A collection of twenty-five letters from Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin George Boxshall MBE, the archivist of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) within the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to Mr MacLaren. The letters conveyed details about Canadians who served in clandestine operations during the Second World War, information that was used by Mr MacLaren while writing his book, 'Canadians Behind Enemy Lines, 1939-1945.'
Though Canadian servicemen and civilians worked behind the lines during the war, their clandestine activities were controlled by the British Directorate of Military Intelligence (MI9). When a serviceman was recruited for this work, a note was added to his Canadian military service personnel file (which is held at LAC) that the individual had been 'transferred to the Q List,' and the Canadian file was effectively closed.
These letters conveyed detailed summaries of the service of sixty-two individuals, and brief mentions of many others. The summaries include confidential assessments of the men's suitability for working behind enemy lines, their specific activities in the field, and often the attempts to reconstruct how they died from the post-war testimony of witnesses. The information was compiled from MI9 files, and provided some of the first confirmations of the men's secret work.
The collection also includes eight letters from the Public Archives of Canada confirming details of some individuals' military careers.
The men identified in this collection worked behind the lines in Europe and the Far East. Those recruited for work in the Far East were Canadians of Chinese and Japanese heritage, while a good number of those who served in Yugoslavia had family ties to that country. The collection includes details about the most famous Canadian agents: Frank Pickersgill, Roméo Sabourin and John Macalister who were captured in France and murdered at Buchenwald concentration camp in September 1944.
