A similar story of the unpromising material sent to SOE for agent training in the early days is related by Maurice Buckmaster. When he took over as head of the French Section in September, 1941, he inherited a recruit by the name of Nigel Low, a professional gambler and confidence trickster passed on to SOE by Scotland Yard, who failed to inform them of Low’s criminal record and his long list of convictions. Low was a fluent French speaker and was sent to Wanborough Manor for much of his agent training. He passed all the tests with credit and was sent to France by torpedo boat in the spring of 1942, carrying a large sum of money in old French banknotes. He made his way to the Riviera and was never seen again. As far as is known he was never caught by the Germans nor by the Vichy authorities. After that episode the French Section made sure that they took careful account of recruits’ gambling and drinking habits.
In his memoirs Kim Philby mentions that among the earliest students were two Frenchmen, one politically left-wing, the other right-wing, whom he trained as propagandists. One of these two students was Yvon Morandat, a young Christian trade unionist who was to carry out important missions for General de Gaulle in France.
In May, 1941, a party of twenty Norwegian soldiers, one officer and nineteen privates of the Linge Company, all in their early twenties, were billeted at The Drokes, replacing the Spaniards. Among the men was Joachim Ronneburg who was to lead the team that became famous for sabotaging the German’s heavy water installations and supplies. As privates they were ‘Other Ranks’ and lived within the house in quarters separate from their officer, who messed with the ‘Housemaster’, Captain R. Carr. They were debarred from the dinner parties held in the officers’ mess. They were not given batmen like many of the later student agents, but had to make their own beds and clean their own quarters.
Ronneberg who was very tall, slim and like all the Norwegians physically exceedingly tough, wrote, ‘The main entrance of The Drokes was on the north side of the house. When you went inside you entered a roomy hall. A staircase on the left took you up to the bedrooms on the first floor, some faced north and some faced south looking out across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. The lecture room and the sitting room had entrances from the hall. The sitting room was in the south-west corner of the house and a door opened from it on to a veranda and a terrace that stretched along the south side of the house. A lawn led down from the terrace and was framed by a hedge overlooking the sea. To the south-west of the lawn was a little rectangular swimming pool sheltered by hedges on three sides. On the far short side of the pool was a diving board.’ He failed to mention that the swimming pool was not like a modern heated pool; it was fed from a natural spring and was exceedingly cold, relying on the sun to warm the water. One of the lunchtime activities of the Norwegian soldiers was to compete with each other diving into the pool to retrieve half-crowns which had been thrown in for the purpose.
At this stage of the war the raid on the Norsk Hydro had not been envisaged and the men were undergoing basic training primarily as uniformed agents, on the offchance that they might be of some future use for work in enemy-occupied Norway. They were given only limited training in the spy crafts but received a fairly rigorous training in security. Afterwards they were posted to Scotland for general mountain warfare training and it was to be a long time before any of them saw active service in Norway.
Although the Norwegians were forbidden to go outside the grounds of the estate they did so nonetheless on a number of occasions, dressed in battledress trousers and civilian pullovers, posing as civilians. One day a party of them wandered out of the grounds during the morning and found their way to the Turfcutter’s Arms at East Boldre where the locals treated them to endless drinks. They tumbled out of the pub at closing time and were staggering back towards Beaulieu when a car load of Field Security men brandishing small arms fell upon them and arrested them as German agents. They were taken back to The Drokes and then sent up to London, to the Norwegian Section headquarters to be severely reprimanded.
A substantial proportion of the 400 Norwegian agents were trained at Beaulieu and are known to have been housed in Hartford House, The Vineyards, Boarmans, Warren House and Clobb Gorse, as well as at The Drokes.
On the other side of the Beaulieu River, at Boarmans, the first women agents of the French Section had arrived. There were four of them, Yvonne Rudellat, Andrée Borrel, Marie-Therèse le Chene and Blanche Charlet, accompanied by their conducting officer, Pru Macfie of the FANYs. It is said that the arrival of women for training as secret agents caused much consternation and some horror among many of the Beaulieu tutors. Two of these women, Yvonne Rudellat, a Canadian, and Andrée Borrel who was French, were caught by the Nazis and died in concentration camps.
The first group of Polish students did not arrive at Beaulieu until early in 1942. Before this date resistance in Poland had been carried out by disparate groups fighting both the Soviet Russians and the Germans. In 1942 they were formed into the underground Home Army. On 11 April a group of Polish students, probably the very first group, fifteen of them under a conducting officer, Captain Zelkowski, arrived at Beaulieu and were accommodated in The Drokes and thereafter the Poles seem to have arrived regularly in batches of fifteen or more and were accommodated in The Drokes and The House on the Shore. There is documentary evidence that they took the Beaulieu course in May and July, 1942; in June, 1943, they sent a senior air force officer with one course of fifteen students to appraise the syllabus and he suggested some modifications. In March, 1943, the Polish secret service occupied Inchmery House while continuing to send students to Beaulieu. The last course for the Poles ended on 22 September, 1944, while the Warsaw uprising was in its dying phase. It is not known how many of the Poles who did the course at Beaulieu were among the 318 men parachuted into Poland to help the Home Army during the course of the war. Nor whether the last course finished their training before Poland was liberated.
