Shadow Warriors of World War II

The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE

Gordon Thomas, Greg Lewis

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781613730867
• eBook ISBN: 9781613730898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

They were told that the only crime they must never commit was to be caught. Women of enormous cunning and strength of will, the Shadow Warriors' stories have remained largely untold until now. In a dramatic tale of espionage and conspiracy in World War II,  Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE unveils the history of the courageous women who volunteered to work behind enemy lines.
            Sent into Nazi-occupied Europe by the United States' Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), these women helped establish a web of resistance groups across the continent. Their extraordinary heroism, initiative, and resourcefulness contributed to the Allied breakout of the Normandy beachheads and to the eventual victory over Hitler. Young and daring, the female agents accepted that they could be captured, tortured, or killed, but others were always readied to take their place. So effective did the female agents become in their efforts, the Germans placed a price of a million francs on the heads of operatives who were successfully disrupting their troops.

1

By All Means Possible

SINCE DAWN, BRIGADIER COLIN Gubbins had supervised the SOE’s move into its headquarters at 64 Baker Street on July 15, 1941.

Born in 1896, his mother had given him a strong sense of duty and a piety governed by the demands of a responsive conscience. With it came his father’s sense of justice, logic, and integrity in an orderly mind. War and action had filled Gubbins’s own military life, during which he had learned that “thinking first before applying action was essential.” His deep-set eyes and voice warned all comers not to cross him. They never lost their look of searching for information. He gave the impression that all he heard he would keep secret, unless it was an essential ingredient for the policies that guided both diplomacy and war and served the needs of the decision makers. Churchill was always the first to hear his latest secret—not something from the nonstop gossip mill in Whitehall but information that could involve a current event.

On that summer’s day Gubbins went to his office on the fifth floor and stared out of a window at the ugly scars of a city at war—gaps in a row of buildings where a bombed shop or a café had stood, streets with sandbagged guard posts, and signs with arrows pointing to the nearest air raid shelter. In the sky hung barrage balloons to intercept the Luftwaffe if the bombers made another visit to be met by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfires and the antiaircraft batteries stationed along the flight paths the Germans were known to use.

It would be after dark when the bombers came. By then the army engineers had promised Gubbins they would have finished installing a switchboard and checked its two hundred lines. He calculated the building would eventually need that number of phones by the time the SOE’s training schools and other facilities had opened across Britain. Already in London twenty-five offices were staffed by men who had served under him in Poland and Norway. He had selected them with the help of Sir Hastings Ismay, the chief of staff, when unhelpful Whitehall departments had challenged their transfer into the SOE’s headquarters.

Employees entered through an entrance with a black marble plaque mounted on the wall bearing the words INTER SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. Each person had signed the Official Secrets Act and been told that secrecy was their first duty; the smallest breach of the Act would result in arrest, trial, and imprisonment. In the creaky elevator that took staff up to their offices was a framed reminder. It depicted a finger on lips and the words NO TALK. NO SURPRISE. It was posted in every corridor and on the walls of every office.

To reinforce the need for secrecy, Gubbins created cover names for staff to use in any of their dealings with the War Office, Admiralty, or Air Ministry. They were to say they were calling from either the Joint Technical Board, the Special Training Headquarters, or the one Gubbins most enjoyed, the MO1 (SP), which staff joked stood for “Mysterious Operations in Secret Places,” or simply MOSP. By the end of the war some people in high places in military departments had never discovered what the acronym stood for.

Winston Churchill had defined the MOSP as “tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent.”

To them he added the words of his favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, the Chinese expert on guerrilla war: “The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places. And when he prepares everywhere he will be weak everywhere.” Both the MOSP and Tzu’s words became the battlecry for the SOE.

The prime minister had sent both quotations to Gubbins. On that hot, somnolent July day, when the move into Baker Street was completed, he knew special means would be essential to defeating Adolf Hitler and the million German soldiers manning fortified defenses along the French coast, which Hitler boasted was the strongest since the Great Wall of China. He called it the Atlantic Wall.

The SOE would operate beyond it to provide the French people with their liberty, the first step to lifting the Nazi yoke off the rest of Europe.

