SOE in France

An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944

M.R.D. Foot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135769871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

SOE in France was first published in 1966, followed by a second impression with amendments in 1968. Since these editions were published, other material on SOE has become available. It was, therefore, agreed in 2000 that Professor Foot should produce a revised version. In so doing, in addition to the material in the first edition, the author has had

Part I

Structure

I

The Origins of SOE

The great war of 1939–45 was fought to decide whether national socialist Germany was to dominate the world or not. The nature of the nazi dictatorship gave Germany's neighbours some warning of their impending doom, though most of them took little notice. The nazis, resembling in this the communists, made no secret of their belief in force as the ultimate political solvent; they set a fashion for subversive activities in countries they proposed to conquer which defied the Queensberry rules of international conduct that staider powers had recently observed. This again debased the standards of how countries ought to behave to each other; however reluctant, these powers had to join in the new fashion or succumb.

In March 1938, when Hitler's annexation of his Austrian homeland made imminent danger plain, the British began afresh to turn some official attention towards irregular and clandestine warfare. Clandestine operations are probably quite as old as war, if not quite as respectable; the Trojan horse provides the classic example. The English and Scots had frequently been involved in them as victims and as stimulators: corrupting the allegiance of French feudal lords in the fifteenth century, resisting the encroachments of Catholics inspired from Spain in the sixteenth, holding down Ireland against French infiltration in the seventeenth and eighteenth; flooding revolutionary France with forged assignats in the 1790s; subverting the loyalty of Indian, Afghan, and Egyptian princelings to build the first and second British empires; enduring German-inspired sabotage of munition ships and the German-aided Irish rising in 1916. But by 1938 the days of irregular warfare as a normal tactic of imperial expansion and defence were past, and half forgotten; no organization for conducting it survived, and there was no readily available corpus of lessons learned or of trained operators in this field. T. E. Lawrence's exploits in Arabia, one of the last irregular British armed offensives, had become a romantic legend even before his accidental death in 1935. Several of his colleagues survived, all over forty-five; but the body that had directed them – MO4, GHQ Cairo – was in abeyance. In any case, it had been part of a subordinate headquarters; what was needed was study at the centre.

The need was partly met by three bodies, set up by different authorities in 1938 and overlapping with each other. Late in March the Foreign Office launched a new internal department, sometimes called ‘EH’ and sometimes ‘CS’ after Electra House on the Thames embankment where its head Sir Campbell Stuart had his office. Stuart had been prominent under Northcliffe in propaganda to the enemy in the previous war; his new organisation was to look into methods of influencing German opinion, and formed the nucleus of the eventual Political Warfare Executive.

The second body looking into the subject was somewhat less cramped in by the departmental machine. It was set up simultaneously with E H; it was a new branch of SIS, at first called section IX, then renamed Section D (presumably for Destruction). Its purpose was defined thus: ‘To investigate every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces.’¹ ‘Examining such an enormous task’, its head said years afterwards, ‘one felt as if one had been told to move the Pyramids with a pin’.² His charter meant in practice that the section was to consider – not, in peace-time, to employ – means of injuring targets vulnerable to sabotage in Germany; to look into the sort of people who might be persuaded to attack them, such as communists or Jews; and to consider ‘moral sabotage’, a term shortly extended to cover propaganda. Work on propaganda overlapped of course with the tasks of Electra House; as work on sabotage devices overlapped with the work of the third body looking into subversion.

This was the research section of the general staff at the War Office, originally known as GS (R). To call it a section overstates its early strength, for it began with a single GSO 2 who reported direct to the VCIGS, and a typist. The first incumbent worked on army education. By a lucky accident, he was succeeded late in 1938 by J. C. F. Holland, an engineer major whose war service had included some flying in the near east in 1917–18 and some time in Ireland during the Troubles, in which he was badly wounded. His health never fully recovered, and a friend in high quarters secured him this sedentary work which would let him follow his own bent. Impressed by recent events in China and Spain, he chose for his subject of research the possible uses of guerilla in future wars; this led him to study light equipment, evasive tactics, and high mobility.³ His subject's importance should have been obvious to the British, for in 1899–1902 it had taken a quarter of a million men to put down an informal Boer army less than a tenth as large; and twenty years later an Irish irregular force with arms for fewer than three thousand men had baffled the efforts of some eighty thousand troops and armed police to counter it. Holland soon became a strong contender for preparations for irregular operations of all kinds. Equal support for them, equally imaginative, came from the deputy director of military intelligence, Beaumont Nesbitt. Neither could make much headway against the traditionally hidebound directorate of military operations, which ran between the blinkers of King's Regulations and Army Council Instructions; even while Pownall held jointly the posts of DMO and DM1.⁴

