A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The first stage of the Battle of Britain was being fought overhead. The King joked about Buckingham Palace providing a conspicuous target. One bomb did miss the King and Queen by a few hundred feet. It became apparent to Donovan that these monarchs had no plans to run away.

  A mild Marxist professor, J. B. S. Haldane, experimented on the River Thames with floating mines which were “detonated when the action of the water dissolves the retaining pin—a cough drop.” Professor Haldane’s assistants were schoolboys, who gleefully explained to Donovan how these improvised gadgets would blow up German barges. In crumbling English mansions, Donovan listened to leggy girls in tweed skirts teach the techniques of Gestapo interrogation. But he also met Englishmen who were sharply critical of romantic versions of their plight: men like George Orwell, who attacked the Ruling Class in an essay of that title, quoting what he called a piece of Shakespeare bombast: “Come the four corners of the world in arms / And we shall shock them: / Naught shall make us rue / If England to herself do rest but true.” All very well, said Orwell, but the country would not be true to herself until she produced a revolution. The heirs of Nelson and Cromwell were not in the House of Lords, but in fields and streets, the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden. “And at present they are still kept under by a generation of ghosts—the ladies in their Rolls-Royces, the company directors still fiddling their way around wartime laws. . . . Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary.”

  Three days after Hitler formally decided to “eliminate England,” the real England found its voice. Churchill informed the War Cabinet of the creation of a body “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy.” The body was described for the record as Special Operations Executive, otherwise known as the Baker Street Irregulars. The identity of British Security Coordination was not disclosed until the United States came into the war; its headquarters in New York was never officially acknowledged.

  Bill Donovan’s presence in London for this secret declaration of unconventional warfare was, of course, essential. The President’s agent had to see that BSC in New York was the fountainhead of all armed resistance that would be conducted in an offensive spirit. To the general public, it looked as if Britain could do nothing but absorb the punishment handed out by Hitler until the defenses collapsed.

  The supreme trial had begun on July 10, which, unknown to the victims at the time, marked the opening of the Battle of Britain. The defending forces consisted of Hurricane and Spitfire single-engine fighters, which the Germans hoped to wear down in daily air battles. The main German assault on British Fighter Command was scheduled for August 10, according to Bletchley analysts. Hitler set the date of invasion for September 15 and called it OPERATION SEALION.

  During these anxious days, Donovan talked to the Irregulars about underground warfare. He met Colin Gubbins, whom he knew as the author of the study written two years before based on the argument that “the coming war with Germany will have to be fought by irregular or guerilla forces.” Gubbins was now in charge of training saboteurs, agents, and the leaders of secret armies. His Irregulars worked behind a façade of commercial offices between Westminster and Soho. Some of their recruits were drawn from 20,000 Poles who had escaped from France; and the Dutch, Free French, Norwegians, and Belgians who had slipped across the narrow seas to continue the struggle against Nazism. Their instructors had been on secret missions to Russia and China. They had studied guerrilla warfare from the Boer War in South Africa to the Civil War in Spain, and Mao Tse-tung’s Long March from Shanghai to Yennan.

  The countryside was sprinkled with old mansions earmarked as schools for spies. There were agencies for political warfare and special operations. Something new, called “black” propaganda, was defined by its director as “the only answer to a lie.”

  “But there’s only one answer to a lie,” said Donovan. “And that’s the truth.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. The truth. Exactly. Even if you have to bend it a little.”

  The truth-bender was a newspaper executive. Prominent bankers ran departments of economic warfare. A professor of ancient history, seconded to the cipher school, confessed that he was completely defeated in his attempts to thread a path through the shrubbery of cloak and dagger. “Some of my dear colleagues,” he muttered darkly, “will be lost in that maze for years to come.”

  On the weekend following Donovan’s arrival, Hitler’s “final peace offer” was broadcast to Britain: “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished seeking favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.”

