Shadow Warriors of World War II Read online

  The men and women selected as agents underwent three weeks of assessment in paramilitary training and psychological tests and a further five weeks of training in Lochailort. Courses included handling a range of explosives and learning the technique of silent killing with a dagger. Ten inches long, the double-edged razor-sharp blade was designed to slice through a person’s throat in one stroke. Mannequins were used for practice. Those who showed an aptitude for Morse code were sent to a specialist training school to perfect their skills in sending encoded messages.

  Field agents would be formed into small groups, known as circuits. Each would have an organizer who would recruit local resisters and be responsible for arming them and teaching them the techniques they had learned in the training school. Each circuit would have a courier to act as the link with other groups of local resisters and circuits.

  “A courier will be constantly on the move, often by bicycle or train, traveling considerable distance to deliver messages. They run the risk of being caught by German patrols. A wireless operator must never operate a set for more than twenty minutes as the Germans have powerful detection vans which can detect Morse signals,” Gubbins said.

  The briefing ended with the impact of his next words.

  I have been given by Churchill authority for SOE to send women as couriers and wireless operators into France. Women are less likely to be bodily searched and their messages can be hidden in their underwear. Because many are trained typists they will also make better wireless operators. They will all be assigned to the French Section. The Geneva Convention of 1929 offers no protection to women combatants, let alone for the war which SOE will conduct.

  He then told them how agents would be recruited.

  Selwyn Jepson was forty years old when Gubbins appointed him for the delicate, serious, and individual work of choosing secret agents. With dark, wavy hair and a voice that moved conversations along at its own pace with a nod or smile, the post fit Jepson’s background. He was born in 1899 into a middle-class, respected London family. His father was a thriller writer and his mother a noted musician; his sister was a serious novelist, and a cousin, Fay Weldon, became a celebrated author. Jepson himself was a successful writer of books and screenplays.

  Only Gubbins and Buckmaster knew why Jepson needed separate offices in different parts of London. One was where he interviewed men, and the other was where he selected women to be trained. None of the interviewees were ever brought to SOE headquarters in case they heard or saw something they did not need to know.

  Jepson had his own office at SOE headquarters too, on the same floor as Gubbins. Within the building he became known as Captain Mosp, the SOE’s chief recruiter for mysterious operations. His books had pride of place on a shelf behind his desk in his fifth-floor office. They had titles like Puppets of Fate, The King’s Red-Haired Girl, and The Death Gong. Twenty-five of his thrillers had been published on both sides of the Atlantic. His screenplays had been turned into Hollywood movies like Kiss Me Goodbye, The Love Test, and Money Mad.

  Jepson’s office allowed him to look down on Baker Street as SOE staff came in and out of the building. Some worked in offices along the corridor, and he exchanged pleasantries with them as they rode up in the elevator. The thin man with the bowlegs of a jockey; a tall figure in an RAF uniform who addressed anyone as “hullo, old cock”; a fat man with an engaging smile, which shone through discolored teeth; a fair-haired girl in a FANY uniform, one of the secretaries—Jepson had come to know them, the men by their frequently conspiratorial air, the women with warm smiles. Like him they arrived early for work and left late in the evening.

  In between interviews Jepson spent the day in his office reading the latest letters the Ministry of Economic Warfare had received as a result of the BBC broadcast asking for photographs of “interesting areas” in Europe. They were sent to the Air Ministry to be assessed for possible targets. The letters with the photos included personal details of the senders who had escaped to Britain from Nazi-occupied Europe.

  By the end of the day Jepson had selected who he would invite to come for an interview. Afterward, those he accepted would be sent to Orchard Court, a large, modern apartment block where Vera Atkins lived. Gubbins told Jepson that Atkins had a quality that would be of value when assessing the character of a recruit, especially women. Her apartment became an SOE base to interview every man and woman Jepson selected for a follow-up interview.

