Unearthing Churchill's Secret Army

The Official List of SOE Casualties and Their Stories

Martin Mace

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783376643
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals.Then in 2003, the first batch of SOE personal files was released by the National Archive. Over the course of the following years more and more files were made available. Now, at last, it is possible to tell the stories of all those agents that died in action.These are stories of bravery and betrayal, incompetence and misfortune, of brutal torture and ultimately death. Some died when their parachutes failed to open, others swallowed their cyanide capsules rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo, many died in combat with the enemy, most though were executed, by hanging, by shooting and even by lethal injection.The bodies of many of the lost agents were never found, destroyed in the crematoria of such places as Buckenwald, Mauthausen and Natzweiler, others were buried where they fell. All of them should be remembered as having undertaken missions behind enemy lines in the knowledge that they might never return.

Chapter 1

So Secret a Service

The Special Operations Executive was born out of the ashes of defeat. The summer of 1940 saw Britain forced onto the defensive and fighting for its very survival. But the irrepressible Churchill was determined to carry the war to the enemy, however unlikely this may have appeared in that bleak period of Britain’s history. He knew, nevertheless, that for a long time most of the fighting would be conducted by ‘guerrillas, special agents, revolutionaries, and saboteurs’. It was, as William Stevenson (code name Intrepid) put it, ‘time we learned to fight with the gloves off, the knee in the groin, the stab in the dark.’¹

Even before the collapse of France the Chiefs of Staff had submitted to the Cabinet a paper suggesting that Germany could be defeated by a combination of economic warfare and subversion and that a special organisation was needed to co-ordinate the latter activities.

Following a ministerial meeting on 1 July 1940, the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, consolidated the views of his colleagues in a note to the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax: ‘What is needed is a new organisation to co-ordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability.’²

Eight days later, another meeting was held to talk through these proposals with Churchill, following which a formal document was prepared. This was accepted by Churchill on 22 July and, with the now famous exhortation to ‘Set Europe Ablaze’, the Special Operations Executive was created to ‘co-ordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage’ under the control of Hugh Dalton’s ministry.

The objective of this new force was to make contact with people in the occupied nations who might be willing to participate in subversive activity. ‘The plan’, wrote Major General Sir Colin Gubbins KCMG, DSO, MC, who became its Director in August 1943, ‘was to encourage and enable the peoples of the occupied countries to harass the German war effort at every possible point by sabotage, subversion, go-slow practices, coup de main raids, etc., and at the same time to build up secret forces therein, organised, armed and trained to take their part only when the final assault began … in its simplest terms, this plan involved the ultimate delivery to occupied territory of large numbers of personnel and quantities of arms and explosives.’³

For this the agents would need to be trained in armed and unarmed combat, and in sabotage techniques. They were taught how to withstand interrogation, how to deliver secure messages, how to avoid detection. They were issued with forged identity papers made out in their false new names, and they were issued with plenty of money.

Their training was conducted at numerous locations across the United Kingdom. They underwent commando training at Arisaig in Scotland, where they were taught armed and unarmed combat skills by the likes of William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes, former Inspectors in the Shanghai Municipal Police. They then attended courses in security and ‘tradecraft’ at what were called the ‘finishing schools’ around the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire. Finally, they received specialist training in skills such as demolition techniques or Morse code telegraphy at various country houses in England and parachute training (if necessary) at the Special Training School STS 51 and 51a situated near Altrincham, Cheshire with the assistance of No.1 Parachute Training School at RAF Ringway (now Manchester Airport). A commando training centre similar to Arisaig was later set up at Oshawa, for Canadian members of the SOE.

SOE headquarters in London was split into sections, each one dealing with a different country. These were departments for Abyssinia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, South-east Asia and Yugoslavia. There was a slightly different arrangement for France where there was a competing organisation. This was the Gaullist RF Section (Résistance Français) which, whilst nominally part of the SOE, operated independently and was staffed almost exclusively with French nationals. For this reason it does not form part of this study.

