To carry out one clandestine mission requires courage, but to do it four times requires courage on a quite extraordinary scale. Yet, that is exactly what Peter Churchill did.
Peter Morland Churchill was born in Amsterdam in 1909 to British diplomat William Churchill and his wife Violet. A particularly gifted linguist, upon graduating from university, Churchill followed in his father’s footsteps and entered into the British diplomatic service before eventually joining the Home Office Advisory Committee.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill’s professional exploits and linguistic prowess led him to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — a secret British organization formed in 1940 to carry out subversive warfare against the enemy in Nazi-occupied Europe. Churchill was among the early volunteers for the SOE, and joined as an Intelligence Officer in the French Section in 1941. Throughout his time in the organization, Churchill made it into France on four separate missions. Each of these assignments were hazardous, requiring courage, resourcefulness and tireless hard work. Churchill was successful in his first three missions, but these hazards caught up with him and he was captured at the beginning of his fourth deployment to France. He endured torture, solitary confinement and the everyday horrors of the concentration camps as a result. He eventually made it back home at the end of the war and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his outstanding courage.
The story of Peter Churchill and his time in the SOE is an incredible one. This remarkable history truly does justice to these experiences and will captivate any reader interested in the SOE or in the Second World War in general.