To anticipate for a moment, a technical sub-section under Holland headed by (Sir) M. R. Jefferis later did a good deal of productive research, including the invention of two weapons familiar in England in the summer crisis of 1940: the ‘sticky bomb’ or ST grenade, a hand anti-tank weapon usable by brave men,⁵ and the ‘Blacker Bombard’, a light anti-tank mortar named after its ingenious and assertive inventor. Blacker and Holland were much taken with the possibilities of helicopters or very light aircraft, as vehicles for a new kind of light cavalry; but these possibilities then remained on paper.⁶ Section D's technical experts were mainly busied in devising time fuses for incendiary and other explosives; their work on these was valuable, and over 12 million pencil fuses of their design were manufactured during the war.⁷ These were based partly on a German design of 1917, partly on models provided by the Poles in 1938 and 1939.

Holland and Grand, the head of section D, kept in close touch, and worked out an informal division of labour; GS (R) would concentrate on the whole on actions for which the government could if pressed accept responsibility, while section D handled the unavowable. Between them they prepared a paper which D put up to Gort, the CIGS, on 20 March 1939; and a meeting to discuss it was held in the Foreign Office three days later. Halifax and Cadogan, the Foreign Secretary and Permanent Under-Secretary, were present; so were the CIGS, Grand, and Grand's official superior, C. They agreed that, subject to the Prime Minister's approval, a few active preparatory steps could now be taken in deadly secrecy by section D, to counter nazi predominance in small countries Germany had just conquered or was plainly threatening.⁸ There is no trace of Chamberlain's opinion, though his approval can be assumed. By this decision SOE was begotten; but the child was long in the womb.

Holland followed in securing Gort's approval for an extension of his work, and for another GSO II to join him. On 13 April 1939 GS (R) was authorised ‘To study guerilla methods and produce a guerilla “F[ield] S[ervicel R[egulations]”’ – the contradiction in ideas is eloquent; ‘To evolve destructive devices … suitable for use by guerillas’; and ‘To evolve procedure and machinery for operating guerilla activities, if it should be decided to do so subsequently’.⁹ Brisk study brought the conclusion on 1 June 1939 that if ‘guerilla warfare is co-ordinated and also related to main operations, it should, in favourable circumstances, cause such a diversion of enemy strength as eventually to present decisive opportunities to the main forces’.¹⁰ By that time, a brief substitute for a guerilla FSR had been written, in three short pamphlets, two of them by the new GSO II, (Sir) Colin Gubbins. Like Holland, he had fought on the losing side in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21; he had also seen a few months' service in Russia in 1919. He had been impressed by the weakness of formed bodies of troops faced by a hostile population that was stiffened by a few resolute gunmen, and determined to exploit these impressions against the next enemy. His first pamphlet, The Art of Guerilla Warfare, was a commonsensical treatise on theory; it stressed, for instance, the needs for a friendly population and for daring leadership. Even at this primitive stage, it is worth noting that research into recent Russian, Irish, and Arab history led Gubbins to conclude that ‘Guerilla actions will usually take place at point blank range as the result of an ambush or raid … Undoubtedly, therefore, the most effective weapon for the guerilla is the sub-machine gun’; an armament policy eventually pursued by SOE, not always with happy results.¹¹ Partisan Leader's Handbook, a companion booklet, was written for a more popular readership to cover such practical points as how to organise a road ambush, how to immobilise a railway engine, and what to do with informers (kill them quickly).¹² In the third work, also very short, Jefferis gave a clear sketch of How to Use High Explosives to any intelligent and nimble-fingered layman in the arts of small-scale demolition. Much use was made of this later; it was kept up to date, translated into several languages, and widely distributed by air. Anyone interested in these practical details can see an amply illustrated French version of its contents published not long after the war.¹³

