by Paul Kix
In the war’s early years, by way of introduction, the pair would stand at the top of a staircase in one of the Inverness-shire estates, a class of agents sitting below, and would fall down the steps, tumbling to the bottom and landing in a battle crouch position, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. They would then rise, so the prospective agents could take their measure.
Fairbairn was the older of the two, a lean and hard fifty-eight. He had been in more than six hundred street fights in Shanghai and, twenty-five years later, during the course of SOE training, said little more to prospective agents than “Stick a knife in here,” and “Now, put your thumb in his eye.” Sykes was different. He looked like a retired bishop, observers wrote, a little shorter than Fairbairn and a lot more personable. Would-be agents came to the plumpy Sykes, fifty-six, with questions that Fairbairn and his tough demeanor didn’t invite. Both wore glasses and battle dress with a webbing belt.
By the time Robert de La Rochefoucauld reached Inverness-shire, in the spring of 1943, Sykes and Fairbairn had revised the course syllabus based on the experiences of agents in the field, and Sykes oversaw the training alone, as Fairbairn had moved on to a special ops training ground in Canada. But the lesson plan still honored the collaboration between the men.
La Rochefoucauld and prospects like him learned to shoot a handgun, an automatic Colt .45, from a slight crouch, firing from the navel as Sykes preferred, two quick pops because a quick shot was better than an accurate one—and besides, accuracy came with practice. Sykes taught prospective agents how to keep the lower body tense but the upper loose and yet centered, and from there how to kill up to four people while falling down. He constructed a “house of horrors” for his would-be assassins. They busted open a door to see a dummy connected to wires leap at them from the bedroom; agents had to quickly gun him down. Then a trapdoor opened and more dummies emerged. Some sprang from beneath tables. Bottles and chairs came hurtling at the prospective agents’ heads. They had to shoot everything. They had to adapt quickly, too, because on another day there was a second house, with new horrors, then a third, a fourth and fifth, the intruders coming from above them, below, lifelike and inventive in their attacks. Always, the prospects were graded for their efforts and accuracy.
Fairbairn and Sykes had developed a knife in Shanghai whose blade was thin enough to puncture a man without leaving a mark and yet strong enough to reach his organs. SOE prospects learned to carry it in a sheath in their left hip pocket—the right reserved for their gun—and to flick it at an enemy fighter as if it were a paintbrush, in an upward motion that began at the testicles and ended at the chin. The blade did a nauseating amount of damage. La Rochefoucauld learned that in close combat a man who wielded a knife well was the most dangerous man of all.
In fact, the only good defense against a knife attack was a wooden chair, the four legs upturned and jutting at the opponent. This was part of Fairbairn and Sykes’s defense training, which even Fairbairn called “gutter fighting.” The main point was that one always had a weapon at the ready. The shovel or pick ax with which many nations outfitted soldiers could split a man’s skull. A stick as small as four inches long could be turned into a nasty switch that was more painful than a punch to a face. The corner of a matchbox, held between the second and third fingers of a fist, could puncture a man’s skin when he was punched—or, if delivered as an uppercut to the nose, could come close to killing him. A well-folded piece of newspaper could do the same.
Then there were the surprise moves. These were known as the Silent Killing techniques because the attacks opened with an unarmed maneuver that might end with a quick flick of the knife across the throat—or might not require the blade at all. Agents learned that slamming one’s cupped palms against the enemy’s ears would break his eardrums and perhaps concuss him. The thrust of an agent’s open palm against a combatant’s nose should conclude with the agent jamming his fingers into the enemy’s eyes. Once an enemy fighter was on the ground, an agent should jump and drive both his heels into the man’s diaphragm—at a minimum, the enemy is left without breath; at most, he has organ damage. If an agent was behind a man and had him in a sleeper hold, the agent should push forward on the back of the enemy’s neck. The motion might paralyze, if not kill, him. Punching the enemy in the Adam’s apple might kill him, too.