  Born in Romania in 1908 to a German Jewish father and a South African Jewish mother, her real name was Vera Rosenberg. She came to England in 1936, having anglicized her mother’s name, Etkins, to Atkins, and had met Buckmaster, who had helped her naturalization and in 1941 had found her a job as a secretary in the SOE.

  Gubbins appointed her as Jepson’s assistant as recruitment was fast picking up, and soon a number of potential agents would arrive at Orchard Court for Atkins’s follow-up interview.

  Each interviewee was given a time to arrive at Orchard Court. The entrance was guarded by Atkins’s doorman and butler, Andrew Park, who had worked at the Savoy Hotel before being recruited by the SOE. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, he would lead the way to the gilded elevator gates and up to the second floor to Atkins’s apartment. Using his pass key he opened its doors and led the recruit down the hallway into a bathroom that Atkins used as a waiting room. Moments later he returned and led the person into Atkins’s office. The routine never varied.

  Before each interview Atkins studied the assessment report Jepson had prepared on each candidate. Some had escaped from France and had never been in England before. Others had relatives there who had helped them find work in shops and cafés. Until they had been interviewed by Jepson and signed the Official Secrets Act they had no idea they had been recruited for secret work, except that it would involve speaking French and not to discuss it with anyone. A few admitted to Jepson—“Mr. Potter” to them—they had worked on French Resistance escape lines. Some had just fled across the Channel.

  Jepson’s reports enabled Atkins to judge the character of each agent within a few minutes of meeting them.

  Tall, slim, and in her midthirties, Atkins would smile, proffer her hand, and lead her visitor to an office armchair, before sitting opposite in another. Lighting a cigarette she would settle her blue-gray eyes upon the new recruit and began to explain why he, or more often she, had been chosen to be trained for “special work,” adding that she would follow their progress day by day to the time she would accompany them to the airfield where they would get their final briefing for their secret mission into Nazi-occupied Europe. More than one recruit left her office excited and eager to begin work for this woman who exuded such confidence.

  In the summer of 1940, the mood in President Roosevelt’s White House was uncertain. Across the Atlantic, the RAF fought the Luftwaffe for mastery of the skies over England. The city of Coventry had been destroyed, and thousands of Londoners huddled in bomb shelters and subways, while Churchill continued to promise in his BBC broadcasts that Britain would never surrender and predicted “the time will come when the New World with all its power will step forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”

  The prime minister was too adroit a politician to say he was counting on the United States to openly support his optimism. Some of its radio networks had started to repeat BBC broadcasts from London with a new sound: the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, three dots and a dash, which created the Morse code for V—for victory. In occupied Europe the pattern was used to knock on doors, blow train whistles, and honk car horns. Churchill used two straight fingers to signal V for victory. The press attaché at the British embassy in Washington circulated a photo of the gesture to newspapers. The German embassy issued a press release: “Churchill should not think he can win the war by making a silly gesture.”

  The first of thirty-two thousand British children evacuated to the United States onboard the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth came ashore in New York singing the two new songs fr
om back home. The fall of France had inspired “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and the London Blitz had led to “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

  The children found themselves welcomed into American homes equipped with appliances and consumer durables most had never seen before—refrigerators, radios, telephones, electric fans, and air conditioning. Hollywood provided 90 percent of the world’s movies they were taken to see. Those who were sent from New York to places like Kansas learned it had more cars than all of Great Britain. There were skyscrapers in the cities and passenger planes to take them to their new homes across the nation.

  American youth taught British children a new language: girls spoke of boys as “smooth” and girls were “neat” or “terrific.” Their hosts took the newcomers to church on Sundays, and families would gather around the radio on Friday evenings to listen to President Roosevelt’s fireside chats.

  Newspapers, with advertisements very different from the ones in England, carried daily Gallup polls; one revealed the favorite adjective of that summer was tantamount—as in every Roosevelt order was “tantamount to declaring war.” Key Pittman, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed that “British people should give up their home island and retreat to Canada.”

