SOE

by Fredric Boyce

  In July 1942 the Deputy Secretary to the War Cabinet Office approached the Chief of Staff of the Chief of Combined Operations suggesting that Rjukan be attacked as intelligence showed it to be a target of the highest priority. By September a plan had been drawn up for an advance party of SOE agents to act as a reception committee and guides for the main attacking force of airborne troops. The advance group, code-named ‘Swallow’, of four men from the Norwegian Independent Company landed 30 km north-west of the target in mid-October and had established the vital W/T link the following month. Their up-to-date intelligence indicated that a recent Commando attack on a power station in the general area had resulted in greatly increased enemy security in the Vemork area.

  In an audacious move, the Norwegian manager of the works was brought out to England via Stockholm to provide vital detailed information about the plant, as a result of which it was decided that destruction of the High Concentration Plant, situated in a part of the complex relatively safe from aerial bombardment, must be achieved. With this information SOE made a mock-up of the plant to be attacked at one of its training schools while Colin Meek and Charles Critchfield at Station IX designed and prepared the explosive charges required for the job.12

  On 19 November 1942 the airborne assault force Freshman took off from Skippen airfield near Wick in two aircraft, each towing a glider. In bad weather one aircraft and both gliders crashed around 200 km from the target. All the survivors were shot on Hitler’s orders. The Swallow party had been ready with landing lights and had even heard one of the planes on their Eureka set. They were ordered to leave the area and be ready for the next moon period. The objective of Operation Freshman was now known to the enemy, who further increased the garrison in the area as well as arresting a number of local Norwegians they thought likely to help the Allies. It was therefore decided to make a second attempt using a group of six Norwegians (code-name ‘Gunnerside’) specially trained by SOE with valuable assistance in a consultative capacity given by Prof (later Capt) L. Tronstad, who was attached to the Norwegian Armed Forces.

  The December, January and February moon periods were plagued by bad weather which prevented flights. Due to an alert, a last-minute change in dropping zone on the night of 16/17 February meant that the Gunnerside party was dropped onto the frozen Bjarnesfjord, some 30 km from the reception committee. The two parties met six days later and had to carry the charges, provisions, arms, etc., over 60 km across severe country in very bad weather to attack the target on the night of 27/28 February 1943.

  In what was admitted by the Germans to have been an extremely well executed operation, the factory was entered, the High Concentration Plant penetrated, the charges were placed on the special cells and as a result four month’s stock of heavy water was destroyed; and all without a shot being fired. One member of the Gunnerside team stayed behind with the Swallow party while the other five skied 400 km to Sweden and safety.

  The Germans repaired the plant by August and improved security to a point which precluded another ground attack. However, a strong force of US bombers attacked the power station in November and although the High Concentration Plant was virtually unscathed, the power station on which it depended was so severely damaged that heavy water production was abandoned. In January 1944 reports were received that the plant was to be dismantled and sent to Germany. The following month the Swallow party reported that the remaining stocks of heavy water were to be moved to Germany via the ferryboat Hydro on Lake Tinnsjo. An SOE group code-named ‘Chaffinch’ sent two men who, with nine local helpers, planned to sink the vessel. The Germans anticipated an attack to destroy the precious cargo and employed SS troops, two patrolling aircraft and special guards on the railway from Rjukan to the ferry quay at Mel. But in a fatal error they omitted to place guards on the Hydro itself.

  The Chaffinch agent slipped on board and into the bilges where he placed 8.4 kg of 808 explosive in the bilge water alongside the keel at the bow of the ferryboat. He selected that end so that the boat would sink bow first, thus raising the propeller and rudder out of the water, making it impossible to steer to the lakeside for beaching. The previously prepared charges included in this instance his own time delays made from two alarm clocks with, for reliability’s sake, two independent ignition circuits. The clocks and batteries were attached to stringers and the alarms were set for 10.45. It was vital that the boat sink at a previously selected deep part of the lake and so the timing of the explosion had to be accurate. Hence the use of the clockwork delays rather than Time Pencils or L-delays.

