Sabotage and Subversion: Classic Histories Series E-Book

Ian Dear

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Histories Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 477

Beschreibung

During the Second World War daring and highly unusual missions were mounted by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – formed on Churchill's orders 'to set Europe ablaze' – and its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In sixteen separate chapters the author describes how the fearless individuals in these clandestine organisations were recruited, trained and armed, and examines some of their guerrilla operations in Europe, Africa and the Far East, such as the raid on Fernando Po, the destruction of the Gorgopotamos Bridge in Greece and the strike against Japanese shipping in Singapore harbour. Also covered are the means SOE and OSS used to subvert the enemy, by employing black propaganda, forgery, pornography and black market currency manipulation. It may well read like fiction but the stories are fact, and shows to what lengths the Allies were prepared to go to crush the Axis powers.

Leseprobe

First published by Arms and Armour in 1996 Published by Cassell Military Paperbacks in 1999 This edition published in 2010

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. OSS and SOE – What Were They?

2. Recruiting and Training for Sabotage and Subversion

3. Equipping the Saboteurs

4. The ‘Harling’ Mission and the Destruction of the Gorgopotamos Bridge

5. Maid Honor Force

6. The Swedish Connection

7. Black Radio

8. Special Operations Australia and the Singapore Strike

9. Detachment 101: Behind Japanese Lines

10. SOE and the Atomic Bomb

11. Abduction, Forgery, Pornography and Other Black Subversive Operations

12. SOE’s F Section

13. Walter Fletcher’s Activities in Rubber Smuggling and Black Market Currency

14. OSS Operational Groups

15. The Jedburgh Teams in France

16. Guerrilla Warfare and the Characters of ‘Character’

Appendix: Summary of OG Operations in Greece, April–November 1944

Notes on Sources

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Peter Masters for his help in researching documents for this book and obtaining some of the photographs from OSS archives. I should also like to thank the following who took the time and trouble to read parts of the manuscript: Dr John Brunner, Professor M.R.D. Foot, Themis Marinos, Terence O’Brien and R.A. Rubinstein. Dr Brunner, Themis Marinos, Charles Messenger, Mike Langley, Mrs Shirley Cannicott and the Special Forces Club, London, were kind enough to lend me photographs, and Mrs Sue Rodgers of the Special Forces Club answered my barrage of requests with great efficiency and cheerfulness. Pictures indicated as Crown Copyright are reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO.

Introduction

Sabotage and subversion have always been part of warfare. But the global nature of the 1939–45 conflict, combined with the increasing sophistication of the means to implement sabotage and subversion during those years, make the manner and extent in which they were carried out during the Second World War of especial interest.

In the context of warfare, sabotage – defined by David Stafford in his book Britain and European Resistance, 1940–45 as the physical dislocation of supplies useful to the enemy – needs no further definition here, except to say that Hugh Dalton, SOE’s first political head, believed that armed support for guerrilla forces behind enemy lines was a natural part of a sabotage organization, and it is therfore included in this book. ‘We must organise movements in every occupied territory,’ he wrote in July 1940, ‘comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese guerrillas now operating in Japan, to the Spanish irregulars who played a notable part in Wellington’s campaign.’

Incidentally, the word sabotage comes from the French word sabot, the wooden clogs worn by French industrial workers. Disgruntled workers disabled machines by throwing their clogs into the working parts.

Subversion can be said to be the undermining of the enemy’s government, armed forces, collaborating authorities, and allies by methods other than military ones. These methods included ‘black’ radio broadcasts and ‘black’ propaganda – ‘black’ meaning that the government disseminating it did not acknowledge its existence as opposed to ‘white’ propaganda which it did – were both used for subversive purposes by OSS and SOE, the two organisations that implemented sabotage and subversion for the American and British governments. Chapters on these esoteric arts are therefore included here as are examples of black market currency manipulation, forgery, blackmail, smuggling, pornography, and kidnapping, when used for subversive purposes; and, to set the scene, there are chapters on the training and equipping of saboteurs, the latter describing weapons and special devices which both organisations co-operated to improve.

But this book is not a history of SOE and OSS. What it attempts to do, with the help of new documentation that has become available in recent years, is to highlight a few of their more outstanding sabotage and subversive operations, sometimes for comparison, sometimes to show what their individual strengths and weaknesses were, sometimes to highlight the character and bravery of those involved in their operations; but, especially, to illustrate to what lengths the two Allied governments would go to achieve their ends.

Although the text has been confined to the activities of SOE and OSS, the reader must not infer from this that the Axis did not have similar organisations. The Germans, for example, had the Abwehr’s Abteilung (Department) II which formed the Brandenburger Regiment for sabotage and was very active in the field of subversion. For example, it helped organise the pro-German uprisings in the Sudetenland in 1938 which in turn led to the eventual annexation of all of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis; and actively encouraged local Volksdeutsche (German-speaking nationals living outside the Reich) to subvert the government of the country in which they were living and to help the Wehrmacht when it invaded. In this respect it was particularly successful in Poland in September 1939 and in Yugoslavia in April 1941.

The Japanese, too, were active in using local populations to subvert the governments and local troops of the European colonies before invading them. They had Special Service Organisations, or Kikan, which operated in such countries as Malaya, Burma and the Netherlands East Indies for this purpose. Perhaps the best-known examples are the Minami Kikan which secretly organised the anti-British Burma Independence Army and Major Fujiwara Iwaichi’s F Kikan which fostered the anti-British Indian Independence League and recruited the Indian National Army that fought against the British in the Burma campaign.

However, because the Axis occupied much of Europe and south-east Asia for most of the Second World War (in some cases for all of it), it was necessarily the Allies who developed sabotage and subversion to a greater degree. It therefore seems logical to base this book on the activities of the two largest Allied organisations to carry out these forms of warfare in occupied territory.

