Shadow Warriors of World War II Read online

  Kent also handled the Gray code, a cipher system the State Department believed to be unbreakable. It was the code Churchill used to correspond with Roosevelt. In one message Churchill told the president about the formation of the SOE.

  Information continued to flow across Churchill’s desk, and he shared it with Roosevelt. The president reciprocated by passing information he received from the US Navy. The intention was to allow sensible dispositions of their navies in both the Pacific and Atlantic. For Churchill there was also another motive: he hoped the exchanges would further enlist American sympathy and support for Britain—and ultimately bring the United States into the war.

  Kent, in the solitude of the embassy’s code room, continued to read the Gray code messages passing across the Atlantic.

  On the morning of May 20, 1940, a team of Scotland Yard detectives entered his apartment overlooking Hyde Park. A forensic search, watched by the security officer from the American embassy, discovered fifteen hundred of the most recent Gray code cables. Kent insisted he had been acting in the “interest of my country to prevent American foreign policy leading it into the war.” He was taken to the embassy and told by Kennedy that he was being dismissed from the Foreign Service. Stripped of diplomatic immunity, Kent was arrested, brought to trial at the Old Bailey, and convicted of theft and “dealing in documents of national security.” He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in Britain’s grim jail on Dartmoor.

  A devastated Kennedy cabled Roosevelt insisting he was unaware of Kent’s activities. FDR waited until after his successful third term election before recalling Kennedy to Washington. Kennedy’s own political ambitions would eventually succeed when he propelled his son John F. Kennedy into the White House.

  When the United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ordered the formation of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, America’s first intelligence service, the nascent equivalent of the SOE. From its ranks, carefully selected women were sent to England to use their skills to support the women agents of the SOE. They were the first of four thousand women the OSS would employ.

  The majority of those working in the intelligence communities at the outbreak of war instinctively believed that men made the best agents. The French Section of the SOE was to challenge that preconception. Women eventually made up a quarter of its force. Section heads realized that women could be less conspicuous in a country in which men of fighting age should have been working or might even have been picked up for forced labor in Germany. Being able to move around more easily made the dangerous task of carrying a concealed radio slightly less hazardous. Most women agents would work as couriers and wireless operators.

  After the war many of these women, such as Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom, were rightly celebrated for their courage. They blurred the gender divide that had previously characterized war by not staying at home while the men went out to fight for their country’s protection. Some, despite their exploits in open as well as clandestine warfare, stressed their femininity. New Zealand–born Nancy Wake’s work with the French Resistance made her one of the Gestapo’s most wanted agents in France, but after the war she stated, “What you’ve got to remember is that I was just a normal young woman.” Wake learned what were considered “male skills” to take the fight to the enemy. But there were also women who openly used their sexuality to obtain information. Most notable of these was Betty Pack, who worked for both the SOE and the Americans, becoming the OSS’s famed agent code-named Cynthia. Pack knew that men held the secrets she wanted and that sex was the way to make them divulge what they knew.

  Even though the seductress spy appears in stories from most wars, the way in which Betty Pack got her information for the Allies may actually have put her in the shadow of the agents with the Sten gun. That said, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of the French Section of the SOE, acknowledged, “My organization used quite a number of courageous women. They were not called upon to use their feminine charms in the way that Cynthia did. But I can well see the advantages of a good-looking woman spy using her feminine charms as an added weapon in seeking information.”

  Betty Pack argued that her methods were better than torturing or killing to obtain information.

  The women who volunteered as agents might have been invited to volunteer, but that did not mean they did not face sexism and even derision. Yolande Beekman, an efficient and courageous agent who was executed by the Germans, had been dismissed by one SOE instructor as “a nice girl, [who] darned the men’s socks, would make an excellent wife for an unimaginative man, but not much more than that.” In a report on Eileen Nearne, who was twenty-two when she trained as a wireless operator, an officer used both her youth and gender against her. “In character she is very ‘feminine’ and immature,” he noted.

  The women’s motivations for wanting to join the secret war were varied, but many quoted their family’s experiences during World War I. Odette Sansom was six years old when her father was killed, and she grew up with her grandfather warning there would soon be another war. “I listened to that for years,” she said. “The seed was there.”

  Violette Szabo’s husband was killed in North Africa in October 1942. She said, “I am going to get my own back somehow.” Yvonne Cormeau, who would become one of F Section’s most adept radio operators, had seen her husband die in the London Blitz. “I was willing to do whatever I could,” she said. “This was something I think my husband would have liked to do and, as he was no longer there to do it, I thought it was time for me to do it.”

  Sansom, Szabo, and Cormeau all left behind very young children when they volunteered. Sansom and Cormeau returned. Szabo sadly did not.

  The time frame of this book encompasses somewhere between recent history and fading memory. However, there are sufficient acts of extraordinary bravery by those women and men of the SOE and OSS to provide an accurate, balanced, and compelling account of what happened when they parachuted in the moonlight to help disrupt the Third Reich. For the first two years of the war, the SOE operated alone. In 1942 the OSS became its partner.

