SOE

by Fredric Boyce

  SOE

  the scientific secrets

  This book is dedicated to Douglas Everett,

  a man of stature, modesty,

  kindness and tremendous enthusiasm

  SOE

  the scientific secrets

  FREDRIC BOYCE AND DOUGLAS EVERETT

  FOREWORD BY M.R.D. FOOT

  Title page: The sketch in Everett’s notebook showing the principle of the ‘air leak’ or ‘disc time’ delay – Newton’s hoped-for temperature independent time delay.

  First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Fredric Boyce, 2003, 2004, 2009, 2011

  © The Estate of Douglas H. Everett, 2003, 2004, 2009, 2011

  The right of Fredric Boyce, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7580 6

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7579 0

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by M.R.D. Foot

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 Introduction

  2 What was the Special Operations Executive?

  3 SOE Research and Development Establishments

  4 Organisation of Research and Development

  5 Physico-Chemical Section – Sabotage Devices and Materials

  6 Physico-Chemical and Physiological Sections

  7 Camouflage Section

  8 Engineering Section – Weapons

  9 Engineering Section – Seaborne Craft

  10 Operational Research and Trials

  11 Operational Research – The Air Supply Research Section

  12 The Wireless Section

  13 Organisation of Supply and Production

  14 Supply, Finance and Manpower Problems

  15 Special Operations involving R&D Section

  16 Technical Liaison

  17 Overall Assessment

  18 Epilogue

  Appendix A Research and Development Establishments

  Appendix B Inventors of Devices produced by SOE Research Section

  Appendix C Abbreviations

  Appendix D Summary of the Work of the Engineering Section

  Appendix E Examples of Camouflaged Devices

  Appendix F Optimisation of Equipment

  Notes

  Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  The history of SOE seems to spring a never-ending run of surprises: here are some more. For several years past, the Imperial War Museum’s secret war gallery has exhibited a set of SOE’s tools –some of them gruesome –for forwarding its tasks of subversion and sabotage. Many of SOE’s surviving papers have now gone public, and the Public Record Office has published two of the catalogues in which the tools were listed. This book explains how, why and where they were designed.

  It is by two scientists, one of whom has just died –his survivor dedicates the book to him; Everett served in SOE himself, and his co-author Boyce shared in the task of clearing up after it, so they write with inside knowledge, always an advantage when dealing with a secret service. They present a clear scientific account of the ways SOE’s inventors worked, and summarise the results; some of them well enough known, others partly or entirely new.

  There is a mass of detail, for instance, on Operation Braddock, the proposal to drop small incendiaries into Germany, to be picked up by slave labourers and used to start fires; Mackenzie mentions this in his recently released in-house history of SOE, but here it is handled fully (the results were disappointing). There is also a lot of new detail on Periwig, Templer’s attempt to convince the German security authorities that there was an active resistance movement in Germany in the last winter of the war; Leo Marks’s dark hints are here spelled out in full. SOE has often, wrongly, been accused of dealing in biological warfare; the authors are able to rebut this charge, but do have a disconcerting passage on research intended to disrupt the digestion of members of the Wehrmacht. This never reached the point of attempted action.

  These pages give a vivid picture of how hard SOE’s scientists worked, and how informally; they were free of many constraints of service discipline, and encouraged to think laterally. George Taylor and Tommy Davies from SOE’s governing Council gave them plenty of starting impetus, and D.M. Newitt, the head of scientific research, kept all of them up to the mark.

  Needless to say, he recruited on the old boy net –there was no other safe way of doing so; the results justified the method. He and six of his colleagues became Fellows of the Royal Society. Inter-service and inter-secret-service jealousies marred corners of the story, and will probably be blown up by the ignorant into attempts at sensation; they did not much hinder the war effort. With the passage of time it is getting less and less easy to remember that SOE was a fighting service, formed to help win a world war.

  A good deal of mud was thrown at SOE by Marxists who maintained that it was a tool of capitalism. Many of its members did come from large firms; but they were there to beat a bad enemy, not to serve any commercial interest. One of the large firms that supplied several senior men was the great textile firm of Courtauld’s; and after the war Courtauld’s looked after Newitt, funding a chair for him at Imperial College London.

  He would have enjoyed this account of his and his colleagues’ role in aiding a critical victory.

  M.R.D. Foot

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The authors would like to express their gratitude to the many individuals and organisations who have helped in the writing of this book. In particular, they thank Professor D.W.J. Cruickshank, FRS, for his recollections and photographs; John van Riemsdijk for supplying information and material; Elizabeth Howard-Turner for the gift of the late Agnes Kinnersley’s Station IX scrap book; and Tony Brooks for his first-hand account of sabotaging railway wagons.

  Duncan Stuart, the SOE Adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was always helpful with advice and information from files prior to their official release. Christopher J. Tompkins made an excellent sectionalised drawing of the Time Pencil and Lady Cicely Mayhew translated the German on the Pigeon Post form.

  Of the organisations contacted during the research for this work, the MoD Pattern Room, then in Nottingham, and the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp were most helpful in permitting photographs to be made of key items of SOE equipment.

  The portrait of Professor D.M. Newitt, FRS, was obtained with the assistance of the Royal Society, while the biographical details of some of the engineers were drawn from documents made available by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

  Other organisations which contributed are the Public Record Office at Kew who never failed to come up with any of the over two hundred files consulted; the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport; the Airborne Forces Museum at Aldershot; and the Imperial War Museum whose photographic, audio and document archives were used. It is worth noting here that the IWM contains a fascinating exhibition devoted to the SOE.

  Finally we would like to thank the following individ
uals with whom conversations have elicited numerous small but interesting points in this history: George I. Brown, Graden Carter, H. Woodend, Eric Slater, Mrs Mary Fields, Bill Mack, Tom Rae and the late Leo Marks who sadly died during the writing of this book.

  The photograph of the Welbike is British Crown Copyright, 1999 Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, and is reproduced with permission of the Controller, Her (Britannic) Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for the illustrative material contained in this book. The publishers would be grateful for additional information on any copyrighted work that is not acknowledged in these pages.

  FB

  DHE

  PREFACE

  The history of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the exploits of some of its agents in Occupied Europe have been the subject of many books published in the last fifty years. As security has, little by little, been relaxed and the Public Record Office (PRO) has released previously secret material into the public domain, a clearer and more complete picture has emerged. However, despite the publication by the PRO of the Secret Agent’s Handbook of Special Devices and the release of the official Secret History of SOE by W. Mackenzie, there has been so far no detailed account of the development of equipment and techniques upon which the success of subversive activities relied. Though not having the same dramatic impact as stories of the daring deeds of agents, such an account is important in setting their deeds in perspective. As noted by Professor M.R.D. Foot, this aspect of SOE’s history ‘awaits reliable treatment in print’. This book attempts to fill that gap.

  The main objectives of the book are threefold. First, to present a coherent account of the role of technical support in the evolution of overall SOE policies and their relation to the grand strategies of the Allies. Second, to describe in some detail the research leading to the development, production and distribution of a wide range of devices and supplies for the use of agents. Finally, to make an assessment of the importance of the work of the various R&D establishments set up by SOE in the early stages of the war and which provided much of the impetus for the development of new devices.

  Relatively few of the personnel brought in to staff the research establishments were professional soldiers, and those that were had been trained in conventional military rather than in guerrilla warfare. Apart from a few seconded from Government departments, the majority of those recruited for research positions were young graduates with only a short period of research experience. Consequently much of the research started virtually from scratch and it was done by what were effectively amateurs who were faced with a steep learning curve to be surmounted on a challenging time scale. Not surprisingly, many of the initial ideas were reached ad hoc and depended on research to establish their technical validity and bring them to fruition. Ingenuity, imagination and enthusiasm were the characteristics most apparent in the staff. Perhaps the most striking feature of their activities was the very wide range of topics with which they became involved. They ran from high explosive technology to chemical and biochemical devices; from the techniques of air supply to incendiarism; from camouflage to underwater warfare; and from radio communications to weaponry.

  Much of the work involved collaboration with the Operational Directorates of SOE and with other Government and military research establishments. Despite the political problems which beset SOE from time to time, these close links were effective and mutually beneficial.

  One of the authors of this book, the late Douglas Everett, was recruited by SOE in 1942, worked at the research station at The Frythe near Welwyn (Station IX) and was later in charge of the User Trials Section with special responsibility for Air Supply Research. He therefore had first-hand knowledge of many of the topics dealt with. Some of his notebooks have survived, and together with several of his reports released by the PRO have formed the basis for several chapters. Fredric Boyce was an ICI engineer whose contact with and interest in SOE was fired by his involvement in the clearance of dangerous material left by them when The Frythe was acquired by ICI in 1946. He has been responsible for researching over 200 files at the PRO which have filled in many details of the organisation and development of SOE’s technical operations.

  The outcome is a well-documented account of a major contribution to the effective exploitation of scientific and technical skills in support of the often heroic efforts of the SOE agents worldwide.

  ONE

  INTRODUCTION

  On the night of 14 May 1941, a 29-year-old German spy by the name of Karel Richard Richter descended by parachute into a field near London Colney in Hertfordshire. After burying his parachute and other incriminating items, including by mistake his emergency rations, he went into hiding. If he had set off up the Great North Road and managed to avoid detection he would have reached, after a few miles on the left, the entrance to a fine estate. A notice on the gate revealed that this was War Office property and that entry was forbidden without written permission. An armed guard in a discreetly placed hut kept watch on the gates. The drive beyond the gates wound up through a plantation of mature trees – Cypress, Redwood and Wellingtonia – interspersed with banks of rhododendrons in full bloom. Through the trees he might have caught sight, silhouetted against the sky, of a red-brick Victorian mansion at the top of the rise. There was little to suggest that this was a specially protected property. There were no high fences topped with barbed wire and no guard dogs. Had he hidden in the undergrowth and waited until morning he would have observed the arrival of a few dozen girls – typists or secretaries perhaps – and the departure of a car carrying three or four men, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes. During the day a little traffic would enter or leave and in the evening the girls went and those who had spent the day away elsewhere would return. To the casual observer, even a German spy, there was little to arouse curiosity. Many companies, some of them with Government contracts, had been evacuated from London to avoid the bombing, but maintained daily contacts with their headquarters. Unfortunately for him, Richter, who had spent three days without food or drink, was quickly arrested and convicted as an enemy spy. Prisoner 13961’s short stay in the UK ended in a struggle on the gallows in Wandsworth Prison at 9 a.m. on 10 December.1

  The mansion he would have stumbled upon was The Frythe at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, known then by its cover name as part of the Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB). These initials concealed its true identity. It was in fact one of the highly secret establishments set up early in the Second World War by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to carry out sabotage and subversion against the enemy in occupied Europe using unconventional and often ungentlemanly means. SOE’s very existence was a closely guarded secret – denied even by the Government in the Commons. To those working at The Frythe it was simply ISRB Station IX and to many of them the initials SOE meant nothing. Nor would many have known that it had other cover names (of non-existent departments!) such as MO1(SP) in the War Office, NID(Q) at the Admiralty and AI10 at the Air Ministry. Those members of its staff who in the course of their work were required to visit other military establishments were issued with passes identifying them as from MO1(SP). Sentries and security officers rarely recognised these initials but were usually satisfied when told they stood for Military Operations 1 (Special Planning). It was not until some time after the war that the very existence of SOE was allowed to be mentioned in public.

  Station IX was the main centre for the Research, Development and Supplies Directorate of SOE and, as will be described later, played a pivotal role in the evolution of new and improved weaponry, equipment and techniques for use by its agents in occupied Europe and worldwide. Over the years glimpses of this work and some of the products which evolved have been given, often incidentally, in accounts of the history of SOE and the exploits of its agents published since the war. However, the authors of many of these books were constrained by security considerations. Those who were not personally involved have had to rely
on the limited amount of information available to them at the Public Record Office (PRO), and on the discreet recollections of those who were. The belated release by the PRO of most of the surviving SOE files, supplemented by personal recollections of those who are now free to speak, has made available in the public domain new evidence to fill some of the gaps. Exhibits relating to its work are displayed in a number of museums including the Imperial War Museum in London, the Airborne Forces Museum at Aldershot, the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp and in a small local museum at Arisaig in Western Scotland. But the full stories behind the invention and development of its weapons have until recently remained buried in the archives. A major problem facing historians attempting to compile a definitive account of the organisation arises from the fact that in the rapid and piecemeal development of SOE there was no Central Registry for its documents and no rational filing system. The departmental papers are scattered, incomplete and often confusing. Towards the end of hostilities a Central Registry was set up but only a quarter of the work of reclassifying the papers into a common system had been completed when the organisation was eventually disbanded in 1946. Unfortunately, a large proportion of the records of SOE have been lost, partly by deliberate destruction at the end of the war, some in a serious fire at the Baker Street headquarters, and many by weeding over half a century. One estimate is that over 80 per cent of the archives had been lost and the remainder were classified.

  The situation has, however, changed dramatically in the last few years as most of the surviving SOE files have been opened to the public and now provide material for a more extensive study of its activities. It is interesting that some of the files which were said to have been lost have come to light. A number of important books have now collected together information hitherto unavailable. They include The Secret History of SOE by William Mackenzie (2000), written between 1945 and 1947 but not allowed to be published for a further 55 years; the Secret Agent’s Handbook of Special Devices (2000); and even more recently SOE Syllabus (2001). But none of these provides an account of the research and development of SOE weaponry and equipment, nor of the distinguished band of scientists and engineers who were recruited to solve the wide range of problems arising from this new form of warfare.