1

OSS AND SOE – What Were They?

The Special Operations Executive was formed on Churchill’s orders in July 1940 from three smaller organisations: Section D, part of the Secret Intelligence Service which dealt in sabotage; EH, a semi-secret Foreign Office department which handled propaganda; and an obscure branch of the War Office known as MI(R). Its objective was, in Churchill’s well-known phrase, to ‘set Europe ablaze’ – the prime minister’s order to Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, who was SOE’s first political head. Its inspiration were the Fifth columnists who were supposed to have been so active throughout Europe, including Britain, and were much feared at the time (although except for the examples of Volksdeutsche activity mentioned in the introduction, they proved to be largely a myth). It was, of necessity, a secret organisation. By that is meant that it was not one that the government would officially acknowledge as existing.

Being new, SOE had its difficulties with the other two long-established British secret services. These were the Security Service, which was primarily responsible for the security of the United Kingdom (counter-intelligence), and the Special Intelligence Service, whose business was the gathering of information in enemy-occupied territory by spying (intelligence). Both were numbered as being part of the Military Intelligence Directorate – MI5 and MI6 respectively – though, in fact, the former reported to the Home Office and the latter to the Foreign Office. SOE, on the other hand, was responsible to the Ministry of Economic Warfare, or the Ministry of Un-gentlemanly Warfare as its first political minister, Hugh Dalton, called it.

SOE’s differences with MI5 were minor, but with MI6 it had a fundamental problem in that spies need anonymity and a tranquil, unsuspecting enemy; the whole object of sabotage and subversion is to create mayhem and confusion. This fundamental difference in approach was one of the reasons that made cooperation between the two organisations difficult. Having different political heads was another. Nor was their early relationship made easier by the fact that until April 1942 SOE had to rely on MI6’s radio network. Initially, it also had to rely on MI6 to supply it with the necessary forged documents for agents entering the field. As MI6 calculated, not unreasonably, that the risk of a forged document being discovered was in direct proportion to the number in circulation, SOE found it difficult to obtain any.

One senior SOE staff officer, Bickham Sweet-Escott, even hinted that inaccurate documents were deliberately foisted on to SOE. ‘There were one or two ugly cases’, he wrote after the war, ‘where our people were arrested because they said the papers they had been given were not in order. In the end we were forced to break ‘Z’s’ [MI6] monopoly and do our own forging, but our right to do so was not won without a tremendous campaign of mutual vilification.’

During the course of the war SOE survived several crises of confidence in it, and numerous clashes with rival organisations and with the armed forces. Initially it was organised into three parts: SO1 (propaganda), SO2 (operations), and SO3 (planning). SO3 was soon absorbed into SO1, and in August 1941 SO1 became the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), controlled by the Foreign Office.

This new arrangement did not prevent SOE from continuing to take an active part in ‘black’ subversion. This often provoked angry confrontations with the PWE – a secret department of which took over the dissemination of ‘black’ propaganda and ‘black’ broadcasts from SO1 – and the Ministry of Information (MOI) which disseminated ‘white’ propaganda. A good example of these clashes is illustrated in a letter sent to a member of SOE in India in July 1944 by a London staff officer when the former proposed creating a ‘black’ propaganda station to broadcast to the Japanese.

‘You were, I think, in London when some at least of the great Middle East radio SOE versus PWE uproar was going on,’ the staff officer wrote, and went on to explain that that débâcle was similar to the position in India in that there had been a definite need for propaganda broadcasts in the Middle East and SOE had been the only organisation on the spot with the technical and political knowledge, and the skilled personnel, to do it. So, while accepting that it was for the PWE to initiate policy – described by the writer as ‘wishy-washy directives’ – SOE went ahead with its propaganda broadcasts. When the PWE sent their own representatives out to Cairo and demanded that SOE relinquish control of the stations, however, ‘a tremendous battle of words and paper followed’. Telegrams flew between Cairo and London in abundance and the Foreign Office even joined in on the PWE’s side, with the ambassador to Greece wiring the Foreign Office from Cairo. The upshot was that the PWE took the credit for everything that went well, and the SOE took the blame for everything that did not. SOE was also accused of interfering in policy which was none of its business, of promoting an attitude in various Balkan peoples which flew in the face of Foreign Office policy, and of misinterpreting directives. All this reached ministerial level, and even Churchill, which did SOE no good at all. Such conflicts, the writer concluded firmly, ‘must not occur again’.

It is not surprising that with infighting on such a scale SOE’s first executive head, Sir Frank Nelson, became a victim of overwork and was replaced in April 1942 by his deputy, Sir Charles Hambro. After a disagreement with his political boss, Lord Selborne (who replaced Dalton in February 1942), Hambro was himself replaced in September 1943 by his deputy, Major-General Colin Gubbins who remained SOE’s executive head until the organisation was disbanded in January 1946. The executive head was always known by the initials CD.

Initially, SOE came directly under the supervision of the heads of the three armed services which formed the Chiefs of Staff, a committee which advised Churchill on military strategy and directed commanders in the field. Later – with the exception of Poland – its organisations in the field were responsible to the relevant commanders-in-chief.

Dalton tried to make SOE a fourth service but this was quickly squashed and the lack of sympathy and understanding with which SOE was regarded by the conventional military was as serious as any of its clashes with rival organisations, particularly when it came to the allocation of resources. For example, in early 1941 the RAF’s chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Portal, widely acknowledged as having one of the most brilliant minds, remarked of one SOE operation that ‘he thought that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated… there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins’. With attitudes like that to overcome, and they were far from uncommon in the military establishment, it is not surprising that SOE had extreme difficulties in acquiring the aircraft it needed to mount its operations.