  Charles H. Lindbergh, who had become a national hero after flying solo across the Atlantic and a figure of sadness after his baby son was kidnapped and murdered, shared with the nation his views on the international situation at a New York rally in Madison Square Garden.

  We are in danger of war today not because people have attempted to interfere in America, but because we American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe. We need not fear foreign invasion unless American people bring it through their own quarrelling and meddling with affairs abroad. We are surrounded by people who want us to go to war. These are men seizing every opportunity to push America closer to the edge and want to lead us into conflict across the Atlantic and bring it to our doorstep.

  The reporters gathered below the platform scribbled furiously while Lindbergh waited for the applause to stop before he continued.

  “We have all heard Mr. Churchill’s promise that Britain will go on to the end. That it will fight on the seas and oceans and in the air. That is fine for Britain. But we do not need it here.”

  Brushing aside questions, Lindbergh walked off the platform and was driven away. The next day, he resigned his commission as an Air Corps colonel. The speech was heavily criticized as being anti-Semitic. In response, Lindbergh insisted again he was not anti-Semitic, but he did not back away from his statement. Another Gallup poll reported that 90 percent of Americans would fight if America was invaded but only 10 percent would do so if America was not invaded.

  In Jeanette, Pennsylvania, a gun club started to practice marksmanship so that its members would be ready to pick off descending Nazi parachutists. A hamburger chain changed the word hamburger to liberty steak. Time magazine quoted a new word—blitzkrieg. It was soon attached to every story from the war front in London. The House of Lords, adjacent to Parliament and Big Ben, had been hit by a bomb; Buckingham Palace had been struck by five bombs.

  The thirty-second president of the United States knew that the United Kingdom was taking terrible punishment and the pound Sterling was falling on Wall Street. Roosevelt brooded about all this while convalescing from a severe sinus attack in the Caribbean sun aboard the cruiser Tuscaloos when a navy seaplane landed alongside to deliver a letter from Winston Churchill. It had been hand couriered by a Queen’s messenger across the Atlantic and delivered onboard by the British ambassador, Lord Lothian. He would remember how Roosevelt carefully opened it with a knife, read it slowly, and then retreated to a sun chair on the deck.

  “He sat there alone and read and reread the letter for two days. He took his meals in his cabin. When he did appear on deck to enjoy the sun he had the look of a man coming to an important decision,” the ambassador recalled.

  Churchill’s letter asked if the president “working within the American Constitution could prevent Britain being stripped to the bone.”

  The answer to Churchill’s appeal became known worldwide as the Lend-Lease Act. It was fortuitously numbered H. R. 1776 and was titled “A Bill Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes.” It set out in the opening preamble “to provide aid to any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” It gave Roosevelt powers no other president had ever requested.

  Before the bill became law, Roosevelt, his sinus condition cured, was back in the White House. As 1940 came to an end, he once more sent for William Joseph Donovan. Since 1936, the Wall Street lawyer had acted as the president’s fact finder after Hitler came to power. Roosevelt told no one why he summoned Donovan.

  A woman who was to become a key agent in the coming war was already on the MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, payroll, and this after gaining her hunger for espionage during the Spanish Civil War.

  Betty Pack was tall, slim, and beautiful, with bright auburn hair and deep green eyes. Born into a life of privilege in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 22, 1910, she had been christened Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, but everyone called her Betty. Her father, George, was a decorated officer in the US Marines, and her mother, Cora, had been educated at a number of top universities, including the Sorbonne in Paris. Throughout Betty’s childhood the family moved around a great deal, settling first in Cuba and then Hawaii, where George was given command of marines at Pearl Harbor.

  In 1922 George Thorpe retired, and the family, which by now included two younger siblings for Betty, moved to Washington. With time on his hands, George and his wife planned a grand tour of Europe. Arriving in France in the spring of 1923, the family traveled to Monte Carlo and then Rome, Naples, and eventually Germany. Betty then spent three months studying French at a boarding school for young women on the shores of Lake Geneva. Her trip gave her an excellent understanding of the French language and a love of Europe.