Gubbins read every MI5 vetting report on his staff. A number were nationals of occupied countries who had fled to England. Their language skills and geographical knowledge of their countries made them suitable recruits.

But Britain was increasingly gripped by spy mania. B Section, the counterespionage department of MI5 headed by Guy Liddell, a cello-playing veteran spy hunter, faced a mounting task of checking reports that the nation was riddled with German spies who were embedded to prepare for Hitler’s invasion. The fear was fuelled by spy novels, tabloid newspapers, and an obsession that the Kaiser had sent spies to England in the First World War and that these had remained. They were said to be disguised as nuns, traveling salesmen, bank managers, and “those gentlemen who are the best behaved in your town,” the Sunday Express wrote. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, insisted, “You can identify a spy from the way he walks—but only from behind.”

“There is a class of people prone to spy mania,” Winston Churchill told Gubbins, who dismissed it as a “Fifth Column neurosis.” An ice cream vendor was poisoning his cones. A psychiatrist at a mental hospital was training patients to kill politicians. There wasn’t a day when reports of nefarious activities didn’t land on Gubbins’s desk. They became stories to lighten his morning staff meetings.

Gubbins brought Margaret Jackson and Vera Long with him to Baker Street, both of whom had been his secretaries since the outbreak of war. He told Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic war, who was responsible for SOE salaries, that he wanted them paid on the same scale as lieutenants in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. In staff relations, as with so much else, Gubbins was ahead of his time.

In the First World War the FANYs were known as the first arrivals as they collected the wounded from the battlefields and drove them to the French coast to be brought back to England.

Gubbins decided that all female staff in the SOE would wear FANY uniforms. Those who would be sent into France would not wear them but would hold an officer’s commission and their salaries would be banked for them in London until their return. However, he knew if they were captured they would almost certainly be executed as spies.

He had the gift of inspiring confidence that amounted to devotion, and both his secretaries typed some of the most secret communications of the war. More than once he asked either Jackson or Long to summarize important decisions made at meetings. Dressed in their FANY uniforms he would take them in turn to the War Office, or another Whitehall ministry meeting, to sit beside him and take perfect shorthand notes, which would be transcribed that night before they returned to their apartments farther down Baker Street. Next morning they would be at their desks in his outer office by 6:00 AM.

His workload grew, increased by the responsibility he carried for the lives of hundreds. At times his frustration boiled over, an anger that had started when MI6 had brought General Charles de Gaulle out of France in 1940 on Churchill’s orders. Since then de Gaulle had been approaching Frenchmen living in Britain to join the Free French force he was forming.

At their first meeting, de Gaulle insisted to Gubbins his movement would become a secret army into which the SOE’s French Section—F Section—should be absorbed. He reminded Gubbins he had come to London not only to establish a government-in-exile but also to use his “connections and reputation in France to prepare organized resistance.” The Free French would be the vanguard. Gubbins replied that while the movement was welcome to work alongside the SOE, there was no possibility of F Section being absorbed under the general’s command.

Gubbins decided he would make a change of the leadership of F Section. Its section head, H. R. Marriott, had developed “a false belief in his indispensability.” Gubbins replaced him with Maurice Buckmaster.

Buckmaster was forty-one years old, a tall, thin man with a slight stoop. He had gone to Eton College, one of England’s oldest and most prestigious prep schools, and had won a scholarship to study classics at Oxford. Afterward he went to France on a cycling tour and ended up on the staff of Le Matin, a Paris newspaper, as a reporter. Other jobs followed, including working in a public relations company that handled the accounts for the Ford Motor Company in France. In 1938 he returned to England and enlisted in the British Army. His knowledge of French led to him serving as an intelligence officer in the British Expeditionary Force sent to confront the German offensive sweeping across France. He was among the last units to be shipped out of Dunkirk and back to England in June 1940. He heard that a new organization was being created that needed French speakers with a military background.

“I called the War Office. Next day, I was told to come to London for an interview. It was with Gubbins. That’s how I joined SOE on March 17, 1941. Gubbins placed me in the Belgium section. Five months later I was head of F Section,” Buckmaster recalled.

Buckmaster’s appointment resulted in the section becoming the first to send women behind enemy lines.

