Faulks hails the SOE

Kyt · May 3, 2008

Sebastian Faulks hails the heroic endeavours of Churchill's secret army - Times Online

THE STORY of the Special Operations Executive, the secret army set up by Winston Churchill at the low point of the Second World War to “set Europe ablaze”, is one that, however much you know about it, never loses its power to make you gasp - in admiration, amazement, humour and disbelief. You could argue that in its mixture of cussedness, heroism and amateurishness, SOE epitomised all the most memorable aspects of the British war effort.

Most memoirs written by its agents are unreliable, tending to vainglory, reticence or deceit; official accounts are also defective. All the more reason to value the oral witness collected by the Imperial War Museum, a pungent sample of which has been selected by Roderick Bailey. “I was invited, aged just over 21,” recalled Julian Amery, “to start a revolution in Albania against the Italians and given a budget of about £50,000 to get on with it.” That is the authentic SOE tone: “Don't know what I'm doing, let's start tomorrow.” But later, Julian Amery touches on the contribution made by even the most harum-scarum SOE operations: “Even if we couldn't help these countries, if we could divert the Germans from what they were doing or planning to do against us, that would be a plus.”

The training was tough and sometimes hilarious: Outward Bound with a touch of Ealing comedy. At its best, as in the intensive month in the Highlands, it was not only good practical preparation, but also gave agents the sort of otherworldly confidence that they would need in the field. Childish fear persisted. Robert Ferrier recalled that to shame the more timid men into making a trial parachute jump, dispatchers made sure the trainee women jumped first. No boy's-own device was infra dig so far as the boffins of SOE were concerned: booby-trapped rats, exploding cowpats - anything that might annoy the Germans.

The dangers in Europe were terrible. The agents, if caught, were not treated as regular prisoners of war; they faced torture and death in a concentration camp. It is impossible to recall in tranquillity that one of the SOE's bravest women agents was betrayed to such a fate in Paris not by her own shortcomings (which were considerable) but by a French woman jealous of her looks.

One or two survived even concentration camps. Robert Sheppard gave an account of being in Dachau: “I wanted to keep my dignity as a British officer. I thought: ‘I won't let them destroy my personality'... We were starving, we were dressed like clowns, but we always wanted to keep dignified in front of everybody. It was the last part of our duty in the war... I think many of our friends and comrades from the camps of all nations remember this. Difficult sometimes.”

Good agents came in different guises. Here is Robert Wade in Serbia, on seeing the five Yugoslav partisans he was meant to be leading get shot down: “So I thought, ‘Well, you can't do it on your own, Wade - return!' My word, it was awful.” By contrast, Benjamin Cowburn revealed an extraordinary level of cool efficiency, shuttling across the border of Occupied and Free France in a hollow compartment beneath the engine of a locomotive. His book No Cloak No Dagger, a masterpiece of gritty understatement, is for my money the best of all SOE memoirs.

The French Section of SOE, while it contained many men and women of almost unbelievable courage, was disaster-prone. One of its best organisers, Henri Déricourt, was a double, perhaps treble or even quadruple agent: a bad lot in any case, a man addicted to deceit. The radio protocols were frequently ignored by wireless operators in the field and, less forgivably, by Baker Street - by the people who had invented them. Not all the women were as cool and resilient as Violette Szabo, while many of the men grew bored and depressed by their double lives and took unforgivable risks to find company in public places. In Holland, the entire network was captured by the Germans.

A problem faced by agents in all countries as they tried to organise the nationals into resistance units was that there was not much appetite for guerrilla action, for blowing up trains and factories. The German occupiers were quick to trace local suspects and, if they couldn't, took reprisals against the innocent civilian population - usually ten killed for each German life taken. Not every factory owner producing steel or pneumatic tyres under German rule was keen to open his works to sabotage, and SOE action was actively discouraged by its British sister organisation, SIS (MI6), which regarded them as interfering amateurs whose loud bangs merely drew attention to their, and SIS's, presence.

It was different when there was real fighting going on alongside. SOE spread far beyond its initial European mission. In Burma, the nature of the terrain meant there was less distinction between what the regulars and irregulars were doing. The small Lysander aircraft - in symbolic terms the SOE's Spitfire - was still in operation, though it was used in Burma as much to lift out Japanese prisoners as to drop in SOE personnel. The valleys were short and tight and the Lysander needed 400 yards in which to land, measured out by eight bamboo markers at 50-yard intervals. If the landing area was too short, Herbert Roe recalled, they just squeezed the markers down to 40-yard intervals and trusted the pilot. “What could you do? These were tight valleys.”

In some ways the war in Burma was more up SOE's street, because the operatives didn't have to spend lonely months of planning and recruitment; they could get stuck in. “The extent of the damage and mayhem that we created amongst the occupying forces in Burma was really quite something,” said Ron Brierley. “Maybe the lessons one had learnt in Europe were more readily translatable into a country that certainly does lend itself to guerrilla warfare.”

Even here, there could be boring or gloomy moments. Richard Broome said that they were driven to making board games with what materials they had. The Chinese in their small battle group managed to improvise a Mah jongg set, and in return the British made “Monopoly”: “It was a bit wild to see these Chinese sitting in the middle of the Malayan jungle, buying and selling Piccadilly and Leicester Square.”

SOE was an extraordinary organisation: distrusted at home, betrayed abroad, leaky, rash, frequently - and fatally - in breach of its own basic security rules. And yet... You only have to read a dozen of these oral witnesses to see that the quality of the men and women the SOE recruited far outshone the failings of the organisation. Here is sacrifice; here is raw, selfless, bloody-minded courage, not always wisely applied, but applied, as the French would say, à l'outrance.

And when they were good, they were very, very good. They harried, they disrupted, they fought and, perhaps above all, they inspired. You could ask no better summary of the value of SOE than that volunteered by General Eisenhower, whose assessment in 1945 was that the disruption to German troops caused by the SOE-led French Resistance after D-Day had been worth an entire extra division to him in Normandy.

© Sebastian Faulks, 2008. Taken from the introduction to Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations in the Second World War by Roderick Bailey, published by Ebury on May 1 at £19.99
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Antipodean Andy · May 4, 2008

Good review/beat up.

Gage · Apr 15, 2009

I read that some ex-SOE weren't very happy about Charlotte Grey.

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