Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  Small wonder that the savagery of the German Occupation drove an enormous number of people of many nationalities to risk their lives by overt or covert acts of defiance or resistance, despite appalling risks to themselves and their families. A huge number ran away to remote or wooded areas to avoid being rounded up for forced or slave labour in Germany and lived as outlaws.

  A great many of those who remained at home embarked upon hazardous enterprises aimed at preserving their national identities, or at succouring and harbouring the hunted and the oppressed, or undertook aggressive and often suicidal clandestine activities against the common enemy. However, individual and unco-ordinated acts of defiance had no more than nuisance value unless they could be co-ordinated, directed at suitable targets and provided with the means of inflicting significant damage to the Nazi war effort.

  The governments of many of the conquered countries had fled into exile in Britain and had left behind networks of citizens and agents to keep them informed of events in their native countries. But each country was acting individually, possessed few and tenuous means for maintaining contact with their homelands and only slender, if any, trained personnel and resources at home or in exile for inflicting substantial damage to the occupying Germans.

  Britain, standing alone against Hitler’s armies after the fall of France in 1940, was ill-prepared for subversive warfare, and its citizens are not conspiratorial by nature. We have no recent history of centuries of oppression and underground resistance like the Poles or the people of other Baltic and Balkan states, no natural aptitude for covert activities and conspiracies, no experience of the dire necessity of mistrusting our nearest neighbours, no knowledge of clandestine ways of establishing the reliability of like-minded dissidents or of how to organize them into clandestine cells.

  Until the 1930s the British Establishment abhorred underhanded diplomatic and military practices, and possessed no organizations, as did Hitler’s Germany, for arming and encouraging dissident groups, using commando and geurrilla tactics, black propaganda and sabotage and other means of ‘underhanded’ warfare.

  On 7 March, 1936, the Nazis tore up the twenty-five-year-old Treaty of Versailles, imposed on them at the end of the 1914 – 18 war to prevent them from re-arming, and sent their troops to repossess the Rhineland, the traditional industrial heartland of Germany, removed by the Treaty to prevent them re-arming.

  Two years later, in 1938, Germany occupied Austria and the Sudetenland on the Czechoslovakian border, adding ten million Austrians and Sudeten Germans to the native German population and tipping the balance of manpower in their favour over the populations of Britain and France.

  Although it was evident to most British citizens that a war with Germany seemed inevitable, the politicians, conscious of the appalling slaughter of the previous World War, were wedded to a policy of appeasing Hitler, a policy that led to their humiliation at Munich in 1938.

  Until mid-December, 1938, the British Government was being advised by our Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, that Hitler’s ambitions lay in the East, namely in the Russian Ukraine, despite the fact that they had been warned to the contrary by no less an authority than Admiral Canaris, the Chief of German Military Intelligence, the Abwehr. Indeed, between September, 1938, and May, 1939, Whitehall received no fewer than twenty warnings from a variety of secret sources about the impending aggression by the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. Most of these warnings, intended to stiffen the resolve of Britain and France to take firm action to curb Hitler’s ambitions, had been brushed aside by our politicians as Intelligence plants!

  Not until the Nazis over-ran Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, did the British Military High Command take any notice of the proposals of a few far-sighted individual army officers, buried in the bowels of the War Office where, since 1935, they had been studying guerrilla warfare and covert offensive action against future enemies. One of these officers was J.F.C. Holland of the Royal Engineers who had been a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and had fought with Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War. Another, working separately, was Colin Gubbins, a small wiry major in the Royal Artillery, born in Japan, widely travelled, fluent in French and German, and with more than a smattering of Russian, who also had a distinguished record in the First World War and its aftermath, the civil wars in Russia and Ireland. He and another officer, Millis Jefferis, an explosive expert of the Royal Engineers, had produced a Handbook for Partisan Leaders and a booklet on the use of explosives for sabotage in guerrilla warfare. By the time war was declared, Gubbins had already personally reconnoitred the Danube valley and the Baltic states looking for likely strategic targets and targets of opportunity and had made contacts within the Polish Intelligence community.

  On 3 September, 1939, the Germans attacked Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany. The same day two very small Intelligence sections of the War Office, which included Holland’s and Gubbins’, were combined and started work organizing several kinds of secret warfare and ‘stay behind’ parties, and various plans had been put into action. Early in the war translations of Gubbins’ pamphlets setting out the principles of guerrilla warfare were scattered by air over many countries in occupied Europe.

  On 10 May, 1940, the ‘phoney war’ ended when the Germans launched their blitzkrieg offensive into Holland and Belgium and in sixteen days routed the French and British armies. On the same day Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.

  On 16 July Churchill authorized the creation of a department dealing with subversion, sabotage and irregular warfare, to be called the Special Operations Executive. It was controlled by the Ministry of Economic Warfare which was headed by a Labour politician, Hugh Dalton, and was formed by amalgamating three different organizations.