On and on the lessons went—testicle kicking, thumb bending, back breaking. “Your aim is to kill your opponent as soon as possible,” the SOE syllabus said. “A prisoner is generally a handicap and a source of danger.” As Fairbairn himself wrote: “The majority of these methods are drastic in the extreme. They are inspired by judo, but in contrast to judo, they recognize no accepted rules . . . The methods . . . enable a young man of only average strength to overpower a much stronger opponent.”
The techniques became so well-known that in 1942 the Germans published a manual about how to counter these Silent Killing methods, which the Nazis called “savage.” In fact, some scholars contend that Hitler’s Commando Order—an October 1942 mandate stating that all captured Allied special operatives be executed—sprang from Hitler either obtaining the SOE syllabus or, at least, growing familiar with its passages on Silent Killing. “From captured orders,” Hitler said, “it emerges that [Allied soldiers] are instructed . . . to kill out-of-hand unarmed captives who they think might prove an encumbrance to them, or hinder them in successfully carrying out their aims. Orders have indeed been found in which the killing of prisoners has positively been demanded of them.” Hitler’s mandate to immediately execute imprisoned operatives was a violation of the Geneva Convention, but, then again, so were Fairbairn and Sykes’s training techniques. Hitler appeared to be speaking directly of SOE agents when he said, “In future, all terror and sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices who do not act like soldiers but rather like bandits will be treated as such by the German troops, and will be ruthlessly eliminated in battle, wherever they appear.”
The threat was real. Beheadings, firing squads, and the slower death of the camps awaited many captured SOE agents. But they parachuted back into their native countries unafraid, in part because of the very training that incensed Hitler. “I think the great advantage of the advanced assault course,” SOE agent Henry Hall said after the war, “was that . . . you knew so many more tricks of the trade and methods of attack, demolition and causing havoc and destruction that you became super confident . . . The answer to whatever attack you were up against would be an instinctive reaction. You just took it as something as natural as drinking a cup of tea or making a sandwich.” As another agent, George Langelaan, put it, the self-confidence Fairbairn and Sykes gave trainees “gradually grew into a sense of physical power and superiority that few men ever acquire. By the time we finished our training, I would have willingly enough tackled any man, whatever his strength, size or ability. [The instructors] taught us to face the possibility of a fight without the slightest tremor of apprehension, a state of mind which very few professional boxers ever enjoy and which so often means more than half the battle. Strange as this may seem, it is understandable when a man knows for certain that he can hurt, maul, injure or even kill with the greatest of ease, and that during every split second of a fight he has not one but a dozen different openings, different possibilities, to choose from.”
Summarizing all he learned and the edge it gave him, Robert de La Rochefoucauld said with his characteristic understatement, “The English were great coaches.”
The preparation didn’t end there. La Rochefoucauld and his class traveled to Manchester and its Ringway Airport for the most terrifying of lessons: parachute drops. It started simply enough. La Rochefoucauld learned to jump from a six-foot-high trampoline and roll properly onto the ground. Some agents from previous classes recalled the staff asking trainees to watch sandbags attached to parachutes drop from the sky. “A good half of the parachutes did not open,” one agent said, “and the bags thudded onto the ground with a dull, flat noise that brought us
no confidence at all.” The surviving SOE records show that by 1943 the staff seemed to have done away with the airbags and just put the agents in the sky. A hot-air balloon tethered to the ground hoisted La Rochefoucauld and an instructor more than five hundred yards up. “I don’t really know why,” La Rochefoucauld later said, “the rope under our feet reinforced the feeling of empty space and gave me terrifying vertigo.” That first time, Robert sat at the basket’s edge, staring down, frightfully down, the distance between him and the earth shocking and disturbing. But the only way to learn was to do, and when the instructor commanded him to jump, he found it within himself to push off.