From November 1940 SOE’s London headquarters were at 64 Baker Street; by the end of the war it had grown to such an extent that it occupied much of the office space between Portman Square and the Baker Street tube station as well as many flats in Berkeley, Chiltern and Orchard Courts, and in Bickenhall Mansions. Its operational organisation for Europe was based on sections, each of which administered an individual country, though France, because of its proximity and political complexity, had no less than six separate ones. SOE’s Cairo HQ worked on the same system for the Mediterranean, Balkans, and North Africa.

Elsewhere in the world – and there were few places SOE did not cover – it had missions, such as the Indian one, or the Oriental one based in Singapore, or it adopted a cover name, such as Force 136 which was what the India Mission was known as after 16 March 1944, It also ran and financed Special Operations Australia (see Chapter 8), though by the end of the war this had become an Australian organisation. In the Western Hemisphere SOE was represented by British Security Co-ordination in New York.

SOE also acquired various establishments outside London for training (see Chapter 2), called Special Training Schools, and stations for developing and manufacturing special weapons and devices (see Chapter 3). Its total numbers have never been officially calculated, but by mid-1944 its estimated strength was 13,200 men and women. Nearly half the men, and some of the women, served as agents in occupied or neutral countries. The casualty rate was high. For example, SOE’s F Section (see Chapter 12) was one in four.

Unlike SOE, which was formed entirely for the purposes of sabotage and subversion, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was structured more like the Abwehr, the departments of which performed different clandestine roles but were responsible to the same head. The OSS was formed in July 1942 from the Office of the Co-ordinator of Information (COI), the co-ordinator being General William J. Donovan, and by the end of the war had grown to a total of 26,000 men and women.

The COI had been created the previous July as part of the Executive Office of the President. Its official charter was to collect, analyse and correlate all information and data that might relate to national security. But its secret, unwritten agenda – simply covered by the charter as ‘supplementary activities’ – was, as the official OSS history expressed it, to wage unorthodox warfare in support of the armed forces. Such unorthodox warfare would include not only propaganda and intelligence but also sabotage, morale and physical subversion, guerrilla activities and development and support of underground and resistance groups.

To give him guidance in forming the necessary branches within COI Donovan was in close contact with the British who had had two years’ start in gaining experience in clandestine warfare, and he also received advice from William Stephenson, the Canadian head of British Security Co-ordination. Donovan’s first move was to form, among other branches, one for Research and Analysis.

‘The functions of R & A’, the official OSS history states, ‘were so broad and complex as to resist precise definition’, but broadly speaking it was responsible for the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information, intelligence, and data. SOE had no equivalent organisation. It proved to be of great assistance not only to the operational branches of OSS when they came into being, but to agencies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and others.

Another early COI branch was the Foreign Information Service (FIS) which was responsible for disseminating propaganda in the Eastern Hemisphere. After the USA entered the war the FIS successfully fought against being put under military supervision. Instead, its functions became part of a civilian agency, the Office of War Information, when this was formed in June 1942.

It was part of Donovan’s policy to form branches which could work closely with their British counterparts, the PWE, MI6 and SOE (the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, was approximately the US equivalent of MI5, but it was not part of Donovan’s remit). However, while the USA remained neutral it was not politically possible to form such branches openly though on 10 October 1941 a section designated ‘Special Activities K and L Funds’ was established in the Co-ordinator’s Office which was responsible for espionage, sabotage and subversion, and guerrilla formations. Soon after the USA entered the war in December 1941, this section was divided into two: the Secret Intelligence Branch under David K. E. Bruce, known by the initials SA/B (Special Activities/Bruce), and the Special Operations Branch which was known by the initials SA/G when Colonel M. Preston Goodfellow became its head in January 1942. When OSS was formed from the COI these sections became the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Special Operations (SO) branches which were roughly the equivalents of MI6 and SOE respectively.

In 1943 the West European sections of SO and SOE became a joint organisation, based in London, but SI never had the same close links with MI6. As SO, and the other OSS branches mentioned below, were the principal OSS branches involved in sabotage and subversion only their operations are covered in this book.

An agreement between SOE and OSS to co-operate in the field was concluded in June 1942 just as OSS was being formed from its predecessor, the COI. This agreement, confirmed in September 1942, allotted each organisation certain geographic spheres within which all operations were the responsibility of either SOE or OSS. (Incidentally, where military operations were in progress or were being planned, both organisations always worked under the overall control of the local theatre commander.) Initially, SOE was the responsible agency for France, the Low Countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, most of Norway, and the Balkans, and OSS was responsible for Finland and, later, Bulgaria, Roumania, and the northern tip of Norway.

During 1943 the two organisations worked towards forming a joint headquarters to support and direct resistance groups in the occupied countries of western Europe. Between March and September 1943 SOE’s Planning Section held a series of meetings with OSS SO Free French personnel to draw up plans for the use of the French resistance before, on and after D-Day. Eight separate plans were originally conceived, but these were later boiled down to three, all of which were successfully implemented.

‘Vert’ covered the destruction of all railway communications to isolate areas and prevent all German movement to, from or through them. As many key German personnel as possible were to be killed at the more important rail centres. ‘Tortue’ covered the laying of ambushes on all roads that would prevent, or at least delay, German armoured and infantry reinforcements reaching the beachhead. It was to be supplemented by other sabotage activities such as misdirecting traffic. ‘Violet’ dealt with the severing of Wehrmacht telecommunications system so as to isolate certain areas from the remainder of France, and from Germany.

In January 1944 SOE and SO in London were formally integrated with the title SOE/SO, and SO personnel became part of many of SOE’s country sections, though the shortage of suitable OSS agents meant that SOE always predominated in the field. Nevertheless, 523 members of the SO and OG branches of OSS fought behind German lines in France during the course of 1944, 85 of whom were SO agents and radio operators working with SOE’s F, RF and DF Sections, 83 were Jedburgh (see Chapter 15), and 355 made up 22 Operational Groups (see Chapter 14). Their casualties were 18 dead, 17 missing in action or made prisoner, and 51 wounded.

