SOE

by Fredric Boyce

  TABLE 3

  3,900

  Suitcase sets Type A Mk III with spares

  £158,370

  (£40 12s 0d each)

  21,600

  Midget Communications Receivers with spares

  £259,200

  (£12 0s 0d each)

  6,755

  Suitcase sets Type B Mk III with spares

  £323,380

  (£47 17s 5d each)

  In addition, the programme included 1,600 steam-powered battery chargers and 1,725 pedal-powered generators.

  Marconi’s Parsons Green factory supplying A II sets was wiped out by enemy action in spring 1944 and gave rise to concern about how to maintain delivery to the field. The other Marconi factory at Hackbridge was producing the A III transceiver but its production was also threatened by the loss of key staff to the forces as the invasion of Europe approached.9

  Flying bomb activity in 1944 caused a loss of production from the Production Unit at Station VIIa in Wembley. It was therefore moved out of range of the land-launched missiles and established at Kay’s Garage in Bristol Street, Birmingham (Station VIId) in August.

  As the war ran towards its close so activity in the Laboratory diminished. In the last month of 1944 the staff of Station VIIc fell from 113 to 85. After VE Day SOE’s European activities began shutting down but there was still demand for the Far East Theatre and in August Maj Reg Vince, the Officer in Charge at the Yeast-Vite Factory at Watford gave the following breakdown of the estimate of cost for a B III transceiver:

  TABLE 4

  Receivers from RGD

  £110

  Gearbox from S.E. Opperman

  £15

  Pedal generator from Dayton Cycles

  £14

  Generator MAP from Hoover

  £8

  Smoothing equipment from Philco

  £10

  TOTAL

  £157

  After VJ Day the run-down became rapid. Maj Vince, as Chief Supplies Officer, spent a day cancelling orders to suppliers, stopping half a million pounds’ worth between breakfast and lunchtime. Parties were organised to collect all unfinished work, materials and drawings from contractors and take it to the SOE stores. Station VIIb at the Yeast-Vite Factory closed on 10 January 1946, the remaining assets being transferred to Station XII at Stevenage. Brown was transferred from Station VIIc also to Station XII where he was resident for a while with a laboratory in a Nissen hut. His assistants were posted away and before long his equipment was loaded into trucks to be taken away and dumped down a disused mineshaft. He packed all his papers into a filing cabinet but most eventually went to the destructor. Personnel in RCD as a whole had reached a peak of 740 at 30 June 1944. From October 1945 closure was set in train, being finally completed on 11 January 1946.

  THIRTEEN

  ORGANISATION OF SUPPLY AND PRODUCTION

  The development of new items of equipment started typically with an original idea or requirement and consideration of how it might be exploited in the work of SOE. This was followed by research, development, trials and finally production. In the previous chapters an account has been given of the evolution of a wide range of devices and equipment. In this chapter we summarise the way in which such projects were taken from the production prototype to mass production.

  Upon the declaration of war the small experimental group of Section D at Bletchley Park expanded and soon sought a new home away from the increasingly busy de-coding operation. The home they found in November 1939 was Aston House on the outskirts of Stevenage. The mansion was converted into an officers’ mess and the 46 acres of the estate provided ample room for expansion (see Chapter 3).

  In the closing weeks of 1939 Dr Drane was appointed Commandant of Section, Station XII, which used the cover name of Signals Development Branch, Depot No. 4, War Office. Mr E. Norman and Dr F.A. Freeth joined on a permanent basis in early 1940, the latter, somewhat entertaining scientist having come from the Research Division of Imperial Chemical Industries at Northwich in Cheshire with the reputation for having solved the explosive supply problem in the First World War. Capt E. Ramsey Green (D/D2), Mr D.A. Barnsley (D/X1a), Capt O.J. Walker (D/X2) were appointed and shortly afterwards Lt C.V. Clarke (D/DP) joined the section. During 1940 Capt F. Davis (D/DS) was appointed Stores Officer.

  At first the work at Aston House was organised on the basis of two Sections; D/D (engineering and small mechanisms) and D/X (laboratory work on explosive and incendiary devices, chemical and physical problems) and included a research laboratory and a development section. The latter was also responsible for placing orders with outside contractors. Financial control had not been given a great deal of thought and in the early days the Station existed virtually on a day-to-day basis, sometimes being overdrawn on a reimbursable account from Headquarters in Baker Street.

  Command of the Station passed to Capt (later Lt Col) L.J.C. Wood, RE and later the name was changed to War Department, Aston and then on 12 May 1941 it was officially given the cover name Experimental Station 6 (War Department) or ES6 (W.D.). SOE, however, continued to refer to it as Station XII. Leslie John Cardew Wood was 16 years old when the First World War started. He had been educated for five years at Dulwich College, for two years by a private tutor in France and for a total of four years at the City and Guilds College, interrupted by military service as a Lt Tech in the Royal Flying Corps. After the war when he had finished his studies he spent seven years with the Greaves Cotton Company in Bombay working on refrigeration and water purification plant before returning to England to become manager and later director of Bell’s Asbestos Company at Slough. Here he worked on research into and development of applications for uses of asbestos and was the joint holder of a number of patents. On the outbreak of the Second World War Wood was commissioned into the Royal Engineers where, from 1939 to 1943, he was responsible for building up and commanding Experimental Station 6 (WD) at Aston House, Stevenage. In 1943 he was posted to India where he became Director of the Special Forces Development Centre and Colonel ‘Q’ of Force 136 until 1944.

