Covert Radio Agents, 1939–1945

Signals From Behind Enemy Lines

David Hebditch

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781526794949
• eBook ISBN: 9781526794956
• Subtopic: World War II

"A treasure of a book…An authentic adventure saga [and] a very human story generously seasoned with ingenuity, technology and hardy individualism." — K9YA Telegraph
Includes photos and maps
Clandestine radio operators had one of the most dangerous jobs of World War II. Those in Nazi-occupied Europe for the SOE, MI6, and OSS had a life expectancy of just six weeks. In the Gilbert Islands, the Japanese decapitated seventeen New Zealand coastwatchers.
These highly skilled agents' main tasks were to maintain regular contact with their home base and pass vital intelligence back. As this meticulously researched book reveals, many operators did more than that. Norwegian Odd Starheim hijacked a ship and sailed it to the Shetlands. In the Solomon Islands Jack Read and Paul Mason warned the defenders of Guadalcanal about incoming enemy air raids, giving American fighters a chance to inflict irreversible damage on the Japanese Air Force. In 1944 Arthur Brown was central to Operation Jedburgh's success delaying the arrival of the SS Das Reich armored division at the Normandy beachheads. The author also explains in layman's terms the technology of 1940s radios and the ingenious codes used.
Most importantly,  Covert Radio Agents tells the dramatic human stories of these gallant behind-the-lines radio agents. Who were they? How were they trained? How did they survive against the odds? This is a highly informative and uplifting history of World War II's unsung heroes.

Chapter 1

How to Make a Radio Agent

Espionage has always played a great role in wartime. The difficulty in carrying it on successfully lay less in the procurement of information than in passing the information in good season to the military or political leaders of the country involved.

Wilhelm F. Flicke, cryptanalyst, German High Command

1.1 Infiltration: unusual arrangements

Compared with the First World War, the conflict of 1939–45 was far more global. But its defining characteristic was the way in which so many countries were occupied by the enemy, in terms of their geography, natural resources, infrastructure, economic assets and those members of the population who could not or would not flee. Every square kilometre seized was available for exploitation and plunder. In Europe the main occupying power was Germany; its change of name in 1943 from ‘Deutsches Reich’ to ‘Großdeutsches Reich’ (‘German Realm’ to ‘Greater German Realm’) reflected the scale of its territorial expansion. In the Far East, Imperial Japan added some twenty-eight countries to the domain it occupied in 1939. Italy did its bit by taking over only marginally important Abyssinia and Albania.

The situation in lands occupied by the enemy was of vital significance to the Allies’ conduct of the war. France’s Atlantic coast, especially Brittany, provided the Kriegsmarine with a fine choice of lairs for the U-boat ‘wolf-packs’ which, during the early years, wrought havoc on merchant shipping supplying an isolated Britain. Northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands offered excellent ground for airfields which put Luftwaffe bombers within easy range of southern England and London. This was an advantage denied to the Royal Air Force and, from 1942, the United States Army Air Corps targeting Hitler’s industrial centres and, later, his major cities. Taking a longer view, the geographical deployment of ground forces influenced where and when the Allies would start the lengthy and bloody undertaking of liberating continental Europe.

The islands and fjords of Norway’s 2,650km (1,650 mile) coastline – especially the stretch facing the North Atlantic – could have been designed to meet the German Navy’s requirements. A total of 239,057 islands and some 1,200 fjords gave unlimited – but not impenetrable – cover to warships being repaired and provisioned before striking out west above the British Isles to the North Atlantic and up around Nordkapp (North Cape) towards the Soviet Union. The disadvantage of Norway was its mountainous terrain; Galdhøpiggen is, at 2,469m (8,100ft), the tallest European peak north of the Alps. Consequently, roads have to follow the difficult, twisty contours of this landscape. Even in the twenty-first century Norway boasts only 500km (310 miles) of motorway (freeway), and almost all of this is in the east, serving the capital of Oslo. For the German occupying forces this logistical nightmare could be solved only by sending troops and materiel up and down the country by train or sea.

