Special Operations Executive

A New Instrument of War

Mark Seaman, Mark Seaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134175246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This unique book presents an accurate and reliable assessment of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It brings together leading authors to examine the organization from a range of key angles.

This study shows how historians have built on the first international conference on the SOE at the Imperial War Museum in 1998. The release of many records then allowed historians to develop the first authoritative analyses of the organization's activities and several of its agents and staff officers were able to participate. Since this groundbreaking conference, fresh research has continued and its original papers are here amended to take account of the full range of SOE documents that have been released to the National Archives. The fascinating stories they tell range from overviews of work in a single country to particular operations and the impact of key personalities.

SOE was a remarkably innovative organization. It played a significant part in the Allied victory while its theories of clandestine warfare and specialised equipment had a major impact upon the post-war world. SOE proved that war need not be fought by conventional methods and by soldiers in uniform. The organization laid much of the groundwork for the development of irregular warfare that characterized the second half of the twentieth century and that is still here, more potent than ever, at the beginning of the twenty-first.

This book will be of great interest to students of World War II history, intelligence studies and special operations, as well as general readers with an interest in SOE and World War II.

1

‘A New Instrument of War’

The Origins of the Special Operations Executive

Mark Seaman

An examination of the origins of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) has, understandably, been a feature of most published sources on the organization. Official historians have charted the course of Whitehall meetings and exchanges of memoranda while the memoirs of participants have helped provide a lively picture of events and personalities.¹ But in most of these accounts, the events of the last year of peace and the first year of war have only one conclusion: SOE. This chapter will not seek to describe the various clandestine operations that preceded the formation of SOE but will endeavour to chronicle the friendships and rivalries of this period and suggest that the path to Baker Street was far from immutable. Furthermore, it is hoped that a detailed examination of the origins of SOE will offer a helpful insight into the beginning of that organization’s subsequent, troubled relations with Whitehall, the armed forces and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The First World War had witnessed only a limited utilization of irregular warfare. The prominence of T. E. Lawrence’s exploits in Arabia perhaps bestowed a disproportionate level of attention that was reflected in some areas of post-war military thinking:

He [Lawrence] is seen to be more than a guerrilla genius – rather does he appear a strategist of genius who had the vision to anticipate the guerrilla trend of civilized warfare that arises from the growing dependence of nations on industrial resources.²

This is not to say that the British Army had not acquired a broad experience of this type of warfare during the Allied intervention in Russia and, in particular, during the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. However, British units had largely been on the ‘receiving end’ of such tactics and this experience of irregular warfare had resulted in a preoccupation with developing appropriate defensive responses. In contrast to the army, the nascent British secret service had engaged in ‘offensive’ activities during the conflict such as those recorded by George Hill, who operated in Russia at the end of the war:

Under my direction for months the men in my organisation had been systematically harrying the Germans on Russian territory. This was done by engineering uprisings; by destruction of stores; by the wrecking of the railway lines over which their trains passed; in fact, by using violence wherever possible.³

In spite of accounts such as Hill’s that reported the efficacy of clandestine warfare, post-war British defence planning perceived little need of it. However, by the mid-1930s the new threat posed by Nazi Germany resulted in a change of mind. Germany’s nomination as the ‘ultimate potential enemy’ by the Defence Requirements Committee in its report of 28 February 1934 marked the recognition of a new and potent threat.⁴ While the Secret Intelligence Service sought to provide adequate intelligence on Germany and its rearmament, in the summer of 1935 it also began to examine the need to confront this potential enemy by clandestine means.

SIS staff officers reported to Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, the Chief of the Secret Service (‘C’), suggesting a wide variety of sabotage options against ‘Germany, our most likely enemy’. However, it was clear that there was no existing framework to develop such activity and it was reported ‘Probably the reason that sabotage has never been organised is that it is nobody’s particular job.’⁵

But even within the secret, inner sancta of Whitehall, the concept of planning for sabotage, let alone carrying it out against countries with whom Britain was not at war, caused some misgivings. Consequently, SIS sought to cloak its intentions for offensive action by examining defensive considerations. It was therefore proposed that SIS planning for offensive sabotage operations be seen to evolve out of a review of Britain’s own susceptibility to a similar form of external attack. A sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was established in the summer of 1935 to look into this with SIS’s own agenda ‘that the only effective reply to this form of attack is retaliation’ firmly in place.⁶

In the absence of an opportunity to study SIS documents for this period, it would appear that something of a hiatus descended over the scheme until in January 1938 the question of sabotage was revived. Both Section VI (Industrial) and Section III (Naval) of SIS endorsed a recommendation that the potential of sabotage operations be readdressed and it was proposed that a Royal Engineer officer be recruited to prepare a detailed assessment.

