Shadow Warriors of World War II Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Gordon Thomas

  All rights reserved

  First edition

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61373-089-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Thomas, Gordon, 1933– author. | Lewis, Greg, 1968– author.

  Title: Shadow warriors of World War II : the daring women of the OSS and SOE

  / Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis.

  Description: Chicago, Illinois : Chicago Review Press Incorporated, [2016] |

  Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016022142 (print) | LCCN 2016030063 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781613730867 (cloth) | ISBN 9781613730874 (pdf) | ISBN 9781613730898

  (epub) | ISBN 9781613730881 (kindle)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States. Office of Strategic Services—Biography. |

  World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—United States | Intelligence

  service—United States—History—20th century. | Great Britain. Special

  Operations Executive—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Secret

  service—Great Britain. | Intelligence service—Great

  Britain—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Women—Biography.

  | World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Female.

  Classification: LCC D810.S7 T52 2017 (print) | LCC D810.S7 (ebook) | DDC

  940.54/864109252—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022142

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Acknowledgments: Edith Maria Thomas and Moira Sharkey (research)

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  “They were certainly young and attractive and well educated. Between them they spoke the languages of Europe, and beyond, as they fought for freedom and justice in a shadow war against the Nazi enemy. I selected them and read the reports of their instructors on their progress in the black arts of sabotage, subversion, and spying. When they qualified I accompanied them to a secret airfield to be flown on extraordinary missions, protected by the cover story which had been created for each one of them. They organized guerrilla groups, unmasked traitors, and shattered the morale of the enemy. Their own life expectancy was six weeks. They each were offered a suicide pill; not all accepted. They were my girls, like no other.”

  —Vera Atkins, intelligence officer in the French Section of the Special Operations Executive during World War II

  “I hate wars and violence, but if they come then I don’t see why we women should just wave a proud good-bye and then knit them balaclavas.”

  —Nancy Wake, SOE agent

  “I discovered how easy it was to make highly trained, professionally closemouthed patriots give away their secrets in bed.”

  —Betty Pack, agent with the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of Strategic Services

  “Air raid bombs that demolish homes and kill children bring out in every woman the right to protect, to seek out and destroy the evil behind those bombs by all means possible—including the physical and militant.”

  —Selwyn Jepson, SOE recruiting officer

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 By All Means Possible

  2 The Clouds of War

  3 The Magician’s Airfield

  4 Slipping into the Shadows

  5 Enigma in the Suitcase

  6 Agents by Moonlight

  7 Donovan’s Decision

  8 The Russians Arrive

  9 Betrayed!

  10 They Serve Alone

  11 Out of the Shadows

  12 Afterward

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  WORLD WAR II WAS the first time in history that women were trained as combatants and secret agents to be parachuted behind enemy lines. This was the war in which old gender rules changed, as intelligence agencies created specific training and roles for women. It was the war in which spy chiefs realized women’s potential as couriers, wireless operators, spies, saboteurs, and even Resistance leaders. British prime minister Winston Churchill had rung the changes when he gave the order in July 1940 to “set Europe ablaze.” The unit charged to do this was the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, a different kind of intelligence agency. Churchill called them “members of my underground army who collaborate and fight in the shadows.”

  They were spies and saboteurs trained as cryptographers, cartographers, analysts, and experts in recruiting, communication, and leadership to guide the resistance and partisans in the tense days of action in every theater of the European war.

  In the United States, on June 13, 1942, six months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the formation of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The president’s pen paved the way for American women to operate behind enemy lines along with the SOE.

  These agents ranged from girls barely out of high school to mature mothers, from working-class women to the daughters of aristocrats, from the plain to the beautiful, from the prim and proper to wild high-livers.

  Each of them was trained to blend in with the local population and even to disguise herself if necessary, by walking with a limp or wearing glasses. Burglars taught them how to pick locks and blow safes. Specialists showed them how to use rubber truncheons, tommy guns, Smith and Wesson automatics with silencers, and the killing knife with its polished and blackened blade. They were taught to throw grenades, jump from a fast-moving train, and plant a bomb on the hull of a ship. Those trained as wireless operators learned how to send secret messages and arrange for weapons to be dropped for the resistance fighters they would work with. All knew that torture and death were the price of failure.

  They were brave and resourceful women, ready to place themselves in harm’s way in order to serve their country. They worked undercover and carried out their assigned missions, sometimes with high-tech gadgets but none that could replace their own intelligence and determination. Their average age was twenty-five—some were younger, others older.