CHIFFCHAFF was an SOE operation in Norway in early 1945 to support the arming and training of Milorg resistance fighters.

When Japan extended its reach south through Indo-China, Indonesia and the islands of the South Pacific towards Australia and New Zealand, its logistics inevitably became stretched and totally dependent on sea-borne support and supplies. On some islands, the jungle was so impenetrable that distances were measured in days of travel rather than miles or kilometres. There, even a Norwegian road would have been viewed as an extravagant luxury.

* * *

Co-operation between Allied special operations units was a marked feature of the clandestine effort in this war. The first nine hundred Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents were trained at SOE’s Camp X (Special Training Station 103) on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada, just 48 km (30 miles) from the border with the United States. Even more American radio operators were taught in the UK at a dedicated school (STS 53c) in Poundon, Buckinghamshire.

The scale of this co-operation – and, indeed, the indebtedness of OSS to the SOE – may come as a surprise to many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Most Hollywood screenwriters and, less forgivably, some military historians must shoulder the responsibility for this, having depicted major events like Operation OVERLORD as all-American actions without mentioning the presence on the Normandy battlefields of Canadian or British forces. In 2006 the balance was redressed a little when the US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) History Office published a biography of one of its most distinguished and long-serving officers, Herbert R. Brucker.1 This is of interest in the immediate context of this book because Brucker was a W/T operator who was trained by SOE for Operation JEDBURGH.

Private Herbert R. Brucker aged nineteen, US Army, 1940.

Herbert Brucker was born in Newark, New Jersey on 10 October 1921 to a French-American father and a German-American mother, but grew up in the French province of Alsace-Lorraine, which borders Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Switzerland. He was seventeen when his family brought him back to the US, and two years later, he enlisted in the army as a private soldier, long before America entered the war. Understandably, his English was not very good, but while training as a radio operator he demonstrated considerable skill in Morse code and rose to the rank of Technician/4 (T/4). When the OSS was created, he volunteered for special operations, and the combination of prior military training with fluent Morse and French made him a candidate the new agency could not ignore. In fact, he was recruited at the time of Operation JEDBURGH’s gestation, when there was pressure on OSS to find operators they were prepared to serve up to the SOE. Briscoe’s 2006 article (written a year before Brucker’s death) explains in no uncertain terms why the British were doing the training:

British SOE had been putting agents into the German-occupied countries of Europe since 1940. This was almost three years before the United States formed the Office of Strategic Services. As such, British field training for special operatives far surpassed anything that the OSS could provide. Colonel Charles Vanderblue, Chief, Special Operations Branch, OSS, knew this because he had detailed one of his training officers, Captain John Tyson, to evaluate SOE instruction. Tyson reported on 30 July 1943: ‘The training any prospective SO agent has received in our Washington schools prior to his arrival in this theater is entirely inadequate and no trainees should be considered for field operations until they have had further training in this theater, which in many cases will involve a period of three months.’

On completion of his OSS courses Brucker was sent to New York, where he boarded a troop-transporter (a converted Australian cattle boat) for an unpleasant and hazardous winter voyage across the North Atlantic. He and his fellow passengers landed in Glasgow on 23 December 1943 and headed south by train to London. On the drive to a US Army ‘Replacement Center’ they were appalled by the sight of the damage the Luftwaffe had inflicted on the capital – but they must also have noticed most of the pubs were still open. Early on 26 December, a car collected Brucker and took him to ‘a headquarters’ – presumably that of SOE F section, Norseby House, 83 Baker Street. There he was informed he had a few more days off before, on 2 January 1944, he was sent for further training.

