E-Book
7 Tage kostenlos im Abo
E-Book
8,49 €

PROSPER E-Book

Francis J. Suttill

0,0

Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.

Herausgeber: The History Press
Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
Serie: Espionage
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

In May 1940 Francis Suttill was commissioned into the East Surrey regiment of the British Army. He was later recruited by the SOE, and after being trained during the summer of 1942, Suttill was chosen to create a new resistance network in northern France, based in Paris, with the operational name Physician. His code name was Prosper and his assumed identity was François Desprées. The circuit of agents grew fast until June 1943, when the Gestapo discovered letters, instructions, crystal sets and addresses in a car and false ID papers in an apartment. Over the next three months, more then eighty agents died or were killed, mostly in concentration camps. Major Suttill DSO would be killed in Sachsenhausen in May 1945. Rumours of betrayal by MI6, even of the involvement of Winston Churchill, have abounded ever since. For the first time, Major Suttill's son tells the whole story of the tragedy basing his meticulous research on primary sources.

Details

Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:

Android

iOS

von Legimi
zertifizierten E-Readern

Kindle™-E-Readern
(für ausgewählte Pakete)

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:

Android

iOS

Bewertungen

0,0

Rezensionen(0 Rezensionen)

Leseprobe

Major Francis Alfred Suttill, DSO. Photo taken when a Lieutenant in 1941/42. (Author’s collection)

For his grandchildren Emma and Sami and the families of all of those who fought with him for the freedom of France.

‘Truth does not do as much good in the world as the semblance of truth does evil.’ François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Title

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

THE CALL OF FRANCE

THE CALL TO FRANCE

ARRIVAL

THE MISSION

FIRST STEPS

SLOW GOING

PROGRESS AT LAST

FAST FORWARD

DISASTER

A WAVE OF ARRESTS

CONSEQUENCES

THEORIES AND LIES

THE ROLE OF DERICOURT

COOPERATION

THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Afterword

Acknowledgements and Sources

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

FOREWORD

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), one of a handful of wartime British secret services, was only in existence for less than five years, but its activities and personnel have attracted undiminished scrutiny and controversy ever since it came into the public gaze at the end of the Second World War. Discernibly less secret than its wartime colleagues (and sometime rivals) MI6 and MI5, its activities started to become public knowledge scarcely before hostilities had ended. The SOE’s work in France drew particular attention as a result of the country’s strategic importance and the special resonance drawn from the fact that many, if not most, of the agents of its F Section were British citizens. Publishers soon grasped that there was a ready market for tales of British secret agents engaged on clandestine operations in Occupied France and, as early as 1945, George Millar became the first member of F Section to write his memoirs. Interest was further increased with the highly publicised gallantry awards made to SOE heroes and heroines such as ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas, Odette Sansom and Violette Szabo. Subsequent biographies of these agents became best sellers. But soon, darker tales began to circulate. While ghostwritten autobiographies of the agents and hagiographic biographies described sometimes real, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes even fictional feats of derring-do, other writers started to make more critical assessments of SOE’s achievements in France.

Perhaps the most controversial debate in Britain and France concerned the rise and fall of SOE’s largest circuit (or network), PROSPER. It was created and led by Francis Suttill who had been brought up in France and England, and in peacetime had practised as a barrister. He was married with two young sons. While serving in the British Army, his language skills marked him out as a potential recruit for SOE and, after specialist training, he was parachuted into enemy territory in October 1942. Thereafter he developed a very substantial circuit that eventually spread throughout much of the old occupied zone of France. As speculation grew on both sides of the Channel that an Allied invasion was imminent, the increased recruitment of local personnel and the delivery of stores by the RAF’s supply drops began to turn PROSPER into a veritable army. Perhaps the circuit grew too large too soon; the bigger it got, the more vulnerable it became to the implacable and relentless German security forces. Through a variety of circumstances, a wave of arrests took place amongst Suttill’s followers and then in the ensuing weeks the Germans exploited the leads with ruthless efficiency. Ultimately the network was completely dismantled with more than 150 members of PROSPER falling into German hands.

The destruction of this pivotal feature of F Section’s plans for fomenting resistance in Occupied France attracted post-war controversy and the circumstances behind PROSPER’s collapse inspired a profusion of official and personal enquiries. Formal post-war French investigations failed to identify any single cause or culprit while a variety of British authors offered sundry theories and speculations. A major limitation of these analyses of the 1950s and 1960s was that they were conducted without the benefit of access to SOE’s official archives. These remained classified and therefore closed to private researchers. An ‘SOE Advisor’ was appointed in 1959 by the Foreign Office to answer questions from the closed archive but he applied his brief largely to inhibit the increased probing of SOE’s secrets (although, thankfully, his successors proved much more forthcoming). Finally, in 1966, an official history, SOE in France by M.R.D. Foot, was published. Drawing upon the closed SOE archive and a range of published secondary sources and interviews with a selection of veterans, the book provided an unprecedented and radically clear view of SOE’s structure and activities. But this ‘definitive’ version of events failed to still the debate over the PROSPER controversy and writers continued to dissect the story with their further, ‘unofficial’ examinations of the affair.

In the 1970s a series of revelations began to emerge about intelligence in the Second World War and, in particular, the British exploitation of deception stratagems. Speculation began to be voiced that PROSPER had been sacrificed on the altar of Operations BODYGUARD and FORTITUDE, the schemes devised to mislead the Germans of the time and location of the Allied invasion of the Continent. Amongst the more fanciful conspiracy theories to emerge were allegations that MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, had conspired to betray the work of its SOE ‘rival’ to the enemy in order to achieve the success of its D-Day deception plans and maintain its primacy in Whitehall.

