Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  However, there were some kinds of sabotage on rolling stock that could be done effectively by the inexpert and were difficult to detect. SOE parachuted into Europe a special axle ‘grease’ that caused the axle boxes to catch fire when the carriage was moved. It also supplied ground carborundum to put into rail-car axle boxes after the oil had been drained off. The rail-car axles then seized up.

  Agents were also supplied with exploding telephones which detonated when the hand set was lifted, and exploding ‘horse manure’ and small ‘rocks’ that could be left by the roadside to be detonated under or beside enemy vehicles. Other gadgets included limpet mines that could be stuck to the sides of vehicles or ships, and bombs that could be slipped into aircraft which were exploded by air pressure when the aircraft reached an altitude of 6000 feet. A great many other devices were manufactured in SOE’s workshops. Ian Fleming’s fictional ‘Q’ in the James Bond films was directly inspired by the wartime SOE special devices workshops.

  In France alone there were 144 recorded acts of industrial sabotage using a total of over 3,000 lbs of plastic explosives. Sixteen of these acts (11%), were ineffective. A high proportion of them were against power supplies and a considerable number caused the Nazis only temporary inconvenience. As D-Day approached and on D-Day itself a large number of acts of sabotage were conducted against the railways, power supplies and telecommunication networks, causing significant disruption to the movement of German troops and supplies.

  Assassination has long been an integral aspect of guerrilla warfare, but it does not appear to have been a notable feature of SOE’s operations. All the agents were taught ‘silent killing’ using weapons or their bare hands and a few were taught to use undetectable poisons and how to dispose of corpses. Few of them were ever called upon to participate in deliberate acts of assassination, although some had the unpleasant task of executing double agents who had penetrated their networks. However, there are two well-known instances of political assassination during the war. One was the unauthorized assassination of the French Admiral Darlan in Algiers on Christmas Eve in 1942. The other was the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’, the top SS man in Czechoslovakia, in May, 1942. The assassins, Czech agents, were not trained at Beaulieu but at STS 17 at Brickendonbury. The assassination had been authorized by the Czech government in exile and it produced horrific retaliation from the Nazis. The assassins were caught and shot or burned alive. Ten thousand hostages were shot and every man woman and child in the village of Lidice on the outskirts of Prague was murdered, many of them burned alive in a church. The village itself was razed to the ground with flamethrowers.

  The price was far too high and there were no more assassinations of high-ranking Nazis until the last week of February, 1944, by which time the Germans were being harried from every quarter in every one of the occupied countries and on such a scale that they lacked the forces to exact revenge for all such acts of resistance.

  At the beginning of 1944 the Nazi security service, the SD, which was in the process of taking over the Abwehr and purging it of Admiral Canaris and his associates, was considered to be making itself such a nuisance in hazarding operations, including those in support of the impending invasion of Europe, that SOE organized an operation called RATWEEK. All over Europe during the last week of February, 1944, SOE instructed its agents to kill as many of the senior SD staff as they could. According to Major H.J. Giskes, the head of the Abwehr counter-espionage in Holland, London ordered the assassination of twelve Dutch collaborators, the chief of the Dutch para-military organization working for the Germans and the chief of the SS. He did not say if the assassinations were carried out.

  There is no record of the total number of SD personnel killed in this operation, but in one area of France an agent of the Armada circuit who was a crack shot bagged eleven senior SD men.

  One aspect of agents’ training seems singularly out of place and that is propaganda and political warfare. As related earlier, it was designed by Philby and taught brilliantly by himself and Paul Dehn. Philby noticed at an early date that the students showed little relish for his subject and its inclusion in the Beaulieu curriculum seems to have been the product of political infighting within SOE’s high command.

  At its inception SOE possessed two main branches, SO 1, its political wing, and SO 2, to carry out acts of disruption. Both were initially under the control of Hugh Dalton, who was particularly keen on the use of political methods of warfare to break the Nazis’ hold over the German population as well as over their supporters in several non-belligerent European countries such as Spain and Sweden, and in their occupied territories, where, in some cases, such as several of the Russian provinces, their conquest had initially been welcomed.

  SO 1 had been a brainchild of the Foreign Office and had been sponsored by the Secret Intelligence Service. It was soon hived off to a newly created outfit called the Political Warfare Executive, or PWE, which retained its close ties with the Foreign Office. It was probably out of political pique that Dalton insisted upon retaining a political and propaganda warfare element in SO 2 and insisted that Gubbins, as head of SOE training, included it as a module in the Beaulieu course.

  The students were made’aware of its place in the scheme of their training during the Opening Address by the Commandant, delivered soon after their arrival. Outlining the purpose of their training as Subversion, Woolrych explained that this could be achieved by various means, for instance by materially damaging the enemy’s means of production and communications and by hampering his war efforts by straining his manpower resources beyond its limits, undermining his morale and by boosting the morale of the peoples of the conquered territories and inciting them to acts of resistance.