Among the many Poles trained at Beaulieu was Jan Piwnik, known as Ponury (Grim), which aptly described his habitual expression, famous for his daring raid on Pinsk prison (now in Belorussia) to release members of the Resistance. With equal daring he also dressed himself in a German SS uniform, held up a German troop train, walked through the train ordering the Germans to hand over their weapons which he then passed out of the windows to awaiting partisans! He was killed in a partisan battle with the Germans at Jewlasze on 16 June, 1944.
The glamour of espionage and other forms of resistance activity tends to overshadow the bread and butter work of the Beaulieu organization. Although many kinds of secret agents were trained there, a significant proportion of the trainees were being prepared for other, very varied overt and covert activities, and it is possible that half the trainees were never dropped behind enemy lines and never went anywhere near the battlefield. A large number of the Beaulieu students were British and foreign officials of the Country Sections or were on the SOE headquarters staff. One of there was Vera Atkins, the Chief Intelligence Officer of the French Section and a powerful figure within SOE, who paid several visits to monitor the courses, sat in on the Security lectures and admits to participating in a burglary exercise, sneaking about in the forest like a footpad in the dead of night, acting as the lookout for a raiding team.
Some of the students were being trained as trainers for SOE schools in other parts of the world or as liaison staff to work with Allied countries such as Russia and America. Several parties of Americans were trained at Beaulieu which at one stage had on its training staff an American officer, Captain Carroll.
Many of the Beaulieu students were posted to Commonwealth missions or to SOE missions in neutral countries all over the world, some of which were hazardous, like the pair of Beaulieu-trained agents who were sent to Iran, a neutral country, and were subsequently murdered at the instigation of German agents. Also a substantial number of British, Commonwealth and foreign personnel including Americans, were sent to Beaulieu for what might be called ‘appreciation’ courses, the object o
f which was to ‘sell’ the Beaulieu training package. Special courses were run to gain the co-operation of other organizations such as various branches of the armed services, Scotland Yard and MI 5’s Regional Security Liaison Officers.
The course for higher grade agents lasted three weeks. For couriers and radio operators it lasted between three weeks and ten days. For non-operational personnel it lasted between ten and fourteen days. But within these parameters the training needs for specific groups varied enormously in length and emphasis. Such a variety could be easily accommodated in the Beaulieu complex of scattered houses of varying capacity. It was not unusual for a single student agent to be coached on his or her own, and there is one documented case of a woman trainee being accommodated on her own in one of the cottages in the grounds of The Rings. Two or three trainees of the same nationality undergoing similar training could be accommodated in Hartford House whereas the much larger facilities of The Drokes and The House on the Shore could accommodate about twenty students providing they were taking the same type of course. One of the instructors, Ralph Vibert, stated that at any one time there were usually four courses running simultaneously.
For all the students being trained for operations in the field, and for those being trained as trainers or controllers of agents, the school staff, including the Conducting Officers, were required to prepare reports on their performance. One such report, on a Polish student agent, has survived. It was completed early in 1942 by one of the former Chief Instructors and is clearly a home-made and naive attempt at performance appraisal, but no worse than many in use in industry today. It is disappointingly vague and couched in subjective phrases that are nearly useless for career decision-making. It says nothing about the man’s skills as an agent. Instead it reads:-
‘A first class man of high intelligence. He has a good organising brain and is capable of thinking logically and thoroughly. A striking personality, both calm and steady with a deep sense of responsibility. Is capable of exercising authority and would inspire all with respect and confidence.’
It is not the kind of report on which life and death decisions on the individual’s future should be made and there is little wonder that the heads of the Country Sections sometimes chose to ignore them in favour of their own assessments. Hopefully, reports compiled later in the war, when more practical forms of training had been introduced, were more informative.
Some of F Section’s most famous women agents, including Odette Hallowes and Noor Inayat Khan, both of whom distinguished themselves in the field, were given adverse reports from the school which regarded them as temperamentally unsuitable for operations. Both were caught by the Gestapo and the latter paid the supreme penalty.
There must have been many who failed the course and were rejected for operations. The percentage of failures may never be known. The disposal of those who had failed and been rejected must have presented the authorities with quite a problem. They could not be returned directly to any unit outside the SOE orbit in case they talked about their spycraft training. Some sources refer to the existence of a ‘Forgetting School’ where failed male agents lingered interminably until they had forgotten most of what they had learned. In all probability failed agents were sent on numerous weapon and commando or special service courses to crowd their minds with more pressing information and overwhelm their Beaulieu training, before being assigned for years to a training unit or to one or other of the SOE establishments to perform some sort of teaching or administrative role. Some are known to have been sent back to SOE’s commando school at Arisaig to spend a long period performing minor training functions. Others are said to have been sent to an establishment at Inverlair in the remotest part of the Scottish highlands where they were kept until all the successful agents with whom they had trained were out of harm’s way, after which the failed students were returned to the general manpower pool, as had been the unwanted Spaniards in the earliest days of the School. What was done with the women trainee agents who failed is not recorded. They had been specially recruited and enlisted into the Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force or the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry; the latter had plenty of jobs into which failed agents could be assigned and kept within the SOE orbit, such as domestic servants in the Holding Stations, or drivers and clerks in any one of a large number of SOE establishments.