  Within the hour, an insulting reply hit Berlin. It was delivered, without the British government even being consulted, by a newspaperman. Hitler’s grandiose offer of peace was not even discussed by Churchill’s War Cabinet, which had dispersed for the unshakable ritual of a weekend in the country. The vulgar nose-thumbing reply was left to Sefton Delmer, of Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express, who ran a center of propaganda dirty tricks at the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey, ten miles east of Bletchley Park. When Delmer sat before a microphone that night of Friday, July 19, he had no authority—and neither had the British Broadcasting Corporation—to respond to Hitler’s speech. In idiomatic German he spoke directly to the Führer: “Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal to what you are pleased to call our reason and commonsense. Herr Fuehrer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you. Right back into your evil-smelling teeth.”

  Nobody at the BBC questioned the sentiment. The final insult to Hitler was that the British government had not even troubled to discuss his peace offer. All Hitler could do was mutter back the threat of “an exceptionally daring undertaking”; meaning invasion.

  Donovan made friends with a young English girl who typified this defiance of Hitler. She was Joan Bright, a stenographer who became a key figure in Allied war-making although her salary never rose to more than the equivalent of twenty dollars a week. She typified the adventurous, emotionally stable, selfless youngsters attracted to dangerous work without the reward or encouragement of public acclaim. From her mid-teens, she had sought whatever experience and knowledge she found stimulating, taking secretarial jobs in remote parts of the world and thus giving herself an unorthodox education. A year before the war, a friend told her of “work that might interest you.” She was to stand inside St. James’s Park Underground station at 11:00 A.M. on a certain day, wearing a pink carnation. She would be approached by a woman. She went, was duly picked up, found herself taken by a circuitous route that constantly changed direction to the office of a colonel, who, warning her of tortures to come if caught, required her to sign the Official Secrets Act, and then explained that on leaving the building she must avoid certain street characters visible from his window. If such lurking observers identified her with intelligence, her name would go on the German Black List of those to be exterminated when Britain fell.

  Donovan was aware that the Tyler Kent case had sharpened suspicions within this armed camp. Counterespionage experts described to him how the American Embassy leak was plugged. A start had been made with the Double Cross System, by which German agents came under British control so that the next enemy infiltrator and his controllers could be led down the wrong path. “Wrong for them, right for us,” murmured one Oxford don in charge of double agents.

  A broadcasting station was being set up near Bletchley to beam very strange programs indeed into Germany, concocted by an anti-Nazi Berliner, Paul Sanders, once a writer of detective stories, now a British Army corporal. Sanders invented a conspiracy among German generals against Hitler. Then he created an imaginary network of radio stations run by the rebels. His transmitter near Bletchley was to operate in such a way that it seemed to be located inside Germany. The broadcasts were to be irregular, using different call signs, designed to excite Nazi watchd
ogs. Corporal Sanders had a cast of characters led by “Der Chef,” an imaginary German general in charge of this fictitious conspiracy. “By constantly changing transmission times and frequencies, we hope to keep a good part of the Gestapo busy chasing shadows,” Sanders told Donovan. “We might even get some good Nazis arrested.”

  Such dirty tricks were inventive, certainly, but Donovan wondered if British ingenuity was enough. The German Air Force was attacking ships in the English Channel to lure British fighters into aerial battles, hoping the RAF would lose not only precious aircraft but also pilots. The pattern was set by an engagement on July 10 in which six RAF Hurricanes found themselves grossly outnumbered by long-range Messerschmitt 110s and short-range 109s escorting Dornier bombers. The skirmish drew other RAF squadrons into the fight, and into battle with other decoys. Over 600 British sorties were flown that day, twice the daily average during the Dunkirk withdrawal. The wear and tear rose in the days that followed. The Germans would lunge at relatively unimportant targets, which the RAF felt compelled to defend. Teasing attacks on ships were carried out by German dive bombers, while swift and deadly fighters waited up-sun to fall upon the British drawn into range. “We never had time to gain height before we were attacked,” reported the chief of RAF Fighter Command, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding.

  But inventiveness was paying off, Donovan discovered. Told about a scientist who “started work on a death-ray in 1934,” Donovan expected a crank. Instead, he met Robert Watson-Watt, who had worked with Stephenson in that year on the rudimentary system later called “radar.” At Stephenson’s request, Watson-Watt risked arrest just before the Nazi invasion of Poland to travel through Germany looking for signs of parallel work in radar detection. By the time of the Battle of Britain, radar stations along England’s coasts worked closely with a sophisticated system of fighter direction and control. Radar and visual information were fed into the central control rooms buried in the countryside. British fighters were then directed onto enemy formations. With practice, less and less time was wasted in the air, with a consequent saving in frayed nerves, engine wear, and fuel.

  The Germans had no radar at this time and were puzzled by a growing British discrimination between feints and real attacks. There was another explanation for this skill. ULTRA was beginning to develop confidence in its ability to read and interpret orders to the German Air Force. This information was not vital to RAF victory, but together with radar it demonstrated that mechanized barbarism could be outwitted.

  “I’ve always believed in the superiority of mind over matter,” Watson-Watt told Donovan. “But, by God, we suffered from some witless leaders before the war. Stephenson and private enterprise helped me in the 1920s. Bill understood what I was doing because it was close to his own work with the rudiments of television. By the 1930s, he was able to get me secret support. If I’d relied on the British government, there’d have been no radar and no Spitfires.”

  On the tenth day of Donovan’s journey, the London newspapers reprinted an editorial from the New York Times:

  It is twelve o’clock in London. . . . Is the tongue of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of the King James version of the Scriptures, of Keats, of Shelley, to be hereafter, in the British Isles, the dialect of an enslaved race?

  Let us try to see clearly. We have to look back a good many centuries to find the beginnings of English liberty. We see it as a rough and obstinate growth, heaving the rich soil under the oaks of lordly estates, breaking out in Wat Tyler’s time and in Cromwell’s and in the day of the Second James, forcing through the Reform Act, never perfected, never giving up. . . .

  It is twelve o’clock in London. Not twelve o’clock for empire—there is no empire any more. Not twelve o’clock from the old “Dominion over Palm and Pine.” Twelve o’clock for the common people of England, out of whom England’s greatest souls have always come. Twelve o’clock for all that they are and have been, for all those things which make life worth living for free men . . . We know little, and for a time shall know little, of this unparalleled spectacle of the nation rising as by a single impulse.

  The rising, on the face of it, was one of spirits more than arms. There was a Home Guard of a million civilians, with 20,000 sporting guns to repel the invaders. Churchill reckoned that the available ammunition provided one bullet for every 2,000 Germans, judging by the size of Nazi forces committed to the invasion. Some fifty Lee-Enfield rifles had been unearthed behind the stage at Drury Lane, and a clutch of Indian mutiny rifles, circa 1857, was found in Manchester Zoo. The American Committee for the Defense of British Homes shipped 160 crates of shotguns and pistols to be shared among civilians. “The loss of these rifles would be a disaster of the first order,” said Churchill to the naval commander who had to protect this pitiful shipment from U-boats.

  Two weeks after arriving in Britain, Donovan wrote a note to Stephenson:

  The defenders share a total of 786 field guns, 167 anti-tank guns, and 259 inadequate tanks, enough for two divisions against the forty German divisions waiting across the Channel. There are just over a thousand pilots left in the RAF, shredded by meat-grinding air attacks. The Royal Navy looks like a fleet of old bath tubs riddled with holes. The loss of destroyers in evacuating the troops from Dunkirk leaves the navy in no shape to stop an invasion. I have seen the Orders Concerning the Organization and Function of the Military Government of England instructing the German gauleiters on the liquidation of all intellectuals and all Jews. This is to be done under the direction of the former dean of political science at Berlin University, Dr. Franz Six. All other Englishmen between 17 and 45 are to be deported to Germany as slaves. The SS is to select mates from among its finest men to impregnate Englishwomen and breed a new race.

  The two British islands of Guernsey and Jersey were now occupied. Hitler had English soil under his boots for the first time since he was a poor student in Liverpool before World War I. Few knew about Hitler’s sojourn in the largest shipping center in the British Empire. He celebrated the capture of the Channel Islands on his fifty-second birthday, more than a quarter-century after his first glimpse of this maritime power. From these islands, Hitler intended to dispatch SS officers charged with the task of establishing liquidation centers in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Special arrangements were specified in the Military Government Orders for Liverpool, where the selection of victims was to be especially harsh. Hitler, clearly, had not forgotten Liverpool.*

  Yet Churchill directed the Irregulars to “Set Europe Ablaze.” Baker Street maps of Europe were plastered with code names that represented great expectations and small realities. TROJAN and HORSE looked like a web centered on Paris but amounted to nothing more formidable than an agent and his radio operator still waiting in England to go. A printer from Leighton Buzzard, drawn into the nearby Bletchley web, protested that he could not produce edible editions (“to be swallowed if captured”) of The Partisans’ Guide on his flatbed press. The Ministry of Agriculture distributed pamphlets on wartime vegetable-growing, in which were concealed tips on blowing up invaders tramping through the fields of Hereford and Hertfordshire.

  Each hamlet had its own guerrilla detachment and tunnels so well concealed that some villagers remained unaware of them thirty years later. Donovan was taken into the secret by that extraordinary product of another age Colonel Eric Bailey, the explorer and former British agent in Central Asia (whose collection of rare butterflies later went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Bailey was nearing his sixtieth year but refused to recognize this. He ran his own guerrilla unit as if he were still His Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Nepal, his last official post, off in the Himalayas, where he had once conducted military expeditions. Bailey knew better than to question Donovan’s appearance in his village, accompanied by a British general. The party repaired to Bailey’s observation post near the Norfolk coast.

  “Suppose you spotted enemy paratroopers here,” said t
he general, “and Germans landing on the beaches over there. What would you do?”

  Bailey peered down the hillside. “How many? Precisely where? Moving in what direction?” He peppered the general with questions, to which the dignitary replied with improvised details.

  “Well,” said Bailey, “I’d order my chaps back there to do such-and-such, and then our fellows back in the woods to move thus-and-thus. . . .”

  “But how would you get the orders away?” demanded the general. “You’ve no radio and you’re exposed up here, so you can’t very well use signals.”

  “I’ve already got the orders away,” Bailey replied. He lifted a sack lining his observation trench, revealing the end of a pipe. The pipe ran underground to his signal office under the village church. While the general talked, Bailey had scribbled notes he inserted into old tennis balls and rolled down the pipe. It was his communications system.

  Donovan and Bailey became friends. Later, Bailey moved to New York to work for Stephenson as a King’s Messenger, carrying BSC’s confidential papers around the world. “He sighed for the simpler days,” Donovan would recall. “Rolling tennis balls down drainpipes, waiting to stick a German with a pitchfork, struck him as healthier than being stuffed into the gun turret of a bomber to be ferried back and forth.”

  Bailey wanted to get into the offensive side of operations. His ideas for industrial sabotage were also deadly simple. But he was up against stiff competition. Gubbins had collected some real geniuses in Baker Street. “Insurance adjustors, for instance,” he told Donovan. “Clever blighters. In peacetime, they deal with claims for damages from factories. So they know what puts a machine out of action—fast. For example, the weak link in the chain of certain manufacturing processes may be the sulphuric-acid factories. You can knock one out with a well-placed hammer! You drive it through one of the gigantic clay vats holding the acid. The clay cracks. And in wartime, those vats are irreplaceable.”