  Back in Washington, she socialized with the city’s elite, got to know Italian and Spanish diplomats, and was presented to Washington society in November 1929, a day before her nineteenth birthday. A few days earlier Betty, who had already had more than one sexual relationship, seduced Arthur Joseph Pack, a commercial secretary at the British embassy. Betty and Arthur had been guests at a weekend house party when he found her waiting for him naked in his bed. Arthur was thirty-eight and a veteran of the Great War, but he was no match for Betty. He was smitten, and by February 1930 they were engaged to be married. By then Betty was pregnant. The wedding was brought forward, and they were married at the end of April 1930. The couple then traveled to Britain. A son, Tony, was born on October 2, 1930. Some have speculated, perhaps unkindly, that Tony may not have been Arthur’s son, and Arthur certainly acted coldly toward the baby, but this may have been due to his embarrassment over the obvious fact that the child had been conceived out of wedlock. Arthur advertised for a foster-mother, and Tony was taken away to be raised by a couple in Shropshire, England.

  Arthur’s career as a diplomat developed, and the couple moved to Santiago, Chile, where he accepted a post. They lived well and again mixed with high society, and on New Year’s Eve 1934, Betty gave birth to a daughter, Denise. Betty learned Spanish, but still only twenty-one, she quickly grew bored with the much older embassy wives. To make life more bearable she took up horseback riding and joined the Santiago polo club, where she began an affair with a wealthy industrialist.

  In 1935 Arthur Pack was transferred to the British embassy in Madrid. Life in Spain began well, with bridge nights and picnics in the Sierra de Guadarrama, but once again Betty grew bored. She and Arthur befriended a couple named Carlos and Carmencita Sartorious, who introduced them to the “authentic” Spain of bullfights and shooting. Betty and Carlos, an officer in the Spanish air force, began an affair, meeting in a borrowed penthouse apartment to make love. These liaisons went o
n for about a year while around them the country slipped toward civil war.

  Just days before it broke out, on the orders of the British ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, Arthur, Betty, and their daughter Denise left Madrid and traveled across the border to Biarritz in southern France. Together with Denise’s nurse and her own child, they set up home in a rented villa. But as the fighting intensified, Arthur quickly became concerned for his embassy colleagues in the “summer embassy” in the northern Spanish city at San Sebastián, and on July 21, he set out on a four-hour journey to check on them. Two days later he had not returned, and Betty got her chauffeur to take her on a mission to find him. She was stopped in the border town of Irún and imprisoned by the Republicans. After an uncomfortable time in a basement jail, she managed to persuade her captors that she was not one of Franco’s spies, and she and her chauffeur were escorted back across the border into France.

  Betty was not to be dissuaded from trying again and set out on the same journey two days later. This time she met a more agreeable border guard who granted her a one-day pass and an escort of two militiamen. Betty reached San Sebastián and found her husband and the other embassy staff safe.

  Arthur was angry that Betty had put herself in danger; but she reveled in it and even managed to smuggle five Franco supporters out of the city with her. She was back in Biarritz by late evening. It had been a wild and dangerous mission, bringing with it the same rush of adrenaline she had experienced from a love affair.

  Her husband helped with the evacuation by ship of a number of Britons trapped by the war, then set up a temporary embassy in the border town of Hendaye. From there, Betty, whose personal loyalties were with the Catholic Church and Franco’s forces, watched Irún burn. She mourned for Spain but also feared for her lover, Carlos, about whom she had heard nothing since they had fled Madrid. When a Spanish aristocrat friend suggested they visit Spain while Arthur was away on business in England, she eagerly accepted his invitation. In Burgos, Betty met the head of the Spanish branch of the International Red Cross and volunteered to smuggle in much-needed medical supplies.