by Gary Mead
SOE agents were well aware that the Geneva Conventions offered no protection against the Gestapo. Wearing military uniform was obviously impossible behind enemy lines, thereby ensuring SOE agents were at much greater risk than any uniformed combatant, particularly after Hitler issued his ‘Commando Order’ following the Dieppe Raid of August 1942, which instructed that ‘all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception’. Women SOE operatives were largely drawn either from the WAAF – the Royal Air Force, more willing to accept women than the army or Royal Navy, regarded the WAAF as an integral part of itself – or from the FANY. They were generally employed as wireless operators or couriers, but SOE training made no distinction between men and women; it emphasized aggression and daring,39 and included ‘weapons handling, unarmed combat, elementary demolitions . . . map reading, fieldcraft and basic signalling . . . the sort of training that any army recruit might expect to receive’.40 If captured and interrogated, SOE agents were often tortured. One female trainer recalled after the war that
someone who had been tortured more than once said it was the smaller things that were hardest to bear, such as pulling out teeth or nails or sticking pins into a woman’s breast, not the beatings, hangings by the wrists, electric shocks or near-drownings. These made them semi-conscious after a time. Most agreed that if you could withstand the first quarter of an hour without ‘talking’ you probably wouldn’t talk at all.41
If we focus purely on F Section of SOE, it is clear that anomalies exist in the recognition of gallantry. F Section employed 480 agents, 130 of whom were captured. Between 17 July 1942 and 7 July 1944 it sent thirty-nine female agents into France – thirteen did not return – the first being a forty-five-year-old grandmother, Yvonne Rudellat, who was born in France, had married a British waiter, and settled in London.42 She entered France in July 1942 and lived a clandestine existence for almost a year before being arrested by the Gestapo. Rudellat was then incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died from typhus shortly after the camp was liberated in April 1945. To the end, she maintained her alias of ‘Jacqueline Gautier’ and, before her true identity was known, died and was buried in a mass grave. Lost amid the secrecy surrounding SOE at the end of the war, Rudellat received no posthumous award.
One SOE F Section agent who did receive appropriate recognition – although not by Britain – was Virginia Hall. An American citizen working for the New York Post before America joined the war, Hall had the disadvantage of a wooden leg, the result of accidentally shooting herself in 1932 while in Turkey. Her disability meant SOE had little hope that Hall would be of much service, but her work as a journalist in Vichy France provided good cover, and she was asked by SOE to keep her eyes open. She did that – and also organized rescues of stranded SOE agents, managed the finances for Resistance groups, blew up bridges and much else. Hall was recommended for a CBE by SOE, but that was downgraded to a civilian MBE. In 1944 she joined the newly opened Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA. For her OSS work she became the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the US Army’s second-highest military decoration after the Medal of Honor.
After the war some SOE female agents were, understandably, angry at being fobbed off with what they regarded as inappropriate decorations: ‘Pearl Witherington . . . was strongly recommended for an MC, for which women were held ineligible; and received instead a civil MBE, which she returned, observing she had done nothing civil.’43 At the end of her SOE training Witherington’s instructor had commented: ‘This student, although a woman, has leader’s qualities. Cool, resourceful, and extremely determined. Very capable, completely brave . . . the best shot, male or female, we have had yet.’ Witherington parachuted into central France in September 1943, where she worked as a courier between Resistance groups. She took over as head of one branch of the Limousin region’s Stationer circuit, which had been split into two when Maurice Southgate, its original SOE organizer, was captured by the Gestapo. Witherington was awarded by France the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’Honneur and the Resistance Medal and, later, the British CBE. Much later she gained the honour she most coveted. During her SOE training she had completed four instead of the required five practice jumps, and had therefore been refused the paratrooper’s insignia. In 2006, aged ninety-three, Pearl was finally granted her ‘wings’ as a parachutist. Southgate was tortured and narrowly escaped execution at Buchenwald concentration camp; when liberated he received the DSO.
Nancy Wake was an Australian who, after she ran away from home aged sixteen, landed in France, where she married a French industrialist in 1939 and settled in Marseilles. Dubbed by the Germans the ‘White Mouse’ because she was so elusive, Wake established an escape route across the Pyrenees for Allied servicemen and, fleeing the Gestapo, left for England in 1943. There she joined SOE and returned by parachute to the Auvergne, where she welded together several Maquis groups into a 7,500-strong force, allocated their weapons and controlled the financial support from London. The rest of the war she spent ambushing German convoys and blowing things up, with a five million franc reward for her capture posted by the Germans. Contemporary witnesses spoke of Wake’s ferocity: she was said to have killed an SS guard with her bare hands, and in later life she said her biggest regret was not having killed more Nazis. She died in 2011, aged ninety-eight. On 13 July 1945 a small entry in the London Gazette read: ‘Awarded the George Medal: – Miss Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. For brave conduct in hazardous circumstances.’44
Throughout the Second World War the all-embracing terms of the 1920 VC warrant were studiously ignored; there was little obvious interest from any senior politician (and certainly no officer) in pushing for either women or civilians to be granted the VC. Nevertheless, some contemporary Members of Parliament prodded for a wider distribution of the Cross. On 18 January 1944 the Tory MP Alexander Critchley asked Winston Churchill
[if,] having regard to the courage displayed by women in this war and their devotion to duty in the tasks allotted them, any woman serving in the branches of His Majesty’s Forces has been recommended for the Victoria Cross; if such honour has been open to women since the commencement of hostilities; and if he will give an assurance that no discrimination will be used against women being awarded such an honour.
The prime minister’s reply, while strictly accurate, was evasive:
No recommendation in favour of a woman has been made during the war so far for the Victoria Cross, which is given only for services in active operations against the enemy. The Naval, Military and Air Force Nursing Services and the Women’s Auxiliary Services have been eligible for the award since the outbreak of war . . .Women are also eligible for the George Cross for services not in active operations against the enemy . . . I can, therefore, readily give my hon. Friend the assurance he desires and I should like to take this opportunity of paying tribute to the courage and devotion to duty displayed by women in all walks of life and forms of service during the present war.45
As a young man, Churchill had craved the VC and indeed probably deserved one. For him, the VC was the ultimate military accolade, the defining symbol of what it meant to be a hero – and a man. The newly created George Cross had in 1944 none of the cachet of the VC. Churchill’s comment that women were also eligible for the George Cross for services ‘not in active operations against the enemy’ was wily in the extreme; he was fully aware, for example, that courageous women were, as he spoke, engaged in ‘active operations against the enemy’ in occupied France and elsewhere on the Continent. He may not have said it, but in his heart Churchill was wedded to the nineteenth-century notion that the VC should be reserved for acts of supreme courage by men; by all means let women and civilians have the George Cross instead.
The first official public word on women engaged behind enemy lines in France came on 6 March 1945, when Sir Archibald Sinclair, then Secretary of State for Air, said in the House of Commons that the WAAF had ‘been
to the fore’ of organized resistance within occupied Europe: ‘several young WAAF officers were dropped by parachute at night [one of whom] took charge of a large Maquis group . . . reorganised it and, displaying remarkable qualities of tact, leadership and courage, contributed to the success of many supply-dropping operations and to the destruction of enemy forces.’ He then undermined this homage by venturing a joke: ‘In another case, a WAAF W/T [wireless transmitter] operator landed and trained three French operators. This brave young woman’s parachute stuck and opened only just in time. So she fell heavily and declares that she owes her life to bundles of paper francs which she was carrying wrapped around her like a cushion.’46 Of the contribution of the FANYs, Sir Archibald was silent.
The minister who had official responsibility for SOE, Roundell Cecil Palmer, 3rd Earl of Selbourne, strived to stifle all reference to SOE’s existence. Dame Irene Ward, an MP at the time, later wrote that the earl, ‘popularly known as “Dumbo”’, had told her that ‘it was vital that the existence of the “Org” operating under our direction should not be disclosed. It is not for me to comment on the different viewpoints and, indeed, actions of Ministers of the Crown.’47 Ward, the redoubtable Conservative Member of Parliament for Tynemouth, was a maverick with a deep loathing for injustice where she thought it existed.48 A dogged campaigner for equal pay for women, Ward in 1956 fought – and failed – to obtain a posthumous VC for Violette Szabo, an SOE agent who was captured in France, tortured and possibly raped, then transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in September 1944, probably shot in the back of the neck. Szabo was given a posthumous GC, a ‘decoration her outstanding gallantry had amply earned already, while she was still free’, according to Foot,49 but arguably she merited the VC. Ward’s lobbying on Szabo’s behalf was ignored by the government. On 6 March 1956, Ward wrote to Anthony Eden, then prime minister, reminding him that
this highest of all Orders can be awarded to women as well as men – though in the nature of things there are likely to be very few women who can quality [sic]: but I think, as there does appear to be one, that it would be significant if a posthumous VC could in this centenary year [of the VC] be awarded to Violette Szabo.
The Atticus columnist, writing in the Conservative Daily Sketch, then edited by Herbert Gunn,50 supported Ward’s effort in his newspaper:
this would be an excellent idea if it were possible to be done . . . women have their full share of the final courage that nothing can break. It would be good if the long roster of VC’s could contain at least one woman – not only in recognition of the gallantry of one, but the gallantry of countless others whose deeds of suffering have ennobled the human race.
Irene Ward’s abrasiveness in her agitation on behalf of a VC for Szabo did not help Szabo’s cause, but there are deeper reasons why Ward was unsuccessful in her campaign. For one thing, the George Cross had become the highest possible award to which the most courageous SOE agents, men or women, might aspire: after the GC citation for Wing Commander Forest Yeo-Thomas, who survived the war, was published in the London Gazette on 15 February 1946,51 it was clear that the VC was not for SOE personnel, even though Yeo-Thomas had performed not just one but several supremely courageous actions in the field and shown tremendous bravery while suffering medieval cruelties at the hands of the Nazis. If the likes of Yeo-Thomas were not to win a VC, then it was obvious that the authorities would not award the Cross to a woman, no matter what she had done.
More deeply, Yeo-Thomas and other SOE operatives were ruled out of the VC because beyond its own portals SOE was an unloved orphan. The Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, now MI6) sneered at what it felt was SOE’s amateurism, a charge dismissed by Foot, even though some SOE agents, such as Noor Inayat Khan, proved themselves hopeless blunderers when in the field. Khan, a wireless operator who was tortured and executed at Dachau in September 1944, was awarded a posthumous GC unusually late, in April 1949,52 her case neglected for so long largely because of the uncertainty that surrounded the circumstances of her death. Noor was a particularly lax agent, leaving her codes lying around, contacting French friends she had known before the war and disclosing to them that she was a British operative; a poor agent, if a courageous woman, Noor’s highly strung nervousness and inability to lie should have seen her weeded out at the training stage.53 Other SOE critics, such as Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, RAF Marshal, regarded clandestine operations as a waste of scarce resources that needlessly risked the lives of aircrew.
A further factor explaining the lack of SOE VC recommendations is that the head of Section F was Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who proved himself almost equal to Noor when it came to making elementary blunders that cost the lives of captured agents. Before the war Buckmaster had been a journalist with Le Matin, and subsequently joined the Ford Motor Company in France. He left France when the war started and joined the British army just in time to experience the Dunkirk retreat. Buckmaster was no professional soldier and was plagued by uncertainty in an organization that officially did not exist. He ran F Section with insufficient guardedness, ignoring warnings that some circuits in France had been penetrated and were being used by the Germans to transmit disinformation to London and trap agents when they arrived in the field. His superior and overall head of SOE was Brigadier Colin Gubbins, an archetypal professional soldier who gained an MC for rescuing men under fire during the First World War. Gubbins did not need to make his view of the VC known; the unquestioned assumption of all long-service senior officers was that only men serving in the armed forces were really eligible, no matter what the 1920 warrant said. SOE’s agents – men and women – were the overlooked and unofficially distrusted soldiers of a secret army.54
But perhaps the most compelling explanation why Ward’s fight to get a retroactive VC for Szabo failed is that SOE and its mostly courageous, sometimes fallible agents were tainted with an aroma of personal and professional scandal. Traitors, double agents, poor management, outright incompetence – SOE suffered from them all. What little information about SOE did filter out after the war’s end merely fed the appetite for sensationalism, the ill-informed and deliberately misled press doing what it always does with espionage – focus on glamour.
The story of Odette Sansom was seized upon by the post-war press, who in the grim days of 1946 could hardly believe its luck. Here was an attractive female agent whose adventures titillated the sadomasochistically inclined; but it was also a story with a happy ending – she survived and was about to marry a male war hero. A wave of publicity followed the official notification of Odette’s GC on 20 August 1946 in the Gazette; several newspapers the following day published her citation in full. Her tale of tussles with Nazis, physical and mental abuse, the concentration camp, ultimate freedom and romance was captured (and perhaps embellished) in a bestselling biography and subsequently a 1956 film, Carve Her Name With Pride.55 Irene Ward later suggested to Anthony Eden that giving Odette the first George Cross awarded to a woman was a blunder:
I have nothing to say about her bravery in captivity, but I think it must be well known to you – as it is to many people – that she and Peter Churchill would not have been arrested at the time they were had they not disobeyed orders for their own personal reasons, and that those in full possession of the facts asserted that as a result some valuable lives were lost. I, of course, have always thought it unfortunate that the George Cross should have been awarded in this instance without waiting for news of some of the other girls; and we are all only too painfully aware of how the light of publicity is shed on a few individuals while others equally or more eligible for it are passed by. I don’t think anyone reading Violette Szabo’s citation for her G.C. would be left under any illusions as to her contribution both in the field and in captivity; and I can see only one way to ensure that posterity recognises that her contribution was, in fact, far greater than Odette’s.56
Irene Ward’s main objection to Odette’s GC was that she had diso
beyed orders and that this had led to the deaths of other agents in her network; the fact that Odette was also technically married to Mr Sansom while she was conducting an affair with Peter Churchill,57 another SOE agent, offended Ward’s strait-laced morality, but the greatest sin was unprofessionalism.58 Against strict orders, Odette, who was already in France, went to meet Peter Churchill when he landed by aircraft on 15 April 1943. Odette was already known to the occupying authorities; she had been negotiating with Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr agent, again defying London’s orders. Peter Churchill was ordered to avoid Odette until she had broken contact with Bleicher. Nevertheless, the couple returned from the landing ground to the Hôtel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz. Next day Bleicher arrested them both and rounded up members of their network.
Ward was not alone in questioning Odette’s GC; doubts were raised by several contemporaries in SOE and later by Foot in the first edition of his history of F Section of SOE, the damning comment there being that Odette’s experiences in Ravensbrück had ‘induced in her a state of nervous tension so severe that she had considerable difficulty for many months in distinguishing fantasy and reality’. Foot amended a subsequent edition following legal action by Odette that was settled out of court. Selwyn Jepson, Odette’s original interviewer at SOE, wrote privately to the Treasury that she ‘was so keen to be a martyr that she ought to be tied to a bedpost and whipped’.59 Yet although Odette is likely to have made some appalling mistakes, blinded by her sexual desires, it would be unfair to castigate her from the comfort of an armchair; no one who has not suffered at the hands of the Gestapo can imagine what mental and physical terror had to be endured. On 1 January 1946 Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins signed Odette’s GC recommendation: