Belatedly, in June 1944 a new accounting system was introduced into the Finance Department by Capt (later Maj) F.J.G. Roberts. The double-entry ledger accounts proved of immediate benefit and even permitted the resolution of disputes outstanding since the early days of the Station. By the end of the summer of 1944 building work at the Station was completed. A new Entertainments Hall, Civilian Restaurant, Routine Test Laboratory, Explosive Packing Shed and an enlarged NAAFI were brought into use. With clear confidence in the future, a piece of land was set aside for the controlled disposal of unwanted stocks of explosive.
The increased attention to the war in the Far East once again raised the problems of tropical packing for stores. Research had been going on at both Station XII and Station IX and, of course, elsewhere in the services. As a result of this work it was decided to redesign nearly all packings and the Carpenters Shop was set up on a semi-production basis to facilitate the change.
Some original development work was done in collaboration with the Arc Manufacturing Company on the welding of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sheets using high frequency electric current – a technique which became widely adopted after the war.
SOE was very aware of the consequences of the enemy adopting a scorched earth policy as it withdrew from occupied countries and had made preparations with Resistance groups to counter this threat. Special devices had been designed and Station XII had the task of producing, packing and despatching these for infiltration into Scandinavia.
After the end of the war in Europe contracts for orders for the Far East continued but attention turned to the problems of closing SOE Stations and disposing of the surplus stores. Station VIII at Queen Mary reservoir, Staines and Station 61 were wound up. After the end of all hostilities all orders were cancelled and staff reductions began.
The final task which fell to Station XII was to hold for disposal the remnants of Stations VI, XV, VII, IX, XVII and the Exhibition Room at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.1
FOURTEEN
SUPPLY, FINANCE AND MANPOWER PROBLEMS
SUPPLIES SECTION
For the sake of completeness it is perhaps worth mentioning briefly the facilities which worked to procure the many hundreds of different items required by SOE for its day-to-day operation and in particular to permit the original research work to proceed in a time of severe general shortages of materials. Any organisation which is regularly equipping hundreds of personnel and despatching them overseas must eventually have a need for a supply department to locate and procure items as and when required and to keep account of the prices paid for that inevitable future reckoning. When the organisation itself is producing hardware, or having it made by commercial firms, the need is greater and extends to a stores system with adequate means of stock, financial and security controls.
SOE set up its Supply Section (or E Section) in December 1940 under Sqn Ldr (later Wg Cdr) Pyle who was given the symbol E. He and his secretary Miss Rheinhold worked alone for a couple of months setting up a system to cover signals, all stores provided by SOE, the Army, Air Force and Navy, shipping, control of Stations VI, IX and XII and the photographic section. Shortly after, its work also embraced the coding and deciphering sections. Early 1941 saw the arrival of Lt (later Cmdr) E.A. Milne RNVR (symbol E1) and Mrs Hemmings who was to become his secretary. Then Mr (later Maj) Dansey joined to assist Pyle with the codes and cipher work.
It very soon became apparent that the supplies dropped by parachute to the relatively few agents operating in the field at this time required more than casual assembly and packing. If they were to survive the drop some considerable thought and care must be given to the way the package or container was put together and protected. In April 1941 a Mr H.L. Boley was recruited to become a special packer for urgent operations. So the Supply Section began its growth.
SOE’s main need was to procure relatively small numbers of items of specialised equipment notwithstanding the millions of Time Pencils and hundreds of thousands of small arms it handled by the end of the conflict. Military stores were drawn through the War Office and on a much smaller scale from the Admiralty and Air Ministry. Where items had to be manufactured and special production runs were required there was usually sufficient goodwill to ensure adequate priority was given for the small quantities involved.
The handling of stores was centralised at certain specific points. The military equipment depot was at Knoll School, Camberley. The Arms Section, as we have seen, was at Bride Hall near Ayot St Lawrence, not far from Station IX. The Motor Transport Section with its own repair depot was at the North Road Garage at Welwyn. These facilities represented a fairly normal organisation and one which grew eventually to a total of twenty-eight persons made up of a G1, two G2s, two G3s, six junior officers, seven secretaries, three statistical clerks, two registry clerks, four other ranks and one packer. This work expanded rapidly and led to the establishment of several Packing Stations. E Section was responsible for the procurement of all stores for SOE except wireless stores, transport, stationery and camouflage.1
FINANCE
Of all the aspects of SOE, the one which prompted most sudden amnesia or invoked the Official Secrets Act most readily was the question of finance. When one considers the organisation was responsible for large amounts of high-quality forgeries of all kinds, it is not surprising that there was a reluctance to publish details of the financial management of its activities. By the very nature of the operation, a secret organisation, creating and issuing large sums of cash, and all in the frenzy of a vicious worldwide conflict, it was not unexpected to find the accounting procedures were not as tidy and watertight as one would expect from a peacetime endeavour. Many, if not most, of SOE’s senior players, true to their calling, took these secrets to the grave.