In the spring of 1939 GS (R) was renamed MIR, and became nominally part of the military intelligence directorate. For a few months Holland set up his still minute staff alongside section D's; but he seems to have believed D's head to be too visionary and impractical to suit the exigencies of the war that both he and Gubbins regarded as imminent, During the summer they and D held a few discreet training courses on the elementary theory of guerilla for selected civilians – explorers, linguists, mountaineers, men with extensive foreign business contacts – some of whom later had distinguished careers in SOE. Gubbins also made two secret journeys by air, one down the Danube valley and one to Poland and the Baltic states, to study the possibilities of guerilla action among Germany's eastern neighbours. On 25 August he left for Warsaw as chief of staff to the British military mission to Poland. A week later Holland broke away from proximity to D and returned to the War Office main building; for he had no faith that what he regarded as D's wildcat schemes would ever produce specific achievements.

Holland was both brilliant and practical; he was also quite unselfish. He saw MIR as a factory for ideas: when the ideas had been worked up to the stage of practicality, his aim was to hive off a new branch to handle them, not to keep them in an empire of his own. Early in the war he and his lively and enterprising staff launched several interesting and secret organizations, including the sizeable escape and deception industries and the commandos. MIR was also one of the bodies from which SOE sprang. But for all its good men and good ideas, it had only slight actual achievements to display by the late spring of 1940: a useful small flanking action against German troops in Norway, and the destruction of several million pounds' worth of bearer bonds in Holland, just before the Germans arrived. Section D equally was so far able to show more promise than performance, save for the rescue of £1¼ million worth of industrial diamonds from under the Germans' noses in Amsterdam, in spite of multifarious activities and expansion to an officer strength of over seventy (Grand claimed twice as many) by July;¹⁴ and even more than MIR it had managed to antagonise a considerable number of established authorities, British and allied, whose help might have been of value had they been more tactfully approached.

Yet section D had already secured one achievement of weight, without which SOE could probably never have been brought to birth. Its head had managed to accustom a few very senior civil servants to the concept, until that time unheard-of to them, that there should be in London a highly secret government department that dealt in sabotage and subversion overseas.¹⁵ This was so vitally important for SOE's future that much could be forgiven the section that had managed to achieve it. Its leader, moreover, was a real inspiration to the people who worked under him. He gave them unbounded confidence, and just that élan which was indispensable for their work, particularly in its early stages – disagreeable and uncomfortable though such ardour was to many of the bureaucrats whose paths his officers crossed.¹⁶ Some of these officers later held positions of importance and influence in the clandestine war, and their wide-ranging inquisitive spirit infused and inspired many parts of SOE.

Each section had a few contacts in France, official and less official, and a small mission in Paris, where the deuxième bureau's attitude was later described as ‘friendly but sceptical’ to section D;¹⁷ scepticism, in retrospect, seems a reasonable attitude to a body that was deep in proposals to destroy the telecommunications of the southern Siegfried line through the agency of two left-wing German expatriates, one stone deaf and the other going blind.¹⁸ The MIR mission was to the Czechs and Poles, not to the French. It was headed by Gubbins till Holland withdrew him in April 1940 to take over the independent companies; his successor was Peter Wilkinson, a discovery from the first training course, who spent much of the rest of the war in responsible positions on Gubbins's staff and in enemy-held territory.¹⁹ No one in the French government or high command would so much as admit the possibility of the French collapse, until it came; hardly anyone on the British side was better informed. Someone in section D must have had some insight, for that body did manage to leave behind in northern France ten small dumps of sabotage stores, with two Frenchmen in charge of each, scattered over 150 miles between Rouen and Chalons-sur-Marne, with an eastern outlier at Strasbourg. But the prescience that posted them did not extend to providing these 20 men with adequate orders or with a base of supply; for sabotage purposes they were therefore useless – no base, no achievement – and the sur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Analytical Table of Contents
• Maps
• Part I: Structure
• Part II: Narrative
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index