In preparation for the invasion of north-west Europe Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) delegated its responsibility for the control and supply of all resistance forces in France, to SOE/SO which on 1 May 1944 was designated Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ). The same month a joint SOE/SO headquarters, Special Project Operations Center (SPOC), was established at Algiers, to conduct operations on behalf of SFHQ into southern France. It was these two organisations which were responsible for dropping the different groups of special forces into France on and after the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944 to implement ‘Vert’, ‘Tortue’, and ‘Violet’ and to help supply, train, and co-operate with, the French resistance. (Although separate chapters of this book have been devoted to the sabotage activities of the OGs and the Jedburghs, and to those of SOE’s F Section, they all co-ordinated their operations with one another – or at least attempted to do so – and with the Inter-Allied Missions and the teams of SAS which were also parachuted into France.) From 1 July 1944 all Allied clandestine forces working into France came under the overall command of the staff of de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior (FFI) commanded by General Koenig.

Outside Europe SOE was responsible for the Middle East, India, and West and East Africa, and OSS was responsible for North Africa, China, Manchuria, Korea, the South and South-West Pacific and the Atlantic islands. Responsibility for Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Sumatra, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain was shared.

In the Far East, which posed entirely different problems from those in Europe, there was often a lack of co-operation between OSS and the various offshoots of SOE; and sometimes, as in Thailand where the two Allies had conflicting political aims, outright rivalry, as indeed there was in China.

Nor was opposition to the presence of the OSS in the Far East confined to the British, for both Admiral Nimitz, commanding the vast Pacific Ocean Areas, and General MacArthur, who commanded the South-West Pacific Area, banned or severely limited the presence of the OSS in their theatres. In China the OSS were equally frustrated by General Tai Li the Chinese Nationalist government’s head of internal security and counter-intelligence, when it tried to operate independently. Eventually, in 1944, it managed to enter the field by forming a unit within the Fourteenth US Army Air Force based in China.

The agreement to combine the two organisations in some theatres worked well in some places, not so well in others. For example, they worked amicably together in the Balkans and both organisations provided members for the three-man Jedburgh teams and Inter-Allied missions which were dropped into France on and after D-Day. But even when co-operation was the norm relations were not universally smooth and Bickham Sweet-Escott mentions at least two awkward moments that occurred.

The first arose from a report written by an OSS colonel who proposed setting up an underground OSS network in the Middle East to gain the Allies Arab support. There was no reference to working with the British who, he said, were completely discredited in the region, and made no mention of the fact that the British already had large organisations, both covert and overt, working towards the same end.

Apart from the dangers inherent in having two secret organisations working separately in the same area, it was obvious to Sweet-Escott and his colleagues that the colonel could hardly achieve what he sought without denigrating British policy in the Middle East. ‘This hardly seemed to be furthering our common effort,’ Sweet-Escott commented dryly, though he thought ‘there was a good deal of force’ in the colonel’s contention. SOE protested, but the document already had White House approval, and it was not until the British Embassy took up the matter with the State Department that the colonel’s proposal was diluted and then abandoned.

The second incident was more serious and illustrates how difficult it was to achieve co-ordination within a secret organisation, much less with another one. It arose out of talks in Washington between SOE and OSS representatives about setting up a joint training school and operational base in Algeria if the Allied landings (code-named ‘Torch’) in North Africa proved successful. Complete agreement on a joint establishment was reached and a telegram was sent to let SOE in London know the successful outcome of the talks. Soon afterwards, however, Sweet-Escott was summoned to meet a furious Donovan. Unbeknown to anyone in Washington, parallel talks on the same subject had been taking place in London, and these had come to the opposite conclusion. Donovan commented angrily that if this was how the British behaved SOE and OSS would have to go their separate ways, and nothing Sweet-Escott said could persuade him to believe other than that he had been double-crossed.

Sweet-Escott then asked London what explanation he should give Donovan. To his astonishment he received the reply that the SOE representative sent from London to take part in the talks had had no authority to conclude them and that anyway London had had no prior knowledge of them! Sweet-Escott refused to pass this on to Donovan and reminded London of the telegram he had sent. London then told him to apologise to Donovan but to tell him that the decision in London had to stand. ‘The incident was one which OSS never forgot,’ Sweet-Escott wrote. ‘I was never quite clear whether they suspected our integrity or doubted our competence. Whichever it was it did not help us.’

SOE, or SO2 as it was then known, attempted to land its first agents in France in August 1940 and another attempt was made in October. Both failed, and the first agent it attempted to drop by parachute (on 14 November 1940) refused to jump. Later the same month, however, a successful, though atypical, operation was mounted with men provided by the Free French’s London headquarters. SOE’s war diary described it as follows: ‘Five agents under the direction of Lt. Minshull, RN, were conveyed by submarine to the Gironde. In the Estuary, they seized a French tunny fishing smack, impressed half the crew, and placed the remainder on the submarine. After a successful reconnaissance to observe the procedure followed by U-boats in entering and leaving the river, they sailed the fishing boat back to Falmouth without incident. The information procured by personal observation and by the interrogation of the French fishermen proved of great value to the Navy and RAF and it is understood that successful operations based on this information were shortly afterwards undertaken.’

From this modest beginning SOE grew to become a powerful sabotage force in nearly all the Axis-occupied countries. It also delivered large quantities of arms, ammunition and explosives to the local resistance organisations it helped. There were serious setbacks and disasters. Some of these must be attributed to bad luck or the fortunes of war, but others – such as the well-known Englandspiel operation which led to the capture and death of so many SOE (and MI6) agents in the Netherlands – must be put down, to a greater or lesser degree, to carelessness or inefficiency, or because Baker Street was simply outwitted by the Gestapo and the Abwehr.