  The two wagons containing the heavy water were loaded onto the Hydro which left at 09.00 for its journey down the long, narrow lake, by which time the Chaffinch agents were well on their way to Jondal, Oslo and safety in neutral Sweden. At about 11.00 on 21 February 1944 the charge exploded. The boat tipped steeply down, the wagons ran forward along the deck and into the lake, and within four minutes 14,485 litres of heavy water were lost for ever.13

  OPERATION PERIWIG

  Perhaps Maj Everett’s most bizarre enquiry, and one which stretches the concept of research within SOE to the limit, was made early in 1945 in connection with Operation Periwig which was concerned with ‘Methods of Breaking the German Will to Resist’.14 It was a deception plan to convince the Nazis that there were Resistance groups throughout Germany about to rise up against them. A continuing feature of Government policy since 1940 had been based on the mistaken belief that an effective anti-Nazi faction existed in Germany. There had, indeed, been scattered cells of resistance to Hitler ever since he came to power in 1933. It was known that there were German resistance groups on the Austrian– Yugoslav border and throughout Germany a large number of bands of youths were organised into anti-Hitler Youth groups similar to the Edelweiss Piraten and Catholic youth groups.15 But major organised anti-Nazi action was hindered by the church’s Lutheran tradition of deference to authority and the military’s deep-rooted tradition of loyalty and professional ethic.

  Nevertheless, for years SOE’s German Section had maintained most secret contact, through its representative in Switzerland, with a railway workers’ organisation which had carried out some administrative and physical sabotage to rolling stock in Basle marshalling yards. In the end it was left to the Army but several attempts on Hitler’s life, terminating in the plot of 20 July 1944, failed to remove him and resulted in very many innocent deaths. This July attempt on Hitler’s life could have been the catalyst that resulted in the setting up of a joint SOE/PWE (Political Warfare Executive) project to revisit the question of anti-Nazi resistance inside Germany. The event revived the hope that an internal revolt might succeed in overthrowing the Nazi regime.

  However, Lt Col R.H. Thornley, AD/X1 in the German Directorate and an expert on the German situation, carried out a realistic assessment and formed the conclusion that there was no hope of raising an organisation sufficiently powerful to overthrow the Nazi rulers. Gubbins, with typically ‘blue-sky’ ideas, argued that if a genuine movement did not exist then SOE should invent an entirely fictitious Resistance Movement in the Reich by the use of ‘black’ radio transmissions and other convincing deception techniques and convince the German Security Service, and through them the military machine and the German public, that it was a real threat. This would put maximum strain on the Gestapo, leading to the development in Germany of a lack of confidence and a feeling of insecurity, increased general suspicion and doubt, and eventually to the breakdown of the security system. Plans to divert and confuse the German Security service had appeared early in the war. One such was Plan ‘Stiff’, proposed by SIS in 1941, which was to parachute into Germany a wireless set, instructions and codes to give the impression that an agent had been dropped but had abandoned his task. It was hoped that the Germans would undertake a search for the missing agent and would play back the set, thus providing information on their techniques of deception. According to Masterman ‘practical difficulties’ prevented this plan from being executed although it
was revived in various forms on subsequent occasions.16 Some aspects will be seen to bear a resemblance to parts of Gubbins’ SOE operation Periwig.

  Operation Periwig, one aspect of which has been highlighted by Leo Marks (Between Silk and Cyanide, 1998), has excited interest not only in the popular press but in several histories of SOE (e.g. Gubbins and SOE by Wilkinson and Astley, 1993; Secret Agent by David Stafford, 2000; The Secret History of SOE by W. Mackenzie, 2000). Several features of the story have remained unclear and in the view of Stafford ‘until historians have thoroughly mined the records, the truth may never be known’. It is now becoming possible to draw together the available evidence based mainly on the recently released Public Record Office files. Additional detail of the involvement of the Air Supply Research Section comes from the personal recollections of Everett, the Head of the Section, together with his contemporary notebooks which have survived. Bearing in mind that more information may still be waiting to be unearthed in files which have not yet been consulted, this account must still be provisional.

  Deception techniques, aimed at confusing the enemy by feeding misinformation to its planners, have been a feature of secret warfare from earliest times. The widely publicised example of a successful deception in the Second World War was Operation Mincemeat in which a corpse dressed as a Royal Marines Officer was washed ashore in Spain carrying plans suggesting that the forthcoming invasion would take place in the Eastern Mediterranean rather than in Sicily. A major programme of deception was also a prelude to Overlord. In both these cases the objectives were to give the enemy false information on the location of future military operations. On the other hand, political warfare had the psychological aim of creating confusion among the German people and sowing doubts about the outcome of the war.