In 2002 the last of the formerly secret SOE files were released to The National Archives and whatever official evidence about PROSPER that had survived the years was finally available to researchers. Although the number of veterans had sadly diminished and opportunities to garner their oral testimonies has all but ended, the amount of data on the PROSPER tragedy is now substantial and perhaps complete. Seventy years after the events, we stand the best possible chance of learning what really happened.

Francis J. Suttill has written a remarkable book about his namesake father. It is a memorable achievement on many fronts, not least that while it constitutes the story of a son’s journey to discover the truth about a father he never knew, it avoids any drift into self-indulgence. His personal drive to find the real facts is evident on every page but the investigation is handled in a clear-headed, forensic manner. The author is not looking for someone to blame nor is he seeking simply to whitewash any criticisms of his father’s decisions and actions. As a result of this rigorously analytical perspective, the book is a far from conventional account of an SOE agent’s life. Unlike the sometimes fanciful and novelistic approaches of other authors, Francis J. Suttill’s text is replete with facts and detail ranging from the timing and location of RAF supply drops to an in-depth analysis of the German security offensive launched against PROSPER. While others might have drifted into speculation about what personalities might have thought or said, the story has an exemplary grounding in fact derived from a mass of documentary evidence and the oral testimonies of survivors. The book is a genuine voyage of discovery rather than a validation of preconceptions.

This book will surely be the definitive account of Francis Suttill and the tragic story of his PROSPER circuit. The focus upon blame and guilt that dominated previous studies has been replaced by recognition that there are few ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ but largely a variety of ‘greys’. The SOE agents were volunteers and, although they were given the best available training to meet the tasks ahead of them, they were only human. Some of the characters proved stronger than might have been expected in meeting the ghastly challenges confronting them, while others, sadly, did not. The mistakes and failings of the British agents and their French colleagues are generally characterised as human weaknesses not treachery, although such a word still seems applicable to the double agent Henri Déricourt. The book sensibly represents the view that it is not surprising that scared, brutalised and skilfully manipulated agents should have succumbed to the menacing, persuasive powers of their captors. Most accounts of the PROSPER story have focused upon the fallibilities of these agents and made scant recognition of the efficient practices (all too often achieved through brutal coercion) of the German security forces. While British historians have celebrated the successes of MI5’s handling of their ‘Double Cross’ operations and the ‘turning’ of German agents sent to find the United Kingdom’s secrets, it is rarely conceded that their Nazi opposite numbers were sometimes achieving similar results against SOE networks in France.

In conclusion, this work serves two main purposes. Perhaps the most important is that it might have laid to rest the ghosts that attended a family tragedy. Secondly, it finally puts to rest a 70-year-old debate and, one hopes, will stifle the persistent, indiscriminate conspiracy theories that have continued to besmirch the memories of a group of brave, volunteer secret agents who risked their lives for the liberation of France from Nazi tyranny.

MarkSeaman, SOE Historian

2014

From my time as the last SOE Advisor to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I know for how long and hard Francis J. Suttill has worked to bring this book to completion. I also know that the late Professor M.R.D. Foot, the doyen of historians of SOE’s operations in France, supported his conclusions and strongly encouraged their publication. I am sure that Mark Seaman is right to describe this as the ‘definitive account’ of the tragic story of the PROSPER circuit and that it will be accepted as such. The book is, moreover, excellently presented, with a liberal and original use of illustrations, which add vividly to the picture of the circuit and its personalities and geographical spread. Above all, the reader is able to understand with unusual intimacy the humanity of the French resistants: the dedication and heroism of ordinary people who were willing to risk their all for liberty. I am delighted that this book has finally been published and I am confident that it will find the success its author deserves.

Duncan Stuart

2014

INTRODUCTION

One night in November 2000 I happened to catch part of a television programme about prisoners-of-war whom the Germans thought might be used as hostages in peace negotiations towards the end of the Second World War.1 One of them was ‘Jimmy’ James who had taken part in the famous ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III in 1944. Fifty of the seventy-six escapees had been shot by the Germans and four of the survivors were sent to a special camp just outside the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, some 35 kilometres north of Berlin, where other potential hostages were held. They of course tunnelled out again but were all recaptured and this time they were thrown into the prison block inside the camp – the Zellenbau.

I did not know a great deal about my father’s wartime activities at this time, except that he had been part of something called the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He had been parachuted into Occupied France towards the end of 1942 to organise resistance groups and supply them with arms and sabotage material. He had been caught by the Gestapo in mid-1943 and nothing more was known except that he was last seen in the Zellenbau at Sachsenhausen in March 1945, where he was officially assumed to have been killed together with a fellow SOE agent known as Charles Grover-Williams.

I had always thought that the Zellenbau was where prisoners were held prior to their execution, so I was surprised to hear that someone had survived. More in hope than in expectation, I asked the makers of the programme to pass on a letter to Jimmy James. Within a week, I had a telephone call from Jimmy saying that he lived not far from me at Ludlow. He was delighted to receive my letter but somewhat surprised as he had been trying to trace any relatives of the British and Commonwealth personnel killed at Sachsenhausen for the erection of a plaque there in their memory to be unveiled in a few months’ time. He had contacted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and had been told that there was no record in the files of my father having any children.

Although Jimmy’s time in the Zellenbau had coincided with part of the time my father was there, he had not met him as the prisoners were all in solitary confinement and kept strictly separate, but he suggested we meet so that he could tell me about the conditions in which prisoners were held. He told me his amazing story, which I later discovered more about in his book.2 He confirmed that the Zellenbau was a place where you did not know from one day to the next whether you were to live or die.

I wrote to Duncan Stuart, his contact in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who worked in the Records and Historical Department with the title of SOE Advisor. I discovered that although some SOE files had been released to the Public Record Office at Kew (now The National Archives), these did not include the files of individual agents. He was, however, able to let me have a copy of most of the documents that remained in my father’s file. These related mainly to the post-war search for my father, which was complicated because Sachsenhausen was in the Russian Sector and the arrival of the Iron Curtain meant that information about former prisoners of the camp was extremely difficult to find.

The situation became somewhat confusing when Duncan Stuart told me there was a story circulating that Grover-Williams, my father’s fellow SOE prisoner, had somehow survived and returned to France under a pseudonym, only to die when he was run over and killed by German tourists in the 1980s! If Grover-Williams had survived, perhaps my father had as well?

The only evidence for the death of my father and Grover-Williams was in two documents that I found in War Office files relating to the ‘killing and ill-treatment of allied nationals’ in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.3 Paul Schroeter was a fundamental Christian who had been a prisoner in Sachsenhausen since early in the war and was one of those who were trusted to work in the prison block, bringing round food. In an interview on 5 July 1946 he stated, ‘I saw Suttill and Williams for the last time round about the 15th to the 18th of March 1945. At approx the end of March they were transported by ambulance car to the Industriehof where they were most certainly executed.’ He added, ‘As a further proof of the death of the prisoners, their prison garb was handed back to us by mistake. We then sent it to the Q.M. stores where it ought to have gone in the first place.’ In a second interview on 21 August 1946, he adds that, ‘as such prison garb was unimpaired, the victims must have been hanged or gassed, since shooting would have left its mark on the clothing’. (The Industriehof, also known as Station Z, was a small group of buildings outside the main camp walls where prisoners were killed by shooting, hanging or gassing and then the bodies burnt.)

On the basis of this document, the British issued a Death Certificate that my father was ‘Presumed Killed in Action’ in ‘Western Europe on or shortly after 18 March 1945’.

By this time, I felt the need to visit Sachsenhausen. I had contacted one of the researchers who worked at what is now a Place of Remembrance (Gedenkstsatte) and Museum. Dr Winfried Meyer was unfortunately not going to be there on the day I visited, but he left two documents for me to collect when I arrived. These were interrogations by the British of Kurt Eccarius who had been Chief Warder of the Zellenbau.4 I read these before going any further and found that Eccarius told a completely different story from Schroeter. He stated he believed that Suttill and Grover-Williams had been sent, with all their kit, to the Gestapo HQ in Berlin sometime early in 1945.

Somewhat bewildered by this contradiction, I went into the camp and found the remains of the Zellenbau. Some parts had been rebuilt but Eccarius had said that my father was in Cell 10 and this was only marked by an outline of the foundations. I stood in what remained of that cell and found it difficult to believe that he had lived in this small space for well over a year. I was very glad that my wife was with me as the emotion of the moment was overwhelming. I later found the Industriehof, where all that remained were again the foundations and two small incinerators.

I was given a leaflet about the trial for War Crimes of Anton Kaindl, the Camp Commandant, and many others.5 After they liberated the camp on 22 April 1945, the Russians started to assemble evidence for a trial. They were particularly keen to investigate Sachsenhausen because some 10,000 Russian prisoners-of-war had been shot there in late 1941. However, most of those they wished to prosecute had ended up in the hands of the British, who also had a particular interest as two of their Commando units had been killed there. They set up a Special Investigation Team, which had found sufficient evidence by early 1946 to indict twenty-three of the main SS leaders from Sachsenhausen. It was then decided to hand over all the evidence and the prisoners to the Russians and, after months of further interrogation, including ‘psychological and physical pressure’, all of the defendants gave general confessions. A War Crimes Trial finally started in Berlin in October 1947 and after only eight days, thirteen of the most important criminals were sentenced to life imprisonment. If they had been found guilty in one of the Allied War Crimes Trials, they could have been sentenced to death, but this penalty was not available in a Russian court under their penal laws applicable at the time. Those convicted were sent to work in the northern coalmines and six of them died in the first winter, including Kaindl. Eccarius and other survivors were released back to Germany in 1956, where they were tried again and heavy sentences imposed.

I returned home confused. The experience had been cathartic in some respects, but the unanswered questions as to my father’s fate were disturbing. I spent a couple of days at the Public Record Office looking through the files about Sachsenhausen. A really frustrating discovery was the file that had contained all the evidence gathered by the British team; it was now empty, as all of the documents had been sent to the Russians and no copies kept. The only interesting document I found was a statement dated 15 May 1946 by one of the Zellenbau guards, Heinrich Meyer, which corroborated and expanded Eccarius’ story. I noted that the British had held Meyer in the same camp as Eccarius, which would have given them the opportunity to ensure that their stories were consistent.

This uncertainty also caused a problem for the wording of the memorial plaque proposed by Jimmy James. The relevant German authorities would not accept wording that stated that the people to be commemorated had necessarily been killed at Sachsenhausen. A compromise was agreed so the inscription read: ‘In Erinnerung an die tapferen Mitglieder der britischen und Commonwealth Streitkrafte, viele noch heute unbekannt, die im KZ Sachsenhausen gefangen gehalten und hier oder an anderen Orten getotet wurden.’ (In memory of those brave members of the British and Commonwealth forces, many still unknown, who were interned in Sachsenhausen and perished here or elsewhere at the hands of their captors.)

Memorial at Sachsenhausen. (Author’s collection)

A date was finally fixed for the unveiling of the memorial – 6 July 2001 – and I returned to Sachsenhausen with my younger daughter, Sami, then aged twelve. Her older sister, Emma, could not come as she was sitting her GCSEs. It was all very moving and we both cried. When she returned to school that autumn, her teacher asked the class to write about a day that had changed their lives, thinking that they would all write about the destruction of the twin towers in New York, but Sami considered that what she had been through on her trip to Sachsenhausen where her grandfather had been killed was more important to her. She said that she was determined to go back to Sachsenhausen in 2045 to make sure that the memory was kept alive.

