasing Nazi Germany. In the House of Commons, Churchill gave a fiery speech opposing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement, saying , “There can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which … uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.” Among the regimented expectations in