Beaulieu

  May had Dourlein thoroughly searched and then began to question him. Like many other captured agents, Dourlein must have felt very foolish about falling into the trap of telling the members of his reception committee about his mission. It was too late to retract when confronted with a formal interrogation. When he refused to cooperate May took him on the tour of the cells where he was shown forty Dutch agents and asked if he recognized any of them. It was an obvious ploy to demoralize the prisoner thoroughly and it had the intended effect.

  Like many other agents faced with the prospect of death, Dourlein’s mind must have raced over the various ways of placating his captors and saving his life. In this situation many SOE agents immediately revealed all they knew. Others were talked into offering their services as double agents or stool pigeons in exchange for their lives, but those who accepted were eventually executed despite the promises they had been given. Yet others played for time, pretending to cooperate by revealing substantial amounts of non-operational information. There were two subjects that could always be used to give the impression of being cooperative without jeopardizing the lives of others. One was to talk about themselves. The other was to talk at length about the training they had received, the schools they had attended and about the instructors. Each scrap of information added to the store of information used by the interrogators to convince later arrivals that they did indeed know everything. In interrogation knowledge breeds knowledge.

  Sergeant May questioned Dourlein with endless patience about his signalling routines and codes and after forty hours of non-stop questioning allowed his prisoner to go to his cell to sleep for a brief period before the questioning was resumed. During the weeks that followed they exchanged information about sabotage techniques and sometimes May spoke about the training at Beaulieu and in Scotland. Dourlein also implies that they talked at length about how he had escaped from Holland after the German occupation and about his life in Britain and in the Dutch Navy before being recruited into SOE. Like all escapers from the continent to Britain after the German occupation of their countries, Dourlein had been cleared through the MI 5 security establishment, the Royal Patriotic School, a former girls’ school on the outskirts of London. May seemed to be particularly interested in this establishment and had Dourlein draw plans of its layout as well as discussing details of the clearance system. There could be only one reason for his interest and that was to see if it was possible for the Germans to get an agent posing as a refugee through the school undetected.

  During the six weeks of his overt interrogation Dourlein was never assaulted or in any way physically abused. He was kept in solitary confinement, fed quite well and allowed a ration of tobacco. The reasonable treatment he had received in the Gestapo prison at Haaren was later to be used by British security interrogators as evidence of his cooperation with his captors. Admittedly the Haaren regime was quite uncharacteristic of the usual treatment of prisoners held in Gestapo prisons. Nearby there was a concentration camp where the SS guards were beating Dutchmen to death.

  On completion of his overt interrogation Dourlein was moved to another cell where he was joined by his associate Bogaart.

  It is a fair assumption that the Germans were doing what they were doing in Dulag Luft, that is using hidden microphones and stool pigeons in their detailed interrogation centres and in the special wings of their prisons. Certainly Dourlein and Bogaart would not have been reunited for humane or charitable reasons. After lengthy solitary confinement and all the tensions that build up in people expecting torture and death, they must have been bursting to exchange experiences and confidences, probably chattered eagerly and at length to check out with each other what they had told their interrogators, forgetting all their resistance to interrogation training, to the benefit of their listeners.

  Two months later, when they had probably exhausted conversation about anything new, they were transferred to another cell where they were joined by a third prisoner, Van der Bor, another captured agent. It was while they were in this cell that Dourlein began talking to his cellmates about escaping and made contact with Jan Ubbink who was in an adjacent cell. Whispering to each other through a hole they had made in the adjoining wall, under a sink, they began plotting their escape. Had these cells possessed concealed microphones the Germans would have heard Dourlein talking to his cellmates about escaping and they might have heard the whispering with Ubbink. They would have taken steps to separate and punish the plotters before they made their escape. The fact that the pair conversed in whispers indicates that they had at last remembered something about their training in resistance to interrogation.

  The pair squeezed themselves through the skylights over their cell doors, hid all day in a cubicle of a lavatory used by the guards and that night, 29/30 August, 1943, during a thunderstorm, lowered themselves with a rope made from bedding to the ground forty feet below and disappeared.

  They hid in a house within a stone’s throw of the prison and two weeks later went to the town of Tilburg in the south of Holland and remained there for months before attempting to leave the country. They were helped to get away from Tilburg by a former police inspector who, earlier in the war, had collaborated with the Nazis, a fact which the British security interrogators were later to use as evidence that the Germans had assisted their escape to Britain to work as double agents. The inspector was later assassinated by the Dutch underground.

  Eventually they reached Berne, after wandering through Belgium and France, and reported to the British Embassy. Here they reported that the Germans were controlling all the Dutch SOE operations and radio transmissions and had captured all the agents. London ordered them to be sent to England by ‘a safe route’ which turned out to be an escape line through France into Spain, reaching there on 1 December. They were shipped to Gibraltar from where they were flown to an airfield near Bristol on 1 February, 1944. Two days later they were sent to London for debriefing by a British Intelligence officer, to whom they reported that the entire Dutch operation had been compromised and was under German control and that the Germans claimed to have an agent within SOE.