At the end of that year, an article appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine for 16 December in which the arguments for Grover-Williams’ survival were expanded. It had a suitably dramatic title – ‘The Spy who came back from the Dead’. A one-time filmmaker called Jack Bond had somehow come across the story and thought he might be able to make a film about it to restore his reputation. The first hint that he found to support the story was that, unlike the widows of other agents who had been killed, the widow of Grover-Williams was not receiving a war pension.6 Then he found in Grover-Williams’ SOE file some rather curious correspondence from 1947. This started with a request from an Intelligence Officer in Germany to the then SOE Advisor, Major Norman Mott, asking for information as to the fate of an SOE agent called Williams. It appeared that a letter from a W. Williams had been intercepted by the Censors in which he expressed his fear of returning to France as he would be liable to arrest. This seemed to be related to an earlier memo on the file, dated 10 February 1945, from the Security Services in London to the head of the French Section of SOE, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. It said that an enemy source now in this country, whose information was considered to be reliable, had made the following statement: ‘A certain Benoit formerly of 47 Avenue Brocard, Paris, worked for the Germans and denounced to them the well-known racing driver Grover-Williams who was parachuted into France in 1942 and was working under Gestapo control in May 1943.’ The source had also stated that Grover-Williams was now in Germany.7

With my father before he joined SOE – 1941.

Encouraged by these leads, Bond decided to employ researchers to look more closely at the archives in the Public Records Office and in France and he claimed to have found evidence (although this has never been presented) that Grover-Williams had been transferred to another camp in Poland from where he was able to walk free when the German guards abandoned it as the Russians approached. He surmised that Grover-Williams had worked in some capacity for MI6 after the war. It was then discovered that a man called Georges Tambal had moved into the house of Grover-Williams’ widow in 1948. The article claimed some very tenuous likenesses between photographs of Grover-Williams and Tambal and between some writing found on a post-war document and documents he was known to have written before the war.

It seemed to me that Bond and his team were trying to make something out of nothing in an attempt to persuade investors that there was an exciting story to tell. Looking back at the conflicting statements of Schroeter and Eccarius, I felt that Schroeter was more likely to be telling the truth as he had no reason to lie. Eccarius, on the other hand, was still in British hands when he made his statements and would have been aware that if the British had tried him, he would have faced the death penalty: a good reason not to admit killing people.

It was clear to me at this stage that it was time to start trying to find out more about my father and his extraordinary role in the war. Little did I know that I was embarking on an incredible journey that continues to this day as, although I have now found most of the outline and some of the details, many of the details are still missing or sketchy and I hope that others will now help me to fill in the gaps.

NOTES

1. The War behind the Wire, Hartswood Films for BBC2, 17 November 2000.

2. B.A. James, Moonless Night, William Kimber, 1983.

3. WO 309/439, TNA.

4. Interrogations 21 and 27.02.1946, WO 309/853, TNA.

5. Information Leaflet 24, Gedenkstatte und Museum Sachsenhausen, 1999.

6. I discovered later that his widow did, however, claim compensation for his death under an agreement with the German government in 1965.

7. HS 9/1596/8, TNA.

THE CALL OF FRANCE

The Suttill name is an old one originating in Yorkshire. My father had carried out some research and the oldest record he found dated from 1207 when a Michael de Suthill appears in the Pipe Rolls. Standardised spelling of names is relatively modern and the first official recording of the Suttill spelling was a reference to John Suttill who was Sheriff of York around 1730. Before that there was an enormous range of spellings: Sootell, Sotell, Soothill, Sothell, Sothile, Sothill, Sothille, Sothulle, Sottell, Sotthill, Southehill, Southill, Sowtell, Sowthyl, Sutel, Suttle and probably others.

There are two ideas for the origin of the name. It could have come from the ancient French ‘sotil’ meaning clever and cunning, still occurring as ‘subtle’ in English. This might suggest a Norman origin. The alternative is that it comes from ‘south of the hill’, which might suggest an English origin for the name. There is still an area of Dewsbury in Yorkshire that is called Soothill.

In the parish church of Dewsbury or The Minster Church of All Saints there used to be fourteenth-century stained-glass windows showing the arms of Sothill, but the Reformation and time have taken their toll. There is still a late twelfth-century de Soothill grave in the church and the great bell is said to have been given by Sir Thomas de Soothill, in penance for the murder of a servant boy whom he threw into the forge dam in a fit of rage. The bell is known as Black Tom and is rung each Christmas Eve, one toll for each year since Christ’s birth, a tradition dating back to the fifteenth century and known as The Devil’s Knell.

My father had found some intriguing records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Sir John de Suthill is recorded as owning land in York in 1266 and is accused of homicide in 1282. The next year he is recorded as a knight fighting for the Bishop of Durham and in 1298 he goes with King Edward I to Scotland. He is pardoned as an adherent of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, in 1318 and as a rebel in 1326. At the same time, Sir Henry de Suthill, a Lord of Laxton, is also pardoned but then imprisoned at Nottingham on a charge of rebellion, being released on bail and having his lands and goods in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire restored to him in 1322. Another record shows that he fought at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1322 with Edward II against Robert Bruce, where his arms were ‘gules un aigle argent’, which translates as a silver eagle on a red background. Then in 1324, as a non-resident knight of Lindsey in Lincolnshire, he was summoned to the Great Council at Westminster.