Having been told nothing about the exact nature of his deployment, the young American protested he had already been trained by the OSS ‘and was ready for combat’. The Commander of F section, Maurice Buckmaster, told him, ‘It would simply be murder to send you on an operation with just OSS training.’ At the time, Brucker was not happy, but he was just one of sixty-five other OSS operators to endure this indignity. However, on completing the course at Special Training School 7 in Surrey (home to the Students Assessment Board) he was forced to concede that ‘SOE training was far superior. It made most of my OSS/SO stateside training seem amateurish.’ His next stop was STS 54, the Special Radio and Wireless School at Thame Park in Oxfordshire. He later described the training there in admiring terms:

The shed [one of many dotted about the grounds] was just big enough for table, chair, electric lamp, and radio transmitter and receiver. Antennas were set up to limit transmissions to a couple hundred yards … ‘We transmitted and received using the large Type 3 Mark II suitcase radio (fifty pounds with transformer), the little Type A Mark III radio, and the cigarette pack-sized “Biscuit” receiver with an earplug,’ said Brucker.2

(See Briefing Chapter 8.1 for more on the radios.)

* * *

This co-ordinated transatlantic effort bore fruit when, in the late evening of 5 June 1944 – the day before the D-Day landings in Normandy – Operation HUGH parachuted into central France near Châteauroux on the banks of the River Indre. The three-man team was the first of ninety-three units tasked to rally, train and supply resistance groups in support of the invasion. They operated under the banner of Operation JEDBURGH. Each team’s members were carefully selected from the British SOE, the US OSS and the French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations). One agent would be a British or American officer, a second would be a French interpreter and the third a radio agent, an NCO of any nationality. The wireless operator played an essential role in providing liaison with other units and communications with Special Forces HQ in London to schedule the airdrops of the arms, ammunition and explosives needed to sabotage and delay the German defences against Operation OVERLORD.

JEDBURGH teams also operated in the Low Countries (where they worked in concert with the Special Air Service) and in the Far East.

1.2 Irregular Warfare: cogs in a very large machine

After the failure of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the French Army to repulse Germany’s westward onslaught in 1940, Allied commanders looking on nervously from the other side of the Channel needed to get creative. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was originally established in 1909 with the specific objective of gathering and analysing foreign human intelligence (HUMINT). It took its present formal name after the First World War; ‘MI6’ became one of its cover names in the Second World War and stuck. SIS contributes another acronym to this story: GC&CS (the Government Code & Cypher School) at Bletchley Park was part of the same organization but specialized in the highly technical field of signals intelligence (SIGINT). It has now been renamed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

However, the SOE and the SAS were responses to the immediate circumstances of 1940. SOE was formed specifically to implement Winston Churchill’s edict to put the torch to occupied Europe. It set up shop in London’s Baker Street in 1940, and the SAS began its behind-the-lines attacks on the Afrika Korps in the Libyan Desert the following year.

For SOE the disadvantage of starting with no agents was turned into the advantage of being able to train all its recruits in its own evolving doctrine. SOE’s training manual sets out the objectives of irregular warfare, specifically: ‘to undermine enemy’s morale’; ‘to raise morale of Occupied Territories’; ‘to damage enemy’s materiel’; ‘to infiltrate weapons, explosives, sabotage equipment’; ‘to damage enemy’s man-power and communications’; and ‘to improve our own man-power and communications by infiltration of “organizers”, radio sets and operators’.

The manual goes on to state that:

All these methods are interdependent. Each one singly has its relation to our fundamental objectives; but, if each is used singly, the objectives can never be attained … You will be a cog in a very large machine whose smooth functioning depends on each separate cog carrying out its part efficiently.3

These edicts are clearly directed at students who will graduate to become members of SOE; SIS/MI6 disliked any activities that would draw attention to its spies.

1.3 Recruitment: ‘don’t want them overburdened’

In the UK, an initial obstacle to the urgent recruitment of agents was the MI6 and MI5* tradition of only employing candidates who were British born and b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Unsung Heroes?
• Chapter 1 How to Make a Radio Agent
• Chapter 2 SIS in Norway
• Chapter 3 The Solomon Islands
• Chapter 4 The Red Orchestra: Nazis versus Soviets
• Chapter 5 SOE and OSS in Sweden and Norway
• Chapter 6 France: ‘Votre place n’est pas ici!’
• Chapter 7 Signing Off
• Chapter 8 Technical Briefings
• Notes
• Bibliography and Further Reading