But overall the record of SOE is an impressive one. Its record in just one occupied country, Denmark, will have to suffice here to show the range of its operations. The extract comes from an outline history of SOE which is in the organisation’s files in the Public Record Office at Kew.

‘Operations included the attack (1943) on the power station of Burmeister and Wain (Copenhagen) which was engaged on U-Boat production and which was put out of action for nine months: the destruction (1944) by 20 men of 30 German aircraft, the aero mechanised workshop, and special tools at the Aalborg West aerodrome: the destruction (1945) of all the material and much machinery of the Torotor factory (Copenhagen) which was engaged on VI and V2 manufacture: the destruction, by 33 men, with 800lb of explosive, of the only armament factory (the Rifle Syndicate) in Denmark, with final cessation of production; the destruction (1944) of the Always Radio factory, when working on U-Boat production: and its final destruction (1945) when rebuilt.

‘To these examples of major destruction of the German war potential must be added much widespread minor sabotage and, above all, the incessant attacks of the Jutland “Special Forces” (i.e. SOE) against railway traffic. The early months of 1945 saw a steady increase of the flow of troops from Norway to the Western Front via Denmark, and these attacks are described as having “resulted in a reduction of the rate of movement from Norway from four divisions to less than one division a month”. For instance, during the week 4th–11th February, 1945, the transport of the German 233 Panzer Division and 166 Infantry Division was attacked successfully over 100 times: by the end of the week, more than half their 44 trains were immobilised in Denmark and 6 derailed.’

The OSS became operational much later than SOE, but its record is also an impressive one. The first SO London agent to enter the field was E. F. Floege, code-named ‘Alfred’, who, with his wireless operator, an SO officer called André Bouchardon, was first parachuted into France on 13 June 1943 to organise a sabotage circuit in the area of Le Mans-Nantes-Laval. Their story is told in the chapter on F Section.

When SO was formed it was Donovan’s intention that it should handle black propaganda and similar methods of subversion. But SOE and PWE, which handled British political warfare, had different political heads which made it difficult for PWE to liaise with SO satisfactorily. Therefore, in January 1943, Donovan created the Morale-Operations (MO) Branch to mount black propaganda operations of all varieties into enemy territory. ‘Persuasion, penetration and intimidation’, he said of this type of warfare, ‘are the modern counterpart of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days.’

MO had a slow start, caused by administrative problems and disagreement with the OWI over their respective areas of responsibility. Once these had been ironed out MO expanded rapidly and eventually became an effective organisation, though the nature of its operations always made it difficult to quantify its successes. However, Elizabeth P. MacDonald, one of OSS’s few female operatives, described an MO operation which was initiated by another female OSS operative, Barbara Lauwers, which did have discernible results. Lauwers, based with OSS in Rome, decided to undermine the morale of Czech troops being forced to fight for the Germans in northern Italy. ‘She wrote five “speeches” from “fellow Czechs” who had allegedly defected and joined the Czech Army of National Liberation, fighting with the Allies in Italy. The “speeches” were broadcast over the BBC to Czech garrisons in northern Italy. At the same time Lauwers designed surrender passes which were infiltrated behind enemy lines by German prisoners of war working for OSS. Six hundred Czechs defected and the passes were honoured by their liberation army. Lauwers won the Bronze Star for her part in this action.’

But perhaps MO’s greatest contribution was, as the OSS official history states, ‘that it brought to the attention of American authorities a weapon which the United States had not theretofore systematically and effectively employed’. Nowadays, it is called disinformation.

In January 1943 OSS was reorganised and the post of Deputy Director, Psychological Warfare Operations (later Strategic Services Operations), was established to supervise and direct the activities of SO and MO. In May 1943, after approval by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Operational Group Command (OG) became a third branch, though it constituted a separate military command and only came under the Deputy Director for over-all planning. This was authorised to ‘organise, train and employ operational nuclei for guerrilla warfare’. In November 1944 it was made a separate military unit within OSS so that its commanding officer reported directly to Donovan. This decision was taken as it was felt these groups, despite being in uniform, might not be treated according to the Geneva Convention if captured and that the further removed they were from any connection with OSS the better their chances of survival. In the European and Mediterranean theatres the Operational Groups normally consisted of four officers and 30 men who were divided into combat sections comprising two officers, thirteen men, a radio operator and a medic. They were all volunteers from the US Army and normally spoke the language of the country in which they were to operate.

In the Far East, Detachment 101 (see Chapter 9) worked with local Kachin guerrillas in Burma and supplied valuable intelligence to the US Army and US Army Air Forces. Its numbers fluctuated but by 1944 it comprised 5-600 men, and about 9,000 tribesmen.

Finally, in June 1943, the Maritime Unit (MU), which evolved from the training of SO and SI agents in the techniques of clandestine landings from the sea, was also given branch status which enabled it to put personnel into the field. It had four main functions: 1, landing agents from the sea; 2, supply of resistance groups and others from the sea; 3, maritime sabotage; 4, development of special equipment and devices for maritime sabotage. MU personnel were active in Europe and the Far East.

By the end of the war OSS was as ubiquitous as SOE. It, or rather its COI predecessor, was operational in North Africa as early as January 1942; and after the Allied invasion there that November it established a headquarters at Algiers. Others were also established in Cairo, Chungking, London and Corsica, and numerous SO, MO, and OG operations were organised from them.

A typical SO mission was one where a four-man team crossed into the Evros region of Greece from Turkey on 29 March 1944 with orders to cut the flow of chrome ore, a valuable strategic raw material, from Turkey to Germany by destroying two important railway bridges. They made contact with the local communist guerrilla headquarters and spent next two months training and equipping a force of 220 guerrillas for the operation. At the end of May two targets were selected: the Svilengrad bridge in Bulgaria, which was 210 feet long and 12 feet high, and the Alexandroupolis bridge in Greece, which was 100 feet long and 45 feet high. Two SO officers and 170 guerrillas with 1,400lb of plastic explosives were sent to dispose of the former and two SO non-commissioned officers, fifty guerrillas, and 550lb of plastic explosives were sent to destroy the latter.