  One of these was Section D (D for Destruction) of the Secret Intelligence Service. The Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, has been this country’s main Intelligence and espionage service nominally under the control of the Foreign Office, whose duties have been described by one wag as ‘lying and spying’! The SIS is also known as MI6, and its very existence was officially denied until very recent times.

  Section D of the SIS was created shortly before the outbreak of the war, a foundling of the Foreign Office which, with characteristic hypocrisy, had authorized the birth while disowning it and any direct interest in ‘disreputable’ forms of warfare such as guerrilla activities and sabotage.

  Section D was headed by Lieutenant-Colonel L.D. Grand and had on its staff a man by the name of Guy Burgess, who was already working for the Russians as a spy! The professed aim of Section D was to stir up resistance to the Germans in Europe by acts of sabotage. Before the war it had been starved of funds and as a consequence it comprised a group of people sitting in a conference room discussing ideas such as how to interrupt Hitler’s oil supplies and how to cripple German food production by launching incendiary balloons to set light to grain fields! However, at the outbreak of war it did manage to pull off a few coups, one of which was to evacuate the entire stock of industrial diamonds in Amsterdam before the Germans overran the place!

  As far as this narrative is concerned, it was Section D that provided the Special Operations Executive with a nucleus of secret servicemen, and, although they were not from the mainstream of the SIS, they were to be influential in formulating the agent training programme.

  Another unit of the triumvirate from which the Special Operations Executive was created was yet another Foreign Office foundling, a not so secret offshoot that had been studying the production of subversive, corrupting propaganda. It was funded by a newspaper magnate and manned by some very well known Fleet Street feature writers and reporters.

  The third component comprised several very small Intelligence sections of the War Office already involved with secret warfare, including those of Holland and Gubbins. None of these officers were career Intelligence officers, but were on secondment from their regiments. The professional Intelligence Corps, founded during the First World
War, had been disbanded in the 1920s and had not yet been re-formed.

  This new secret organization, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE as it came to be called, was to join the ranks of a number of existing or burgeoning secret services, but unlike the others, which depended for their success on lying low and keeping very quiet and unnoticed, this new creation was a hoyden, a rowdy child designed to make its presence felt by causing havoc, and therefore guaranteed to stir up hornets’ nests of Nazi counter-espionage and counter-revolutionary agencies. Consequently its objectives were totally incompatible with its sisters, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Radio (monitoring) Security Service (now called GCHQ), and a brand new secret service coming into being to rescue civilians and servicemen from behind enemy lines, MI 9.

  The fourth truly secret service, MI 5, the country’s main counter-espionage agency, was not so directly affected by the overseas activities of the new organization, and it was soon to provide considerable assistance, in various ways, to the new organization.

  The bitter conflict of interests between the SIS and the SOE resulted in a struggle for power that lasted throughout the war. It began by the SIS insisting on keeping control of secret signal traffic, refusing to allow SOE to use its existing training facilities or to impart knowledge of, or allow SOE to interrupt or hazard, its own operations. SOE was therefore compelled to be dependent on its own internal resources which included a nucleus of SIS men, almost all of whom, as we shall see, were as inexperienced in the arts and trade crafts of underground warfare as any of the other officers in SOE. They all had to learn virtually from scratch how to organize, train and control secret agents, and the arts of secret communications, clandestine operating methods and methods of infiltrating agents into enemy territory and recovering them. They were thus compelled to design the syllabuses of their various courses and recruit people capable of teaching a variety of topics, including murder, blackmail, forgery, arson, sabotage and other activities which in normal times would have been regarded as criminal.

  Inevitably, as the war progressed, the work of the five main Intelligence services and several other Intelligence agencies overlapped, and also got in each other’s ways. One author has estimated that in France alone no fewer than twenty agencies of various nationalities were operating simultaneously. However, it is not the aim of this book to delve into the complicated rivalries and politics of the various agencies and their effects on wartime operations. These have been chronicled in much detail by several British and Continental historians.

  The new organization started off badly and within months the Foreign Office political and propaganda warfare component was hived off to a different department of the controlling ministry, the Ministry of Economic Warfare. However, the idea of training secret agents in the art of so-called ‘Black’ propaganda was retained by SOE and was to be incorporated into its agent training syllabus.

  The Headquarters of SOE was housed in Baker Street in London and was headed by Sir Frank Nelson, a former Indian Army specialist in Intelligence, who had with him the nucleus of men from Section D of the SIS and regular army officers seconded to Military Intelligence. This nucleus, acting on the advice provided in the 1922 edition of the Manual of Military Intelligence, recruited many leading businessmen, journalists and lawyers with foreign language skills to man the headquarters and its outstations and training establishments. The organization was divided into a number of Country Sections, one of which, the East European Section, was under the command of one of the original War Office team of pre-war researchers, Colin Gubbins, soon to be promoted to the rank of Brigadier and made head of Operations and Training.