In 1520, when Henry VIII of England met Francis I of France on The Field of the Cloth of Gold (Le Camp du Champ d’Or) near Calais, his queen, Catherine of Aragon, went with him. She had her own separate retinue and among the ‘Gentilmen’ appointed to her train was a Gerves Suttel.

The fortunes of the family declined during the Reformation as they refused to leave the Roman Church and in Camden’s Brittania in 1607 it states, ‘Not far from Dewsbury is Suttill Hall, an ancient seat of the family of Suttill. It is now greatly ruined and the estate belongs to the Duke of Montague.’

The family Bible contains a record of births and deaths, which overlaps with, but does not include, the John Suttill who was Sheriff of York around 1730. The earliest date in the Bible is 1761 when William Suttill was born at Masham in Yorkshire, but his father is named as Francis and his grandfather as William and the latter must have been a contemporary of John. On an internet site, I was able to trace this line back to a David Suttill born in Yorkshire in 1580.

There seems to have been a tradition in our branch of the family of naming the first son William and the second Francis, although the situation is confused by the fact that some of them are called William Francis. The William born in 1761 was a flax spinner who worked with his second son, John, in Pateley Bridge in Yorkshire, but they moved first to Plymouth and then to Dorset where they eventually set up their own business. William’s first son, William, born in Pateley Bridge in 1789, was also a flax spinner. He went to Plymouth with his father and brother, but he then parted company with them and is next heard of living in Moscow, but he appears to be the start of the family connection with France as he died in Lille in 1854. However, in 1830 he must have been in Yorkshire, as this is where his son, another William, was born and he in turn had a son in 1858 called William Francis, my grandfather.

The area between Lille and Belgium is renowned for its textile industries and so would have been an area of opportunity for my great-great-grandfather and the family seem to have prospered there. My grandfather, although born in Manchester, lived in Lille and managed a textile business there. It was here that he married a near-neighbour, Blanche Marie Louise Degrave; he lived at No 13, she at No 28 rue de Roubaix, Mons-en-Baroeul, which is just to the north of the Lille Eurostar Terminal.

They had four children, the youngest being my father, Francis Alfred, born on 17 March 1910. My father was sent to England to be educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. Initially he appears to have done well; I still have two of the books that he won as prizes. Then tragedy struck when he was 16. He was found to have poliomyelitis and told that he would probably never walk again. His mother did not accept this possibility and for a year she devoted herself to getting him to walk, including making him take up golf. The results were remarkable as, despite ending up with one leg 18mm shorter than the other, he could walk without a perceptible limp. At the end of the year it was time to go back to school, but this time locally so that his rehabilitation could be continued, and he gained his Baccalauréat at the College de Marcq, a Catholic school in Mons-en-Baroeul, where he was described as a brilliant laureate, winning five prizes. He then read law at the Université de Lille and at University College London and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1935. Ironically, as it turned out, he claimed British nationality in 1931 to obtain exemption from military service in France.

My grandfather and grandmother. (Author’s collection)

My father and mother. (Author’s collection)

Also in 1935, he married a fellow student who had read medicine, Margaret Montrose, and they had two children. I was born in 1940, three years after my brother. By this time they had bought land in the village of Newdigate near Redhill in Surrey and had a house built. This outlay proved to be excessive in the pre-war years when the legal profession, like so many others, was in decline and this probably contributed to him volunteering in September 1939, some time before he would otherwise have been called up. He started in the ranks of the East Surrey Regiment but was soon selected for Officer Training in Colchester, resulting in his appointment as a second lieutenant in May 1940. He was not very impressed by this training, writing home on 2 May:

We have had an awful day. Out this morning and this evening an exam. I did quite well in the exam, in fact, the best yet but the whole thing leaves one most frightfully tired and exhausted so this letter will probably be a short one. I shall try and get out for a stroll while the light is still good. It might do me good. I don’t think I like this Company much. One feels they don’t give a damn for you. The young officer we had at first is in hospital with a poisoned leg and we keep getting different officers.

A year later he attended an Intelligence Course in April/May 1941, was promoted to Acting Lieutenant and posted as Intelligence Officer to 211 Brigade based near Plymouth. The rest of the family also moved to Devon, first staying in Tiverton, where my mother worked as matron in Blundell’s School, and then to a farm outside Plymouth.

His next posting was to SOE, but how did he get there? There was no fixed selection process and it was not possible to apply as no one knew that such jobs existed. In my father’s case, the only clue that I could find was a letter that I found on his file. His Service Record shows that he was medically assessed in Chesterfield in November 1941 as a potential paratrooper. In January 1942 he was approached by a Colonel Hope Thompson. In his reply to the colonel on 24 January 1942, my father wrote:

I have received your letter and am very grateful to you for having remembered me. I was interviewed by the CO of the 1st Battalion at Chesterfield a fortnight ago. He put me on his A1 plus list. I also passed my medical. I am still very much a volunteer for paratroops and hope that you will remember me if a vacancy occurs in your battalion. Please recommend me for special duties if you can. My one wish is to be used in France. [He then repeats his military history to date and ends by saying] I lived near Lille for 9 years and speak native French. I am not concerned about rank except, being a family man, from the financial point of view.1

I assume that Colonel Hope Thompson was in the 1st or another Parachute Battalion, as on 9 March my father was promoted to Temporary Captain and posted to the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. But Hope Thompson must have known about SOE and passed on my father’s letter as on 16 March this order was cancelled and he was ordered to report to Room 055A at the War Office; he had been selected for interview by SOE.

There was competition for French-speaking officers at this time as they were also needed as translators and Intelligence Officers for the invasion of Madagascar, which started on 5 May. The Allies were concerned that, if the Japanese were to take over the island, supply lines to the Far East would be seriously threatened. A mention in a letter to my mother that month records that he had been considered for Madagascar but not selected.