There were several subsidiary SOE headquarters and stations set up to manage operations that were too distant for London to control. SOE’s operations in the Middle East and Balkans were controlled from a headquarters in Cairo which, in April 1944, became known as Special Operations (Mediterranean). A subsidiary headquarters was later set up in Italy under Cairo’s command to control operations in the Balkans. There was also a station near Algiers, established in late 1942 and codenamed Massingham, which operated in southern France.

An SOE station, which was first called the India Mission and was subsequently known as GS I(k) was set up in India late in 1940. It eventually moved to Ceylon and became known as Force 136. A mission was also set up in Singapore but it was not able to form any resistance movements in Malaya before the Japanese overran the country. Force 136 took over its surviving staff and operations.

Operations in the field, particularly those in France, were generally organised into separate networks, or circuits (réseaux in France). These circuits were normally set up by three agents – the organiser, who was the senior person in the team, plus his courier and his wireless operator.

The organiser was responsible for arming and supplying the local Resistance cells within his group. This was done by sending encoded messages by his wireless operator for boats or aircraft to deliver the munitions at pre-arranged times and places. The organiser would then select targets in his area for the cells to attack – though often, especially in the later years of the war, targets would be chosen by London. These were usually railway lines, power stations, dams and even factories. Women were often recruited as wireless operators and especially as couriers in France (where the mail was subject to censorship) because it was difficult for young men to travel around without being stopped and questioned.

In countries such as Albania and Yugoslavia, where the terrain was more challenging and the political situation between the various resistance groups was complex, the missions, such as they were, were organised along a variety of different lines with no common structure. Similarly, in the Far East, where conditions were even more difficult, the teams were all-male and were put together in an ad-hoc fashion to suit the situation on the ground.

At its outset there was no name for this ultra-secret organisation. Indeed its very existence was never publically acknowledged until after the war. As its longest-serving executive director, Colin Gubbins, explained: ‘I do not believe that theatre commanders, as they came to be called, or even Resident Ministers, were ever informed officially by the War Cabinet of the creation of SOE in July 1940; and secondly they were not given any inkling of the charter upon which it was founded. From the beginning quite excessive secrecy was enjoined on SOE itself from above … In this connection I cannot at the same time find anybody who was ever informed officially or in writing what the charter of the SOE was. I think that SOE was looked upon as a sort of branch of the secret service, and of course a secret service with no written charter.’⁴

SOE was part of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, known as Military Operations 1 (Special Projects). It was divided into three branches: SO1, SO2 and SO3. The operational arm was SO2 and it was this branch, under the control of its executive director, which became the principle body of the SOE.

During its brief period of existence the SOE had three directors all of whom adopted the initials ‘CD’ to conceal their identities and to maintain continuity. This practice was extended throughout the SOE with each staff post represented by a symbol that had no obvious connection with the position held.

The historian Nigel West used the SOE’s Polish country section as an example to demonstrate this: the section itself was MPP, the Head of Department was MP, his two senior staff officers were MPJ and MPF. Other posts were, Operations, MPC, Training, MPG, Movements and Supplies was MPN and Intelligence was MPX. 1. This meant that an individual could well be known by more than one symbol during his service with SOE and it was these symbols that were used in all communications and internal communications.⁵

Such was the degree of secrecy surrounding the organisation it actually operated under the cover title of the ‘Inter-Service Research Bureau’. This was so that no-one would question the comings and goings of so many people in different service uniforms. The people who worked there referred to it amongst themselves as ‘The Org’, or ‘The Firm’, or ‘The Racket’.

The SOE was, as its principle historian, Professor M.R.D. Foot, bemoaned, an unusually complex organisation and its complexities have not been made any easier to unravel by the dense fog of secrecy in which it lived. In that fog few fragments of it have still to be hidden, and wisps of fog still keep getting in the way of the seeker of past truth.’⁶

With their headquarters at 64 Baker Street in London the SOE happily adopted the nickname of ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’, after the gang of street urchins that Sherlock Holmes employed ‘to go everywhere, see everything and overhear everyone’. Ironically, the one place that they could not go was their own headquarters. This was in case any of them saw details that could be extracted by torture. It was the SOE’s cardinal rule that the people in the field should know only enough to enable them to carry out their duties.