  The number of Country Sections expanded rapidly to include, in addition to the Eastern European Section, separate sections for Holland, France, Belgium and the Scandanavian and Balkan countries. For our purposes we need only note that the Country Sections were almost autonomous and many were answerable directly to their Governments in exile. For example, the Poles, Czechoslovakians, Dutch and Norwegians had governments in exile which exerted a major influence on operations in their respective countries, though all of them were ultimately dependent on the British and later the Americans for most of their transport and supplies and much of their training facilities.

  One of the largest of the Country Sections, that of the French, had no government in exile. The Free French were led by a junior General, Charles de Gaulle, who was not universally recognized as the spokesman of France, either in occupied France or elsewhere, and certainly not by the Americans, who, after the Allied landings in North Africa, were backing another French general, General Giraud.

  The result, for our purposes, was that there were two organizations dealing with the training and operation of secret agents in France, the British-controlled French Section, and the Gaullist Secret Service, known as the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, (Central Bureau for Intelligence and Action), otherwise known as the BCRA. To link the two organizations, SOE created a liaison section, manned jointly by British and French personnel, and called it the RF Section. The French Section was to be headed by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and the French BCRA was headed by a man who called himself Colonel Passy, whose real name was André Dewavrin, originally of the French Deuxième Bureau, the equivalent of our SIS. And the RF Section was headed originally by a British officer, Captain Eric Piquet-Wicks.

  Here again was another conflict of interests, particularly political interests. Although the Free French BCRA was beholden to the British for some training facilities, the transportation of agents, and for a time, all of its supplies, once the agents were in France they could act as they pleased and in their own political interests, especially Gaullist interests.

  The reason for mentioning the distinctions between the French Section of SOE, the RF Section and the Free French BCRA is that all three of these organizations used secret establishments in the Beaulieu area, and for administrative purposes were part of the Beaulieu SOE complex.

  By the end of 1940 SOE had created a number of establishments for training servicemen of several nationalities in a variety of commando techniques. It retained a close association with numerous commando groups all over the world throughout the war, and often used them for its own nefarious purposes. The commando training of prospective secret agents was to develop into a tiered system, beginning with gruesome physical training and weapons training lasting between two and four weeks and designed to weed out those lacking the stomach and stamina for aggressive action. One such school was based at Wanborough Manor, near Guildford, and another, for Free French servicemen, was based at Inchmery House, overlooking the estuary of the Beaulieu river.

  Those who survived the rigours of these courses were sent on parachute courses either before or after special training in close and unarmed combat, fieldcraft, boat work, elementary morse code, demolition training and learning to live off the land. This sort of course was originally designed for the training of commandos and took place at Lochailort, in Scotland, but towards the end of 1940, SOE had set up its own school, known as the MI (i.e. Military Intelligence) Wing, nearby, at Arisaig on the wild north-west coast of Scotland. This school was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. Munn of the Royal Artillery, who was destined to become the first Commandant of the new school for secret agents at Beaulieu. Included in the curriculum of the MI Wing at Arisaig was the deadly art of ‘silent killing’ with and without weapons, elementary sabotage and the use of enemy weaponry.

  In parallel with the development of the commando training schools, Section D of the SIS created at the end of 1940 or thereabouts, a school for training foreign saboteurs. Known as Station 17 or STS (Special Training School) 17, it was located at Brickendonbury Hall in Hertfordshire.

  The idea for this school is said to have come from Guy Burgess, who was an established official of the Foreign Office and a member of Section D. In the summer of 1940 he had participated in the recruitment of Kim Philby into his section at a salary of £600
per annum. Burgess had been Philby’s secret courier when Philby had been spying for the Russians in Spain in 1937.

  According to Philby, the idea of creating a school for training secret agents in the techniques of underground work was first raised by Burgess in July, 1940; Philby said he found it astonishing that such a school did not exist already. (It probably did, but the SIS evidently kept it secret even from its own people and especially from Section D to stop it passing on its knowledge to an outfit like SOE.) Having launched the idea, Burgess left Philby to work out the details, and Philby claims to have been the architect of the syllabus, the system of agent selection and the type of accommodation required for the school.

  Philby’s proposals were put to a Section D training committee and after some discussion and an unknown amount of modification led to the creation of Station 17, the SIS sabotage school for foreign trainee agents at Brickendonbury Hall, a former school standing in spacious grounds near Hertford. It was at this school that a team of Norwegians was trained to sabotage the German heavy water production at the Norsk Hydro plant in the Norwegian province of Telemark, and where the Czechs trained to assassinate the German SS chief, Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’. This school was initially placed under the command of a naval officer, Commander F.T. Peters RN, later to earn a posthumous Victoria Cross for gallantry during the Anglo-American assault on Oran harbour in November, 1942. He had survived the murderous assault but was killed a few days later in an air crash. Philby was posted to the school from the London Headquarters and evidently hated it, not least because it cramped his activities for the Russians.

  Among the staff at Brickendonbury was a man whom Philby describes as ‘jolly George Hill’, who was to be posted with Philby to a new school that SOE was to set up at Beaulieu.