  Early in 1941 a considerable further expansion in personnel took place and it was soon clear that even greater expansion of the workplaces would be necessary as well as increased staff accommodation. At this time various schemes for reorganising the research and development organisation were under consideration. Following the appointment of Newitt as Director of Scientific Research in July 1941 the research side of the establishment (D/X) under Colin Meek, the explosives expert, together with some of the development work of D/D, was moved to Station IX at The Frythe where some additional temporary buildings had been erected, and where they would be freed from the pressures of production. Here they joined the Wireless Section which had been at The Frythe since 1939. Station XII was then reorganised to handle design, production, testing, stores and administration.

  The Design Department consisted of a drawing office and a development workshop staffed by civilians under Capt (later Maj) E. Ramsay Green RE. Their responsibility was to take the sketches and prototypes of devices originating from Station IX and work them into proper engineering drawings which could be passed to an outside contractor for bulk production. Prototypes made in a research workshop would often be fabricated or machined without attention being paid to the economies of quantity production. Designers with a knowledge of production engineering would therefore introduce the subtle changes necessary without detriment to the effectiveness of the device. This department also had to find contractors with the necessary qualities to manufacture the items and place the initial contracts with them.

  An increasing number of devices and a greater volume of production made it necessary to form a separate Production Section under Mr W.H.B. Billinghurst, who was to control all outside contracts by placing and progressing all orders and inspecting work at the manufacturer’s premises. The Testing Laboratory, which carried out routine testing, assisted the Production Section in their inspection role. In December 1941 Capt (la
ter Maj) W. Morland Fox, RE took over the Section.

  From June 1940 the Stores Section had started to assemble mixed parcels of stores for the Auxiliary Units intended to wage guerrilla warfare should the Germans invade Britain. In February 1941 the first large order for 1,000 cases was placed.

  The organisation of both the Stores and the Administration Sections was at this time very basic with neither a stores accounting system nor qualified orderly room staff for the administration of military personnel.

  Explosive and incendiary stores, some in an unreliable state, together with more general stores were kept in small buildings in a confined area close to the mansion. The regulations governing the safe storage of explosives had not been implemented when a serious fire took hold in the early hours of 4 January 1942. The more dangerous stores were not involved and the damage was localised but it resulted in surplus stores being moved to Fawley Court (Signals Section’s establishment at Henley-on-Thames) and a few ‘Elephant Shelters’ being obtained to improve segregation.

  At the beginning of 1942 plans were made for a further substantial expansion of the facilities at Station XII. General stores, incendiary and explosive storage, accommodation for explosive filling and a light engineering workshop were completed early in 1943 and there followed a proportional increase in staff. In roughly the same period improvements were made with the financial organisation of the Station when Mr (later Sir) George Turner of the Ministry of Supply and the Master General of Ordnance Finance Department, War Office (MGOF(a)) met and began to pay contractors’ invoices from their funds. In addition, arrangements were made for small bills up to £5 in value to be paid directly.

  The Stores Section came under increasing pressure in terms of quantities and urgency as they found it impossible to obtain the relatively small quantities of materials at the short notice demanded by the operational sections. It became apparent that a major contributory factor was the lack of any forward planning. The problem was discussed with the user groups and MGOF(a). As a result estimates of requirements for six months ahead were prepared. The increased flow of new prototype devices from Stations IX and XV led in turn to overloading of the Design Department in their task of preparing manufacturing drawings. In a transfer of functions the Production Department took on the task of finding manufacturers and liaising with Station IX on devices moving towards production. Coincidentally, problems were experienced with the inspection function and the somewhat risky procedure of delegating it to individuals at the contractors’ works did not prove successful and was abandoned.

  The arrival of RAOC personnel in 1942 under Capt (later Maj) D.S. Duke introduced a modified (for the special requirements of SOE) normal ordnance procedure for stores accounts. Attempts were made to comply with the Magazine Regulations and official classifications were obtained from the Explosive Storage and Transport Committee for all SOE devices. Every device now carried in its shipping classification a generic title, explosive group and storage and stowage class. Even at the height of a world war, bureaucracy had to be complied with. In July the storage problem was eased by the allocation of a considerable amount of space at 84 Command AD at Sandy in Bedfordshire.

  Over this period the social character of Station XII changed steadily as the majority of new staff were RAOC, REME or RE officers. This increasingly military atmosphere was in contrast to that at Station IX where most of the experimental staff were civilians.

  In 1942, SOE and CCO personnel began a series of operations involving detailed planning and ‘tailor-made’ stores. Targets were very precise and carefully researched and to obtain the best results the stores had to be specific to these targets. Because of the large number of special charges and initiators produced for this campaign, towards the end of the year a splinter group of the Testing Laboratory called Operational Supplies was formed with the purpose of designing and supplying stores for ad hoc operations. The Testing Laboratory was then freed to carry out its inspection work.