‘Our plan was’, wrote the leader of the team attacking the Svilengrad bridge, in his after-action report, ‘(1) to place sufficient guards to eliminate any interference from the German guard post of ten men and the Bulgarian post of 21 men; (2) to prevent any reinforcements from reaching there in time; (3) cut all telephonic communications; (4) carry out the demolition of the bridge.

‘The first step was very easy because the Germans were caught napping and did not interfere until the last five minutes of the operation. They fired a flare and opened up with a machine-gun and submachine-guns in the general direction of the bridge. Luckily the bridge was already mined and we were making the connections with prima-cord. Steps two and three were easily carried out... After the demolition of the bridge we began our forced march, crossing the Arda river at 0400 hours. There a German post noticed us and notified the reconnaissance battalion.

‘The next evening the reconnaissance battalion was hot on our trail... Captain –, Lt.– and the sabotage crew broke away from the main body and proceeded south to get the news of the southern bridge leaving a Greek officer in charge. This young officer after three days of manoeuvring finally ambushed the CO of the German battalion and his staff and killed them all.’

The Alexandroupolis bridge was also destroyed. A total of 25 SO agents entered Greece between September 1943 and November 1944, most of whom were attached to guerrilla bands that carried out numerous sabotage attacks.

President Truman issued the Executive Order which terminated OSS on 1 October 1945, though many of its functions were subsequently taken over by the Central Intelligence Agency which was formed in September 1947. SOE officially ceased to exist on 30 June 1946.

2

Recruiting and Training for Sabotage and Subversion

Recruiting for SOE and OSS was often by word of mouth, though one would-be SOE agent was recruited in a bar and another joined by answering an advertisement for a bilingual secretary. So discreet was her induction that even after completing the preliminary training course she was still in the dark as to what organisation had accepted her, though it was always stressed to recruits that they were volunteers and could withdraw at any time.

Staff officers and agents working in the field often came from the armed forces of the two countries, and the latter were drawn from the armed forces of the governments-in-exile, from the large immigrant communities which abound in North America, and, of course, from the nationalities of those countries to be penetrated.

For operations in Europe and the Balkans, recruitment at all levels posed few problems, but in the Far East both OSS and SOE faced many difficulties. There were few Americans or Europeans with the necessary skills to fill staff positions, and as any white person was instantly recognisable they could only be used in the field on a very limited basis. Therefore recruiting was from the Asiatic communities – altogether 1,500 were trained – though by the end of the war SOE had sent 450 British officers and NCOs into the field to lead guerrilla operations such as ‘Character’ (see Chapter 16) and OSS had about 600 American officers and enlisted men working with its Detachment 101.

On a world-wide basis SOE agents included, as M. R. D. Foot wrote in his outline history of SOE, ‘several score Spaniards, Germans and Austrians, and several hundred Italians and Frenchmen. Their social range reached from a head of state – the regent of Siam – through an Indian princess (born in the Kremlin), of the upper and lower European and east Asiatic bourgeoisie, to railwaymen, telephonists, clerks, labourers, peasants, prostitutes and coolies.’

Generally speaking they lacked, as the historian, Hugh Seton-Watson, put it, ‘the habit of subordination to a regular hierarchy; were disciplined by no mandarin ethos; and were impatient or even contemptuous of the bureaucratic conventions of the diplomatic service and its auxiliaries. To the diplomats they often appeared brash, ignorant of things which diplomats were trained to regard as important, and at times a positive menace.’ OSS personnel were equally heterogeneous, and those recruited within the United States included ‘a noted anthropologist, a businessman, an explorer, a high-pressure salesman, a professional football player, a former Treasury agent and an adventurer-author’.

Both SOE and OSS recruited women. SOE dispatched 50 into France during the course of the war, two of them American citizens, but few of the 4,000 female OSS recruits reached the field. One who did, Aline Griffith, an SI agent in Spain from January 1944 to August 1945, records that the training she received was the same for men and women and that though her fellow students were mostly Americans there were also ‘Yugoslavs, a Belgian, several Frenchmen, and a German or two’. Three of SOE’s country sections had women as their operations officers and the intelligence officer of F Section (see Chapter 12) – assessed by a female colleague as being ‘really the most powerful personality in SOE’ – was also a woman. But, as with OSS, the majority of female SOE recruits – who came mostly from the armed forces or the all-volunteer First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) – were used in non-combatant roles.

Another invaluable source for SOE personnel was the underworld. One of its most successful agents owned a chain of brothels and it relied on professional forgers to manufacture the right papers for those entering the field. One retired burglar ran SOE’s lock-picking course and a second was such an outstanding agent that he was awarded the DSO. One British general, sacked by Eisenhower (unjustly as it turned out later), was immediately made a member of SOE’s Council. Small wonder that one historian has commented that SOE sometimes enjoyed appearing disreputable.

SOE’s staff officers were drawn from a much tighter social group. They were often businessmen from the City, or were lawyers, journalists or academics, professions where everyone knew everyone else, or at least knew them by reputation. This might be regarded as élitism, but where man management, total trustworthiness, and a high intelligence were essential prerequisites, it had to be. On the whole this ‘old boy network’ worked, though it was not infallible: the traitor ‘Kim’ Philby started his intelligence career in SOE before transferring to MI6.

