SOE

by Fredric Boyce

  In the following chapters an attempt is made to present as full a picture as possible, based largely on the available documentation together with personal recollections of a few of those who were involved. Sadly, many of those who could have answered some of the outstanding questions have taken their secrets to the grave: Time continues to reap its harvest month by month.

  A large number of abbreviations and symbols were used throughout the conflict. An explanation of them is given in Appendix C.

  TWO

  WHAT WAS THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE?

  The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formed in mid-July 1940 at the height of the crisis following Dunkirk and the fall of France. It brought together three existing secret organisations: Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) otherwise known as MI6; the Military Intelligence Research unit (MI(R)) of the War Office formerly known as General Staff (Research) or GS(R); and Electra House, attached to the Foreign Office and mainly concerned with propaganda.

  As early as March 1939 the existence of three organisations tackling much the same work was seen as an anomaly. Certain duplication of effort was taking place between MI(R) and D Section, something the country could ill afford. It wasted valuable time and there was a tendency for production aspects of the work to take precedence over vital research. The first paper to address this problem was prepared in June 1939. Over the next few months there followed various initiatives attempting to solve the problem of co-ordination.

  Reorganisation was discussed in a complex series of meetings held in June and July 1940 involving, in various combinations, the CIGS, Lord Gort; the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax; the Chief of GS(R), Col Holland; Mr Hugh Dalton; Mr Clement Attlee; and representatives of SIS. They dealt among other things with the sensitive problem of the military or civilian control of a merged organisation. The solution was to some extent a compromise between political interests, but the details of the discussions, said to have been acrimonious, leading to agreement cannot, according to W. Mackenzie in his Secret History of SOE, be traced from the papers available. The final document proposing the setting up of an organisation to be called the Special Operations Executive under the Chairmanship of Dalton was signed on 19 July by Neville Chamberlain (then Lord President of the Council following his resignation as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940). Churchill had already, on 16 July, offered the Headship of SOE to Hugh Dalton, the 53-year-old Minister of Economic Warfare (MEW), with the now much-publicised exhortation to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Ironically, it was on this very day that Hitler signed his Führer Directive No. 16 for the planning of Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. The SOE Charter was finally approved by the War Cabinet on 22 July. In retrospect it seems somewhat anomalous that it was placed, not under any of the parent ministries, but under the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The reasons were a consequence of the complex political negotiations which preceded its formation. Each of the constituent organisations had been set up independently before the war in 1938 with objectives which were loosely defined and overlapping. The new organisation was given a more specific task of promoting sabotage and subversion through its own covert agents and with supplying arms, equipment and agents to resistance movements throughout occupied Europe and beyond. When they were amalgamated to form SOE they each brought with them a good deal of historical baggage which, throughout the war, coloured relations between SOE and its parents. These political problems, though they were of major importance in the general progress of SOE, did not have any significant influence on its scientific and technical work.

  Implementation of the Charter took a little time. Control of Section D and Electra House passed from the Foreign Office to MEW on 16 August, while the formal dissolution of MI(R) followed in October. Meanwhile SOE’s London Headquarters was moved in October 1940 to 64 Baker Street, where it adopted its public cover name of the Inter-Services Research Bureau. It was quite separate from MEW in Berkeley Square. Dalton remained as head until in 1942 he was replaced by Lord Selborne, also aged 53. To appreciate the development of the scientific and technical aspects of SOE’s work it is important to set the scene by outlining the history of those components which came together to form SOE. Electra House, which was set up in 1938 by Lord Hankey and headed by Sir Campbell Stuart, was mainly concerned with propaganda and had little impact on the research and development work of SOE. Attention is, therefore, here restricted to Section D (MI6) and GS(R) (later known as MI(R)). The formal relationship between them is difficult to disentangle, but some of their technical work certainly overlapped.

