Behind enemy lines

Gender, passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War

Juliette Pattinson, Bertrand Taithe, Penny Summerfield, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones, Ana Carden-Coyne, Bertrand Taithe, Penny Summerfield, Peter Gatrell, Max Jones, Ana Carden-Coyne

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162236
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War. With its original interpretation of a wealth of primary sources, it examines how these ordinary, law-abiding civilians were transformed into para-military secret agents, equipped with silent killing techniques and trained in unarmed combat. This fascinating, timely and engaging book is concerned with the ways in which the SOE veterans reconstruct their wartime experiences of recruitment, training, clandestine work and for some, their captivity, focusing specifically upon the significance of gender and their attempts to pass as French civilians. This examination of the agents of an officially-sponsored insurgent organisation makes a major contribution to British socio-cultural history, war studies and gender studies and will appeal to both the general reader, as well as to those in the academic community.

1

Reconstructing the Special Operations Executive

‘If I had accommodated one man, the word would have spread around. They would have been coming over from the next mountain! [laughs] I would have had a very sore arse! [raucous laughter] The pine needles! And when would I have done the work which I had done and would those men have had respect for me? They wouldn’t have. They wouldn’t have.’¹ Sitting at the bar in the Special Forces Club near Harrods in the summer of 1999, Nancy Wake, the most highly decorated woman of the Second World War, was recalling a conversation she had had with the producer of an Australian mini-series about her wartime experiences resisting the Nazi occupation of France. Aware that Wake had spent several months living and working with seven thousand maquisards on the hillsides of the Auvergne, the producer, who was keen to inject more romance, had said: ‘You must have had a love affair in the mountains?’ Wake recognised that despite being accepted by the men any overt reminders of her femininity would result in her losing their regard and admiration. Being a woman in this very masculine environment had its complications and over several gin and tonics Wake told me about this period of her life including the time when some of her male colleagues observed her urinating and another occasion when they photographed her changing from her khaki uniform into her pink satin nightdress. She dismissed these incidents, reasoning: ‘But could you blame them? Out there? I didn’t get cross about it, but I didn’t want it. But I figured that if I had been with a bunch of women that hadn’t seen a man, maybe I would have done the same!’² Despite having climbed over the Pyrenees, been trained in silent killing techniques, parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, risked her life by undertaking sabotage missions and cycled over 500 km in 72 hours through enemy territory without any identity documentation in the hope that she would be mistaken for a young housewife out shopping, she asserted: ‘What you’ve got to remember is that I was just a normal young woman.’³

Behind enemy lines is about the extraordinary experiences of ordinary men and women like Wake who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War. The book draws upon personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film to examine how these law-abiding civilians were transformed into paramilitary secret agents. It is concerned with the ways in which the SOE veterans reconstruct their wartime experiences of recruitment, training, clandestine work and for some their captivity, focusing specifically upon the significance of gender and their attempts to pass as French civilians.

This chapter introduces the organisation, discusses the publicity that the SOE has generated both in print and on screen, situates the book within the broader debates around British women’s wartime contributions and the emerging literature on masculinity and outlines the book’s conceptual framework by explaining the theories of ‘passing’ and ‘performance’.

What was the SOE?

In 1938, a clandestine organisation called Section D was created, so called because of the ‘destruction’ caused by sabotage and subversion undertaken in the Balkans. In the summer of 1939, MI R (Military Intelligence, Research) concluded that guerrilla warfare could assist in diverting enemy troops if used in conjunction with the regular armed forces. Following the Nazi ‘blitzkrieg’ of the Low Countries, the withdrawal of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) from Dunkirk and the capitulation of France, the new War Cabinet under Winston Churchill agreed to afford a higher priority to acts of sabotage and subversion. On 27 May 1940, they agreed to a restructuring of the bodies concerned with subversive activities, which led to the establishment of the Special Operations Executive on 1 July. A War Cabinet memorandum dated 19 July 1940 noted: ‘A new organisation shall be established to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas. This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive.’⁴ The new strategy was fuelled by Churchill’s memories of quasi-guerrilla fighting on the north-west frontier and in South Africa, as well as by the success of T. E. Lawrence who had demonstrated the possibilities of irregular warfare. Sabotage and subversion were thus given increased prominence in Churchill’s war strategy: ‘We regard this form of activity as of the very highest importance. A special organisation will be required and plans to put these operations into effect should be prepared, and all the necessary preparations and training should be proceeded with as a matter of urgency.’⁵

