The administration and training departments were functionally separate but shared some of the administrative duties and some of the domestic and training supervision of the students. The Adjutant, Major Palmer, (later replaced by Major Alan Wilkinson) headed the administration, and Major S.H.C. Woolrych, whom we have yet to meet, was the Chief Instructor until promoted to the role of Commandant of the school in April when Munn moved on.
The administration was responsible for the running of the nine student accommodation houses. The ‘housemasters’ were veterans of the First World War, ‘Funny old dug-ups,’ as one of the younger instructors described them, and came from a variety of regiments, were fluent in a foreign language, usually French, and were about twenty years older than the instructors.
The main administration at The Rings negotiated with the various SOE Country Sections in London for places at the school, attended to the allocation of students to the various houses and had the custody of their personal files. The Commandant had the responsibility for completing a report on the performance of all students, for submission to the head of whichever Country Section had sponsored them. It was the Country Section which made the decision on whether or not the student would be dispatched as a secret agent, and there are many well-publicized instances where women students were sent on active service despite adverse reports from the school. Some of them lost their lives in dreadful circumstances.
The dispersal of both the domestic and teaching arrangements among the nine student residences was not without its problems. The need to conceal from the students the existence and location of the other student houses, and the segregation of the students by nationality and often by their future functions, required an organization of some complexity and was a nightmare for those responsible for timetabling the syllabus.
The secrecy surrounding the whole enterprise was such that the students undergoing training at the various houses never knew the names of the houses in which they resided, unless they happened to know the area from pre-war experience, which very few of them did. Secrecy also gave rise to a number of rumours among the students about the administration of the school and its location. They were deliberately kept in ignorance of the central day-to-day administration, or took it for granted, and therefore make no reference to it in their personal reminiscences. They usually knew where it was located because The Rings was the target of many of the housebreaking and burglary exercises, but many of them believed that the name of the house was ‘Beaulieu Manor’, which is in fact the name of the entire Montagu estate. Almost every student who subsequently wrote about his or her experiences at Beaulieu stated that the school’s headquarters was housed in ‘Beaulieu Manor, the home of Lord Montagu’! Even M.R.D. Foot, in one of his histories, states that the school’s headquarters was located in ‘Beaulieu Manor, on the site where the National Motor Museum now stands’. In fact the Motor Museum is sited in the parkland near Palace House.
Many of the personal reminiscences of the trainees make a point of explaining that students of particular nationalities were always allocated to particular houses. For instance it has been repeatedly stated that the Norwegian and Dutch students were always put into houses overlooking the Solent to make them feel more at home with the presence of water. But this is a rumour since it is known for certain that Dutch students were also accommodated in Hartford House, adjacent to The Rings and Saltmarsh, which is above the millpond at the very top of the Beaulieu River. The Norwegians are known to have been accommodated in almost all of the student houses at various times during the war. There is, however, some substance in the rumour that the French Section had a preference for, but not exclusive use of, Boarmans for their students, among them the very first batch of women trainee agents.
The management of the entire school staff, officers and other ranks, the allocation of duties, leave rotas, the issuing of pay to staff and students, catering, the drawing and issuing of supplies, and disciplinary matters were all duties of the administration.
The functions of the houses in the SOE complex varied during the course of the war and was complicated by the constantly changing policy regarding the security training of student radio operators of all the Country Sections and by the handing over to the Free French BCRA of Inchmery House, initially for the training of their radio-operators. Most of the Country Sections seem to have preferred to keep the W/T operators separate from other kinds of trainee agents, such as couriers, organizers or saboteurs. The reason was that radio operators were very vulnerable to detection and a high percentage of them were caught by the Nazis.
The security training of radio operators seems to have provided the school with a continuous administrative headache. They were often young and irresponsible and were considered by higher authorities to be ‘a considerable danger to the organization in the field’, a fact underlined by the appalling losses of those trained for the RF Section at Inchmery House. At first those undergoing W/T training for the other Country Sections were given only rudimentary training in security while learning their telegraphy skills and procedures, but this was evidently unsatisfactory and they were sent on a course which was a mixture of W/T and security training. In the spring of 1942 it was changed again and became a ten-day security course. It was changed yet again to a full two-week security course at Beaulieu, during which they had to continue with daily W/T practice.
The Commandant and his Adjutant, Captain Palmer, had to keep the peace between military personnel and the civilian population and liaise with Captain Widnell and the Beaulieu estate office on a wide variety of matters concerning trespass of their troops, drunken pranks with ‘borrowed’ property like bicycles, motor cycles and in one instance a horse, major and minor damage to property, the punishment of offenders and the interpretation of military and civil rights.