The man chosen was Major Laurence Grand, a 39-year-old sapper who had been commissioned in 1917 and had subsequently served in France, Russia, India, Iraq, Kurdistan and the United Kingdom.⁷ In 1934 he had been appointed Deputy Assistant Director of Mechanization in the War Office and it was at the conclusion of this posting (when he was looking forward to a summer’s cricket at Chatham and a new appointment in Egypt) that he was approached for secondment to SIS. He accepted on condition that this would not adversely affect his next army posting. Shortly afterwards he had a meeting with Colonel Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS’s Military Section, and was then taken to meet ‘C’ himself, whom he later recalled resembled an ‘American gangster’. Grand started work on 1 April 1938 in a sparsely furnished office in the basement of SIS headquarters in Broadway Buildings. His next-door neighbour was another new arrival who had been brought in to work on clandestine communications.⁸ Neither of the newcomers was aware of what lay ahead and, as Grand later reflected:

We were both very vague as to what we had to do – in fact we soon realised that we had come to fill a complete vacuum. There were no real secret communications and there was no organization for anything except the collection of information. We were starting from scratch with a vengeance.⁹

If Grand at first felt ill-equipped for secret service, he soon adapted and, in the opinion of several of his contemporaries, even came to be the very embodiment of the stereotypical spymaster, ‘He was tall and thin, with a heavy black moustache. He never wore uniform, always had a long cigarette holder in his mouth, and was never without a red carnation in his buttonhole.’¹⁰ Kim Philby, who began his British secret service career by working for Grand, commented upon the imaginative and ambitious nature of the latter’s thinking, ‘his mind was certainly not clipped. It ranged free and handsome over the whole field of his awesome responsibilities, never shrinking from an idea, however big or wild’.¹¹ Even Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office and Ministry of Economic Warfare, who was to be closely associated with Grand’s subsequent downfall and who criticized him as ‘rather theatrical and James-Bondish’, was nevertheless willing to concede that ‘he was an able man who inspired loyalty’.¹²

Grand did not stay in his subterranean existence for long and moved to the 6th floor of a neighbouring office block at No. 2 Caxton Street. As the work and the size of his staff increased, more offices were taken over linked, in the best traditions of spy thrillers, by confusing passageways (including one into the St. Ermin’s Hotel) and an especially constructed internal staircase to another floor in the building. He set about his task with what was to become a characteristic hallmark of enthusiasm:

his imagination flaring ahead of our schemes, each one of which seemed to him a war-stopper. If, as so often happened, one of his schemes or ours came to nothing, he showed no disappointment, called for more and never let his enthusiasm descend to the level of a cautious ‘Wait and see’.¹³

On 31 May 1938 he submitted his ‘Preliminary survey of possibilities of sabotage’ that identified likely areas and methods of sabotage. The response from within SIS was mixed with comments ‘that it was ambitious, it merely scratched the surface, that it went too far and too fast, that it was too wide or that too much of it was of doubtful practicality’.¹⁴ Whatever the reservations, Grand pressed on, identifying the need to draw up a list of potential sabotage targets, develop special devices and clandestine communications and locate likely saboteur recruits. In a supplement to his report he predicted that setting up the organization would demand an expenditure of £20,000. This does not seem to have totally dismayed his superiors and he was appointed head of a new department of SIS, Section IX or, as it was more popularly known, Section D, with Grand taking the symbol ‘D’ for himself.