  SECTION D

  In April 1938 the then head of the SIS, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, arranged for the secondment of Maj Lawrence Grand, RE, from the War Office to SIS to carry out a study and to report on the possibilities of creating a British organisation for covert offensive action. Germany and Italy had already conducted such operations in countries which they later overran, and the possible existence of a Fifth Column in Britain was not entirely ruled out.1 Grand had no experience of secret service work but he had ideas and enthusiasm and a persona which earned the admiration of all who worked with him. His personal energy was much needed for time was not on his side – by now, Austria had been occupied by Germany. Grand was promoted to Colonel, given the symbol D and set up the Devices Section of MI6, to be called Section D and with the cover name of Statistical Research Department of the War Office. Section D’s terms of reference were:

  a) To study how sabotage might be carried out

  b) to produce special sabotage ammunition

  c) to make experiments on carrying out sabotage

  d) to train saboteurs

  e) to study methods of countering sabotage.

  The use of aggressive action was precluded as long as peace held.

  At first the Section consisted of only two officers. Among those recruited by Grand in December 1938 was Cdr A.G. Langley RN who set in motion and pursued energetically work on the research and development of ideas and stores needed to meet the above objectives. In particular, his small group was concerned with the design of time fuses and switches of various types and of explosives and incendiary devices. Section D was originally based at SIS’s head office at 54 Broadway but soon expanded to the adjacent Caxton House. In the early months of 1939, as the threat of war grew ever closer, Horace Emery of SIS arranged for the manufacture of the first batch of Time Pencil fuses to Langley’s design. Articles made in Germany and Italy which might be suitable for concealing or camouflaging weapons were collected and contacts established with organisations which could be of use in war, such as various Service Departments, the Research Department at Woolwich Arsenal, the British Scientific Instrument Research Association, the Royal Society, Imperial Chemical Industries, Shell Oil Company, the Railway Executive, etc. On the outbreak of war, most of Section D’s staff moved with the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), the forerunner of GCHQ, to Bletchley Park (Station ‘X’) although some went to The Frythe.

  By the middle of 1939 a small magazine for explosives and incendiaries had been built at Bletchley and work had started on full scale experiments with weapons.2 This was not universally popular as it was judged that it was incompatible to have explosives and decoding work on the same site. Furthermore, GCCS’s work was expanding rapidly and Section D was forced to find accommodation for Langley’s work elsewhere. In November 1939 it was moved to Aston House at Stevenage in Hertfordshire which was given the title Signals Development Branch Depot No. 4, War Office. In 1941 it became War Department Experimental Station 6 (ES6 WD), recognising its parent MI6. On the formation of SOE it became known also as Station XII. Langley took with him a small group of about seven officers, two laboratory technicians, five other ranks (O/Rs) and secretarial staff. Among those who moved to Aston House were Dr Drane (in command); Capt L.J.C. Wood (later Colonel and in command of the Station); Capt C.R. Bailey; Mr Colin Meek, a Scientific Civil Servant and explosives expert on secondment from Woolwich Arsenal and a
nother un-named, possibly Douglas Barnsley; and, on a part-time basis, Mr Eric Norman. The laboratory assistants were Mr G. Doe and Mr B.S.M. Stalton. Dr F.A. Freeth was also concerned with this group.

  Also recruited by Grand was a group of distinguished amateur sailors from the Royal Cruising Club including Frank Carr, the Assistant Librarian of the House of Lords, Roger Pinckney, the architect of Melbourne Cathedral and Augustine Courtauld, Arctic explorer. They had all been recruited to familiarise themselves with parts of the continental coastline which could be of strategic importance in wartime. Attached to this group was Gerry Holdsworth who was later to set up the Helford Base in Cornwall.3 Meanwhile, Section D had established agents and offices in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Spain, and France. However, within a few months of the outbreak of war it had lost contact with nearly all of its overseas agents, and it was soon apparent that most had been arrested by the Germans. Its work was, inevitably for such a novel enterprise, largely a process of trial and error which was overtaken by the progress of the war before significant results could be obtained. As a result, after the fall of France neither Section D nor any other Allied covert organisation had any agents on the Western European mainland, although a number remained in the Balkans and the Middle East.

