Churchill's Band of Brothers

by Damien Lewis

  Oddly, at some stage the document’s title, ‘SAS/SOE Plans’, had had the ‘SOE’ part scrubbed out, by what appears to be an official’s angry pen. For some reason the SOE’s role, working in partnership with the SAS in organising the Resistance, was seen as worthy of being expunged. But whatever the reason or the timing for the striking out of one partner from the record, it seemed ominous. And certainly, for Garstin and his men it would not augur well.

  Dropping with containers stuffed full of weaponry, Garstin’s force would be highly dependent on their SOE-organised reception party, for they were going in without the means to make radio contact with the UK. Deploying without a Jed set, they would rely on the Resistance radios for establishing contact with their Moor Park signals headquarters. In case of emergencies, one man – poacher Howard Lutton – would take carrier pigeons strapped to his chest, complete with sachets of bird food. It wasn’t uncommon for SAS parties to take pigeons as a back-up means of sending messages home. As the Resistance were in regular contact with SOE by radio, Garstin and his men should have no reason to send any pigeon winging its way back to British shores.

  Strictly speaking, the SOE was not a part of the British armed forces. Deliberately so. Churchill believed that the Second World War was a ‘total war’ that needed to be fought with no holds barred. The forces of Nazi Germany had already demonstrated as much, in their lightning seizure of nearly all of western Europe – an exercise in unprovoked aggression and bullying almost without compare. Churchill was convinced that Hitler –‘that guttersnipe’, as he referred to the Führer – would only understand one thing: an opponent willing to fight fire with fire. Hence the need for SOE.

  Formed under the Ministry for Economic Warfare, SOE would operate under a series of cover names – including the anodyne-sounding ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’, and, more tellingly, ‘the Baker Street Irregulars’, ‘the Firm’ or ‘the Racket’. Officially, the SOE did not exist, which made it perfectly placed for carrying out ultra-secret and deniable operations, such as assassinations, economic sabotage and the raising of guerrilla armies. It could break all the rules of war, and be denied by His Majesty’s Government if and when all went awry.

  Unlike the men of the SAS, SOE agents – both male and female – deployed into Nazi-occupied Europe dressed in civilian clothes. As they weren’t in uniform, they could expect to receive none of the protections extended to bona fide prisoners of war. But even SOE agents – spies, by any other name – were entitled to a fair trial under international law. And despite their obvious differences, the SAS and SOE made for perfect bedfellows, especially when tasked with joining forces with the Resistance to help liberate France.

  So why the striking out of the SOE’s name from that summer 1944 report? Why the need to hide that singular partnership? Why the desire to deny it; to expunge it from the record?

  Very possibly because something had gone terribly wrong at the heart of SOE’s operations in France.

  Chapter 11

  SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Hans Josef Kieffer was preparing his report on the present Funkspiel operation, to file with his superior in Berlin. SS Sturmbannführer Kriminaldirektor (Major Chief Inspector) Horst Kopkow ran one arm of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office), the Gestapo and SS security headquarters, in Berlin, which wasn’t so far removed from the Führer himself, as Kieffer well appreciated. Horst Kopkow had first come to Hitler’s notice in the aftermath of the assassination of SS Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich, a mission orchestrated by the British and their wily SOE.

  As Hans Kieffer was fully aware, the SOE – his nemesis –was divided into individual country sections. So, for example, F Section, his direct adversaries, dealt with France. It was Kieffer’s job, operating out of his Paris headquarters, to confound and defeat them. It was the Czech section of SOE that had trained the agents for Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of General Heydrich. On 27 May 1942 they’d struck, ambushing Heydrich’s staff car on the streets of Prague, the Czech capital, and wounding the SS general. Heydrich was both a Hitler acolyte and one of the Führer’s favourites, and it was Kopkow who was called in to investigate the audacious ambush.

  Ironically, Operation Anthropoid would be the making of Kopkow, not to mention his direct subordinates. Flying into Prague on the very afternoon of the attack, Kopkow quickly set about making his arrests, tracing the bomb fragments and the weapons used . . . to Britain. The SOE assassins, Czech citizens Jozef Gabík and Jan Kubiš, were duly tracked, and would die in a last-stand shootout with German troops. On 4 June, SS General Heydrich – the de facto ruler of Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia – died of his wounds. In the savage reprisals ordered by Hitler, thousands of innocent Czechs were murdered.