Typically, Grand was keen to develop foreign links and in the summer and autumn of 1938 he visited Czechoslovakia to engage in meetings with members of the Czechoslovak General Staff and to survey the Skoda Armaments works with a view towards preparing it for sabotage in the event of further German aggression. He also set about recruiting an engineer to work on the development of scrambling telephone conversation and commissioned research into innovative sabotage devices. Grand was also desirous of exploiting propaganda potential. He made plans for aggressive propaganda against Germany using neutral countries as the notional point of origin in order to mask the material’s connection with Britain. He was similarly interested in the potential of ‘black’ wireless broadcasting and funded the Joint Broadcasting Committee out of his own secret vote.¹⁵ This was an area already under consideration elsewhere in Whitehall and during the Munich Crisis Sir Campbell Stuart had been asked to head a small branch of the Foreign Office to examine its potential. Based at Electra House, the department was subsequently named EH or, after its chief, CS and was to constitute yet one further complication in the numerous permutations of Whitehall’s clandestine activities.

Meanwhile, at the War Office, another Royal Engineer was pursuing a parallel, if less secret, course to Grand’s. Major J. C. F. Holland’s career was already impressive. During the First World War he had been transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. His service also included a period in Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. In the spring of 1938 he was appointed to the War Office’s GS(R) Section, a department deemed not secret enough to remain in obscurity, for its creation was announced in Hansard on 9 March 1938:

When so much instruction is to be gained from present events the absence of any branch exclusively concerned with purely military research is noticeable, and a small section to study the practice and lessons of actual warfare will be established.

Furthermore, the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff minuted ‘I have introduced a research section directly under me. This section must be small, almost anonymous, go where they like, talk to whom they like, but be kept from files, correspondence and telephone calls.’ Holland was, in large measure, left to his own devices and in January 1939 presented his preliminary report. His superiors were sufficiently impressed to authorize the secondment of two further officers. The first was a fellow sapper, Major M. R. Jefferis, the second, Major C. McV. Gubbins, was a gunner with a wide range of experience to rival Holland’s.

It was clear that such similar enterprises undertaken separately by SIS and the War Office ran the risk of duplication of endeavour and, therefore, waste. On 20 March 1939 Grand submitted his ‘Scheme D’ report to Sinclair. It strongly emphasized the lessons to be learnt from the Irish Republican Army’s methods during the ‘Troubles’ along with similar conclusions drawn from experiences in Russia and policing the Empire. A wide range of activity was discussed including the elimination of Gestapo agents in Romania, the supply of guerrilla bands in Poland and the fostering of a national revolt in Italian Libya. He requested the appointment of Holland as GSO1 for the project and estimated that it would need 25 other officers and a war chest of £500,000. A copy of the report was sent to Major-General F. G. Beaumont-Nesbitt, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence (DDMI), and two days later, a briefing was given to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Viscount Gort. The next day (23 March) another meeting was held at the Foreign Office at which the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, his Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Gort, Menzies and Grand were present. Halifax expressed concern at the funding of a sabotage organization and, not unnaturally, sought reassurance that His Majesty’s Government would be suitably distanced from the plan. Grand was able to put his mind at rest and Halifax concluded the meeting by agreeing ‘in principle with the scheme, which he now intended to forget’. But before his amnesia set in, Halifax agreed to discuss the matter with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. In the words of SOE’s most eminent historian, ‘By this decision SOE was begotten; but the child was long in the womb.’¹⁶ Such a diagnosis is understandable but does not fully reflect the ebb and flow of the next 18 months when it often looked as if no such organization as SOE would ever emerge.

Section D and GS(R) were now so closely entwined that the latter moved into the former’s offices in Caxton Street, Westminster, close to SIS’s headquarters in Broadway. Furthermore, GS(R)’s expansion was funded from SIS’s secret vote. But far from inhibiting Holland’s fertile mind, the new arrangement gave him scope for expansion. There is something of a conflict of opinion regarding the relationship between Grand and Holland. A close associate of Holland stated ‘he and Grand got on well together’ while others have suggested that their radically different outlooks and temperaments engendered hostility.¹⁷ However, the two men seemed, at the very least, to have achieved a modus vivendi and, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Grand’s contingency plans and Holland’s thoughtful development of the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare seemed set to be a useful addition to Britain’s arsenal during the drift towards war.

On 3 April 1939, Holland submitted a report in which he asserted his intention ‘To study guerrilla methods and produce a guerrilla “F[ield] S[ervice] R[egulations]”‘. Moreover, he advocated the steppin...