Robin Cross: The triumphs & disasters of Churchill's secret army
Robin Cross is a television documentary writer and historian, who has written extensively on military history and World War II, including Warfare: A chronological history (1991) and Fallen Eagle (1995).
The Special Operations Executive
In
the mid-summer of 1940, Nazi Germany dominated western Europe. Britain's
pre-war intelligence networks in Nazi-occupied Europe had been rolled
up and the nation was facing invasion. But plans were already being laid
to strike back. Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued an order to 'set
Europe ablaze'. The result was the formation, in July 1940, of the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), with headquarters in London's Baker Street.
SOE was tasked with supporting the European resistance movements, building arms stores, gathering intelligence and planning sabotage and escape lines. Eventually over 11,000 agents would be engaged on these tasks, not only in Europe but also in Africa and the Far East.
From the start, however, SOE was viewed with suspicion by the British military and rival branches of intelligence. The pre-war Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) feared that its own intelligence-gathering operations would be compromised by SOE's high profile and initially amateurish approach. As a result, a bitter 'turf war' between SIS and the 'Baker Street Irregulars' broke out. SOE was also excluded from the 'Ultra' secret, the wartime decryption of German military and intelligence codes carried out at Bletchley Park.
In 1942, Britain's American ally established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was modelled on SOE. Just before D-Day in June 1944, the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, General Dwight D Eisenhower, brought the two organisations together as the Allied Special Forces.
SOE was disbanded in January 1946. However, much of the expertise it had gained in the conflict was employed by MI6 in the early phases of the Cold War when a series of operations was mounted behind the Iron Curtain.
SOE's triumphs
SOE took some time to establish itself, but in the mid- and late-war years, under the leadership of Major-General Colin Gubbins, it undertook many successful operations.
A blow against Rommel In November 1942, 180kg (400lb) of plastic explosive was used by an SOE team, aided by Greek partisans, to blow up the Gorgopotamos bridge on Greece's Salonika-Athens railway. This had been carrying vital supplies for Rommel's Afrika Korps in the desert war against the British 8th Army.
Heavy water into the deep One of the key Allied sabotage operations of World War II was mounted by a Norwegian SOE team. At the Vermork plant in occupied Norway, the Germans were manufacturing heavy water, which the Allies feared would be used in the development of an atomic bomb. After an initial SOE raid followed by an Allied bombing attack on the plant, the job was finished by the Norwegian resistance and SOE men led by Knut Haukelid. In February 1944, the Germans tried to move their remaining heavy water by train to the Fatherland. Haukelid's men placed a time bomb on the ferry carrying the drums of heavy water across Lake Tinnsjo and sent the cargo to the bottom at the deepest point.
A fishing expedition In August 1943, Captain Ivan Lyon commanded a heavily armed native fishing boat – the Krate – on a two-month cruise that took him and his 14 SOE companions from Australia deep into Japanese-controlled waters. In 'Operation Jaywick', the men of the Krate sank or disabled seven enemy ships totalling some 38,000 tons. A year later, Lyon and his party were lost on a similar expedition.
In disguise In August 1944, two SOE agents on the German-occupied island of Crete in the Mediterranean kidnapped German divisional commander General Karl Kreipe. Wearing German uniform, Patrick Leigh Fermor (later famous as a travel writer) and Stanley Moss drove Kreipe in his own car past 24 guard posts before making off into the mountains. The general was eventually smuggled to Cairo by submarine.
Das Reich derailed After the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, it was imperative to prevent the Germans from rushing armoured reinforcements to their ring around the bridgehead. SOE agent Tony Brooks – who had created a network codenamed 'Pimento' among rail workers in southern France – played an important part in thwarting the Germans. His network disabled many of the flatbeds on which the Germans planned to speed the tanks of the élite Das Reich division to northern France. Forced to travel by road, and harried all the way by the French resistance, Das Reich took weeks rather than days to arrive in the combat zone.
SOE's disasters
The successes of the SOE went hand in hand with a string of failures that periodically threatened to ring down the curtain on the 'Baker Street Irregulars'. The greatest threat to SOE's operational integrity was posed by enemy infiltration, and this occurred on many occasions. The most common reasons were lax security combined with the growth of a network to an unwieldy and unmanageable size. Danger always loomed when this stage was reached.
Here are two examples of the kind of disaster that almost brought SOE to its knees ...
Sacrifice of 52 agents In 1942, Hermann Giskes – a German intelligence officer in occupied Holland – persuaded a captured SOE wireless operator, Hubert Lauwers, to transmit to London signals given him by the Germans. Lauwers did so but deliberately left out his security check (an agreed misspelling devised precisely for such an eventuality). But London ignored the mistake, and instead answered requests to drop ever more agents into Holland, where they were met by German intelligence officers. In 1942-3, 52 agents were delivered into German hands, along with great quantities of arms and ammunition. It was only when two captured Dutch SOE agents escaped to Britain to tell their tale that the tragedy was eventually brought to an end. The debacle also nearly brought an end to SOE.
The double agent In 1943, the entire 'Prosper' network in France, run by SOE agent Francis Suttill, was rounded up by German intelligence. Hundreds were sent to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps, and Suttill was executed. The man responsible for this catastrophe was Henri Dericourt, an SOE man and Prosper's movements officer, responsible for flying the network's personnel in and out of France. But Dericourt was a double agent, working for German security, the SD, probably to protect his wife. Dericourt shared his knowledge of SOE, and of Prosper's flights, with the Germans. It has also been alleged that Dericourt was an informant for SOE's suspicious rival, the SIS. Early in 1944, Dericourt and his wife were recalled to England – his SOE days were over. Two years after the end of the war, he was tried in France for treason but was acquitted and hailed as a hero of the resistance. SIS men had given evidence at the trial. Dericourt died several years later in an air crash in south-east Asia, taking his secrets to the grave.