  The German Section (X) of SOE had placed a great deal of emphasis on ‘black propaganda’ that included the extensive distribution by air drops of forged ration books, clothes coupons and travel passes. These operations were successful in confusing and annoying the local civilian authorities. They were backed up by ‘white propaganda’ which was largely factual and designed to convince the German people of the Allies’ eventual victory. But these operations were seen as being organised and executed by forces outside Germany. They had to contend with the determination and resilience of the general population – just as the British population responded to German air raids and the broadcasts of ‘Lord Haw Haw’. A far greater effect on the determination of the Germans would be achieved if the acts of sabotage and subversion were seen to emerge from inside Germany.

  Gubbins’s initial plan to create a fictitious German Resistance movement was developed in the late summer of 1944 but received little support from Thornley, the then Head of the German Section, while it was strongly opposed by the Foreign Office. The latter were concerned in particular about the impact such an intervention would have on Anglo-Soviet relations since it would be impossible to explain a venture of this kind to the Kremlin, for whom the concept of ‘German Resistance’ had an altogether different connotation. As in so many other SOE projects the SIS had serious doubts about any overt SOE operations which they saw as creating dangers for their own agents who operated covertly. To succeed, the operation had to appear to be initiated by groups inside Germany and could not be attributed to the Allies, although help from them should be a response to requests from within Germany. In developing the plan and to maintain its credibility, care had to be taken to dissociate it from overall Allied planning.

  Gubbins reorganised Section X on 30 October 1944, transferred its responsibility to a newly formed German Directorate (AD/X) and in early November offered its Headship to an old friend, Gen Gerald Templer, who was recovering from a broken back sustained in his staff car when, as Commander of the 6th Armoured Division leading the advance towards Florence in August of that year, he was struck by a wheel from a 15 cwt truck which had been blown up alongside him by a landmine. He was most enthusiastic at the idea of Operation Periwig. Templer, who was later to head the Control Commission in Germany, take on the guerrillas in Malaya and end his career as Chief of Imperial General Staff, is remembered by some for his ‘Mephistophelean countenance’ which struck terror into young officers, although he was also described as ‘kindly’, ‘welcoming’ and ‘ready to put them in the picture’.17 He had a reputation for unorthodoxy and a prodigious command of bad language. He was said by Sporborg to have arrived in SOE on 22 November like a breath of fresh air. Here was a man likely to push the boundaries of war conduct to the very limits to achieve his objective.

  Templer pursued Periwig vigorously. Planning by a joint SOE/PWE Section started on 12 November. A detailed plan was submitted on 20 November to the ‘Will to Resist Committee’, chaired by Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart of the Political Intelligence Department. While the plan was under consideration, Templer took action to prepare for the operation by briefing Marks and Everett. Marks’s highly colourful account of his first encounter with the General is given in Between Silk and Cyanide.

  One afternoon in late December 1944 Everett, unaware of the political background, was summoned from his office in 64 Baker Street to the offices of the German Directorate in Berkeley Court above Baker Street station. There he met Gen Templer together with James Joll, one of his staff officers, later to become a Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Professor at the London School of Economics. Everett, a mere Major, was shown into Templer’s office to receive a crisp and precise briefing from the man who had a reputation of having a dubious vocabulary. He explained that it was proposed to drop into Germany an agent carrying in his briefcase incriminating evidence linking members of the German High Command with a plot to overthrow the Nazi regime. For this to be effective it was necessary to ensure that the papers fell into the hands of the German Secret Service and for this the agent had to be found dead, his parachute having failed to open. Templer’s brief to Everett (it sounded like an order) was to devise a way of tampering with the parachute so that it was certain to fail without leaving any traces of the cause so that it would appear to have been an accident. Once the importance of the papers was realised, the Germans, always suspicious of a plant, would undoubtedly examine the parachute and the agent’s injuries. It was therefore of the greatest importance that the cause of the parachute failure could not be readily identified. If there were signs that the parachute had been tampered with the plan would lose all credibility. Templer revealed that the agent would be a captured German spy, now a prisoner of war, who had offered to help the Allied cause by becoming a double agent and returning to Germany. He would be carrying the latest W/T set and other convincing ‘proof’ of his role as an agent meeting up with a resistance organisation. That he was being ordered to participate in a planned murder was not lost on Everett, but Templer brushed aside the ethical implications by stressing that the agent had already betrayed as many British agents as he had Germans. The urgency of the matter was impressed on Everett who was ordered to provide an answer as soon as possible.