  Much has still been left unsaid about their work. In preparing this study we have consulted official records, memoirs, and private material, including diaries and letters, and followed the rule of double-checking previous material when it appeared to be contradictory and confusing.

  The secret world of intelligence gathering has always fascinated us after reading about Gideon, the Old Testament hero who saved Israelites from a stronger enemy by providing them with better intelligence. But how was intelligence handled in one of the greatest and most terrible events in history, World War II? How was intelligence gathering carried out? Who were the men who formed the clandestine forces and realized women should be among their most important foot soldiers? And who were the women they chose?

  After the war, the victors—the United States, Britain, and France, and later, Germany—microfilmed the records for their archives. In the Imperial War Museum in London are hundreds of hours of recordings on which the men and women who worked in intelligence gathering have recalled their memories of being behind enemy lines and carrying out nerve-racking sabotage operations. To this day their voices remain timeless testimony. They are reinforced by the Records of the Office of Strategic Services at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

  Those sources are supported by the German depositories: the Military Archives in Freiburg im Breisgau, the Federal Archives in Koblenz, and the Federal Political Archives in Berlin.

  In some cases documents are not always complete; parts of them may have been destroyed in the war or afterward, perhaps accidentally, maybe deliberately. But the stories of the men and women in the following pages explain why intelligence rose to its full importance in World War II.

  Gordon Thomas

  Greg Lewis

  2016, Bath, England

  1

  By All Means Possible

  SINCE DAWN, BRIGADIER COLIN Gubbins had s
upervised the SOE’s move into its headquarters at 64 Baker Street on July 15, 1941.

  Born in 1896, his mother had given him a strong sense of duty and a piety governed by the demands of a responsive conscience. With it came his father’s sense of justice, logic, and integrity in an orderly mind. War and action had filled Gubbins’s own military life, during which he had learned that “thinking first before applying action was essential.” His deep-set eyes and voice warned all comers not to cross him. They never lost their look of searching for information. He gave the impression that all he heard he would keep secret, unless it was an essential ingredient for the policies that guided both diplomacy and war and served the needs of the decision makers. Churchill was always the first to hear his latest secret—not something from the nonstop gossip mill in Whitehall but information that could involve a current event.

  On that summer’s day Gubbins went to his office on the fifth floor and stared out of a window at the ugly scars of a city at war—gaps in a row of buildings where a bombed shop or a café had stood, streets with sandbagged guard posts, and signs with arrows pointing to the nearest air raid shelter. In the sky hung barrage balloons to intercept the Luftwaffe if the bombers made another visit to be met by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfires and the antiaircraft batteries stationed along the flight paths the Germans were known to use.

  It would be after dark when the bombers came. By then the army engineers had promised Gubbins they would have finished installing a switchboard and checked its two hundred lines. He calculated the building would eventually need that number of phones by the time the SOE’s training schools and other facilities had opened across Britain. Already in London twenty-five offices were staffed by men who had served under him in Poland and Norway. He had selected them with the help of Sir Hastings Ismay, the chief of staff, when unhelpful Whitehall departments had challenged their transfer into the SOE’s headquarters.

  Employees entered through an entrance with a black marble plaque mounted on the wall bearing the words INTER SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. Each person had signed the Official Secrets Act and been told that secrecy was their first duty; the smallest breach of the Act would result in arrest, trial, and imprisonment. In the creaky elevator that took staff up to their offices was a framed reminder. It depicted a finger on lips and the words NO TALK. NO SURPRISE. It was posted in every corridor and on the walls of every office.

  To reinforce the need for secrecy, Gubbins created cover names for staff to use in any of their dealings with the War Office, Admiralty, or Air Ministry. They were to say they were calling from either the Joint Technical Board, the Special Training Headquarters, or the one Gubbins most enjoyed, the MO1 (SP), which staff joked stood for “Mysterious Operations in Secret Places,” or simply MOSP. By the end of the war some people in high places in military departments had never discovered what the acronym stood for.

  Winston Churchill had defined the MOSP as “tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent.”

  To them he added the words of his favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, the Chinese expert on guerrilla war: “The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places. And when he prepares everywhere he will be weak everywhere.” Both the MOSP and Tzu’s words became the battlecry for the SOE.

  The prime minister had sent both quotations to Gubbins. On that hot, somnolent July day, when the move into Baker Street was completed, he knew special means would be essential to defeating Adolf Hitler and the million German soldiers manning fortified defenses along the French coast, which Hitler boasted was the strongest since the Great Wall of China. He called it the Atlantic Wall.

  The SOE would operate beyond it to provide the French people with their liberty, the first step to lifting the Nazi yoke off the rest of Europe.

