TLS on Speical Operations Executive

The Secret War for SOE agents
The memoirs of those in the British Special Operations Executive come to light

by Matthew Cobb

The British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which had 5,000 agents operating in both the European and Asian theatres during the Second World War, was renowned for its cheerful amateurism, a kind of “make-do-and-mend” approach to sabotage and subversion. In 1940, Basil Davidson was dispatched to Hungary: “I was sent to run a local news agency and also to set up a clandestine printing press. And of course I hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to do that”. Julian Amery, meanwhile, recalled that “within a fortnight I was invited, aged just over 21, to start a revolution in Albania against the Italians and given a budget of £50,000 to get on with it.”
After the war, SOE was wound up and its very existence was officially denied. However, in the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan commissioned an official history of SOE’s work in France, to be written by a Manchester University lecturer, M. R. D. Foot. SOE in France (1966) was eventually followed by SOE: The Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946 (1984) and by SOE in the Low Countries (2001). In the late 1940s, a “secret” history of SOE had been written by William Mackenzie, which was eventually published in 2000, with many sections blanked out “in the interests of national security”. Until the end of the twentieth century, the SOE archives – or what was left of them after various waves of “weeding”, convenient disappearances and the odd fire – were closed, or accessible only with the agreement of a gatekeeper, the “SOE adviser”. Finally, over sixty years after the events, what remains of this invaluable material has been transferred to the National Archives in Kew, although access to some personal files requires a Freedom of Information request, and may be withheld until the 100th anniversary of the person’s birth.
As well as the dry detail of individuals’ recruitment, security checks and eventual demobilization, the archives also contain large numbers of personal debriefings, in which agents describe their missions. The power of such eyewitness accounts has been exploited by Roderick Bailey, who has trawled through hundreds of testimonies held by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) to present an agent’s-eye view in Forgotten Voices of the Secret War. Like other books in the IWM’s Forgotten Voices series, Bailey’s inspiring book is arranged both chronologically and thematically, providing a patchwork portrait of what it was like to be involved in some of the most daring missions of the war.