The training system for SOE personnel has been likened to a series of sieves, each having a finer mesh than the previous one, and OSS, at least at first, tended to follow SOE’s example. In Britain volunteers passed through the SOE system of numbered Special Training Schools (STS) which were nearly all isolated country mansions taken over for the duration. Many were so grand that SOE came to stand for ‘Stately’ omes of England’.

These training schools not only had instructors but conducting officers. These were experienced individuals who, ideally, had been in the field themselves, and they acted as a student’s adviser, father-confessor and friend. Conducting officers were consulted by the Commandant of the training school before a student’s final assessment, for they sometimes had a greater insight into a student’s potential than the instructors.

The first hurdle for any volunteer was to pass his initial interviews which probed his commitment, linguistic ability, background, and temperament. SOE volunteers went through a series of one-to-one interviews, often without having the least idea what it was all about (though the interviewer stressed throughout that the candidate was under no obligation to proceed once he did know).

George Langelaan described his interviews and training for SOE vividly. He had joined the British Army at a recruitment office in Paris where he was working as a journalist. After Dunkirk he wrote a report on how to extract information about occupied France and how to feed information and propaganda to its people. He sent it to the War Office, but being then only a corporal, never expected to hear about it again, One day early in 1941, however, he was summoned to the War Office and was escorted by an armed policeman to room 108. There he was interviewed, informally, by Colonel Gielgud – brother of the actor, John Gielgud – who had, as a captain, recruited Langelaan into the Army in Paris. Gielgud asked if he would be prepared to return to France. Langelaan queried how this could be done and when Gielgud said by parachute Langelaan protested that he would be too terrified to jump:

‘ “I understand you have been proposed for OCTU... Sandhurst,” said the colonel, glancing at some papers on his desk... “Drop in and see me when you get through in about three months’ time.”

‘ “But, sir… if I cannot…”

‘ “Please don’t worry about that for the moment. To tell you the truth, I rather like your fear of being parachuted – I prefer that to people who think they are afraid of nothing.”

‘ “But, sir. Won’t I have to ask for an appointment, or something?”

‘ “No, just drop in one morning. I’ll be here.” ’

When Langelaan saw the colonel again he was issued with a travel warrant for an isolated part of Scotland where his training as an agent began.

This casual, one might say amateur, approach seems to have worked remarkably well, but by mid-1943 the war had become more professional and it was replaced by an assessment board of psychologists. OSS followed the same route, and though the two organisations developed their own psychological evaluation programmes independently the end results were, according to the official OSS history, ‘remarkably similar... Immediately upon arrival each candidate was subjected to routine paper and pencil intelligence tests which provided a general index of his intellectual capabilities and aptitudes.

‘A variety of tests were evolved which were designed to produce not only material for a psychological analysis of the candidate but also a job analysis, namely what he could do best and whether he was capable of performing the task for which he was employed.’

The tests included ones for general initiative which, besides revealing his ingenuity, indicated the candidate’s ability to ‘withstand frustration, to persevere, to think clearly’. There were also more precise exercises to test a candidate’s ability to memorise maps, faces, and so on, and his aptitude to process propaganda material and to speak extemporaneously before an audience.

Next came what was called a ‘clinical’ interview, a personal discussion between the candidate and a staff member designated as the candidate’s mentor. This played a decisive role in assessing a candidate. If the results of the interview clashed with those of the tests, a rare occurrence, the interview usually carried more weight.

These assessments took 3½ days and were held at Station S, a country estate in Fairfax, Virginia. Too great an administrative burden was put on the Station when, in March 1944, all OSS personnel going overseas were sent to be tested there, so Station W, a house in Washington, was opened which ran a one-day assessment course. In June 1944 another assessment centre for personnel going to the Far East was opened on the West Coast as Station WS and in November 1944 Area F, which had previously been used for training Operational Groups (see Chapter 14), became a centre for assessing the fitness for further operations of agents returning from Europe. From January 1944 to July 1945 5,300 candidates passed through OSS assessment schools.

In Britain if an SOE candidate passed his interview he was normally sent on a two- or three-week introduction course where the prospective agent was put through a rigorous fitness programme and taught the basics of reading maps and weapons training. Personal idiosyncrasies – such as succumbing to the attractions of a well-stocked bar – were watched and noted. If an individual passed this first test he was dispatched to a Group A, or paramilitary training, school in a particularly wild part of the Scottish Highlands, near Arisaig on the western coast. Here, during a course which lasted three or five weeks, students were taught not only how to fire, strip and re-assemble British weapons, but foreign ones as well. Living off the land, demolition work with plastic explosives, unarmed combat, and silent killing were also part of the course.

Langelaan was taught unarmed combat by a ‘strange, smiling pagan statuette’, a diminutive Japanese who spoke in clipped English with an American accent, but silent killing was William Ewart Fairbairn’s area of expertise. Fairbairn was a retired ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Shanghai Municipal Police who held the rank of major. Another instructor teaching the same skills was Eric Anthony Sykes, a one-time reserve Shanghai policeman.

According to one source, Fairbairn was the first white man to be awarded a jujitsu Black Belt and he was also an expert in other forms of martial arts. He and Sykes emphasised that silent killing was as much an attitude of mind as a technique. ‘This is war, not sport,’ students were told. ‘Your aim is to kill your opponent as soon as possible... forget the term “foul methods”... “foul methods” so-called, help you to kill quickly. Attack your opponent’s weakest points.’ One SOE staff officer, Bickham Sweet-Escott, remembers Sykes’ instructions as being ‘long, complicated and hard to remember, but each of them ended with the phrase: “and then kick him in the testicles”.’

A student was taught how to use his head and each limb as a weapon of attack and that he must never stop just because an opponent was crippled. ‘If you’ve broken his arm,’ they were told, ‘it’s of value only because it makes it easier to kill him.’ As one Canadian recruit commented, ‘it turned our values upside down’, and an OSS member who was taught by Fairbairn summed up his instructor’s attitude succinctly: ‘All of us who were taught by Major Fairbairn soon realised that he had an honest dislike of anything that smacked of decency in fighting.’