  They were not believed and were sent to a holding camp for returning agents near Guildford where they discovered they were virtually under arrest. There were three other Dutchmen being held with them in the same camp. One of them was not really a Dutch national but a Field Security sergeant of the Intelligence Corps who spoke impeccable Dutch and was acting as an agent for British security.

  Sergeant The. Fleming, the British agent, was multi-lingual; he spoke flawless Dutch and fluent French and German. He had been recruited into SOE in October, 1943, after years of service in Field Security in Britain, America and Jamaica. After joining SOE, he had spent three months training with student agents at the commando school in Scotland, had learned to parachute with them at Ringway and had been with them through an explosives course at Hereford, to prepare him for the role of a Conducting Officer. He had been posted to Guildford to ‘look after’ the four Dutchmen being held under suspicion and had been asked to pose as one of their fellow countrymen.

  Graham Fleming had an extraordinary background. His mother was Dutch but his father was an Englishman who, during the First World War, had been sent with a naval brigade to defend besieged Antwerp. When the defence collapsed under a German assault the brigade retreated into Holland, a neutral country. Members of the brigade who had thrown away their arms during the retreat were immediately repatriated by boat to Folkestone. But those who had kept their weapons were interned for the rest of the war! Among the internees was Fleming senior. He remained there so long that he learned to speak Dutch fluently and married a Dutch woman with whom he had a family.

  After the war Fleming senior could not get a job in England but was able to get one as a representative in Holland. His son, Graham, went to a Dutch school and later to a Dutch college and took a job in the Netherlands. He was virtually Dutch.

  When Holland was over-run by the Germans during the Second Wor
ld War Graham escaped to England and sought refuge with relatives in Bristol. He volunteered as aircrew but the RAF failed to respond for months. Meantime he had seen an advertisement in the press saying that the army required linguists and volunteered his services. At the age of twenty-two he signed on, was interviewed by an army officer and sent home before being called to a depot in Avonmouth to be kitted out. Although he had received no military training whatever, he was told to sew on the stripe of a lance corporal. He had been recruited into the Field Security Police, later to become the Field Security Wing of the Intelligence Corps. Thereafter his army career followed a similar course to those of Bill Brooker, Cuthbert Skilbeck and many others who had volunteered their linguistic skills to the army.

  Typically for those times, Fleming received no basic army training or any training in military Intelligence matters or interrogation techniques before being assigned to the docks to vet the crews of incoming merchant vessels, looking for infiltrators and collecting whatever useful Intelligence he could.

  He was promoted to the rank of sergeant within a year and, after two years in Avonmouth, he was sent via America to Jamaica for a purpose that was not to be revealed to him for many weeks. Eventually a shipload of Jewish refugees from the Netherlands arrived and he was put among them to keep an eye on them, scarcely a taxing occupation and one that seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the war in Europe. He had great difficulty in obtaining a posting back to England, and when he eventually returned to the Intelligence Corps depot in Rotherham he found that the system had forgotten his existence. After more agitation for a useful occupation he was sent to London in October, 1943, for an interview that was to lead to his recruitment into SOE.

  Fleming lived with his four Dutch suspects for nearly three months, after which the unfortunate Dourlein and Ubbink were thrown into Brixton prison without trial as suspected double agents, forced to associate with common criminals for two weeks until the Dutch authorities managed to extricate them. They were, Fleming reported, extremely bitter about their treatment after risking their lives to escape from Haaren to bring the news of the disaster of the SOE operations in Holland. Dourlein and Ubbink were discharged from SOE under a cloud and it was to take them five years to clear their names. Dourlein was demoted from sergeant to corporal and subsequently joined the Dutch Air Force and saw active service as an air gunner for the latter part of the war. In October, 1950, the outstanding courage of the pair was finally recognized by the Dutch government and they were awarded medals for their bravery.

  Sergeant Fleming was posted to the Finishing School at Beaulieu in the spring of 1944 and served there in a multiplicity of roles. He was a Conducting Officer, rendering reports on the suitability of the student-agents under his charge, an interpreter for Nobby Clark’s demonstrations in living off the land and a tutor in resistance to interrogation, while also doubling up as a Field Security sergeant in the Beaulieu area. He was destined to meet up with Jan Ubbink in Holland after the war.

  The post-war investigations carried out independently by the British and Dutch authorities concluded, after a prolonged and detailed examination of the evidence, that the Germans had not managed to plant a spy within the senior ranks of SOE. Giskes, Schreieder, May and other members of the German counter-espionage team had been captured by the Allies and had been questioned for three years about their activities. Surviving Dutch agents and British and Dutch officers of the Dutch Section and other senior officers in SOE, including Colin Gubbins, had been questioned in detail and their records examined.

  Both governments concluded that the British and Dutch officers controlling the Section had been negligent in failing to notice the absence of an array of security checks in the radio transmissions of agents under the Germans’ control. Much of the blame fell upon the British officer who had been head of the Dutch Section during most of the period of Operation Nordpol.

  Both of these high-level enquiries must have investigated how the Germans had acquired sufficient information about SOE techniques, facilities and controlling personnel to enable them to mount Nordpol, but their findings have never been released. Therefore one can only speculate about how much of this information came from the use of penetration agents and collaborators posing as reception committees, how much was disclosed freely by the captured agents and how much of it was derived from clandestine interrogation techniques.

  After the war there were other examples of people being named as highly placed spies when in fact the information they had acquired had been obtained from secret sources such as code-breaking and the use of clandestine interrogation techniques. The people concerned were unable to disabuse the public because their true sources of information were still Top Secret. But that did not stop Hollywood making a film about the alleged high-level spying activities of one of them. The truth was that he had never been a spy. Throughout the war he held what soldiers called ‘a soft-arsed number’ in an Intelligence unit that was never put in the slightest danger, never experienced any hardship and never went anywhere near enemy territories.

  Epilogue

  THE BONFIRE OF MEMORIES

  On 8 May, 1945, hostilities ceased in Europe. The Commandant and staff of the school issued invitations to a party at The House in the Wood to the Montagu family, to local residents and to their own relatives and friends, to celebrate the end of the war. The invitations stated that the School would be ‘opening its cellars’ to the guests at 9 pm.

  The catering staff prepared a splendid spread of food the like of which the civilian guests had not seen since before rationing was introduced early in the war. The cellars were opened to produce wines and spirits of such a variety and quantity that the guests were left gasping with wonder as to how the School had managed to obtain it when it had all but disappeared from the normal sources of supply. Other members of the staff built a huge bonfire in the garden and topped it with an effigy of Adolf Hitler.

  Soon after the guests arrived somebody started playing a piano, (one noble source said it was Paul Dehn), and staff and guests began to sing and dance. Near midnight one of the officers rang a bell for the guests to assemble round the bonfire and at midnight the Commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanley Woolrych, ignited the fire and they all danced round it yelling at the tops of their voices until they collapsed with exhaustion, or with the drink, at dawn.

  The bonfire was, many hoped, a bonfire of so many years of living on the brink of national and personal catastrophe, with the seemingly endless succession of bitter military defeats and set-backs and the constant threat of sudden death from enemy bullets, shells, bombs, flying bombs and ballistic missiles, with the pain and grief of bereavement and perpetual separation, from family, loved ones and friends. The relief felt by everybody exploded into uninhibited celebration, nation-wide.

  According to the late the Hon. Mrs Playdell-Bourverie, it was a stupendous and unforgettable binge on which to end five and a half years of warfare in Europe.

  Few foresaw that the bonfire would mark the end of an era, the end of unprecedented comradeship and unselfishness and the end of a pervasive social cohesion through every section of our society, engendered by years of shared adversity. Or that the abrupt end of hostilities would leave many people stunned, and with a sudden, unexpected feeling of emptiness, incipient loneliness and bewilderment at the prospect of imminent redundancy and an uncertain future in some sort of civilian occupation in a much changed world.

  Meantime the war continued in the Far East for a further three months, until August, 1945, which meant that after the VE Day party the staff of the School returned to work training agents for service in Europe and the Middle and Far East.

  In June, 1945, the School was closed and disbanded and seven officers from the staff were posted to SOE in London to prepare a handbook on agent techniques.

  SOE itself was rapidly disbanded and in the rush to return to normality most of its records were destroyed.

  Few would have dared to predict that soon afte
rwards the country, and some of the officers of the School, would be sucked into another conflict with another savage and brutal political regime, communism, a conflict which became known as The Cold War.

  APPENDIX A

  MEMBERS OF THE STAFF OF THE FINISHING SCHOOL AT VARIOUS TIMES DURING THE WAR.

  COMMANDANTS:-

  Lt. Col. J.W.Munn R.A.

  Lt. Col. S.H.C. Woolrych

  Lt. Col. F.V. Spooner

  APPENDIX B

  THE COMMANDANT’S OPENING ADDRESS TO NEW STUDENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  The full text of Lieutenant-Colonel S.H.C. Woolrych’s opening address to the students of many nationalities is historically interesting for a variety of reasons. It was evidently drafted sometime during 1943 when the German Army was at full stretch and the Germans were plundering the manpower of the Occupied Countries for forced labour in German industries. It also captures the spirit and the mounting tension of the Allies preparing to invade the continent of Europe and gives some inkling of the relative ease with which agents were being infiltrated into and extricated from the Occupied countries.

  Compared with the sophisticated methods of today, and even in comparison with the methods of the Cold War, it reveals an astonishing naivety, and the text has a distinct flavour of the amateurism which pervaded the whole of Special Operations Executive and many of its wartime operations. It is, however, easy to be critical in retrospect, to ignore the stresses of the wartime situations. In truth they were usually such that enormous risks had to be taken by committing half-trained personnel of all Arms into action long before they were sufficiently trained to cope with the tasks they were given without risking their lives through inexperience.