'Secret War'
An excerpt from the most authoritative history of the Special Operations Executive, by intelligence insider Nigel West, first published in 1992
Recent posts relating to the Special Operations Executive, including the departure of Noor Inayat Khan, the capture of Jean Moulin, the hunt for Tito and SOE agents in Yugoslavia and the work of the Stockbroker circuit have attracted a lot of attention. So this week’s excerpt comes from a history first published some time ago Secret War The Story of the SOE, Britain’s Wartime Sabotage Organisation.
Nigel West has written widely on espionage and intelligence issues, his books being so extremely well-sourced that he has been described as the “unofficial historian of the secret services”. His history of the SOE is no exception. Although there remain many mysteries surrounding the organisation, and many related files remain classified, this is the most comprehensive account available to the public.
Eighty years ago this month the PROSPER network in the Paris region began unravelling, with catastrophic consequences. The following excerpt looks at the casualty rate amongst SOE agents in France and provides some context on why “F Section” in particular struggled:
While SOE was never far from contention, interest centred on what had occurred in France for three reasons. Firstly, the very large number of casualties suffered there during the occupation. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but there is broad agreement on the numbers of those despatched to France by SOE. Professor Foot maintains that F Section's attrition rate was an acceptable twenty-five per cent and states that F Section sent over about 'four hundred-odd' agents, which amount to about a quarter of the total number despatched by SOE to France.
Cookridge refers to a total of 480 agents sent to France, with 130 captured, of whom twenty-six survived the experience. The French historian, Henri Michel, uses larger numbers, but agrees that 1,600 agents in all were infiltrated.
These figures coincide with Bourne- Paterson's official ledger, which states that 'F Section in all sent 393 officers to France. 119 of these were arrested or killed by the Germans. Of those arrested only seventeen came back.' According to more recent research, all these figures are underestimates, and 152 SOE-trained agents and their fates are detailed on pages 122-29.
Given the paucity of records, it is almost impossible to determine exactly how many agents were sent to France and how many were captured. However, what is certain is that the number of casualties suffered by SOE circuits (rather than simply the agents who had undergone training in England and had been despatched) was far higher than the figures used by Foot or Cookridge.
SOE personnel primarily fulfilled the role of organisers, recruiters, instructors and wireless operators, leaving the tasks of couriers, safe-house minders, quartermasters, target surveyors and saboteurs to other members of the nearly one hundred independent circuits of reseaux set up before the Liberation.
Although most of the networks were quite small, some had several thousand members. And when they collapsed through enemy activity, there were invariably dozens, if not hundreds, of arrests as a consequence. Thus, ordinary members of the resistance, who had not been to England but had volunteered their services and had participated in SOE-run operations, using weapons and equipment supplied by the organisation, often fell victim to enemy action one way or another, but appear to have been omitted from the calculation of official SOE casualties.
The best example is that of PROSPER, a huge organisation which expanded with great rapidity and, as we shall see, collapsed with the loss of twelve SOE agents. By June 1943 this enormous circuit covered twelve departements, boasted thirty-three landing grounds and had received no less than 254 containers of stores. It reached a peak of activity in mid-June 1943, when it broke all records and received a further 190 containers in a period of nine days, and thereby attracted the enemy's attention.
Some of those directly involved estimate that, apart from the SOE-trained personnel, there were around fifteen hundred others implicated and arrested in this one tragic episode.
What makes the whole subject so sensitive is the performance of SOE itself, an organisation whose members were denigrated as mere amateurs by the self-styled professionals in SIS. Certainly the headquarters in Baker Street was staffed largely by enthusiastic volunteers, only a few of whom had any real knowledge, understanding or training in clandestine operations.
Maurice Buckmaster, the third successive head of F Section, who took over from Henry Marriott in September 1941, had only been in SOE since March and for part of that time had worked in the Belgian Section. Apart from having attended the standard War Office intelligence course at Minley Manor, he had no previous experience in secret operations, yet he was expected to recruit suitable French-speaking British subjects and train them to 'set Europe ablaze'. His transfer back to F Section had happened when the Section had been paralysed by the internal dissension that had seen the departure of Cadett, as well as Marriott and David Keswick.