Many agents’ files contain detailed reports on their training and these are often so revealing that it is surprising that some agents ended up in France. My father’s training records are no longer on his file and so I have had to try and recreate his training programme by discovering who trained with him and then seeing what their files revealed.

Training was by language group, which posed the risk that agents meeting again unexpectedly in the field might know each other’s real names. They were therefore given code names for training, although these often used the same initials as their real names. Thus my father became ‘Fernand Sutton’ and I noticed that when he signed the Official Secrets Act on 19 May, he used this name rather than his real one, which surprised me.

My father’s signature on the Official Secrets Act.

Each training group had a Conducting Officer who escorted them on, and took part in, their courses so that they often ended up becoming agents themselves. This is what happened to Lieutenant André Simon who accompanied them on their first course but left for France on a mission soon afterwards. His replacement was Lieutenant Robert Searle who did not go to France. A note on his file suggests that my father worked as a Conducting Officer initially, but this seems unlikely as the previous training group had started in mid-February, which is before he joined SOE, and two days after joining, he started his own training.

My father’s training group was labelled 27N and started out with eleven recruits. They were sent to Wanborough Manor near Guildford in Surrey, known as Special Training School 5, or STS 5, for a hard training course of military and physical training. This course finished on 15 April and two of the group were failed, leaving nine.

Eight of this group then went to Scotland using as cover membership of the Inter Services Research Bureau for even more intensive training. STS 23 was based in Meoble Lodge near Arisaig and this course ended on 17 May to be followed by a short parachute course at STS 51, Ringway airfield near Manchester.

My father’s companions were now: ‘Clement Bastable’ – Claude de Baissac who would organise the Scientist circuit around Bordeaux; ‘Hilaire’ – Harry Peuleve who was to be de Baissac’s first radio operator; ‘Robert Lang’ – Roger Landes who initially took over as de Baissac’s radio operator when Peuleve was injured and later became the circuit’s organiser; ‘Louis Legranges’ – Louis Lee-Graham, a radio operator captured following a crash-landing; ‘Michel’ – Marcus Bloom who joined the Prunus circuit as a radio operator; ‘Frederick Chalk’ – Fergus Chalmers-Wright who initially worked with the Political Warfare Executive; and ‘Noel’ – David Smithers, about whom I know nothing.

At this point, the trainees were finally told that they were not being trained as Commandos but as potential agents to be sent into France to organise sabotage and resistance networks and this was when they were asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. The group was then split with potential radio operators being sent to STS 52 at Thame Park near Oxford for specialist wireless training. Both groups ended their training, but no longer together, at a large group of country houses near Beaulieu in Hampshire, sometimes known as the ‘Finishing School’. The four prospective organisers were housed in STS 31, The Rings. In a letter home from Beaulieu my father gives nothing away, writing on 24 June, ‘I am afraid my letters are a bit dull but then nothing much is happening.’

There are many descriptions of the training given to SOE agents in other books, but I found an official version written in October 1942, which I do not think has been published previously – see Appendix 1.

On Claude de Baissac’s file I found the report that Lieutenant Searle had made at the end of the course at Beaulieu. It is dated 6 July 1942 and it comments on all four of the potential organisers, although it is not very enlightening on my father, only saying, ‘He has brought to this course a balanced sense of discrimination and constructive criticism.’ On de Baissac he is more explicit and expansive:

He has been inclined to criticise this course and particularly the general nature of the B lectures. (Organisation in the field, Security measures, cover.) This led him first to a certain feeling of frustration since his mind, which needs to seize on a fact and consider its immediate application, is irked by generalities which can only be brought to bear concretely on his work at a later stage in his training. He has worked with extreme thoroughness. He enjoyed the scheme and gained confidence through the ease with which he managed to obtain the information he was instructed to seek.2

Of the four, only these two were selected to be sent into France as organisers. Indeed there was no opportunity for de Baissac to have the suggested further training as he, with Peuleve as his wireless operator (WTO), was parachuted into France only three weeks later. My father had to wait another three months.

Compared with Searle’s unenlightening comment, Maurice Buckmaster was effusive in an article he wrote after the war, perhaps exaggerated with hindsight:

Prosper had the clear intellectual vision and logical perspicacity which are often found allied to Gallic features. Dark hair and clear grey eyes, combined with a classic profile, made him striking to the close observer, but it was not until he spoke that one realised the full extent of his charm and balance. It was a joy to work with a man whose brain cut like a knife into the problems we put before him. He never made the mistake of minimising the difficulties of his mission, and he took as much care over the study of his brief as if he had found it difficult to understand.3

NOTES

1. HS 9/1430/6, TNA.

2. HS 9/75-/76, TNA.

3. Prosper, Chambers Journal, January 1947.

THE CALL TO FRANCE

Finding the basic outlines of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE for short, was fairly easy as an official history – SOE in France – had been written by Professor Michael Foot. (The first 1966 edition was officially amended and republished by HMSO in 1968. A revised and updated edition was published by Frank Cass in 2004 and a French translation of this edition was published in 2008 by Tallandier under the title Des Anglais dans la Résistance.)

The origins and development of SOE have been described in great detail in the official history and many other books and so I will not repeat them here. Following the famous directive ‘And now set Europe ablaze’,1 SOE was set up as a secret organisation to send specially trained agents into occupied countries to identify, train, supply and coordinate the activities of local resistance groups. Initially their main objectives were sabotage targets but ultimately to attack the enemy in concert with the eventual invasion.

Churchill and SOE were both aware from the beginning of the danger that sabotage might trigger savage reprisals if too much of it was done too soon: SOE’s initial approach to armed activity in France was consequently tentative and slow.

In France two parallel organisations were set up: F Section, using mainly officers of British nationality, and RF Section, using officers of French nationality and linked to the Gaullist headquarters. By 1942, the head of F Section was Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, an avuncular figure whom I met several times after the war, and the basic pattern of SOE activity was becoming established. At this stage only the northern part of France was occupied by the Germans.

The first agents to be sent into France by F Section, despite the recruitment rules, were two Frenchmen and an Englishman. These were Georges Begue, a wireless operator, on 5 May 1941; Pierre de Vomecourt on 10 May; and Roger Cotton-Burnett on 13 May. Pierre de Vomecourt based himself in Paris and started the Autogiro circuit, receiving the first drop of two containers in June. Cotton-Burnett had been sent in to start a circuit in Brittany but joined de Vomecourt as his second-in-command. In July Noel Burdreyon was sent in to start a circuit in Normandy with a wireless operator but the latter was arrested soon afterwards and Burdreyon stayed quietly in Caen.

In August Jacques de Guelis was landed to reconnoitre in the south together with an agent, Georges Turck. On 6 September six more agents arrived with another wireless operator, André Bloch, all to work in the south except for Ben Cowburn who was sent in to identify oil targets and then joined Autogiro in the north. A fortnight later, a third group of four arrived, this time by sea on the Mediterranean coast. A fourth group, a team of sabotage instructors, including another wireless operator, were dropped in the south on 10 October. One of them landed some way from the others and was arrested, carrying the address of Georges Turck where they were to meet. When the rest of the team arrived there, they were also captured but the compromised safe house continued to be used and the last two wireless operators were caught, first André Bloch and then Georges Begue, leaving the remaining agents throughout France with no direct radio link with London.

Colonel Buckmaster. (Buckmaster family)

Pierre de Vomecourt was now not only in desperate need of a radio link with London but he had also run out of funds. He was put in touch with a group of former Polish intelligence agents, known as Interalliée, who were in contact with British intelligence. He decided to test the reliability of this link by asking them to send a request for funds. A positive response was received and also the necessary funds. What de Vomecourt did not know when he did this was that the Abwehr had just turned one of Interalliée’s agents, which resulted in many arrests including the group’s leader ‘Armand’, Captain Roman Czerniauski. One of those arrested was Mathilde Carré and she was also turned, leading to the total destruction of Interalliée and the capture of four wireless sets tuned to London, then used for radio games. The story of what happened next is extraordinary and is set out in several, not entirely reliable, books2 but is not directly relevant to my father’s story.

Pierre de Vomecourt. (SFC)

De Vomecourt returned to London in February 1942 and it was decided that the original structure that had been proposed should be abandoned. This had involved having ‘a chief organiser for the whole of France having under his command a delegate from each zone and zone delegates controlling a certain number of organisers by Region and Department’. It was realised that in such a structure, one arrest could bring about the collapse of the whole organisation due to the multiplicity of contacts. The solution was to create watertight independent groups having their own system of communications with London; this was sometimes referred to as Plan B.3 So when de Vomecourt returned to France at the beginning of April 1942, it was with strict orders to break up his organisation into several independent sections having no contact with each other. He spent a fortnight in the south and apparently achieved his missions there before going north to Paris.

In the south, despite the many arrests of SOE personnel, the situation initially looked more promising. Henri Frager, an architect by profession, had fought in the 1914–18 war and had joined up again in 1939. He made contact with British intelligence in North Africa and in July 1941, SOE landed him near Marseilles. Here he met the painter André Girard, known as Carte, who not only claimed to have formed several resistance groups but was also in radio contact with London. SOE were interested and sent Francis Basin to France in September 1941 to liaise with Carte and establish his own radio contact but this was no longer possible when all of the wireless operators were arrested. His task was further complicated as there were several other organisations all attempting to take overall control. Basin was arrested in August but was quickly replaced by Peter Churchill who arrived on 28 August 1942.

This was at the same time that a staff officer from F Section, Nicholas Bodington, was sent in by SOE to investigate Carte’s organisation. He presented a very favourable report on his return to London in early September and this resulted in SOE taking a serious interest in Carte. The situation changed soon afterwards however when, in retaliation for the Anglo-American landings in north-west Africa on 8 November, the Germans three days later occupied the southern part of France. Also in November, a Carte courier, taking the details of over 200 members of the organisation from Marseilles to Paris, fell asleep on the train and was relieved of his briefcase, which ended up in the hands of the Abwehr.4 Curiously the Germans do not seem to have made any immediate use of this information but Carte was beginning to fall apart for other reasons. Basin’s replacement, Peter Churchill, did not get on with Girard as Basin had done and then Henri Frager, who had become Girard’s deputy, also fell out with his leader, feeling that Girard was not only achieving nothing himself but was preventing other SOE agents from getting on with their missions out of jealousy. There was a final split and Frager left Carte on 2 February 1943 to start his own circuit around Montelimar.

But I must return to the second half of April 1942 with Pierre de Vomecourt reaching Paris, although he does not seem to have achieved any of his objectives there before he was arrested on 25 April. This news apparently only reached London on 26 May,5 by which time another wireless operator, Marcel Clech, had been sent in to join Autogiro, but he was warned in time and was diverted to another circuit. Four days after de Vomecourt’s arrest, Edward Wilkinson was sent in with Cowburn to take over the latter’s Autogiro contacts in Paris with Denis Rake as wireless operator but they struggled to get themselves and a radio there. On 19 July Richard Heslop was sent in to try and rescue de Vomecourt from prison but on 15 August he, together with Wilkinson and Rake, were arrested trying to cross the demarcation line and SOE finally gave up on Autogiro.