The SOE was organised according to territories, with each country having its own section and staff. France was unique in that it was comprised of not one but four sections: F (which was independent of de Gaulle and is the focus of this book), RF (the Gaullist section), EU/P (Poles in France) and D/F (escape lines and clandestine communications). F Section built up a network of independent réseaux or circuits throughout France, incorporating an organiser who was responsible for building up the resistance group, an arms instructor or saboteur whose job it was to train new recruits and plan and conduct sabotage missions, a wireless operator who regularly contacted the base stations to arrange the dropping of supplies and an agent de liaison or courier who undertook a wide variety of tasks, such as conveying weapons, passing messages from one resister to another and locating dropping grounds. Each circuit was given a name, usually that of an occupation, such as SALESMAN or HEADMASTER, and they were to be independent of neighbouring groups. In total, 480 British agents were sent to France by F Section. Despite heavy losses and German penetration, F Section agents played an important role increasing the pace of resistance against the Nazi regime by recruiting, training and arming resisters, by establishing communication networks, by arranging parachute drops and, especially in the run-up to D-Day, by conducting sabotage operations which delayed German troops getting to the Normandy beaches.

Post-war representations of the SOE

These clandestine activities of SOE operatives were being made public even before the Second World War had ended. Newspaper articles told of the exploits of the two female agents, Sonya Butt and Paddy O’Sullivan, who had been publicly named. The Sunday Express for example, ran an article on 11 March 1945 entitled ‘WAAF girls parachuted into France’.⁶ Such articles provided positive accounts of women’s capabilities and efforts in helping to win the war, which mirrored the image presented in newsreels including Jane Brown changes her job⁷ and Nightshift,⁸ films such as The Gentle Sex⁹ and Millions Like Us,¹⁰ propaganda posters such as ‘Serve in the WAAF with the men who fly’,¹¹ as well as adverts such as one for Weetabix which depicts a female barrage balloonist and the by-line ‘On a man’s job and equal to it’.¹² As well as encouraging women to enlist (or buy their product), these different forms of media emphasised that despite undertaking previously male roles in industry and in the services, and being clothed in uniforms and overalls which had a distinct gender tag, women had retained their femininity. Hence, newsreels showed factory women clamouring to get in front of the mirror to put on their make-up, films demonstrated that female war workers were still attractive to men by incorporating a love interest and both posters and adverts used illustrations of young, attractive women. It was especially important to reassure the public that the women who had engaged in clandestine warfare, undoubtedly the most masculine of roles given their proximity to combat, were feminine. The Sunday Express article, for example, asserted: ‘The interesting thing about these girls is that they are not hearty and horsey young women with masculine chins. They are pretty young girls who would look demure and sweet in crinoline.’¹³ This article appeared before the horrors of concentration camps were widely known and there is certainly a rather naive, condescending tone given that these women had risked torture, deportation and execution.

After the war when the public knew about the camps, articles on the fate of the missing female agents who had failed to return from Germany began to appear, prompted by Violette Szabo’s father, Charles Bushell, who was publicly demanding to know what had happened to his daughter.¹⁴ The post-war trials of concentration camp staff brought further coverage of the female agents of this clandestine organisation. The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, for example, ran an article on 30 May 1946 with the headline ‘British women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Reconstructing the Special Operations Executive
• 2 ‘To pass as a native’: recruiting for operations in France
• 3 ‘Taught how to play a part’: training agents for undercover work
• 4 ‘A jittery business’: representations of anxiousness in personal and filmic accounts
• 5 ‘Living a different life’: performing ‘heroic’ and ‘stoic’ masculinities
• 6 ‘The best disguise’: performing femininities for clandestine purposes
• 7 ‘Pretending at once’: passing performances in captivity
• 8 ‘So many happy memories’: demobilisation and the return to civvy street
• Appendix: biographies of interviewees
• Bibliography
• Index