Using a knife was an essential part of silent killing and Fairbairn taught exactly which areas of the body were the most vulnerable to attack. He was an expert in knife-fighting and he and Sykes invented the double-edged commando knife named after them.

‘There are several schools of thought pertaining to knife fighting technique,’ an OSS manual stated, ‘and perhaps the most widely known and accepted today is the Fairbairn system which embodies various slashing operations. These slashing operations are directed at vital spots on the body, arms and neck, and the penetrating technique which is most usually used is a thrusting proposition directed at the most vital spots of the body. It can be accomplished from either the front or the rear.’

Aaron Bank, a member of one of the Jedburgh teams to go into France (see Chapter 15), noted how thorough Fairbairn was in training his students with a knife. ‘He waited for a really dark, moonless night and had us called out for sentry elimination training. We had been taught how to approach a sentry from the rear, snap an arm around his neck in a choke hold, and thrust a stiletto of Fairbairn design between his upper ribs while bending him backward. When it came to my turn, I approached the dummy, grasped it, and bent it back as I plunged my knife into, of all things, a knapsack instead of the ribs. Had this been for keeps, the sentry would not have been eliminated. All our previous practice had been on dummies without a knapsack. Fairbairn drove his point home. We never forgot. You had to determine before the attack whether a knapsack was being worn. A two-man elimination team was the safest and quietest, since one man effected the assault while the other grasped the sentry’s rifle before it dropped, clattering, to the ground.’

Fairbairn and Sykes also taught new methods for firing weapons which had been honed by Fairbairn during his career with the Shanghai police between the wars. The loss of nine policemen shot by armed criminals led to Fairbairn’s recommending new methods for using a pistol or revolver. ‘Although I was responsible for the training of the Police in shooting,’ he wrote later, ‘I was compelled to teach only the methods as laid down in Army textbooks. Anything that savoured of being original was not permitted. The methods of loading and the use of the so-called safety catches had to be as per the book.

‘I pointed out that one of our men had his safety catch on SAFE when he was killed and advanced the theory that the only man who gained the advantages of the safety catch was the criminal. I explained that I had a method of instruction based on the principle of “shooting to live” in which men would be trained to fire instinctively in bursts of two shots without even bringing their pistols to the line-of-sight: practice in the dark when all one would see of their opponents would be a shadow: firing up and down a staircase at moving objects, with offstage noises to make the practice as near as possible to the conditions one would have to contend with in actual combat. I asked for and obtained permission to pin down all safety catches.’

The time-honoured way to fire a pistol had been standing straight, side-on to the target with the weapon fired once it had been swung up to eye level by an outstretched arm. Now Fairbairn and Sykes taught the crouching stance square on to the target with a two-handed grip on the pistol which was fired at waist level; and instead of firing a shot at a time they taught what is known as the ‘double tap’: two shots fired in quick succession. It was this kind of training which was of inestimable value to the hundreds of SOE and OSS agents who went into the field. As Langelaan pointed out it gave him and his fellow students a ‘sense of physical power and superiority that few men ever acquire. By the time we finished our training, I would have willingly enough tackled any man, whatever his strength, size or ability.’

Once through this particular sieve, prospective SOE agents were sent from the Group A schools to the Group B finishing schools. These were country houses in southern England around Beaulieu in the New Forest. As at Arisaig, each country section had its own residence for its students; the instructors and conducting officers lived in Beaulieu Manor. The course lasted three or four weeks.

Whereas Arisaig had emphasised the aggressive techniques of subversive warfare, the Group B schools primarily taught the equally essential defensive ones to survive in a hostile environment. It required quite a different set of skills and a different temperament, and students who had done outstandingly well at Arisaig, did not always manage to make the necessary adjustment.

Students were made familiar with police methods and techniques in the countries they were eventually going to enter, were shown how to detect, and throw off someone shadowing them, and were given detailed instruction on how to appear and behave as inconspicuously as possible. The school also drummed into their students how to avoid making the smallest mistake in behaviour which might give them away: like looking the wrong way when crossing a road or not knowing the local culinary preferences when eating in a restaurant.

Students were also made to act out situations that occurred in occupied territories. These varied from the casual routine search, or scrutiny of identity papers at a control point, to the intensive interrogation which started with a shake on the shoulder in the middle of the night. They were also instructed on how to compile concise reports and to use the simplest codes to transmit them (Morse code had already been taught at Arisaig), and advice was given on basic propaganda, and how to recruit sub-agents in occupied territories.

Above all, students had to learn how to submerge themselves in their cover, just as an actor has to absorb himself in his part so completely that he assumes the persona of the character he is playing. With this an essential requirement for survival it is little wonder that one of the best-remembered instructors was Paul Dehn, who came from the film industry and who also, during the course of his wartime career, served as chief instructor at Camp X (see below).

The course ended in an exercise which lasted several days. It tested to the full everything the students had learned before they passed on to more advanced technical courses such as clandestine printing, lock-picking, industrial sabotage, and using advanced ciphers and operating a wireless (the wireless school was at Thame Park, east of Oxford). Industrial sabotage was taught by George Rheam at Brickendonbury Manor (Station XVII), situated between Hertford and Hoddesdon. Rheam was, wrote M. R. D. Foot in his outline history of SOE, ‘the inventor of many industrial sabotage techniques and an instructor of genius... Anyone trained by him could look at a factory with quite new eyes, spot the few essential machines in it, and understand how to stop them with a few well-placed ounces of explosive; to stop them, moreover, in such a way that some of them could not be restarted promptly by removing undamaged parts from comparable machines nearby.’ Later, many of these techniques became part of the training of OSS personnel and of those passing through SOE schools abroad.