  Two days after Heydrich’s death, Kopkow’s Berlin department was elevated to dizzying heights, being placed in charge of combatting all ‘parachute agents, terrorists and saboteurs [whether] English, Soviet Russian or any other agency.’ Across the length and breadth of Nazi-occupied territories, and within Germany itself, Kopkow was responsible for the fight against the SOE and their Russian counterparts, and any other Commando-type forces that might operate alongside them.

  As more and more SOE agents were dropped into France – clearly where the Allies planned to launch their D-Day landings – Hitler had become obsessed with the French Resistance and their British associates. It was almost as if each mission, each act of defiance, was a personal insult against the Führer. Once captured, SOE agents were to be classed as Nacht und Nebel – ‘night and fog’ –prisoners, Hitler decreed. They were to be subjected to the very worst and made to disappear without trace. Neither their families, their loved ones nor their associates would ever learn of their fate.

  Not only their lives but even their very identities would be forever snuffed out. But first, they would be made to suffer terribly. ‘The agents should die, certainly, but not before torture, indignity and interrogation has drained from them the last shred of evidence that should lead us to the others,’ SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the all-powerful chief of the SS, had declared. ‘Then, and only then, should the blessed release of death be granted to them.’

  The prescribed treatment for captured Allied parachutists and agents fell to the SS. Under Nazi dogma, all SS members had to be certified as ‘pure Aryan’, making the SS the elite of the elite, the cream of the Übermenschen – the so-called master race. By summer ’44, the SS had grown to a million-strong force – a state within a state, boasting its own police service, the Gestapo, its own military, the 600,000-strong Waffen SS, and its own slave labour force some 700,000 strong, spread across hundreds of forced-labour Konzentrationslager (concentration camps). For the SS, subjecting a few captured Allied Commandos to the very worst was child’s play.

  But Hans Kieffer didn’t necessarily agree that this was the right approach. Quietly, he believed there was another way – a less violent, more ‘collaborative’ means, one that he did his best to encourage at his Paris Gestapo headquarters. By apparently befriending SOE agents, and by convincing them that all was lost – that their agency had been penetrated to the very highest levels – he argued he could gain so much more. He didn’t just seek usable intelligence. Kieffer was far smarter than that. He sought a partnership. He aimed to turn captured agents, so they could be used as a weapon against the very people who had sent them in the first place.

  In this, he believed he had been uncommonly successful, as the present Funkspiel (radio game) operation should prove. As the man charged with hunting down all SOE agents throughout France – and, more recently, the SAS and Commandos working hand in glove with them – Kieffer was at the peak of his power. Born in 1900, Kieffer, the humble son of a barrel-maker from Offenburg, had followed his brother into the German police force. He first came to his superiors’ notice when he was found to possess an uncanny skill at getting information out of suspects, and was quickly moved into intelligence work.

  At war’s outbreak, Kieffer
had been transferred to the Gestapo. Ironically, he’d won his plush Paris posting due to the fact that Offenburg lay on Germany’s western border with France, and his superiors had presumed that Kieffer would be reasonably fluent in French. In truth, he spoke not a word. But he and his wife were long-standing Nazi party members, and all their children were enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth, so he believed himself deserving of the very best that Nazi Germany might have to offer.

  With his family’s impeccable pedigree, plus his charm and his fine physique – Kieffer, a talented sportsman, believed himself striking-looking, with a shock of wavy hair and deep-set, dark eyes – Kieffer was highly ambitious and driven, and he felt himself destined for great things. Now, as the chief of anti-sabotage and Funkspiel operations across the length and breadth of France, his was a pivotal role.

  By the winter of 1943, some 500 clandestine radio sets had been detected transmitting out of France, which equated to a similar number of radio operators. Most, though not all, of those sets were sending messages to SOE in London. But rather than seeking to do the obvious – to smash the network – Kieffer had decided to try to co-opt it, and wherever possible to turn it against the enemy. The means to do so was the Funkspiel – the radio game – at which he and one of his deputies would prove past masters.