On 5 June, 1941, Captain Widnell wrote to Munn pointing out in no uncertain terms that civilians walking legitimately on the Beaulieu estate had been stopped by Captain Parsons and told they would be prosecuted. Widnell pointed out that SOE had requisitioned only certain isolated properties and that ‘access to other houses, rides, woods etc have not been the subject of any communication regarding requisitioning.’ He continued, ‘I shall be only too happy to go into the whole question fully with you to ascertain exactly what it is that you require in the way of extra privacy.’ He concluded, ‘If these regulations interfere with the usual enjoyment and use of any portion of the estate, the matter must be put through the usual channels and I shall naturally be obliged to claim compensation.’
It was a sharp reminder that SOE had not requisitioned the entire Montagu estate, only small bits of it, and had no right to interfere with country life outside the grounds of the houses that they had requisitioned. Throughout the war Captain Widnell kept up a lively barrage of communication with the school’s successive Commandants over a variety of matters concerning the Army’s rights and the damage caused to woodlands by the depredations of military exercises and vehicles crashing into hedges. In one of these exercises 150 saplings of sycamore, ash, birch and alder were cut down without permission in furtherance of some field exercise.
After the fall of France in May, 1940, until 22 June, 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, Britain was continuously under the threat of a German invasion. Beaulieu was in a very vulnerable area and within a coastal defence belt. From the outset the staff of all the houses, like every other service unit in the area, were involved in preparations for the defence of the coast and had to take an active part in defence plans. They had to undergo regular weapons and explosives training in disused quarries. One of the houses, The House on the Shore, is right on the coast at the head of a beach and seems to have been earmarked as a defensive point from which members of the School staff were required to repel any attempted landing.
In Lord Montagu’s archives is a collection of photographs of labels on cupboard doors in The House on the Shore which read ‘Boxes of Grenades not to be primed until Action Stations is given.
’ and ‘Boxes of .32 (ammunition) not to be opened until Action Stations is given’.
Part of the SOE plan for the defence of the area was to organize ‘stay behind’ parties drawn from members of the School staff to carry out guerrilla warfare once the area was overrun by the enemy. For this purpose a very well known member of the School staff, Captain William Clark, a highly skilled woodsman and former gamekeeper from the royal estate at Sandringham, had secretly constructed hideouts, one of which was a large hole in the floor of the New Forest, somewhere in the Beaulieu area. It was superbly hidden and indistinguishable from its surroundings in the forest and could not be detected even by somebody walking over it. It was large enough to house the stay-behind party and all their food, weapons and ammunition. The idea was that the party would emerge at night and attach limpet mines with delayed fuses to the tracks of German tanks and vehicles. It was used during several defence exercises, before the threat of invasion had faded after the German invasion of Russia.
Chapter IV
STATION 36
THE CRUCIBLE OF ACTION
Inchmery House was known to the British as STS (Special Training School) 38, to the French as Station 36, or, more affectionately, as ‘La Pouce Marie’, and was probably known by the Poles by some other number.
The house was originally the home of the Rothschild family, before they moved into Exbury House, and it was requisitioned by SOE in the spring of 1941, at about the same time that the first batch of houses had been requisitioned on the Montagu estate at Beaulieu.
During much of the war it was used to house various small specialist groups of commandos that were part of the SOE organization. In the middle of the war the house was taken over for some months by the Polish 6th Bureau (Secret Service) and afterwards reverted to use by SOE.
Official records are vague on the issue of whether it was originally intended to be an integral part of the Beaulieu Finishing School. In the official history of the SOE in France, Inchmery House is classified as the RF Section’s preliminary commando training school on a par with F Section’s school at Wanborough Manor near Guildford, but it was plunged into training Free French saboteurs a month or so before the main school came into use and many of these men were parachuted into France some months before the Beaulieu-trained agents were sent on active service. Throughout its wartime history it remained an unwanted and unloved appendage to the main SOE complex at Beaulieu.
Yet Inchmery House can claim to have played a very significant part in the history of SOE, not just because it produced some of the first agents to be parachuted into France, but because their success led to the strengthening of SOE’s position in its early struggles for its own survival.
In 1940 France had fallen to the Nazis and had been split into two zones. The northern part had been occupied by German forces and the southern part, known as the Unoccupied Zone, was governed on their behalf by the French Government at Vichy. Britain was threatened with a German invasion, SOE was in its infancy and the Country Sections were still in the process of being set up. Few, if any secret agents had yet been trained by the British or by any of the Governments-in-exile.
At the end of 1940, at the height of the German’s nightly bombardment of British cities, known as ‘the blitz’, somebody in our own Air Ministry asked SOE if it could mount an operation to kill the German ‘pathfinder’ pilots of the Kampfgeschwader 100 at an air base in Meucon in Brittany. The task of these pilots was to lead the German bombers to their targets, using radio beams to fix their position, and our scientists were experiencing a great deal of trouble devising countermeasures to jam or bend the beams. On 6 November, 1940, one of these specially equipped German aircraft had run out of fuel and had landed by mistake, intact, on a beach at Bridport in Dorset! Somebody in Air Intelligence had discovered, probably by interrogating the crew of this aircraft or from questioning German bomber crews who had been shot down over this country, that the pathfinder pilots were being ferried from their quarters to the airfield in buses, thereby providing an opportunity to kill them all in one blow and severely disrupt the nightly devastation of our cities.