Gubbins spent time choosing heads of sections. Though all had undergone positive vetting by MI5, he decided selection would not be based on a candidate’s family connections or school background, as was so often the route used by the armed forces.

With the patience of a headhunter, he made discreet inquiries about the service records of those whose names he had been given by members of his own network of military contacts. He had told them he was looking for men who had some experience in guerrilla tactics. Ideally they would have been at the Special Training Centre for commandos at Lochailort in the Scottish Highlands. Others had served under him in Poland or Norway.

Fluent in French, Polish, and Dutch, Gubbins tested each applicant’s language skill, then talked about their family, military background, and any special qualities he noticed in their military records. Once satisfied, he offered a candidate a post as head of a section and told him to sign the Official Secrets Act.

The men and women selected as agents underwent three weeks of assessment in paramilitary training and psychological tests and a further five weeks of training in Lochailort. Courses included handling a range of explosives and learning the technique of silent killing with a dagger. Ten inches long, the double-edged razor-sharp blade was designed to slice through a person’s throat in one stroke. Mannequins were used for practice. Those who showed an aptitude for Morse code were sent to a specialist training school to perfect their skills in sending encoded messages.

Field agents would be formed into small groups, known as circuits. Each would have an organizer who would recruit local resisters and be responsible for arming them and teaching them the techniques they had learned in the training school. Each circuit would have a courier to act as the link with other groups of local resisters and circuits.

“A courier will be constantly on the move, often by bicycle or train, traveling considerable distance to deliver messages. They run the risk of being caught by German patrols. A wireless operator must never operate a set for more than twenty minutes as the Germans have powerful detection vans which can detect Morse signals,” Gubbins said.

The briefing ended with the impact of his next words.

I have been given by Churchill authority for SOE to send women as couriers and wireless operators into France. Women are less likely to be bodily searched and their messages can be hidden in their underwear. Because many are trained typists they will also make better wireless operators. They will all be assigned to the French Section. The Geneva Convention of 1929 offers no protection to women combatants, let alone for the war which SOE will conduct.

He then told them how agents would be recruited.

Selwyn Jepson was forty years old when Gubbins appointed him for the delicate, serious, and individual work of choosing secret agents. With dark, wavy hair and a voice that moved conversations along at its own pace with a nod or smile, the post fit Jepson’s background. He was born in 1899 into a middle-class, respected London family. His father was a thriller writer and his mother a noted musician; his sister was a serious novelist, and a cousin, Fay Weldon, became a celebrated author. Jepson himself was a successful writer of books and screenplays.

Only Gubbins and Buckmaster knew why Jepson needed separate offices in different parts of London. One was where he interviewed men, and the other was where he selected women to be trained. None of the interviewees were ever brought to SOE headquarters in case they heard or saw something they did not need to know.

Jepson had his own office at SOE headquarters too, on the same floor as Gubbins. Within the building he became known as Captain Mosp, the SOE’s chief recruiter for mysterious operations. His books had pride of place on a shelf behind his desk in his fifth-floor office. They had titles like Puppets of Fate, The King’s Red-Haired Girl, and The Death Gong. Twenty-five of his thrillers had been published on both sides of the Atlantic. His screenplays had been turned into Hollywood movies like Kiss Me Goodbye, The Love Test, and Money Mad.

Jepson’s office allowed him to look down on Baker Street as SOE staff came in and out of the building. Some worked in offices along the corridor, and he exchanged pleasantries with them as they rode up in the elevator. The thin man with the bowlegs of a jockey; a tall figure in an RAF uniform who addressed anyone as “hullo, old cock”; a fat man with an engaging smile, which shone through discolored teeth; a fair-haired girl in a FANY uniform, one of the secretaries—Jepson had come to know them, the men by their frequently conspiratorial air, the women with warm smiles. Like him they arrived early for work and left late in the evening.

In between interviews Jeps...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 By All Means Possible
• 2 The Clouds of War
• 3 The Magician’s Airfield
• 4 Slipping into the Shadows
• 5 Enigma in the Suitcase
• 6 Agents by Moonlight
• 7 Donovan’s Decision
• 8 The Russians Arrive
• 9 Betrayed!
• 10 They Serve Alone
• 11 Out of the Shadows
• 12 Afterward
• Glossary of Acronyms
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors