After a grim battle to seize Breville a week after the landings, MacMillan investigated allegations that two paras had been executed after several had driven into Herouville in German vehicles and had been captured. He established from a householder that an Army motor cycle company commanded by a decent captain was billeted in the village and had two SS lieutenants attached to it. It was they who insisted that captured commandos and parachute troops were to be executed under the infamous Hitler Order, but the captain had not shared the directive with his men. MacMillan later learnt that one of the SS had been killed. The other was eventually hanged for the murders. On 14 June, Captain MacMillan attended a briefing in which 3 (X) Troop, No. 10 (Inter Allied) Commando was to escort three Caen Resistance members through German lines opposite 4 Special Service Brigade. Two successfully infiltrated; however, the Troop commander, Captain Hilton-Jones, was badly wounded and captured and the third Frenchman was shot dead by 1 (French Troop) near Amfreville after he forgot the password. In the last week of June, Sergeant Reg Ribton-Turner broke his leg and was evacuated. MacMillan was accidentally shot by one his men while cleaning his pistol and was treated by a visiting Intelligence Corps NCO, who had previously served with the Small Scale Raiding Force. The persistent shelling and mortaring affected morale and inevitably led to civilians being accused of communicating with the enemy. Shortly after the Light Armoured Regiment had been heavily mortared, two civilians wearing white helmets seen heading for the German lines were arrested, but they turned out to be firemen. It was recommended by 317 FSS that Battalion intelligence officers place observation posts in no man’s-land.
On D-Day, 49 (Lines of Communications) FSS heard about the landings from the BBC and a week later were loitering off Arromanches. Corporal Jean Vila, a former French Railways manager, had a brother who was a French Army prisoner in Germany. While he was waiting to land, a German aircraft strafing the anchorage was shot down by anti-aircraft guns and, exploding as it crashed alongside the ship, caused several casualties when shattered timber planks collapsed into the holds crowded with soldiers. Late next afternoon, 49 FSS scrambled down nets into a landing craft that crunched onto Gold Beach and the NCOs revved their motor cycles through the surf and drove about two miles inland to their assembly area in a field. Next day, the section deployed to protect the oil installation near Port-en-Bessin against sabotage from raids and pro-German collaborators. Billeted in the village school, regular contact was made with local authorities, the Gendarmerie and those villagers who had returned after the D-Day bombardment. On 1 August, detachments took over Port Security at Arromanches and the British Mulberry Harbour ‘B’ and covered the lines of communication to Bayeaux.
A few days after a deception, in which 6th Parachute Division turned their red berets inside out to show the inside black lining more associated with the Royal Tank Regiment, a French civilian brought to FS HQ claimed that he had crossed from the German lines in an attempt to reach his family in Caen. MacMillan sent the suspect to HQ I Corps in the belief that he probably had information of intelligence interest. When it then turned out that he was on the Corps Black List and was suspected of being sent to discover which unit had replaced the Division, it prompted a disagreement on the need to share counter-intelligence information. On 12 July, CSM Roberts arrived with the Sea Tail, and the sleeping bags. Sergeant Howse, a veteran of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, was badly wounded and should have been evacuated; however, MacMillan agreed to his request to stay with the section so long as, in future, he deployed with the Sea Tail.
By mid-August, Twenty-First Army Group had broken out of the beachhead, crossed the River Seine and was advancing towards Belgium. HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) landed on 2 August and was supporting the Field Security sections experiencing the euphoria of liberated towns and villages as they worked their way through their Arrest Lists, unearthing agents and stay-behind groups, checking out displaced people and intervening in attempts at retribution when French women accused of collaboration were having their heads shaved. Behind them, Lines of communications sections and Reserve Detachments mopped up and handed internal security over to mayors. Sergeants Edwards, Kershaw and Hornby, of 317 (Airborne) FSS, were among the first Allied troops to liberate Deauville and Trouville. In one village, Edwards gave his cap badge to a girl. Years later he returned and, by chance, met her. She still had the badge. On 17 August, 6th Airborne Division reached the River Seine and returned to England for leave and refitting. After sustaining injuries in a motor-cycle accident and a parachute jump on exercise, MacMillan took no further part in the war.
Soon after Caen was liberated, Claude Collomb, a line-crosser despatched by his German handlers to report on security controls, the state of civilian morale and food distribution, and assess the effect of naval bombardments, defected and was transferred to FS HQ and admitted to being a SD agent, who had penetrated several Resistance groups and had betrayed three Allied escapers near the Spanish border. He also betrayed his good friend, Daniel Crombe, who arrived with a letter from a Resistance leader commending his integrity, until it turned out it had been written by the SD. One section found they were part owners of a cow rented from a farmer by the German Secret Field Police.
Meanwhile, 1011 FSRD crossed the Seine over demolished bridges at Elbeuf. Raised in 1943 to support HQ Western Command in Chester, with 1010 and 1012 FSRDs it reinforced 45 (XXX Corps) FSS in Caen before being switched to the 2nd (Canadian) Corps spearheading the advance to Rouen. During the night of 29/30 August, as part of R Force, the equivalent of S Force in the Mediterranean, that included five FS sections and six Reserve Detachments, it entered the city. Tasked by the Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub Committee and with HQ FS based in the Marie and some wooden huts overlooking the cathedral, the sections seized documents and equipment and rounded up collaborators, Gestapo and German soldiers while deterring enthusiastic Resistance, whose sole idea was ‘to undress and brand or shave the head of as many women as possible’.
Meanwhile, when the SOE was instructed to stir up trouble in areas still occupied by the Germans, several uniformed Jedburgh Missions, Inter-Allied Missions and Operational Groups parachuted to support the Maquis with advice and supplies. The Maquis were mainly young Frenchmen who had fled into the high scrublands of south-eastern France to avoid Vichy conscripted forced labour in Germany. Jedburgh teams usually consisted of two uniformed Allied officers and a NCO wireless operator asked to support the Resistance conducting guerilla warfare and sabotage. Captain Godfrey Marchant was the only member of the Corps who served with a Jedburgh, Team Aubrey, operating in the northern suburbs of Paris in August. When the Maquis ambush of a German armoured column near Rougemont was unsuccessful, he hid near a lake for eight hours. He was later killed in a plane crash in India. Captain Desmond Hubble was a Gunner who had served as the Cipher Officer to the British Military Mission in the Belgian Congo before he transferred to the Intelligence Corps in 1942. After spending a year in West Africa on SOE operations, he was invited by Wing Commander Forrest Yeo-Thomas to join the RF Section and, during the night of 5/6 June, dropped as part of the eight-man uniformed Inter-Allied Mission Citronelle to support Maquis groups in the Ardennes region. Six days later, he was returning from a reconnaissance of a supply drop zone with US Army Lieutenant Victor Layton when they ran into a German patrol about to attack the Maquis. Layton escaped, however, Hubble was captured and ruthlessly interrogated in Charleville. In August, he was one of thirty-seven shackled SOE men and women prisoners, including Captains Macalister and Pickersgill, transferred to Block 17, Buchenwald concentration camp. Singled out by guards because he was in uniform, he was particularly pleased when a pocket chess set was returned to him. To compete with the inhumanity of the camp, the group imposed military conduct in everything they did. Chess became a focal point of recreation.
Supporting the 7th (US) Army and 1st (French) Army that landed west of Monaco on 15 August was the 2 Independent Parachute Brigade, detached from XIII Corps i
n Italy, and a three-man 89 (Airborne) FSS detachment commanded by Sergeant Glanville. He jumped while Corporal Benjamin arrived with the Sea Tail. Corporal Burnley remained with the Brigade Provost Unit. Seventeen photographic interpreters were attached to 7th Army with Captain Gilbert landing with the 1st Free French Division.
Meanwhile, in Algiers, Supreme Headquarters had amalgamated SOE and the US Office of Strategic Services to form ‘Massingham’, with responsibility to ensure that Maquis operations were co-ordinated to support the invasion of Southern France in Operation Dragoon. In late 1943, Captain Xan Fielding had arrived in Great Britain and, joining F Section, then jumped into Provence in August 1944 with orders to contact Lieutenant Colonel Cammaerts, who was controlling the Jockey Circuit north of Marseille, and mobilize the Maquis to secure the route through the Alps to Grenoble. But they and a French officer were arrested at a French Milice police check point near Digne after Fielding’s documents were found to be inaccurate. When the police then discovered a large amount of money in the car boot, Fielding claimed he was a black marketeer and all three were imprisoned in the town. When the remarkable Polish Krystyna Skarbek, also known as Christine Granville, the longest-serving of all SOE women agents, heard about the arrests, she delivered some supplies to her ‘husband’, namely Cammaerts, and convinced the Alsatian, Albert Schenck, who was the liaison officer between the French Prefecture and the SS, that not only was she General Montgomery’s niece, she was also an agent and, with the Allies in southern France, it was in his best interests to secure the release of the prisoners. Several days later, expecting to be shot, the prisoners were bundled into a car and driven to freedom. Fielding returned to Greece just as the country descended into civil war and participated in Jedburgh operations in the Far East, finally ending an adventurous war in French Indo-China.
In 1940, the French-speaking Australian Edward Bisset joined 20 FSS and transferred to 64 (SOE) FSS until he was commissioned in June 1941 and then spent two years as an F Section conducting officer, with a reputation as a meticulous examiner of students. In July 1944, he dropped with the Inter-Allied Tilleul Mission near Poitiers to co-ordinate Maquis activity in the Correze region. On 23 September, he and the US Captain Fraser left for Paris by jeep, but while they were loading their jeep after an overnight stop, one of their sub-machine guns fell onto the pavement, cocking as it did so, and a bullet killed Bisset almost immediately. Two days later he was buried, with the Maquis forming an honour guard while five Allied officers and a sergeant were pall-bearers.
Belgium
During the evening of 2 September, as 1011 FSRD joined the XXX Corps advance to Brussels, Sergeants Arthur Britton and Wasley were in the section lorry when it broke down. By next morning, they had repaired the lorry and were following Route 240 to Amiens. Britton recalls:
As I knew the country very well, I suggested going via Lille to have a better through road once we got beyond Arras. About 10 miles before Lille, we saw anti-tank guns in ditches on both sides of the road, pointing in the direction towards which we were going and some gunners, we thought, were waving at us in greeting. We entered Lille, widely acclaimed, just as it was getting dusk and not a little surprised at the enthusiasm displayed. We were shown the best hotel and told the room was ‘on the town’; it then dawned on us that we had mistakenly ‘liberated’ Lille. We slept the sleep of the wicked to the sound of rifle and LMG fire all around, caused by the FFI (French Forces of the Interior) mopping up nests of German resistance, and awake in time to greet the first armoured cars to enter Lille. We set off for Brussels early on 4 September, stopping for lunch at a café at the entrance of Hal. Fortunately the truck had been parked at the side of the garden, for while we were enjoying the Belgian publicans’ hospitality, a tank with an enormous black cross lumbered across the road, fortunately free of soft-skinned vehicles.
Corporal Freddie Hensby also claimed to be first into Lille when he rode his motorcycle to the outskirts of the city, collected two gendarmes as pillion and arrived at the Hotel de Ville. On the way to Brussels, Captain Pertwee briefly led his 50 (HQ Twenty-First Army Group) FSS into enemy-held territory until he realized his map reading error and then sheltered overnight with a bemused tank troop. Further embarrassment followed when Corporal John Hitchen on his motor cycle in front of a column of tanks was stung by a bee and struggled to remove his jacket. On 4 September, the section joined R Force in Brussels as the City FS section and working directly with Captain Donald Loudoun, now the Civil Security Officer (Belgium), moved into the Flemish branch offices of Gestapo HQ at 128 Avenue Louise. Meanwhile, 33 (3rd Division) FSS and two Reserve Detachment had been specifically tasked to capture the headquarters before the Germans destroyed their documents. Meanwhile, 50 FSS had guided HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) to several requisitioned houses in Avenue de Tervuren.
Left behind at Dunkirk with 1 Czech Brigade containing the German garrison was 1017 FSRD, which spent most of its time searching for collaborators with a French officer and two NCOs from the 5th (Psychological Operations) Bureau.
By the time that Twenty-First Army reached Belgium, the APIS had proven to be of immense value with its Corps and divisions each having an interpretation section of two officers operating from an office truck that was usually equipped with two Type D stereographs, a magnifying measurer, a book of logarithm tables and a drawing table and office equipment needed for the draughtsman. The delivery of photographs from airfields to the Corps headquarters was sometimes slow and consequently the interpreters used their powers of persuasion to speed up the process, particularly if their commander was impatient for results. In most instances, photographic interpreters had direct access to formation commanders and were expected to anticipate likely courses of action and contribute to briefings. Major General Lewis Lyne, who commanded the 59th (Staffordshire) Division, kept a folder of air photographs in his command caravan which Captain Groom enhanced with panoramas to accompany the mosaics. Some commanders still needed to be convinced. A Polish divisional commander in 1945 dismissed the findings of his photographic interpreter, Major J. Robinson, who believed that a battery of 88mm guns covered the axis of his planned attack and proposed an alternative route. The Pole declared he was going to take the shortest route to Berlin and charged; however, the attack failed with heavy casualties. As the advance penetrated deeper into Europe, B3 Section, Allied Central Interpretation Unit concentrated on providing intelligence for Twenty-First Army Group while separate sections were formed for specialist tasks. For instance, B7 examined the island of Walcheren and the flooded countryside around Antwerp. The demand for censors and code-breakers in liberated countries led to advanced bases being established in Bruges in Belgium and Tilburg in Holland, where they were joined by Intelligence Corps trained at the Foreign Office code-breaking department in London.
The Field Security protection of the 300-mile long lines of communication from Normandy to the leading divisions grew in importance, but by mid-September it was near to collapse. When 11th Armoured Division seized Antwerp on 4 September and then stopped, as did XXX Corps, the trapped German 15th Army escaped from northern Belgium to Walcheren and made for the Rhine bridges at Arnhem. With British commanders focusing on striking deep into the Ruhr, Montgomery planned an airborne carpet (Operation Market) over which 2nd Army would advance the sixty miles from the Belgian/Dutch border and bounce the Rhine at Arnhem (Operation Garden).
Arnhem
The story of Operation Market Garden has been told many times, in particular that the bridge was one too far, and that it was a classic example of credible intelligence being rejected by a commander with disastrous results. In particular, Resistance reports of the presence of the battle-hardened 9th SS Panzer Division and 2nd Army Intelligence identifying 10th SS Panzer Division resting in an area that Field Marshal Walter Model, who was commanding the defending Army Group B from his headquarters at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, believed to have little strategic value.
As the planning took sha
pe, at HQ I British Airborne Corps, Captain Jack Bryden, the GSO 3 (Counter-Intelligence), remained with Corps Rear in England. Lieutenant R.A. Beal, the senior photographic interpreter, commanded the five-strong Army Photographic Interpretation Section. Captain P. Hodgson had taken over from Captain de Silva as the Intelligence Officer. Commanded by Major General Robert Urqhuart, 1st Airborne Division barely had a week to plan the seizure of the bridge. Selecting drop zones seven miles east of Arnhem at Oosterbeek, lack of aircraft forced him to compromise the drop to happen over three days between 17 and 19 September. Captain John Killick commanded 89 (Airborne) FSS with detachments of a sergeant and two JNCOs supporting the three Brigades and two JNCOs attached to 52nd (Lowland) Division, which was expected to reinforce the Division. Accompanying 1 Parachute Brigade, tasked to seize the Arnhem bridges, was Sergeant Bob Pinquet. Born to French parents in Hong Kong, he had read modern languages and law at Cambridge University and was a tennis Blue. Joining the Intelligence Corps in February 1942, he joined 23 (42nd Division) FSS in 1942 and was briefly attached to 317 (Airborne) FSS in UK before joining 89 FSS in North Africa. Arrest lists were issued and German headquarters identified. As with all Intelligence Corps at risk of capture, the several Jewish NCOs selected codewords to be used to decode information passed by letters to families. The 1 Polish Independent Parachute Brigade had its own FS section. The Dutch Liaison Mission of 2 (Dutch) Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, commanded by Captain Martin Knottenbelt and which had recently returned from Burma, joined the Division.
Sharing the Secret Page 21