  The obvious means of damaging the enemy’s production capacity was by smashing the machinery of production, that is by deliberate and undisguised or ‘Attributable’ acts of sabotage. But this required specialist knowledge and training and would bring the Gestapo swarming into the area to find the culprits and take hostages. But inciting industrial workers to careless workmanship, teaching them to omit certain tasks such as failing to lubricate machinery, over-lubricating it, wasting precious oils, or mixing abrasives in the oil, were damaging and hard to detect, or if detected they were difficult to attribute to malintent. These were known as acts of ‘Unattributable’ sabotage, could be carried out with little risk to the perpetrators and were just a few of the great number of ways of damaging the enemy’s war effort at little personal risk. Other ways included pedantic adherence to maintenance and safety regulations, asking for frequent inspections and overhauls ‘to improve performance’, directing materials to the wrong places on the production line, wasting essential and costly raw materials, in fact anything to create waste and delay. If carried out on a large scale this could seriously damage the Nazis’ war effort.

  Since the Germans were rounding up industrial workers and able-bodied men and women in large numbers in the occupied countries and were deporting them to Germany to work in their factories to replace their own men called up for military service, they could be made to import large numbers of unattributable saboteurs. This is why it was important for agents to teach as many people as they could how to damage the enemy’s war effort with little personal risk.

  The Beaulieu students needed little convincing of the relevance of this aspect of propaganda warfare, but they found political and psychological warfare very difficult to learn and very hard to swallow as a practical weapon of war. Philby related how his very first students were two Frenchmen, one of whom was Yvon Morandat, a young Christian trade unionist who became a first-rate political agitator inside occupied France and one of de Gaulle’s finest political agents. They were being trained at Beaulieu for some special mission not divulged to the training staff. They became star pupils and within a fortnight were producing leaflets of a high standard. Philby said that he was mentioning it because they were almost the only trainees who took the slightest interes
t in politics and political propaganda.

  The truth is that political and psychological warfare were very difficult and specialized subjects to master and required political direction of a very high order. Philby is known to have made numerous trips to the headquarters of the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn Abbey to gain expertise and direction. He had meetings with a well-known Fleet Street reporter of German origin, Sefton Delmer, the head of the ‘Black’ propaganda section.

  Given political direction, it was up to the skilled propagandists and political feature writers to give topics and events damaging to the Nazi war effort a form that was acceptable to ordinary Germans and aim it at specific sections of the enemy population. There was not much point in producing defeatist news or turgid anti-Nazi political material and aiming it at Nazi bigots by way of radio broadcasts or newsprint. They would not listen to it or read it. Hence it was a matter of psychology how it was dished up to the target audience. The bigots might listen if the substance was slyly inserted into a broadcast professing to come from Nazi sources or into what appeared to be a Nazi newspaper. This is what is meant by ‘Black’ propaganda. It amounted to counterfeiting the source and sometimes uttering downright lies, inciting resentment by blackening the reputations of Nazi officials and even inventing Nazi officials and accusing them of corruption and embezzlement. It required huge resources, like high-powered radio transmitters, printing presses and methods of infiltrating material, and far more specialized knowledge and writing skills than most of the SOE agents were likely to possess.

  Nevertheless, teaching people in the occupied countries how to commit unattributable sabotage and inciting them to go slow and commit administrative blunders did eventually pay off and did enormous damage to the Nazis’ war production. There are some wonderful examples of administrative sabotage leading to the despatch of key components to far-away parts of France or Poland and causing delays of many weeks before they reached their intended destinations. In one case a distant factory that had not asked for a particularly precious component received the entire stock and very many weeks were wasted while it was being shunted about on the railways through several countries before it reached its uncalled-for destination. It took many more weeks of shunting on railways that were being bombed and sabotaged before it was returned to the original supplier.

  At Beaulieu Philby, Paul Dehn and their successors taught their students how to spread damaging rumours such as circulating the story that the prostitutes in brothels reserved for Germans had been put there because they had venereal diseases, or that rat droppings had been found in the Germans’ rations.

  There were other, quite different acts of unattributable sabotage reported by both German and SOE sources. Powdered glass was put into the Germans’ food and there are many other well-known ways of contaminating food to cause diarrhoea and intestinal infections. Powdered glass was also put into Germans clothing and SOE supplied agents with itching powder. They also supplied ampoules looking like lighter fuel capsules that contained a foul-smelling chemical which, when squirted onto clothing, caused an unremovable stench so that the clothes had to be burned to get rid of the smell. Other ampoules of chemicals were supplied which, if ingested, produced the symptoms of serious diseases. These were given or sold to disgruntled German soldiers wishing to avoid postings to the Russian front or seeking a discharge from the army on medical grounds.

  Chapter X

  SURVIVAL, SECURITY AND RESISTANCE TO INTERROGATION

  The Survival, Security and Resistance to Interrogation training that the students received at Beaulieu was fundamentally incompatible with their commando, sabotage and spycraft training and it was left to the students, when qualified as agents, to reconcile the two areas and strike their own balance. Too much emphasis on security meant they would achieve very little; too little and they did not survive for very long.