It wasn’t awful—at least, that’s what he thought when he landed on the ground. But he never grew comfortable with the particulars of parachute jumping—every time he “felt more and more afraid,” he said—and one sentence in his military file might explain why. In early 1943, while training, La Rochefoucauld was knocked unconscious and broke his wrist. The report offered no further explanation, and perhaps one couldn’t be expected given the clandestine nature of Robert’s work. But it seemed possible that those injuries occurred on one of the four or five parachute jumps that each SOE agent was asked to perform before entering the field.
In some sense, Robert was lucky. SOE’s French sections recorded six fatalities from parachute drops, though none during training. After La Rochefoucauld’s injuries healed, he moved on to SOE’s finishing schools, a euphemistic play on the peacetime connotation: Some of these institutions were literally run by convicts. SOE thought it important for prospective commandos to learn to crack safes and pick locks, and the agency employed burglars on special leave from prison. “They knew how to open the safes better than anyone,” La Rochefoucauld said. The British seemed “concerned with working all of our skills to the maximum.”
Another finishing school parachuted would-be agents into the middle of the countryside, and demanded they return to camp, some sixty miles away, without maps or compasses and while evading the police, who had been tipped off to their mission and worked to catch them. One time Robert and the other trainees saw an approaching patrol car and stripped down to their boxers, posing as joggers out for a run. When the cop reached them, “We’d start to shudder with big heaving breaths, like athletes in training,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. “It wasn’t a complete lie.”
On another occasion La Rochefoucauld parachuted with a trainee on a similar mission—a race where teams competed to get back to camp on wits alone, avoiding arrest—but La Rochefoucauld’s coconspirator landed awkwardly on his drop and sprained his ankle. He couldn’t walk. Wanting to win, La Rochefoucauld stole a military police truck. Hours before anyone else returned, La Rochefoucauld and the man with the bad ankle stepped out of the government vehicle they’d stolen, and the SOE staff, astonished, decided the theft was as ingenious as it was illegal—the mark of a true agent—and did not punish La Rochefoucauld.
At another finishing school Robert learned how to withstand torture. The section heads themselves often participated in the mock interrogations. Maintaining silence during imprisonment was vital to the agency’s success. “These rehearsals were grim affairs,” F Section head Maurice Buckmaster later wrote, “and we spared the recruits nothing. They were stripped and made to stand for hours in the light of bright lamps and though, of course, we never used any physical violence on them, they certainly knew what it was to go through it by the time we had finished.”
La Rochefoucauld’s instructors told him to get angrier than his questioners. “When you become angry, you don’t feel the blows anymore,” he said. “This was one of the central trainings. And of course we were not supposed to say why we were there, where we came from, what we did.” Piquet-Wicks outfitted his agents with clothes and cover stories, “all the intricate planning for a successful mission,” he said, in the hope that the lies agents would convey to the Germans were believable. In fact, the SOE staff assessed agents on their contrived credibility. Stutters and cracks in cover were grave offenses. “On occasion, from perhaps as few as twenty available men, only four or five finally could be entrusted with missions,” Piquet-Wicks wrote. He was a man who abided by the SOE adage, “He that has a secret should not only hide it but hide that he needs to hide it.” These finishing schools taught La Rochefoucauld how to look and act ordinary while doing extraordinary things.
And when all else failed, Robert learned about the final redemption of the cyanide pill. It should be on an agent at all times, the staff directed; swallowing it would kill a man in minutes.
Though the passing rate of SOE trainees was low—in Robert’s class of thirty, he was one of seven to become a saboteur—the last lesson of the agency for a graduating class was humility: Many great commandos had come before, and some had faced impossible circumstances, which had forced them to gulp down the pill. New agents should be prepared to do the same.
CHAPTER 9
With the light of the moon guiding it, the four-engine plane crossed into occupied Europe one summer night in 1943, its lights flicked off, its pilot nosing the bird toward the faintly lit contours of central France and the region above the Morvan. La Rochefoucauld sat inside the plane, confident, even arrogant, and above all anxious to begin his first mission: helping to train Resistance fighters in the lethal tactics he’d just learned. He was not yet twenty years old.