At this point the then head of SOE, Sir Frank Nelson, had not yet received his first operational directive from the British Chiefs of Staff, although a few tentative clandestine operations were being made to put a handful of agents into France by sea and air, and recover them.
The Free French Section of SOE, i.e. the RF Section, had not yet come into being and General de Gaulle and his staff were being deliberately kept in the dark about SOE’s earliest attempts to land and recover agents.
The French Section of SOE (as distinct from the Free French RF Section) had no trained agents available and so Colin Gubbins, who currently held the post of Director of Training and Operations, and his deputy R.H. Barry, took over the organization of the mooted operation. They approached General de Gaulle and his Chief Intelligence Officer, Andre Dewavrin (Colonel Passy) to ask their permission to borrow some Free French troops then undergoing training as parachutists at the British parachutist’s training school at Ringway airport, near Manchester. Apparently they did not reveal why they were required but nonetheless were given permission to use these men. However, Gubbins and Barry did not have the means of delivering them to France.
Even though it had been the Air Ministry that had asked for the operation, when it came to the point of having to assign aircraft to the task the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, and the head of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur (‘Bomber’) Harris tried to insist that the parachutists should be dressed in their uniforms and should not be dropped in civilian clothes. To quote from M.R.D. Foot’s official history, S.O.E. in France, Sir Charles Portal remarked, ‘I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of killing members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated.’
This was typical of the attitude of the Establishment regarding the conduct of war and characterized the distaste that many senior commanders and ministers retained throughout the war for SOE’s ‘dirty and underhanded’ methods. They had no objection to soldiers being dropped in uniform to murder the enemy! Gubbins had much difficulty in getting the Air Ministry to provide a bomber to convey the parachutists to France.
Another last-minute complication erupted when de Gaulle discovered that the British had been sending agents into France behind his back. He decreed that henceforth none of his men were to take part in any operation unless he was given full details.
By this time two groups of Free French soldiers, about fifty of them, had already qualified as parachutists at Ringway and were waiting in a camp at Camberley. Many of these men were very young and the manner by which they had come to this country is interesting. When France fell to the Germans in the early summer of 1940 a number of influential Frenchmen had organized the evacuation to England of over 800 French youths of 17 and 18 years of age. They arrived in Britain in the Belgian ship Prince Leopold, later requisitioned by the Royal Navy and converted to an Infantry Landing Ship. They were accommodated in the exhibition centre at Olympia in London where they were later addressed by General de Gaulle on a recruiting mission for the Free French Forces. Some of these young men volunteered for special duties and were inducted into the Free French army for basic army training. They were then sent in batches for parachute training at Ringway. Many of them were formed into a unit which was to develop into a regiment similar to our own Special Air Service and others were drafted into a unit known as the Chasseur Battalion.
Among the officers of the unit which was to become the 1st Air Infantry Company, was a 30-year-old French regular soldier, Captain Georges Berge. On 20 December, 1940, he was interviewed by Commandant d’Estienne d’Orves, the chief of the French Deuxième Bureau (Secret Service). Berge drew his attention to the advantages of parachuting into France on moonlit nights. The Commandant responded by saying that it was an interesting proposition but before it could be contemplated the par
achutists ought to undertake a course of special training to equip them for duties as secret agents.
As a result of this interview Berge and ten of his men were sent in February, 1941, to STS 17, the British Secret Service’s sabotage and assassination training school at Brickendonbury. While at this school Berge was approached by a representative of the Deuxième Bureau accompanied by an unknown British officer and was invited to carry out an important mission in Brittany.
Eight days later Berge, accompanied by Colin Gubbins and two other officers, sought approval for the mission from the prickly General de Gaulle, who gave his approval for what became known as Operation Savanna.
Captain Berge and four of his men, in civilian clothes, were parachuted into France on the night of 14 March, 1941. Their mission was to kill the busload of German pathfinder pilots of the Kampfgeschwader 100 with a specially made road trap. Unfortunately for the raiding party, the pilots were no longer being transported by bus, but were driving to their airfield in cars with only two or three airmen in each car!
With no target to attack, Berge dispersed his team and spent his time making a reconnaissance to sound out the local population about their willingness to participate in anti-German activities on behalf of General de Gaulle and generally taking note of living conditions under the Nazis. With another member of his team, he travelled to Paris, Nevers and Bordeaux. On 23 March, during his visit, he set up a reception committee and a liaison network for future operations at Mirmizan near the Atlantic coast south of Bordeaux in a sparsely inhabited area of France known as Les Landes.
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