  Their femininity could be a resource in itself, making the Germans less likely to search or arrest them if they were acting as message couriers or wireless operators. It also meant they were often in a position of making great self-sacrifice. For many of these women, going on active service meant leaving babies and children at home. Many paid the ultimate price for their bravery. All have individual stories that deserve a special place in the history of British and American intelligence during the Second World War. The clandestine war, and therefore the war itself, would not have been won without the courage and contributions of these shadow warriors.

  On the same day Churchill gave the order to develop the SOE, Adolf Hitler made a speech in Berlin’s Reichstag boasting that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. To thunderous cheers he reminded his audience that already in a matter of months the German blitzkrieg had conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and now France. Only England remained. In the skies over London the Royal Air Force fought a courageous battle against the Luftwaffe while thousands of citizens huddled in bomb shelters and subways at night, and when they emerged in the morning hundreds more wounded bodies and corpses lay in the rubble. Not since the Great Fire of 1666 had London burned so fiercely.

  Britain stood alone, guarding its coast as the threat of invasion cast a dark shadow over the country.
/>   Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons outlined his vision of the future and ended with him saying:

  I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation, our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

  That evening he told his War Cabinet how it would be achieved. “It is urgent and indispensible that every effort should be made to obtain secretly the best possible information about the German forces in various countries and to establish intimate contacts with local people and to plant our agents among them.”

  He told them the SOE not only would be a morale booster for the nation but also would show the world that Britain’s resistance would determine the course of the war. “Our population will fight the Germans on the beaches and in the fields, in the villages, towns, cities, and ultimately, London. SOE will pave the way for victory.”

  Churchill appointed Dr. Hugh Dalton—a tall, bald man with a degree in economics—to be minister of economic warfare. In his customized suit, hand-sewn shirt, and his Marylebone Cricket Club tie, he embodied the British Establishment, a banker perhaps, or the chairman of a large company. A wealthy Socialist and an antiappeaser, he had devoted much of his time and money in the 1930s to warn of the threat Hitler posed, and he openly admired Churchill. Dalton knew his post, particularly its title, did not guarantee him a welcome among the budget trimmers in the Treasury or Foreign Office. Neither, he suspected, would the senior officers in the War Office see him as equipped with the military background to run the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Nor had his four years in the Great War told him anything about spying and counterespionage, let alone what they cost.

  Churchill reassured Dalton he had chosen someone who had the military background to deal with Whitehall ministers, while at the same time create an underground army to send into Europe to wage war against the Nazis. He was Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins, who had led a British Army force to Norway after the German Wehrmacht invaded that country in 1940. The Scots Highlander was the son of a family who had served in the British Army since campaigning for Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century. He had won a Military Cross in the First World War and possessed the virtues of command. He had courage, compassion, and was a natural leader of the young. He also held the conviction “that women can do the job as secret agents as well as men.”

  The prime minister learned that Gubbins had read a translation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, a military textbook that for two thousand years had been essential reading for China’s military leaders. Churchill met Gubbins and discussed a key element of Sun Tzu’s strategy: the infiltration of secret agents into enemy territory to gather intelligence and commit acts of sabotage. He saw Gubbins as “a mixture of patriotism and espionage.” His name went into the file of “useful people” the prime minister kept, and he decided Gubbins should join the SOE in a key position.

  In 1919 Gubbins had been sent to Russia, where he served under Britain’s General Edmund Ironside and Russia’s General Anton Denikin in the White Army. After the Red Army’s victory in the Civil War, Gubbins returned to England to serve in Ireland. His experiences in Russia and Ireland gave him considerable insights into the nature of guerrilla warfare, and he wrote pamphlets on the subject including The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, Partisan Leader’s Handbook, and How to Use High Explosives. They provided practical information on how to organize a road ambush, immobilize a railway engine, and kill the enemy. His writings had become required reading at Sandhurst and other officer training schools in the British Empire. Churchill had read every one of Gubbins’s handbooks and decided he would have a crucial role in the training and selection of agents. Gubbins had told the prime minister about the roles women had played in Russia and Ireland as couriers, weapons carriers for men, and spies. When Poland had surrendered in 1939 it was women who protected the Polish general staff as they retreated from Warsaw to Bucharest.