Chapter VIII
DOCENDO DISCIMUS
(We Learn by Teaching)
The skeleton syllabus agreed by Gubbins and the SOE headquarters training staff had, according to Cuthbert Skilbeck, been fleshed out by the Beaulieu instructors. Woolrych, with his First World War experience, had undoubtedly had a hand in designing the module on Enemy Organizations and how to recognize them by their uniforms, badges and equipment. Brooker and Skilbeck designed the Security module and Folliss designed a segment of it concerned with Disguises. Professor Patterson and his successor, Ralph Vibert, had devised the module on Codes, Ciphers and Secret Inks. Philby and Paul Dehn had designed the Propaganda Warfare module. ‘Killer’ Green, with the help of experts from MI 5, Scotland Yard and a professional burglar had created an unforgettable module on Criminal Skills. And ‘Nobby’ Clark had devised his demonstrations and exercises in Survival and Living off the Land.
One subject that has not yet been mentioned because it was a commonplace feature of just about every course run by the armed services, is Physical Training and Unarmed Combat. Regular physical training was necessary in this instance to keep the trainees supple enough to maintain their skills in unarmed combat and ‘silent killing’ and keep them fit enough to avoid serious injury when dropped by parachute, which in those days made severe demands upon the body.
It is easy to condemn many aspects of the training programmes as amateurish. And so they were by today’s standards and even by the standards of the Cold War. But allowances must be made for the urgent circumstances of the war and for the fact that there was little previous knowledge or experience of training agents for what was then a new and novel role. Moreover they were trained in an age which preceded many modern developments in fields of espionage and sabotage and much else that we now take for granted. For instance, wireless telegraphy transmission depended upon unreliable valve sets containing finely tuned crystals, not miniature transistors; radar, radio-location and infra-red remote control devices were in their infancy. Miniature radios, electronic transmission of signals, micro-computers and lasers had not yet been invented. Even such things as the design of parachutes and parachuting were primitive and dangerous by today’s standards.
As to the urgency of those times, the whole nation teetered on the brink of a catastrophe of gigantic proportions and catastrophe did indeed overtake hundreds of thousands of families who lost their breadwinners or sons and daughters, close relatives or friends, in combat or in disasters, and many families were wiped out in the bombing of our cities.
Operational and political pressures compelled the armed services to take appalling risks and to commit men and women to combat without adequate training. The training of army units, aircrews and the crews of naval vessels was, to say the least, perfunctory and most of it had to take place on the job, with a high risk of death from inexperience. A well-known example is the rookie fighter pilots who were sent to intercept the experienced Germans in the Battle of Britain. There simply was not time to train people adequately in the face of continuous, threatening enemy initiatives on every battlefront and threatening technical developments in the performance of enemy weaponry and the invention of new devices such as flying bombs and rockets.
Expert though Beaulieu instructors may have been in their respective subjects, scarcely one of them was a former university don or professional teacher. Nearly all of them had come from businesses and the professions. Many of them had been to universities and public schools and had therefore experienced various kinds of tuition and tutorial practices. However, army personnel detailed to act as instructors received no formal training in learning theory and little tuition in instr
uctional techniques. Teaching, like Intelligence, was regarded as merely a matter of common sense. But it is not.
From the inception of the Beaulieu school the staff encountered a number of pitfalls well known to the teaching profession concerning the programming of lecture contents, balancing a reasonable student-teacher ratio required by conventional classroom instruction against the extravagant demands of individual instruction in practical work. There were also the usual difficulties of timetabling for splinter groups scattered between numerous premises running different courses of differing duration, and the never-ending problem of updating material to keep abreast of rapidly changing events in the occupied countries.
A gnawing bone of contention among generations of schoolteachers in this country is that, although they are not allowed to teach school children until they have received lengthy, specialized training, no formal training whatever is needed to become a university don or a lecturer in higher education! The result is that the untrained and inexperienced lecturer is likely to present unstructured material that will meander over his topic because insufficient attention has been given to the thread of his arguments and to the logical arrangement and progression of his ideas and facts. Too much ‘branching’ from the main thrust of the lecture will leave it with all branches and no trunk, and the confused audience will wonder what the talk was all about. There is also the problem of gauging the size of the step from one concept to the next. If the steps in the sequence of the presentation are too small the speaker will be seen as talking down to his audience; if they are too large he will be accused of lofty intellectual snobbery and he will lose his audience altogether. Peppering a talk with amusing or relevant anecdotes may make the delivery more palatable, but if done by an amateur serves to divert attention from, rather than emphasize, essential issues in serious instruction.
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