  To seek advice and collaboration, Everett visited the Parachute Training School (STS 51) at Ringway, near Manchester. Since he could not reveal the reason for his enquiries he had to invent a cover story – using to the best of his ability the training he had received at Beaulieu. He said that there had been one or two unexplained parachute failures in some recent SOE operations and there had been some suspicions that the parachutes might have been tampered with. Since such genuine failures were rare he had, in the absence of specific examples, some difficulty in maintaining his story. It was stressed that it would be difficult to tamper with a parachute since agents either packed their own or supervised the packing: they were responsible for their own safety. Thus if a way of sabotaging a parachute were devised, it would be difficult to conceal this without arousing the suspicions of the agent. Nevertheless, a series of trials over several days failed to find a method of inducing a parachute failure without leaving evidence of the cause. Everett returned to London and reporte
d his findings to Templer in mid-January 1945. He said that the only way of ensuring the agent’s death would be to collude with the RAF and arrange either that the despatcher detached the parachute’s static line immediately before the drop or that the pilot be briefed to drop from a dangerously low level. In either case the RAF would be implicated in the murder. At this point Templer interrupted to say that Everett need not proceed further with the investigation since the operation had been vetoed by the Prisoners of War Branch of the War Office on the grounds that it contravened the Geneva Protocol on treatment of PoWs. As is now known, the SOE plan for Periwig was in fact vetoed by the SIS on 13 January, though not apparently for the above reason.

  The above account is in broad agreement with that told by Marks in his book with the exception that he, as Head of the Codes and Cypher Section, had been briefed to prepare code books to be dropped with the agent in the expectation that on their discovery the Germans would set up radio traffic thinking they were in touch with a subversive group. It seems that Templer did not discuss the use of incriminating evidence in his briefing of Marks. The agent was to be delivered by parachute but Templer said parachuting was a dangerous business and the agent would be dead before he reached the ground. Marks was given the task of briefing the agent, whose name was given as Schiller, on the use of codes and to convince him of the genuine nature of his mission. Marks heard nothing more from the General until, shortly before he left SOE in the middle of March, Templer told him, ‘Your friend has had a fatal accident’, which Marks took to mean that the operation had taken place successfully.18

  It turns out that, unknown to Everett and presumably to Templer, similar experiments had been carried out some months earlier (probably in June) by Angus Fyffe of the Security Section. He, too, had been given the task of defining means by which a parachute could be tampered with in such a way that a malfunction was inevitable, but without leaving any trace of the cause of the failure. His experiments appear to have been more extensive than those carried out by Everett but came to the same conclusion. No written record of Fyffe’s work seems to exist, nor is it clear who commissioned his experiments. There is no evidence linking it with a Periwig-type operation. In passing, it is interesting to discover that Terry O’Brien of the RAF in India carried out independently a series of tests for a similar operation in which a corpse dressed as an Indian Army Officer was to be dropped in Burma using a faulty parachute. He, too, found that it was not possible to ensure a failure without tampering with the harness. (The Moonlight War by Terry O’Brien). The conclusion that it is extremely difficult to cause a parachute to malfunction was supported by Oberst-Leutnant von der Heydte, the German commander who led the airborne invasion of Crete and then commanded the disastrous air drop in the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 when he was taken prisoner. By now thoroughly disillusioned, the officer was interrogated by Everett on 12 February 1945 in an effort to obtain information about an aluminium device found after the drop but during the conversation they also discussed parachute failures. Von der Heydte said he had compared British and German parachutes and found little in their performance to distinguish between them. To reassure his troops he had personally demonstrated that even if the parachute was bundled into its bag without proper folding, it still opened satisfactorily.