In its formative months recruitment was a major problem – one can hardly advertise for a service that is supposed to be secret. The type of people recruited into the SOE ranged from ‘safe-crackers, forgers and professional bank robbers’, to ‘men and women of such distinction in public life that their involvement is unmentionable to this day’. Presumably the professional criminals were equally unwilling to reveal their names to a wider audience.

Secrecy within the SOE was taken to such extremes that Maurice Buckmaster, the head of the French Section, could not tell even his wife the true nature of his employment. Mrs Buckmaster only discovered where her husband was working when, on a trip to London, she accidently stumbled upon her husband’s workplace when the family dog sniffed out his master’s scent.

* * *

Though there were some early attempts by the SOE at developing an organisation in Occupied Europe (Georges Bégué being the first agent parachuted into France in May 1941), its operations only really began in earnest in 1942.

In the main theatre, France, this started with the arrival of Francis Suttill. He was the man, it was expected in Baker Street, who would recruit large numbers of loyal French men and women across France and build the framework around which the great Resistance movement would be created. His circuit was PROSPER and his objective was to prepare the French for D-Day when they would rise up and help the Allied armies drive the Germans out of their country.

In those optimistic days it was thought that the Allied invasion would take place in 1943. It was never imagined that the agents would have to survive in German-occupied France until 1944. The Germans had an extensive and efficient counter-espionage organisation and the chances of agents remaining undetected for almost two years were slim. Indeed, not one of the circuits set up in 1942 was still in existence in 1944.⁷

At its peak, the SOE employed some 13,000 agents and staff (10,000 men and 3,000 women), and it has been estimated that it supplied and supported around a million sub-operatives across all theatres and regions around the world. Yet information about the arrest and death of the lost agents are in many cases extremely difficult to ascertain. Missing agents were not even included in the published War Office casualty lists, appearing only on a separate ‘Secret’ casualty list.⁸

The reasons for this are easy to understand. Firstly, there was no complete central record of agents that were employed or engaged by the SOE and the fact that agents were recruited both inside and outside the UK meant that such a register could never have been compiled. Many of the locally-recruited agents never actually set foot in Britain and consequently do not appear on official SOE or CWGC records.

Secondly, as Buckmaster himself conceded, ‘We did not keep elaborate records, for the more there was on paper, the greater the chance of something going astray. It was therefore our policy to destroy all records after an appropriate time had elapsed.’⁹

To add to what M.R.D. Foot called ‘the density of the clouds of unknowing’, before leaving the UK to begin their active service, the agents had to dispense with everything that might reveal their true identities. This meant a change of name, known as the ‘Documentary’ name, the adoption of an alias or ‘Fieldname’, as well as an ‘Operational’ name. It would also be coupled with a cover story to support the new identity. Even during training in Britain a false name was used. In all fairness, the use of codenames was not merely to confuse the enemy, it also enabled people to hold conversations in difficult circumstances without fear of their true meaning being understood.¹⁰

The agents’ families were given little or no indication of the type of work the men and women were engaged upon, being told simply that it was ‘of a hazardous nature’. Usually they were not even aware of where or when their husbands, wives or children were sent into the field.

Though agents trained together in groups, they were discouraged from meeting other agents in the UK, and whilst at Baker Street or in one of the section houses, agents were often ‘spirited’ from one room to the next to avoid unnecessary contact. Of course agents did meet and inevitably they would talk to each other....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of the Casualties Commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as Serving with SOE
• Foreword
• Introduction: Death be Proud
• Chapter 1: So Secret a Service
• Chapter 2: Carve their Names with Pride
• Chapter 3: The Missing Men
• Chapter 4: Known Unto Man
• Chapter 5: Not Forgotten – A list of agents died on active service who are not recorded as SOE casualties in the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• Source Information
• Index