Soon after de Vomecourt returned to France, SOE received its ‘Charter for operations on the Continent’ by way of a directive from the Chiefs of Staff dated 12 May 1942 and reiterated by them on 8 August 1942.6 This required SOE to endeavour to build up and equip para-military organisations in the areas where invasions of the Continent might take place:

The action of such organisations will in particular be directed towards the following tasks:-

• Prevention of the arrival of enemy reinforcements by the interruption of road, rail and air transport.

• The interruption of enemy signal communications in and behind the battle area generally.

• Prevention of demolitions by the enemy.

• Attacks on enemy aircraft and air personnel.

• Disorganisation of enemy movements and rear services by the spreading of rumours.

For most of this time my father was in training, which he completed in the first week in July. On 7 July the F Section War Diary records ‘Physician – The name of this agent in the field will be François Alfred DESPREZ and he will work in Occupied France. He has been allotted the number 001.F.’7 Then there is a hiatus. On 26 July he writes home, ‘I hope they find something for me to do soon.’ And in another, ‘I gather that the intentions of the authorities with regard to me change several times a day just now. I rather think my job will not be what I thought. I don’t think I shall be away for longer at a time than a few days.’ This sounds more like a Staff job in London and he is clearly marking time – ‘Life is frightfully dull here and it is not warm enough to walk in the parks. So I just sit in the library quite a lot and try and do some work.’

The first mention of a date for him to go to France is a proposal to send him on 20 August to an approved ground near Vendôme with a deputy but without a wireless operator or a courier.8 This is just after the final death throes of Autogiro on 15 August. However, it is noted that the exact date depended on my father being provided with more ration cards and safe houses. This problem is reiterated in a document on de Baissac’s file dated 27 July in which he is asked to, ‘Insist … upon the great urgency of our receiving the safe houses to which we wish to send a certain number of picked organisers and W/T men this moon.’9

Claude Dansey.

Although the period of uncertainty for my father lasted around six weeks, the debate as to what to do in northern France must have started at the end of May if not earlier. It also appears that SOE were not alone in trying to work this out as I found an intriguing reference in one of my father’s letters from this summer – ‘A funny thing. I passed Dansey in the street the other day. He was in civvies and recognised me. We did not exchange greetings.’ Bearing in mind that the collapse of F Section’s Autogiro circuit had resulted from the infiltration by the Germans of the Polish Interalliée intelligence circuit, MI6 may have felt that they should be involved in any decision about replacing Autogiro, who should lead it and whether any use should be made of previous contacts. There was a Claude Dansey who was the Assistant Chief of MI6 and served as their liaison officer with SOE and this could be the man my father had met and clearly had not got on with!10

The fact that SOE was not in total control of this debate is recorded by Colonel Buckmaster. After the failure of Autogiro:

It became apparent that our men would derive encouragement and assistance from more precise briefing. Although it proved extremely difficult to extract a directive from the authorities (it was not even quite certain which authority was the competent one), the increase in target briefing and the more precise orders regarding the preparation for guerrilla warfare afforded some satisfaction to our officers.11

One positive decision that resulted from this debate was that:

The events of April and May had led the Section to abandon a ‘long term economic’ in favour of a ‘short term semi-military’ target policy. … It had long been realised that the French character is such as to welcome the prospect of action, provided it is immediate, but becomes discouraged if action is long deferred. Consequently each agent was given one target for action as soon as circumstances permitted.

By August 1942 the plan that had been laid down for the Occupied Zone (ZO) was:

to expand our various organisations to the maximum possible without pyramiding them and to deliver at least 1500 lbs of stores immediately. W/T communications to be extended as far as was compatible with optimum safety. Insaissable sabotage to be encouraged, particularly the destruction by fire and water of factories working for the enemy.

However, ‘Owing to flak and other technical difficulties, it was not possible to deliver stores to the ZO until the end of September 1942, when one small container was delivered.’

Despite these uncertainties, decisions were made during this period to send in to France all of the organisers who had by then been trained, except for my father and Michael Trotobas, who only finished his training at the end of August. Three of these – Cowburn, Wilkinson and Heslop – have already been mentioned and six others were sent in to operate in the south – Pertschuk, Le Chene, Brooks, Frager, Churchill and John Starr. Three more had been sent into the ZO: Charles Grover-Williams12 to organise the Chestnut sabotage circuit to the west of Paris; Raymond Flower to start the Monkeypuzzle circuit around Le Mans; and Claude de Baissac to start the Scientist circuit in the Bordeaux area. Clearly my father had been held back for some special purpose and a purpose of a scale that meant he needed a deputy, although apparently not a courier or a wireless operator as the people who would join him in these capacities were at this stage allocated to other circuits. The woman who did become my father’s courier was Andrée Borrel who, having finished her training towards the end of June, was recorded as being ready to go to France on 23 July but this record does not state in what capacity or where in France she was to go.

A report in September 1942 mentions the desirability of fixing a date by which SOE plans should be ready to be put into action in the event of an invasion into the Continent. It concluded that, if the war continued to progress at its present pace, it would appear unlikely that invasion could be undertaken until the early spring of 1943. The end of February 1943 is therefore suggested as a suitable target date for these plans to be ready.13

Despite the evidence for a long and fierce debate as to the future activities of SOE in northern France, there is little in the files to show what was ultimately decided. The basic premise of the SOE Charter of May 1942 was reiterated three months later and Buckmaster’s memories in his history of F Section only emphasise the need for the concept of Plan B, the creation of independent circuits each with a separate communications link with HQ, and all of this to be set up and ready for action by the end of February 1943.

It appears therefore that my father was either simply the only person left to take on the job or had been picked as a possibility sometime earlier and kept in the dark until the last minute when all other options had failed.