He had been given French clothes, a French watch—everything that would obscure what he had spent months in Britain training for. He would hide his noble identity and deadly expertise in the dress and demeanor of a Burgundy laborer. On the tarmac just before takeoff, a colonel had stopped him to say La Rochefoucauld wasn’t leaving to get himself killed; he had to be brave, be daring, but the colonel counted on seeing him again.
And yet as the plane crossed into France, the Germans on the ground spotted it, and their antiaircraft gunners opened fire. The plane dipped first one wing and then the other to avoid the rounds, but the bullets pockmarked its frame. The metal-shredding ping terrified La Rochefoucauld as much as the plane’s swerving maneuvers. The craft at last rose, beyond the reach of the Germans but also above the outline of the landscape, and stayed there for minutes, flying blind. Everyone listened for the heavy drone of an approaching Nazi fighter. But none came. And so the Halifax descended to its steady cruising altitude, having endured surprisingly minimal damage. La Rochefoucauld tried to act with a similar resilience, but quietly shook with fear.
It would not be much better on the ground. Robert was joining a decided minority of the population, the 2 percent of Frenchmen who actively participated in the Resistance. The guerrillas the Germans captured, they killed, because a résistant’s mission—anarchy by any means—wasn’t covered by the international treaties that protected prisoners of war in their official military fatigues. The résistant’s civilian clothing was itself sometimes all the goading the Nazis needed to send another suspected saboteur to the firing squad. While special operatives like La Rochefoucauld seldom fought at any front, their war was in some respects more dangerous than an Allied soldier’s, because the standard rules of combat did not apply. Even British handlers said an underground man could make it only six months in France. After that, the law of averages worked against him.
Robert looked out his window at a country that was far different from the one he’d escaped. The North African landings in November 1942 had led a furious Hitler to declare the whole of France occupied. In February 1943, the Vichy government, by then openly Fascist, shipped French workers to Germany to aid the Nazi war effort. Eventually 650,000 Frenchmen would depart for the factories and mines; by the end of 1943, the French would build 42 percent of Germany’s transport planes. Of course, this Service du travail obligatoire, or mandatory work order, worked against the collaborators in Vichy and Paris, too. The STO disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and awakened in some the urge to rebel. They simply refused to honor the order and took to the mountains, where they trained as résistant
s, returning to the lowlands to sabotage everything German. The French began calling these fighters maquis, a Corsican term for mountainous scrubland. “The concept did not exist in January 1943,” the historian Rod Kedward wrote. “It was everywhere by June.” Maquis men, and really any Resistance group, organized by the British or forming organically in France, identified with de Gaulle, who said of the open collaboration between Vichy and Berlin: “Sabotage their plans and hate their leaders. National liberation cannot be separated from national insurrection.” The German ambassador to Vichy counted 3,800 sabotages in France between January and September 1943. Even Défense de la France, a Catholic group that had once called for nothing more than “spiritual resistance,” approved of Nazi assassinations in 1943, and ultimately stated in its underground newspaper, “Kill the German to purify our territory.”
The Nazis were not unprepared for this uprising. They had handed over the policing of France in 1942 to the dreaded brutes of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, nominally an intelligence service, though in practice much more. By the time of La Rochefoucauld’s drop, this secret police force had organized into a head office in Paris, and seventeen regional and forty-five branch sections in the provinces. The SD’s reach covered the whole of France, aided by the collaborating and anonymous Frenchmen who sent up to five million denunciatory letters during the war, enough to turn the country into what the French scholar Michel Foucault would later call a state of “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance.”
And yet, angered by the persistent sabotages, the Nazis and the Vichy government created still another police force, the Milice, staffed by collaborating Frenchmen whose job was to hunt down resisters. In some sense, the Milice men were worse than those in the SD, who were ostensibly concerned with information; the thirty thousand members of the Milice, many of them former criminals, turned their job into barbaric fun, subjecting those they arrested to occasionally harsher torture than the Nazis themselves. As more French police refused to do their jobs to Germany’s liking—a form of passive resistance—the Milice filled the void.