From time to time attempts were made through the House of Commons to identify the source of SOE’s funds. In 1941 the Minister of Information was asked whether certain named individuals (including Hambro and Sporborg) were in the pay of his Ministry and whether they paid income tax. His simple answer was that ‘these gentlemen were not employed by him’. The question should have been put to the Minister of Economic Warfare! The following year a similar question concerning members of a leading firm of London lawyers was put to the Foreign Minister: he too could answer honestly that the costs of none of them was borne by the Foreign Office. Sweet-Escott seems to indicate that these might have been put-up questions to throw the nosey politicians off the scent.2 It was only much later that it emerged that SOE drew its funds from a secret fund administered by ‘C’, the Head of the equally secret organisation, SIS (now MI6). It is relevant that when Everett first joined SOE in October 1942 he was paid weekly in crisp new £5 notes: a month or two later the system changed and income tax was deducted!
One of the aspects reported upon in the Playfair and Hanbury-Williams Report of 18 June 1942 was the apparently casual way in which, when SOE provided stores for other services, most usually for CCO, they were not repaid. The reason was shown to be that SOE received a great deal of help from Service Departments free of charge: all service issues, all material obtained through the Ministry of Supply, the buildings at Station XII and the pay of all the ORs on its establishment. So when Stations IX and XII increased their facilities to supply CCO the extra cost to SOE was restricted to the overheads at The Frythe, the pay of any additional officers and a few miscellaneous purchases. Playfair and Hanbury-Williams recognised that to set up a bureaucratic procedure for mutual repayment would have unnecessarily burdened SOE and strained its security, so it was left as it was.3
The only times money is mentioned in the files pertaining to The Frythe is in connection with a few monthly statements of ‘devices paid for’, the development of the Welman one-man submarine, and suitcase radios. But in the History of E Section – the Supplies Section in Baker Street – which in the early days, at least, exercised some control over Stations VI, IX and XII, there is the following enlightening text written immediately af
ter the cessation of hostilities:
CD made arrangements with various services to the effect that SOE demands should be met without any questions being asked as to why they were required and that everything should be written off and thereby save any form of accounting for the stores by this organisation. This proved more than valuable to this organisation as releases were made without query by all three services until the time came when our demands were such that they seriously conflicted with the service requirements generally.4
Records of financial matters are sparse and give only the slightest flavour of the sums of money spent at Station IX and its associated establishments. For example between 26 July and 26 August 1942 the value of devices paid for under a sanction known as MGOF(a) (see Chapter 13), as opposed to the free issue of stores, was £59,093, bringing the total for the year 1942 to £368,085 (about £8.5m in present-day terms). Corresponding figures for the month 25 September to 25 October 1942 were £39,032 and £466,129. These figures probably represent the value of devices despatched from Station XII and not the research and development costs.
In the spring of 1942, £3,000 was sanctioned for the Welman project, equivalent to £69,000 at 2002 prices. At the end of that year the cost of producing a Welman in the workshops at The Frythe was given as £800 (£18,500 in 2002 terms) but if a large enough order was to be placed with a commercial firm it was estimated to be £1,300 (£30,000 in 2002 terms).
Nowadays the economical way to produce an item is to have it made in large numbers by a commercial firm which is geared-up and experienced in that type of work and which has been selected on the basis of competitive tendering. During wartime, however, short cuts were constantly having to be taken, commercial controls were often being eroded in the interests of national necessity and, with enormous pressures on key industries, the choice of contractor could be severely limited. Station IX had neither the facilities nor staff to enter upon large-scale production so the hull of the Welman was handed over to the Pressed Steel Company, producers in peacetime of motor car bodies, and the Welfreighter to Shelvoke and Drewery, makers of dust carts.
In 1945 the Type A Mk III suitcase wireless sets with spares cost around £40 each, which equates to over £900 at 2002 prices. The Type B Mark III at £47 was equivalent to £1,100 and the Midget Communications Receiver at £12 would have cost around £270 in 2002. Once again as we have seen, design and development work was initiated at Station IX and quantity production was handed over to experienced large-scale production firms like Marconi and Philco.
The cost of SOE’s activities as a whole was for many years one of their most closely guarded secrets and in spite of all the inevitable doubt about their accounting methods the astonishing fact remains that at the bottom line it actually showed a profit, and a huge one at that. Grp Capt J.F. Venner, the Director of Finance and Administration, came up with a final account showing a profit of £23m. This incredible sum can be explained almost entirely by Walter Fletcher’s astounding monetary dealings in Nationalist China.
Fletcher was a physically very large man, half-Central European, who lived on the margin of merchanting and smuggling. He persuaded Dalton and then Mackenzie to let him try to smuggle rubber out of the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies for which he was given a Treasury credit of £100,000, one fifth of what he had asked for. After two years, during which he moved from the Dutch East Indies to French Indo-China, he had not produced any rubber. He managed to persuade both SOE and the Treasury to let him try mainland China where SOE was forbidden to operate. Fletcher claimed to be merely making friends with Chinese magnates, their wives and mistresses, all of whom had a liking for the expensive things of life. He arranged for de Beers to put up diamonds and for Swiss firms to supply thousands of the finest watches for which SOE paid in sterling, and which were smuggled out through France by agents thinking they were handling aircraft gunsights. Both the diamonds and the watches were sold in China at hugely inflated prices, netting SOE around £77m. In SOE in the Far East, Charles Cruikshank describes this as ‘the biggest currency black market in history’. And all with full Treasury approval!
MANPOWER
The Welman project had highlighted the need for many more highly skilled technical workers. Satisfying the demand for workers was an ongoing problem for all sectors of both civilian and military life. Men of military age had been called up to the armed forces unless they were in a ‘reserved occupation’: a job which was vital to the nation’s well-being, such as a farmer or a coal miner. Women had taken over many of the less skilled jobs in engineering, munitions and, of course, on the farms with the Women’s Land Army. They had also taken on some highly skilled work such as ferrying aircraft (anything from a Tiger Moth biplane to a Lancaster bomber) in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). The women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) mounted round-the-clock watch at SOE radio stations receiving morse messages from agents and provided drivers for SOE officers on duty.
Places like Station IX needed many technicians to work on wireless sets, weapons, special devices and equipment. Devices which were under development needed to be fabricated from scratch, tried out, modified, tried again and altered yet again. The very nature of the process required intelligent appreciation from highly skilled precision technicians and machinists who could maintain a rapport with the scientific inventors of the gadgetry. But Station IX was not the only establishment with a shortage of these skills and competition in recruiting became evident. Officers could be recruited from the Services, industry, government research departments and universities. It was much more difficult to obtain good development engineers and design draughtsmen and the Drawing Office at Station IX was never staffed to keep pace with the engineering shops. Fortunately the best technicians, toolmakers and fine machinists could fabricate from sketches and verbal instructions. The recruitment of toolmakers to an establishment such as Station IX may seem somewhat out of place. A toolmaker is a person who can, by using precision machines such as lathes, milling machines, shapers and grinders, make a complicated device to facilitate mass production of an item. The fabrication of the prototypes of many of the one-off devices dreamt up by SOE’s scientists and engineers required the same skills and machinery as the precision devices (or ‘tools’) for mass production in industry.
There was a general disregard among many of the government ministries for the importance of subversive activities. This attitude tended to force SOE into taking matters into their own hands and attempting to develop devices of all sorts, some of which, with hindsight, were clearly outside their field of competence. The submersibles, the spigot gun and the Welmine were all examples upon which much effort was expended but which might have been far more successful had they been designed and developed by a larger and more experienced arm of one of the three main Armed Forces. This lack of support for clandestine subversive forces resulted in some service departments being indifferent towards SOE, an example being in the manpower crisis for technicians. There was one notable exception in Sir George Turner of the Ministry of Supply, who appreciated subversion and helped SOE.
In December 1942, at the height of the development of the Welman one-man submarine, F.T. Davies, the Director of Services, minuted CD bemoaning the problems of recruiting technicians and retaining them in the face of tempting offers from better recognised departments when the workload was on the increase. CD passed the grumble to Lord Selborne, the Minister of Economic Warfare, suggesting he should get the Minister of Production to inform the Minister of Labour that ISRB should be protected against poachers. No doubt the Minister of Labour was inundated with similar requests from many organisations both civilian and military, who considered their work to be of the utmost importance to the nation.
FIFTEEN
SPECIAL OPERATIONS INVOLVING R&D SECTION
The Research and Development Section of SOE was concerned in the main with scientific work which would show benefits for the Allied cause over a wide range of operations in various theatres of wa
r. Thus the tyrebursters, various switches, wireless sets, motorised submersible canoes and all the other inventions were planned to be used throughout the area of conflict wherever they were appropriate. There were other, rarer occasions when devices were produced for ad hoc operations where circumstances dictated that they needed to be manufactured specifically for particular targets. While there were many such operations, there were a few which, because of their importance or sheer scale, deserve special mention here. As will be apparent, the scientific approach is not restricted to the laboratory bench: it is equally applicable beneath the sea or in dropping objects from high altitude.
OPERATION BRADDOCK (FORMERLY THE ‘MOON’ PROJECT)
On 27 May 1942 Churchill sent a personal minute to the Minister of Economic Warfare, Lord Selborne, saying: ‘I commend to your notice a recent book by John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down, published this year by Viking Press of New York. In addition to being a well-written story, it stresses, I think quite rightly, the importance of providing the conquered nations with simple weapons such as sticks of dynamite which could be easily concealed and are easy in operation.’1
Several copies of the book were purchased and distributed to ministers and the sentiments within it became the basis for what was initially called the ‘Moon’ project (but was later renamed Operation Braddock). Ideas crystallised and the plan for the ‘Moon’ project, which was reduced to two schemes, was submitted to the Chiefs of Staff on 28 September 1942.
Scheme I was to deliver by parachute 50,000 small packages of arms, explosives and incendiaries broadcast to nationals of whichever country was to be invaded by the Allies, but not until the invasion had occurred. Scheme II was to deliver by floating down on instruction cards large quantities of simple incendiary devices to foreign workers and disaffected nationals inside Germany. The deliveries were to start as soon as the devices were ready and aircraft were available.
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