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As the war continued, SOE developed equipment that was a mixture of Heath Robinson and James Bond. There were bombs hidden in dried horse dung, miniature collapsible motorbikes, and electric torches that could be slipped into an enemy soldier’s pocket, and would explode when the haplessly curious victim tried to turn it on. How many of these ingenious devices were actually used is unclear: sadly, none of the recollections of SOE work in the Far East suggests agents really wore rubber soles in the shape of naked feet – these were supposed literally to leave the impression of locals, not soldiers. One set of weapons was designed for what would have been the British Resistance had the Nazis invaded – Andrew Croft recalls that as well as grenades and “sticky bombs”, some of his comrades favoured less orthodox methods: “Peter Fleming was in Kent. He was very keen on poisoned arrows”. SOE training was more serious than these somewhat insouciant memories suggest. In the Scottish Highlands, potential recruits were trained in explosives manipulation and lethal hand-to-hand fighting, followed by parachuting at Ringway airfield near Manchester. They were woken in the middle of the night by soldiers dressed as Nazis, who would then interrogate them, and there was a final phase when trainees were given a fake spying mission in the UK and were in turn spied on to check their progress. Although Forgotten Voices contains no overall description, accounts of SOE training and weaponry, accompanied by contemporary photographs and modern drawings, including illustrations of the particularly vicious Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, are to be found in Terry Crowdy’s excellent introduction to the subject, SOE Agent.
As the SOE trainee Robert Sheppard put it, the aim of this training was twofold: “We were to be gangsters with the knowledge of gangsters but with the behaviour, if possible, of gentlemen”. Sometimes, it was simply not possible to be a gentleman, as Alf Holdham found when he was forced to execute a Frenchwoman who had been spying on his group. She cried “Vivent les anglais” before she was shot.
Although SOE agents were inevitably reliant on Resistance forces to be effective, few of the accounts in Forgotten Voices give any sense of the local people who were involved, or of the extent to which SOE actually controlled them. The SOE circuit organizer Ben Cowburn is one of the few to attempt to explain why SOE had such an aura with the Resistance. He emphasizes the importance of radio, of concrete proof of contact with London – he could get the BBC to broadcast a phrase given by his Resistance contact, and even more important, summon up RAF supply drops. This, he convincingly argues, was a real “manifestation of power: this thing had come through, it had roared through the German defences and everything, and it was they that had ordered it. And you were somebody from then on”.
While eyewitness accounts have an intuitive power, they need to be read with a sceptical eye, and where possible confronted with contemporary documentary evidence – after all, how do we know they are accurate? For example, Cyril Watney recalls how a local farmer convinced French police officers not to arrest SOE agents by threatening to cut off their supply of black market cheese. This story is so good it should be true, but did it actually happen – and how could we know? In another version of the story, cited by Nigel Perrin, Watney claimed that the decisive product was milk. Does this difference matter? Histories of the French Resistance have had to come to terms with the fact that there can be striking conflicts between what participants remember happening and what archival evidence suggests actually occurred, but there is nothing in Forgotten Voices to suggest that such contradictions are even possible.
Eyewitness accounts are further limited by the fact that individuals rarely have a grasp of the Big Picture. One striking example of this is the brief episode in September 1944, when Charles de Gaulle effectively chased all SOE agents out of liberated France. Although several of the witnesses in Forgotten Voices were the targets of this policy, none of them attempts to provide an explanation, although the fact that Roger Landes pulled a gun on the French war minister cannot have helped matters. One of the disadvantages of the book’s format is that the questions that put such historical evidence into context are left unstated and unexplored.
Similar problems can arise when a biography is based largely on the subject’s memoirs. At the beginning of his book about one of the bravest SOE agents, Harry Peulevé, Nigel Perrin says he will let Peulevé “tell his own story”. Using Peulevé’s unpublished memoirs, Perrin vividly recreates the emotions and circumstances that led Peulevé to volunteer for SOE, without knowing what exactly he was doing. Having experienced what he later described as “the degradation and humiliation” of fleeing France as a member of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, Peulevé found work at Bury Technical College training wireless operators. Hearing a BBC report of a commando raid on the French coast in 1942, he phoned up the War Office and asked to help out on similar missions. After an interview with Lewis Gielgud (the actor’s brother), Peulevé was sent off on the SOE training course without even knowing what unit he was proposing to join. According to his memoir, Peulevé was determined to burn away the shame he felt after Dunkirk, and to prove his courage. This he did in spades. His first mission ended in disaster as he shattered his leg parachuting into France, and then found himself dependent on the erratic help of the semi-fictitious CARTE Resistance circuit on the Côte d’Azur. His leg took months to heal, and having completely lost faith in CARTE, Peulevé escaped across the Pyrenees, hobbling with the aid of sticks. After a period in a Spanish jail, Peulevé eventually managed to return to the UK. Five months later, he was back in France, making his way down to the Dordogne, where he would play a vital role in the author circuit. While he was on this mission, Peulevé, like Alf Holdham, was faced with a life and death decision. A man who claimed to be an evading Allied airman turned out to be a German infiltrator: Peulevé had him executed. In describing this scene in his memoir, Peulevé says this caused him to question the whole point of the war – “I had to summarily decide on the death of . . . a perfectly good human being, for the simple reason that he was born in a different geographical location to myself”. To Peulevé’s distress, the body was allegedly packaged up and sent to Gestapo HQ in Paris.