  SS Untersturmführer (2nd Lieutenant) Dr Josef Goetz, a myopic, bespectacled former teacher, was that deputy. On 13 April 1943 Kieffer’s men had arrested one of the SOE’s most high-profile radio operators, Marcus Reginald Bloom, seizing his radio and associated ciphers. Upon learning the news, Kopkow, in Berlin, ordered Kieffer, in Paris, to attempt the first ever Funkspiel operation from French soil. Kopkow was a merciless taskmaster, and Kieffer was under huge pressure to get results. Ideally, Bloom would have to be made to talk, if the Funkspiel were to be successful.

  Bloom, the son of British Jews living in London, had dropped into France in November 1942, and he had been transmitting ever since. He’d kept constantly on the move, to avoid the German detector vans, and it was a combination of loose talk and betrayal that had led to his capture. He was incarcerated in the dreadful confines of Fresnes prison, in Paris, and interrogated. When Bloom refused to cooperate, Kieffer was forced to abandon his softly-softly approach. Bloom was beaten remorselessly, but still he revealed nothing.

  Kieffer delegated Goetz to carry out the Funkspiel, and both men felt under huge pressure. ‘The greatest possible importance was attached to this scheme, both by Berlin and Paris.’ Deprived of Bloom’s help, Goetz went ahead anyway, powering up Bloom’s radio set and sending a series of decoy transmissions to SOE headquarters in London. As far as possible, he attempted to mimic Bloom’s ‘fist’ – the individual style of his Morse – encoding the messages via the ciphers that they had captured, along with Bloom’s radio set.

  The aim was to make it appear as if the Resistance network for which Bloom had been the radio operator was still operational, and as if Bloom remained at large. If the Funkspiel was successful, Kieffer’s team could not only send London disinformation, but –crucially – they could also call for more supply drops and agents, to be parachuted directly into their hands. For four weeks Goetz persisted, but without Bloom’s help the Funkspiel proved a failure. For whatever reason, London hadn’t swallowed the bait.

  Two months later, things were to prove very different. On 15 June, two French-speaking Canadians – both SOE agents – were captured by the Gestapo, along with their radio and codebooks. So would begin one of Kieffer’s most successful Funkspiel operations, which would last twelve long months. The two agents had been charged with setting up a new SOE circuit to the east of Paris, codenamed ‘Archdeacon’. Using the captured equipment, Goetz started transmitting as if all was well, and this time SOE’s F Section was well and truly hoodwinked.

  For months on end, agents and supplies were parachuted into France, supposedly for the Archdeacon network, but actually at the behest of the Gestapo and falling directly into their hands. Success breeds success. By that summer, Kieffer had two such Funkspiel circuits up and running. On occasion, Kieffer himself would attend the drop-zone entrapments, as men and war materiel appeared as if by magic from the night skies. Over the six months to December of that year, and urged on by Kopkow in Berlin, Kieffer ramped up such operations, capturing some forty SOE agents.

  It wasn’t just SOE that Kieffer was netting. He’d also ensnared agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the equivalent agency in the United States. The failure of SOE’s French Section to realise they were being played for fools via the Funkspiel would have been laughable, if the consequences hadn’t proved so dire for those on the sharp end. SOE’s radio traffic was supposed to have failsafes built into it – so called ‘bluff checks’ and ‘true checks’. These were specific snippets of information known only to the agent and his SOE handler, which were to be inserted into a radio message as proof that all was well.

  But all too often, when an initial Funkspiel message was dispatched by Kieffer’s men, F Section would reply: ‘My dear fellow, you only left us a week ago. On your first message you go and forget your true check.’ Or: ‘You forgot your double security check – be more careful.’ Again and again this would happen, SOE London offering ‘a blundering reply that gave the game away’. The result was that captured agents faced ever more brutal questioning, to force them to reveal the failsafes with which subsequent Funkspiel transmissions could be made ever more convincing.