  The prime minister asked Gubbins to share his thoughts on the role that women could play in the SOE. Knowing Churchill’s demands for any brief to be kept short, Gubbins confined himself to a page on why women with language skills should be recruited and given special training before being sent behind lines in occupied Europe.

  “Women must be able to pass as locals and be sufficiently trained on how to survive among the German occupiers. They will pass on to Resistance fighters the knowledge they will have received. That must include guns and explosives. Being trained in wireless telegraphy will be essential. Armed combat and silent killing must be included in their training. They must be taught to a level that shows they are equally as capable as their male counterparts.”

  Churchill decided that women must be recruited into the SOE and trained as secret agents. He sent the memo to Dalton with the order that all recruiting officers were to keep a record of women’s language skills and send the details to the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  Meantime the SOE had been listed in the government’s classified telephone directory as the Inter Services Research Bureau with an address at 64 Baker Street. Only a black marble plaque at the entrance indicated its presence. The five-story building was a few doors from where Arthur Conan Doyle had given Sherlock Holmes his office, a connection that amused Churchill. Within months the SOE requisitioned country houses to become training schools, not only for men but for the women that Gubbins described in his memo. But how to find them?

  He asked the Home Office immigration department to provide him with the names of women who had come to Britain from all over Europe to escape the advancing Nazis.

  Gubbins arranged for the BBC to broadcast asking for photographs of “particular interesting areas in Europe” to be sent to the Ministry of Economic Warfare in Whitehall, London. Writers should attach a brief biographical note. Within weeks, scores of letters arrived.

  A number were from women. They included shop assistants, typists, clerks, nurses, a newspaper editor’s daughter, hotel receptionists, a professional dancer. Some had included vacation photos of themselves, mostly in France in prewar years. Several had a parent who was French, and they had been brought up and educated in France. Their letters indicated they were intelligent with a love for France as well as for Britain.

  Gubbins chose Selwyn Jepson to analyze the letters to find suitable women to train as agents. He was a playwright, film director, and screenwriter and had served as an intelligence officer in the First World War. Afterward he had lived in Switzerland for a year, before spending four years in Rome and two years in Paris. He spoke their languages fluently. Gubbins told him that his selection of women to become agents would be a key part of the SOE’s success. While their work would be like no other, he knew he must make sure the women had a full understanding of the risks they would face.

  On May 27, 1941, Roosevelt, following the fall of Greece and Crete, addressed eighty-five million Americans in his weekly radio broadcast warning of the perils of Nazi victory in Europe. He declared, “A state of unlimited national emergency now exists.” From coast to coast, no one was quite sure what the words meant. But soon there was a surge in military and naval construction programs. Isolationists also had a field day, led by the powerful Irish lobby opposed to America entering the war. Senator Worth Clark of Idaho urged in July that year that the United States should “draw a line across the Atlantic behind which Americans
would shelter, taking peaceful control of their entire hemisphere, including South America and Canada.” The proposal was widely reported in the German press as evidence that Roosevelt would stay out of the war.

  In the American embassy in London, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy continued to display his contempt for his host country. It won him no friends in the White House or State Department, and Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, cautioned him about his views. But Kennedy persisted in his attempts to meet Hitler, a man he had come to admire. Meantime the US ambassador in Paris, William Bullit, also continued sending disparaging reports to Washington about Britain’s prospect of surviving the war.

  As the first bombs fell on London, Kennedy cabled the State Department to say that Britain was “not fighting for democracy. She’s fighting for self-preservation. Democracy is finished in England. We should not give military and economic aid to the United Kingdom.”

  In 1940 MI5 continued to monitor the activities of Tyler Kent at the American embassy. He had arrived at the embassy in October 1939 from Moscow, where he had served since 1936 as the State Department code and cipher clerk, a post he now occupied in London. The twenty-nine-year-old son of the American consul in Beijing had started to express his anti-Semitism at meetings of the Right Club, a group of anti-Jewish Fascists who met at the home of Captain Archibald Ramsay, a distant relative of the Royal Family and a member of Parliament. Kent also shared with Ramsey cables that provided a clear insight into Kennedy’s views that Churchill was a warmonger leading Britain to defeat. These caused consternation in the Foreign Office.

  Lord Vansittart, chief diplomatic advisor to the British government, wrote a memo on January 22, 1940, to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: “Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of a double-crosser and defeatist. MI5 has noted that he flees with his family to the countryside whenever London is bombed. He is also making profitable investments on the stock market, a breach of State Department policy. Above all, he is anxious to break the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill.”