By choosing simply to tell Peulevé’s story rather than to contextualize it, Perrin misses some important questions – how many other agents reported such feelings? Are they even a genuine reflection of his emotions at the time? And how does this heart-searching square with Peulevé’s chilling account of how he killed another traitor: “I had the knife ready and suddenly closing my left hand over his mouth, cut through his jugular vein as easy as picking a winkle out of its shell. As I lowered him to the floor, I felt that the sergeant major who had taught me to practise this neat flick of the wrist with a knife in Scotland would have been proud of my first effort”.
At one point in his dramatic account, Perrin does question the veracity of Peulevé’s memoir. Before leaving London, he had fallen in love with Violette Szabó, a young widow who joined SOE at around the same time, and whose life and death would be made famous by the book Carve Her Name with Pride, and the film of the same name. Betrayed to the Nazis in March 1944, Peulevé was tortured by the Gestapo before being deported to Buchenwald, where he saw Violette, who had also been captured. Managing to escape through a scheme hatched by “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas, Peulevé was eventually able to capture two SS soldiers. According to Peulevé’s memoirs, one of these men carried a photo showing nude female prisoners, among whom Peulevé recognized the face of Violette. As Perrin points out, there is no evidence that Szabó was subjected to such mistreatment, or that the photo showed her. Peulevé may have imagined the whole thing.
Despite the lack of context that flows from Perrin’s decision to focus on Peulevé’s post-war recollections, his account is extremely moving, in particular the descriptions of Peulevé’s experiences in Buchenwald, from which – like many others – he never fully recovered. Anyone who wants to understand why and how so many apparently ordinary people displayed such extraordinary courage and determination should read Perrin’s book. This kind of behaviour was well known to readers in the 1950s and 60s, when there was a proliferation of memoirs and biographies of SOE agents, many of them in the heroic mould. Most of the literature of the self-sacrifice and comradeship that existed during the war has since faded from view; Perrin’s book makes an admirable (re)introduction to this forgotten world.
M. R. D. Foot’s memoirs are similar in tone, but rather different in content. Foot’s habitually cool prose recounts his own exciting military career in wartime France (with the SAS, not SOE), and his subsequent academic life. Foot forgivably indulges in the odd piece of name-dropping, but in a frustratingly inconsistent way. He mentions his “brief, unsuccessful affair” with Iris Murdoch, and his discussion with a junior medievalist at Manchester University, which led Ian Kershaw to turn his attention to Hitler and the history of the Third Reich, but he keeps quiet about whom he nominated for a Nobel Prize (and in which field). He describes how he was inveigled into co-editing Gladstone’s Diaries (Roy Jenkins considered that Foot’s introduction was “the most fascinating thing [he] had ever read about Gladstone”), but says nothing about his extensive reviewing for the TLS. Finally, although Foot has spent nearly sixty years as a historian, and has seen academic fashions come and go, he gives little sense of the changing approaches to the study of history, and in particular of the relative weight in historical writing of novel archival research versus the reinterpretation of existing knowledge. Perhaps such epistemological reflection is anathema to a historian of men of action. According to his publishers, Foot is “the only real person referred to in a John le Carré novel”, although they do not tell us in which book, nor why. We can be sure, however, that if he were a character in a 1970s campus novel, this History Man would be an anti-Howard Kirk.
As the title of his memoir indicates, Foot’s claim to fame lies in his work on the history of SOE. In this respect, there is a disappointing lack of titbits – the Official Secrets Act apparently forbids him from even mentioning where he carried out the research for SOE in France, although he does say that MI6 held all SOE papers at the time, so presumably it was in some secret MI6 building. However, Foot does provide some fascinating background to the writing of his book on British escape lines in Occupied Europe, MI9 (co-authored with James Langley), and above all his book contains a brief chapter, “Reflections on SOE”, which, together with his introduction to Mackenzie’s Secret History of SOE, provides a brilliant overview of the work of SOE and of its historiography.
One issue that continually haunts the history of the various Resistance movements and of SOE is whether it was all worth it. Foot’s response is clear, as he cites many of the events described at first hand in Forgotten Voices – the SOE attacks on the Nazi “heavy water” plant in Norway, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, or the profit of £77 million made by SOE through Operation Remorse. According to accounts in Forgotten Voices, this last chapter involved the smuggling of diamonds, gold watches and “tung oil”, all organized by Walter Fletcher, a “gloriously fat” SOE agent who had allegedly “won the hundred yards at Charterhouse when he was nineteen stone”. Fletcher was awarded a knighthood after the war.
More seriously, many of the SOE agents discussed in Forgotten Voices compare their meagre guerrilla successes with the terrible reprisals wrought by the Nazis, which led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. Most, however, point to the inspirational effect on the morale of local habitants. As the mayor of Annecy told Squadron Leader Frank Griffiths, the actions of SOE were “the match that lights the fire”.

Roderick Bailey
FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE SECRET WAR
An inside history of Special Operations in the Second World War
382pp. Ebury. £19.99.
978 0 0919 1850 7

Terry Crowdy
SOE AGENT
Churchill’s secret warriors
64pp. Osprey. £11.99.
978 1 8460 3276 9

M. R. D. Foot
MEMORIES OF AN S.O.E. HISTORIAN
208pp. Pen & Sword. £19.99.
978 1 84415849 2

Nigel Perrin
SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE
The life of SOE agent Harry Peulevé DSO MC
225pp. Pen & Sword. £19.99.
978 1 8441 5855 3