  Gubbins read every MI5 vetting report on his staff. A number were nationals of occupied countries who had fled to England. Their language skills and geographical knowledge of their countries made them suitable recruits.

  But Britain was increasingly gripped by spy mania. B Section, the counterespionage department of MI5 headed by Guy Liddell, a cello-playing veteran spy hunter, faced a mounting task of checking reports that the nation was riddled with German spies who were embedded to prepare for Hitler’s invasion. The fear was fuelled by spy novels, tabloid newspapers, and an obsession that the Kaiser had sent spies to England in the First World War and that these had remained. They were said to be disguised as nuns, traveling salesmen, bank managers, and “those gentlemen who are the best behaved in your town,” the Sunday Express wrote. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, insisted, “You can identify a spy from the way he walks—but only from behind.”

  “There is a class of people prone to spy mania,” Winston Churchill told Gubbins, who dismissed it as a “Fifth Column neurosis.” An ice cream vendor was poisoning his cones. A psychiatrist at a mental hospital was training patients to kill politicians. There wasn’t a day when reports of nefarious activities didn’t land on Gubbins’s desk. They became stories to lighten his morning staff meetings.

  Gubbins brought Margaret Jackson and Vera Long with him to Baker Street, both of whom had been his secretaries since the outbreak of war. He told Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic war, who was responsible for SOE salaries, that he wanted them paid on the same scale as lieutenants in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. In staff relations, as with so much else, Gubbins was ahead of his time.

  In the First World War the FANYs were known as the first arrivals as they collected the wounded from the battlefields and drove them to the French coast to be brought back to England.

  Gubbins decided that all female staff in the SOE would wear FANY uniforms. Those who would be sent into France would not wear them but would hold an officer’s commission and their salaries would be banked for them in London until their return. However, he knew if they were captured they would almost certainly be executed as spies.

  He had the gift of inspiring confidence that amounted to devotion, and both his secretaries typed some of the most secret communications of the war. More than once he asked either Jackson or Long to summarize important decisions made at meetings. Dressed in their FANY uniforms he would take them in turn to the War Office, or another Whitehall ministry meeting, to sit beside him and take perfect shorthand notes, which would be transcribed that night before they returned to their apartments farther down Baker Street. Next morning they would be at their desks in his outer office by 6:00 AM.

  His workload grew, increased by the responsibility he carried for the lives of hundreds. At times his frustration boiled over, an anger that had started when MI6 had brought General Charles de Gaulle out of France in 1940 on Churchill’s orders. Since then de Gaulle had been approaching Frenchmen living in Britain to join the Free French force he was forming.

  At their first meeting, de Gaulle insisted to Gubbins his movement would become a secret army into which the SOE’s French Section—F Section—should be absorbed. He reminded Gubbins he had come to London not only to establish a government-in-exile but also to use his “connections and reputation in France to prepare organized resistance.” The Free French would be the vanguard. Gubbins replied that while the movement was welcome to work alongside the SOE, there was no possibility of F Section being absorbed under the general’s command.

  Gubbins decided he would make a change of the leadership of F Section. Its section head, H. R. Marriott, had developed “a false belief in his indispensability.” Gubbins replaced him with Maurice Buckmaster.

  Buckmaster was forty-one years old, a tall, thin man with a slight stoop. He had gone to Eton College, one of England’s oldest and most prestigious prep schools, and had won a scholarship to study classics at Oxford. Afterward he went to France on a cycling tour and ended up on the staff of Le Matin, a Paris newspaper, as a reporte
r. Other jobs followed, including working in a public relations company that handled the accounts for the Ford Motor Company in France. In 1938 he returned to England and enlisted in the British Army. His knowledge of French led to him serving as an intelligence officer in the British Expeditionary Force sent to confront the German offensive sweeping across France. He was among the last units to be shipped out of Dunkirk and back to England in June 1940. He heard that a new organization was being created that needed French speakers with a military background.

  “I called the War Office. Next day, I was told to come to London for an interview. It was with Gubbins. That’s how I joined SOE on March 17, 1941. Gubbins placed me in the Belgium section. Five months later I was head of F Section,” Buckmaster recalled.

  Buckmaster’s appointment resulted in the section becoming the first to send women behind enemy lines.

  Gubbins spent time choosing heads of sections. Though all had undergone positive vetting by MI5, he decided selection would not be based on a candidate’s family connections or school background, as was so often the route used by the armed forces.

  With the patience of a headhunter, he made discreet inquiries about the service records of those whose names he had been given by members of his own network of military contacts. He had told them he was looking for men who had some experience in guerrilla tactics. Ideally they would have been at the Special Training Centre for commandos at Lochailort in the Scottish Highlands. Others had served under him in Poland or Norway.

  Fluent in French, Polish, and Dutch, Gubbins tested each applicant’s language skill, then talked about their family, military background, and any special qualities he noticed in their military records. Once satisfied, he offered a candidate a post as head of a section and told him to sign the Official Secrets Act.