  Operational Supplies Section was under the direction of the Technical Operational Planning Committee chaired by Lt Col J.L. Bliss. On this committee were represented Stations IX and XII, the operating section of SOE or other force involved (for work was also done, for example, for CCO), the training section and the ‘G’ staff. Thus the special stores for ad hoc operations were produced almost exclusively at this Station, where close control could be exercised by teams under Maj C.S. Munro and later Maj D.W. Pond. An enlarged workshop complete with its own raw material and tool stores was erected in September and staffed by REME personnel under Maj C.F. Moore.

  As the stores became more varied it became apparent that large quantities were being ordered to inadequate descriptions. This eventually gave rise to the formation in December 1942 of the Quality Control Department which was responsible for the preparation of specifications of stores and inspection duties, under Capt (later Maj) J.G. Bedford. The original intention had been to have inspection carried out by in-house staff but it soon became apparent that it would not be possible to recruit and train sufficient numbers. The Central Inspection Agency (CIA) took on the task but with the proviso that Station XII had also to be satisfied, a condition which lead to many disputes with manufacturers. Large numbers of finished parts, components and sub-assemblies, manufactured both internally and by outside contractors, were stored for issue to others for assembly into finished devices.

  Early in 1943 Bliss was given another task: Co-ordinating Officer between Research and Production Departments, where liaison had tended to be somewhat fragmented and greater formalisation was seen to be necessary. He therefore set up Co-ordination Meetings at which Stations IX and XII were both represented and these continued for the rest of the war. A further improvement in liaison developed when, in a reciprocal move, Station XII in the person of Capt Bedford was represented on the Station IX Trials Committee.

  By the summer of 1943, with increasing deliveries of air-dropped stores to the Resistance in Europe, shortages once again caused serious problems. Headquarters therefore carried out longer-term forecasting of its needs and gave estimates up to the end of 1944, refining these as the war situation developed. Maj R. Gardiner, REME took over the Production Department in the summer of 1943 on the posting of Morland Fox to the USA.

  Headquarters turned its attention to the allocation of priorities for the available stocks of stores. It was clearly unreasonable to expect the Stores Section at Station XII to know whose application carried the most importance so an Allocations Committee was set up to meet once a month to allocate the available stocks of stores among the various applicants. The new longer-term estimates included quantities of stores not previously dealt with and raised questions about the contracts needed to meet them. For all contracts over £1,000 value it was decided to set up running contracts through the Ministry of Supply instead of using Local Purchase Orders. This was welcomed by the Finance Department, whose accounting arrangements had not kept pace with the increase in activity, giving rise to delays and mistakes. The change provided only a brief respite however as the problems then showed themselves with the large increase in invoices for raw materials used by the increasingly busy workshops.

  In November 1943 Wood was posted to India and Bliss took over command. By January 1944 the production organisation was tackling large runs of high-quality items for various sections of SOE. Capstan runs of 10,000 pieces were not uncommon and the sheet metal shop produced 50,000 boxes of various types in a year. All the production tools were designed and made at Station XII in what was, in effect, its own toolroom. In September 1944 Capt (later Maj) E.C. Kelly was appointed officer-in-charge.

  As preparations for D-Day got under way, orders for special demolition stores for use by raiding parties diminished drastically and Operational Supplies Department became increasingly involved in the production of items which the overloaded ordnance factories could not handle. Station XII produced 87,000 1½; lb (0.7 kg) standard charges in ten months and 5,000 rail charges in three months.
Half a dozen soldiers from Station XII were sent to the Royal Ordnance Factory at Elstow to use their facilities to pour 25/75 pentolite explosive into MD1 clams, limpets, MSC charges, spigot bomb heads and a variety of special purpose charges.

  An indication of the somewhat hand-to-mouth organisation of wartime ventures such as Station XII is shown by the fact that it was not until the end of 1943 that the electrical problems of the site were taken seriously. Throughout the war extensions and the addition of machinery had been carried out in a piecemeal manner without consideration for the effect on the site as a whole. Almost inevitably, a time came when the unbalanced load across the three-phase electrical system became a serious problem and further examination revealed some parts of the system to be unsafe. A separate small section was therefore set up under Capt J.N. Barnett RE to take responsibility for all electrical installations throughout the Station. This was later extended to include the main boilers whose heating system had so far suffered similar neglect. Early in 1944 the substation capacity was increased to 400 KVA. A year later a 1,000 amp plating plant was added to the electrical loading.

  The departure of Ramsay Green for the USA in April 1944 precipitated an organisational change. The Design Department closed, the drawing office and design function being absorbed by Quality Control and the toolroom and prototype shop by the Workshops. This was claimed to make the Workshops more flexible and able to tackle all development work. The transfer of the drawing office to Quality Control tightened up procedures and ensured that a master drawing could not be altered without the approval of all concerned, including the Trials Committee. Inspection procedures were also made more formal and a system of filing for technical correspondence, drawings, specifications, etc., was at last introduced.