Roderick Bailey
SOE Historian
Imperial War Museum

Dr. Roderick Bailey is a professional historian attached to London's Imperial War Museum as a specialist in the study of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation set up in 1940 to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage in enemy-occupied territory. A graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and former visiting fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 2003 he was appointed to run a major acquisitions project for the IWM aimed at improving the historical record of SOE by interviewing survivors and tracing rare objects in private hands. He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle, a study of SOE operations in the occupied Balkans, and of the Sunday Times top-ten bestseller, Forgotten Voices of the Secret War, an oral history of SOE compiled from interviews in the IWM's sound archive. He is currently writing the official history of SOE operations against Fascist Italy and a study of fifteen SOE agents who perished in concentration camps after their capture in occupied France.