  GS(R)

  In 1938 a section was set up in the War Office by the Deputy CIGS, Sir Ronald Adam, known by the innocuous title of General Staff (Research). It was to research into the problems of tactics and organisation under the DCIGS. It produced a number of papers of which two are of interest but have not been found: ‘Considerations from the Wars in Spain and China with Respect to Certain Aspects of Army Policy’ and ‘An Investigation of the Possibilities of Guerrilla Activities’. In December 1938 Lt Col J.F. Holland, RE, was appointed head of the group. His experience of irregular warfare in Ireland and India had influenced the writing of the latter paper. With Col Grand of Section D, Holland produced a joint paper dated 20 March 1939 dealing with the possibility of guerrilla actions against Germany if they overran Eastern Europe and absorbed Rumania. The formal objectives of GS(R) were similar to those of Section D:

  a) To study guerrilla methods and to produce a guerrilla Field Service Regulations Handbook incorporating detailed tactical and technical instructions, as they applied to various countries

  b) To evolve destructive devices suitable for use by guerrillas and capable of production and distribution on a wide enough scale to be effective

  c) To evolve procedures and machinery for operating guerrilla activities if it were decided to do so subsequently.

  As the Military Intelligence Directorate expanded in response to the increasing threat of war in the spring of 1939, GS(R) changed its name to Military Intelligence (Research) or MI(R). Holland’s section was first housed in Caxton House, adjacent to Grand’s Section D, but on the outbreak of war it was moved to the War Office building. In the spring of that year Holland was authorised to appoint two Grade II staff officers to MI(R). The first was another Royal Engineer, Maj M.J.R. Jefferis, later Sir Millis Jefferis, to work on guerrilla devices. His unit was based initially at 36 Portland Place, but when they were bombed out in Autumn 1940 they moved to The Firs, a Tudor mansion at Whitchurch near Aylesbury which became known as MI(R)c. Also known as ‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’,4 it produced a string of inventions, several of which, like those from Section D, became the basis for the development of devices which were later adopted both by SOE and the regular Army Engineers. However, this unit became increasingly concerned with larger-scale military hardware such as anti-tank weapons, the destruction of concrete pillboxes and the clearance of minefields. On the formation of SOE it was specifically excluded from the transfer of MI(R) to SOE and remained independent as MD1 under the patronage of Churchill and his friend and scientific adviser, Prof Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell).

  For the second of these posts Holland chose Maj Colin Gubbins, RA. This appointment was to prove crucially important in the later development of SOE. Gubbins’s first task was to work on two pamphlets: ‘The Partisan Leader’s Handbook’;5 and ‘The Art of Guerrilla Warfare’. The second of these was written in collaboration with Holland, while a third, ‘How to Use High Explosives’, was written by Jefferis. They drew heavily on the experiences of Lawrence (of Arabia) and of operations in Palestine, Ireland, the North-West Frontier and Russia. Surprisingly, there was not at this time a single book to be found in any library in any language on these subjects. In fact, none of these pamphlets was published in England although they were distributed widely in Europe and South-east Asia.

  With the formation of SOE, MI(R) was combined with Section D.

  THE BIRTH OF SOE

  SOE had a difficult birth and suffered recurring post-natal pains. The incorporation of Section D with MI(R) to form one body responsible to an Executive Director, to be called CD, required many changes both in structure and personnel. There were hard decisions to be taken and several heads rolled. Both Grand and Holland had made internal enemies and returned to pursue their distinguished military careers: they both ended up as Maj-Gens. Many other staff left or were transferred to other duties.

  The first to fill the post of CD in August 1940 was the 58-year-old Sir Frank Nelson who had to build up SOE almost from nothing. Nelson was a businessman, a former Conservative MP and former Vice-Consul at Basle in Switzerland, where he had had some involvement with SIS. He undertook his task with great enthusiasm and dedication, but ruined his health and was obliged to resign in May 1942 after eighteen months.

  Initially SOE was divided into three Branches: SO1 (Propaganda), SO2 (Active Operations) and SO3 (Planning). Of these SO1 was the subject of arguments with the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office and was soon taken over and incorporated in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) controlled by the Foreign Office. Useful sidelights on the early years before SOE and PWE parted company are contained in The Secret History of PWE by David Garnett. SO3, in the words of M.R.D. Foot, ‘proceeded to strangle itself in festoons of paperwork’6 and had disintegrated by the end of September 1940. This left SO2, which now took on the mantle and title of SOE. At this stage, with the exception of a few Regular Army officers, the whole staff was amateur. Mercifully, the organisation was free from the minor bureaucracy of a Government department. This led to a looser and more flexible arrangement, which was not without its disadvantages.