  On occasions, Kieffer had even resorted to executing a ‘soft sabotage mission’ – blowing up a largely unimportant target in France, but one that he could trumpet to London via radio messages as a supposed triumph for one of his ghost circuits. It was well worth suffering a little damage in those mock sabotages, for the supposed authenticity they provided boosted the Funkspiel massively by convincing London that all was going well with a particular network.

  So successful had the Funkspiel proven that Kieffer had to turn over an entire floor of his headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, Paris, to sorting, cataloguing and distributing captured SOE equipment. It didn’t just include weaponry, ammo, bullets and bombs; there were also huge amounts of cash being parachuted directly into the Gestapo’s hands. One of his deputies, Hauptscharführer (sergeant major) Karl Haug, a First World War veteran and a master of reliability and order, had been placed in charge of the cache of captured SOE stores.

  The Funkspiel operations were an intensely guarded secret known only to a top coterie of Nazi officials, and any unauthorised communications about them were a treasonable offence. Regular reports to the Führer were made regarding this ‘partisan combat’. Captured agents were kept alive, simply so they could be forced to assist with further Funkspiel plays. So extensive was such trickery that by the summer of 1944, when the SAS started deploying into France, it was arguably safer for such parties to drop ‘blind’, rather than risk meeting a Gestapo reception party on the ground.

  Kieffer knew that other national Funskpiel programmes were in operation, the one in Holland being said to rival his in France. In every sense, the race was on. And tonight, 4/5 July 1944, yet another SOE consignment was due to fall into his hands. Tonight’s shipment was only supposed to consist of containers, or so the transmissions from SOE London had led him to believe, but still it would represent another feather in his cap. His greatest hope was that a SOE radio and codebooks might be included, offering scope to start yet another Funskpiel circuit.

  The drop was due to take place a few dozen miles to the south of Paris, and Kieffer had given it the codename ‘Marbois’. As only supplies were due – not any live agents – he had delegated the capture operation to his deputies. Hauptscharführer Haug, Kieffer’s captured-kit quartermaster, plus several other Gestapo agents – Woerle, Teschner, Stork and Vogt amongst them – would oversee Operation Marbois, ensuring ‘the reception lights and signals should be shown correctly’.

  That afternoon Haug had set out, in the company of h
is Gestapo cohorts, and with a strong escort of Waffen SS troops. While they weren’t expecting too much trouble in the Forest of Fontainebleau, you never knew quite what to expect with a Funskpiel entrapment. Haug had the procedure down to a tee. He’d made sure to bring the guide lights for the RAF pilot, and was well practised at this: the men with lights would stand ‘in a straight line in the direction of the wind, about 80–100 metres apart. A fourth man stood 10–20 metres to the side of the first man . . . and gave the necessary flash signal.’

  Upon arrival at the Forest of Fontainebleau, Haug and his Gestapo colleagues proceeded to check out the terrain. The drop was scheduled for an isolated cornfield, surrounded on three sides by thick woodland, known locally as the Bois de Bouray. Under the Waffen SS commander’s supervision, the entire ‘place was encircled . . . [as] a security measure against a possible surprise attack by members of the Resistance’. With the cordon in position, Haug and his fellows settled down to await whatever tonight’s drop might bring.

  Earlier that day the BBC had twice broadcast a message into France, to warn the Fontainebleau Resistance that the Bois de Bouray drop was on. As dusk descended, a party of Frenchmen, all armed, crept towards the darkened DZ. But instead of finding it deserted, as they’d expected, a hidden party of gunmen opened fire on them. Two of their number were killed, and after a short but fierce firefight the Resistance party melted away, realising they were outgunned. One, a dogged and courageous individual, volunteered to remain, crawling deep into a thicket so as to wait and to watch.

  With that, silence descended over the Bois de Bouray drop-zone.

  * * *

  Back in Britain, Captain Garstin and his men readied themselves for departure for tonight’s mission – Operation Toby 3. All seemed well both at their Fairford base and on the ground at their DZ. ‘The reception party was arranged by SF Baker Street, and mounted by a BBC message,’ it was reported, ‘SF Baker Street’ being a code for SOE. As far as Garstin and his men could tell, fair stood the wind for France.