  As the official report on agent training emphasized, training the students to lead clandestine lives was not so much a matter of training them in spycrafts as inculcating a habit of mind, the habit of constant vigilance and attention to matters of security. Failure to adopt this mentality would quickly lead to their arrest and would also hazard the lives of others in their circuits. And after they had been arrested those who failed to remember their resistance to interrogation training would jeopardize others if they spoke too soon, even under torture, and if not tortured they might be easily tricked into revealing far more of consequence than they realized. As we shall see, the subject of interrogation is far more complex than being simply a matter of devising ways to force information out of a prisoner, or even of framing pertinent questions and seeking flaws in the answers.

  Throughout the entire period of the School’s existence the principal instructor in Survival training was Captain William Clark, who was also the ‘Housemaster’ at The Vineyards. He often expressed his doubts about the value of teaching Living Off the Land to people who were to become urban guerrillas and is said to have objected to the use of women as agents. Whatever his misgivings he would have been pleased to know that, although he was the least educated of the Beaulieu instructors, he was by far the best remembered. Every Beaulieu-trained agent who later wrote about his or her experiences invariably mentioned him by name and remembered his lessons in survival.

  All the students who had come from the SOE commando school at Arisaig had learned to crawl about the countryside inconspicuously, to walk silently on various surfaces, to map-read and survive a soaking in a desolate area of Scotland. But they knew that at the end of the day they would be returning to barracks and a hot meal. Their survival training at Beaulieu was meant to teach them to support themselves for longer periods and to live alone off the land for weeks on end should events compel them to do so.

  ‘Nobby’ was surprisingly light on his feet and there was little he did not know about silently stalking game or people without frightening flocks of rooks and other birds into flight to warn of his presence. He taught his students far more about fieldcraft than they had learned at the commando school, also how to snare rabbits, catch game and hedgehogs, to fish and to sustain themselves with fruit, herbs, berries, stinging nettles and other vegetation growing in the wild. He also taught them how to steal chickens and livestock without alerting the owners with their cries, to steal root crops and other cultivated edibles, to prepare all kinds of meat and food for the pot, and how to make smokeless fires. One of the lessons frequently mentioned by former agents is catching and cooking hedgehogs, which are apparently good to eat and are abundant in the New Forest. After killing them they would be coated with a thick layer of clay before being placed in the embers of a fire. When cooked, the clay would be removed taking with it all the skin and bristles. He taught his students how to shoot game as well as snare it, and to fish with ‘stun grenades’ made of quicklime and water!

  His students had to learn how to make hides in various kinds of countryside and were compelled to spend a night or two in them in the open. They had to learn to sleep and live rough and be presentable after doing so. Whether many of the students found these lessons of practical use after they had been parachuted into occupied Europe is not known.

  Training in security was an integral part of the lessons on Agent Management and Techniques and practical lessons in many aspects of security were incorporated into all the schemes, including losing a ‘tail’, arranging cells and cut-outs and dead letter boxes, personal security and warning signals. There were many aspects that could be taught and practised in-house, including disguises. Another was how to detect whether one’s room had been searched in one’s absence. The students were constantly reminded of the importance of being meticulously tidy so that they would notice if any of their belongings had been disturbed. They were also taught how to lay inconspicuous traps on their bedroom doors and to scatter them over their belongings, devices like using talcum powder, cigarette ash, laying hairs or threads across places likely to be searched, and placing minute pieces of paper, pie
ces of matchsticks or leaves in door jambs and in the cheeks of drawers so that they would drop out if they were opened. While the students were out of their rooms, the rooms would be searched by Field Security or other members of the staff who knew all the tricks and would replace the traps to see if the students would still notice that their rooms had been searched.

  Students were implored never to commit anything to paper, but in case they needed to do so they were taught to conceal compromising equipment and materials within a room. Although it is doubtful if any novice agent could find a hiding place in a room that would defeat a trained team of spycatchers, there are many places that would escape a perfunctory search or even a more thorough search by soldiers and others who had not been specially trained. It was necessary to teach the students to avoid using hoary old ruses like sticking things under a mattress or on the undersides of drawers and suspending things in the old-fashioned high-level lavatory cisterns. Better to use the insides of electrical appliances and wireless sets where a searcher would think twice about searching to avoid being electrocuted or in the pipe that holds the hangers in a wardrobe or in a small hole drilled into the top of an internal door or to remove an internal door mortice lock, use the cavity for storage and replace the lock. On operations many agents carried large sums of money in cash and bundles of forged documents. Where they hid them is not recorded, but these were probably buried in gardens or fields. No doubt the SOE factory was able to supply special equipment, such as shoes with hollow heels, toothpaste tubes and talcum powder containers with storage space and even hollowed out chessmen, for hiding small compromising articles, especially during transit.