  SOE was financed by secret funds from the Ministry of Economic Warfare and for some time (certainly until the end of 1942) its officers were paid monthly in crisp, white £5 notes – until the Inland Revenue became aware that some people were not paying income tax! It is sometimes said that those paid from SOE funds were exempt from tax. This may well have been true of its agents, but not for the rest of its personnel.

  Nelson inherited two deputies. Maj, later Col George Taylor from Section 6 was in charge of operations, including the re-establishment of Country Sections, while Col F.T. (Tommy) Davies from MI(R) took control of ‘facilities’ which included training, supplies and stores. Both were ruthless and efficient and played important roles in SOE throughout the war.

  George Taylor was an Australian business tycoon who had joined SIS and Section D before the war. He influenced the organisational structure and later was to play a major role in Balkan and Middle Eastern affairs.

  Col Davies, the son of a General and a Director of Courtaulds, had joined MI(R) as a Captain in the Grenadier Guards shortly before the outbreak of war. In 1939 he was a member of the MI(R) mission (No. 4 Military Mission) to Poland which arrived at its destination the day war broke out but returned within a few days since there was little it could do. In May 1940, Davies paid a hasty trip to Amsterdam to destroy or remove certain securities, and a few weeks later led a raiding party to the Courtauld factory in Calais and succeeded in removing large quantities of platinum before the Germans arrived. As well as being deputy for Nelson, he was also his personal assistant and as such was responsible for the setting up of the training sections.
By the end of 1941 he had become the Director of Research, Development and Supplies with the code symbol AD/Z, a post he held for the rest of the war.

  On Nelson’s retiral his post as CD went, early in May 1942, to his then deputy, Sir Charles Hambro, a successful city banker and a Director of the Great Western Railway and of the Bank of England. He had been in charge of the Scandinavian Section for two years. His many other responsibilities meant that he was unable to spend as much time on SOE business as the post demanded. By the spring of 1942 Dalton had been replaced by Lord Selborne. Following personal difficulties with Selborne, Hambro was sacked in September 1943. His replacement was Brig (later Maj Gen) Gubbins who, as recorded above, had joined SOE in November 1940 and been Hambro’s deputy.

  Colin McVean Gubbins was in many ways the ideal leader of SOE. A professional soldier born in Tokyo, Japan on 2 July 1896, he had seen service in the First World War, and in Northern Russia and gained valuable experience when he fought as a Major against the Irish Republican Army in the Irish Civil War in 1921. He was a small, wiry Scotsman who was described as ‘quiet-mannered, quiet-spoken, energetic, efficient and charming’, ‘a still waters run deep sort of man’ and ‘a born leader of men’. He was on the staff of MI(R) in the spring of 1939 when, under the shadow of the approaching conflict, he wrote the two pamphlets on clandestine warfare referred to above. Later that year he became the senior staff officer to the British Military Mission in Poland and was in overall charge of the MI(R) group there. As it was, his efforts to set up a Polish resistance force were thwarted by the lightning speed of the German advance and he was fortunate to get out in time to Paris where he was promoted to Lt Col. In April 1940 he was brought back to select and train troops for the assault on Norway at Narvik. He was then engaged in the setting up of the Auxiliary Units in Britain to fight a guerrilla war against German invaders should they land. By November that threat had diminished and he was put in charge of Operations and Training in Dalton’s SOE, together with responsibility for the Polish and Czechoslovakian sections. After Hambro’s demise he remained as CD for the rest of the war having had to suffer the loss of his elder son in an SOE operation at Anzio, Italy in February 1944. He was knighted for his work and died in Stornoway, Scotland on 11 February 1976. A full biography, Gubbins and SOE, written by Peter Wilkinson and Joan Bright Astley, was published in 1993.