When Buckmaster had first gone to work at Baker Street, he had expressed surprise to Hambro that as yet not a single agent had been sent into the field. In the six months which had elapsed since his recruitment he found that not much had changed in F Section.
Recently four agents had been sent into the field, but in September there was still no news of them. His headquarters staff, initially at least, consisted of just seven officers and his personal assistant, of whom only one had actually seen France during the occupation, to handle recruiting, information, planning, operations, escorting, signals and briefing. Prior to Buckmaster's appointment they had succeeded in sending only about twenty agents into the unoccupied zone, with instructions to work their way north.
A year later most of these agents were either in prison or on the run, and of the four who had been entrusted with wireless transmitters, only two had survived. No wonder then that Buckmaster found that 'questions were being asked by inquisitive generals about the usefulness of our organisation and the efficiency of its staff '.
Fortunately Ben Cowburn (Benoit, the Lancashire oil engineer who had been dropped near Chateauroux on 6/7 September) was to supply some useful information about oil storage depots, which Buckmaster was to circulate in an attempt to improve F Section's standing, but the acquisition of this type of target intelligence, though helpful to the RAF, was not really SOE's responsibility.
Buckmaster's task was not an easy one. As well as having to restore order to F Section's management in Baker Street, he had to endure obstruction from SIS and open hostility from tire Free French RF Section. He recalls that:
The conflict between de Gaulle's reseaux and ours was also a factor which had to be taken into account when we were planning operations in France. We did our best to turn these rivalries to good purpose and we hoped that the competitive element in our relations would lead each group to outdo the other. This may not have been he ideal way of running things, but it did make the best of conditions as they actually were. What liaison did exist between us at Baker Street and de Gaulle was conducted unofficially by individual officers whose tact and charm was the only weapon against jealousy and intransigence.
Another cause of controversy in SOE's operations was the behaviour of the French, for the success achieved by the Germans in penetrating the resistance circuits was greatly enhanced by collaborators, who actively helped the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst. This is another reason for the controversy surrounding SOE's performance in France.
The sheer scale of the collaboration on the part of the French is breathtaking, as is the hypocrisy with which the subject is handled in France. As the Comte de Marenches remarked, having escaped the occupation and spent much of the war in de Gaulle's intelligence service in London, 'what most surprised me when I returned to France at the end of the war was to discover that forty-two million people had fought for the Resistance'.
In fact, after the war there were no less than 118,000 prosecutions for collaborating with the enemy, of which about 50,000 actually went to court; 38,000 Frenchmen and women were convicted, of whom no less than 791 were executed. A much greater number had their death sentences commuted. Even half a century after these events, the whole issue is still the cause of much bitterness in France.
The Germans used collaborators on an individual basis, assigning them missions to infiltrate targeted reseaux, or deployed them as agents provocateurs, sending them down escape routes pretending to be agents or airmen on the run. Whole teams of collaborators, like the notorious Bony-Lafont gang in Paris, were signed up by the SD and put to work as paramilitaries, keeping suspects under surveillance, participating in arrests and even staffing the notorious SD interrogation centre at 82 Avenue Foch and the Gestapo's prison at 13 bis Place des Etats-Unis. Led by an ex-police inspector, Pierre Bony, and a notorious criminal, Henri Lafont, the gang penetrated several circuits and were responsible for entrapping hundreds of resistant.
The whole subject of French complicity with the occupation authorities, and the enthusiastic support given to them by the police and, most notoriously, the Vichy Milice, is still a sensitive topic in France. So too is the role of the Communist resistance cells, which, as we shall see, were to complicate the scene further. Buckmaster's deputy and Planning Officer, R.A. Bourne-Paterson, was to have some very trenchant remarks about 'the political distractions which tended to assail all purely French Resistance movements', but political expediency ensured that they were never published.
This excerpt from Secret War The Story of the SOE, Britain’s Wartime Sabotage Organisation appears by kind permission of Pen & Sword Books Ltd. Copyright remains with the author.
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