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Secret WW2
This is the website for The Secret WW2 Learning Network – the UK registered educational charity with the mission to
EDUCATE, COMMEMORATE and INSPIRE
Latest Secret WW2 News
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OBITUARY – Life Friend and Veteran, Stanley Booker
. Stan was a wartime Halifax navigator serving with the RAF when he was shot down in France in...
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Redevelopment of 64 Baker Street approved – but with important SOE heritage condition.
;s original frontage will be...
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Unveiling of information board commemorating SOE’s Special Training School (STS 3) in Liss, Hampshire
- June 22, 2024
- 10:30
- Riverside Walk, Liss, Hampshire - by the railway station.

Tuesday, 18th June 2024, 10.30 am – L’appel
- June 18, 2024
- 10:30
- De Gaulle statue, Carlton Gardens, London SW1Y 5AA.

COMMEMORATIONS IN FRANCE FOR F (FRENCH) SECTION SOE – PT 2 VALENÇAY
- May 6, 2024
- 11:00
- F Section Memorial, Carr Bénévent,

COMMEMORATIONS IN FRANCE FOR F (FRENCH) SECTION SOE – PT 1 ROMORANTIN-LANTHENAY
- May 5, 2024
- 16:00
- Quai de l'Île Marin, Romorantin-Lanthenay
Help us to keep the memories alive while engaging younger and wider audiences.
Latest Facebook Posts
February 6, 2025
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002796r
Features our Network supporter, Martin Sugarman.
February 3, 2025
Join Dr Ben Jones as he explores the history of the allied special force task force known as The Jedburghs who worked behind enemy lines to strengthen the Allies’ position in France.
February 1, 2025
As a courier for the Comet escape line, “Nadine” helped Allied evaders, including many downed RAF aircrew, travel clandestinely from Belgium into France, before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain to reach Gibraltar.
https://www.legasee.org.uk/veteran/andree-dumon/
January 30, 2025
We sadly report that our dear Life Friend and Veteran, Squadron Leader Stanley (Stan) Booker RAF (Rtd) MBE, Légion D’honneur, died peacefully on Sunday 26th January 2025, aged 102.
Stan was a wartime Halifax navigator serving with the RAF when he was shot down in France in June 1944. Picked up by the French Resistance, but betrayed, Stanley followed captured SOE agents to Buchenwald concentration camp and was fortunate to survive the horrors of that infamous establishment. Postwar he continued in the RAF, served in RAF Intelligence and with SIS/MI6.
For many years Stanley campaigned for recognition and commemoration of the British personnel and agents who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald. He and his wife visited the camp when it was still in East Germany and maintained a positive correspondence with leading politicians of the day, including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Foreign Secretary Lord Howe.
It is a fitting tribute to Stanley’s early and persistent efforts that two memorial plaques, listing the British and French agents murdered in the camp, were eventually placed in the cellar at Buchenwald where many of the agents were hanged.
To the very end of his life, Stan never forgot the SOE and other agents who were murdered at Buchenwald and we will do our best to keep his mantra, adopted from that of the memorial site at Buchenwald, that “It is the duty of the living to honour the dead”.
Our full tribute to Stan, with additional photos, can be seen here:
https://secret-ww2.net/news/obituary-life-friend-and-veteran-stanley-booker/
An interview with Stan by SSAFA, can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=815885766469780
Our condolences go to Pat and other members of Stan’s family.
January 30, 2025
STOP PRESS: pre-meet and wreath laying for SWW2LN followers at 2.30pm at the Memorial to the Missing, 1939-45 on Sunday, 2nd Feb 2025.
This Sunday, 2nd February 2025 at 3pm at the RAF Shelter in Brookwood Military Cemetery, near Woking in Surrey, our Network will be joining the Brookwood Last Post Association - https://brookwoodlastpost.org/ - in remembering the murders of three women agents of F Section SOE at Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany - 80 years ago. Violette Szabo and Denise Bloch are commemorated on the Memorial to the Missing at Brookwood, Lilian Rolfe (as a former WAAF) is commemorated on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede in Surrey.
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