Shadow Warriors of World War II

by Gordon Thomas

  Jepson used the elevator to the second floor at Orchard Court and walked down the corridor to a door at the end. It was opened by Park, who said that Madam was waiting in her office and led the way down the hall, knocked, and opened a door announcing, “Major Jepson is here, Madam.” Jepson had decided Park had the quiet efficiency of Jeeves and only ever heard him call Atkins “Madam” or “Miss Atkins.”

  She motioned Jepson to sit in an armchair that matched the one behind her desk, on which the files Jepson had sent her were neatly stacked.

  Atkins reached for a cigarette in a silver box on the desk and lit it with a lighter beside the box. Both were gifts from Buckmaster after she had been appointed as the French Section Intelligence Officer. Drawing on the cigarette until its ash glowed, she placed it between her first and second finger, stained with nicotine on her right hand, and nodded at the cigarette box as if to offer Jepson one. He shook his head; he had given up smoking months ago. Atkins smiled. It was a running issue between them how long he could abstain. She admired determination.

  What followed could well have reminded Jepson of one of the stage plays he had written. Atkins said it was time for tea and stood up and clapped her hands. Almost on cue the door opened and Park entered carrying a butler’s tray holding a teapot and two cups, a milk jug, and a plate of jam on toast. With a deferential nod to Atkins he left the room.

  6

  Agents by Moonlight

  IN THE GATHERING DUSK on that April evening in 1942, blackout regulations had once more come into force as Atkins and Jepson continued their discussion about the files of the women agents he had asked her to review.

  She went to her office window to draw the black curtains. Below in the road the taxis and buses had their headlights screened and lights in shop windows were being switched off. The first of the air raid wardens were patrolling the streets and shouting, “Lights out!”

  Park had reported he had ensured all the drapes in the apartment were drawn, as were those in other apartments. He was Orchard Court’s air raid patrol officer. When a siren warning wailed across the city he would go to the lobby with a list of residents and check them off as they hurried to their designated shelter. The exception was Atkins. On the first night of the Blitz she had told Park she would remain in the apartment; she gave him no explanation and he had not asked.

  As she turned from the window, Jepson was again struck; there was something about Atkins, not just her tweed suit, neatly styled fair hair, and shoes that set off her ankles. “There was something else, a protective look, as if she had a personal duty of care for the young women being selected to go behind enemy lines,” he would recall.

  Settled behind her desk, Atkins lit another cigarette and turned back to the files. Each was stamped STUDENT REPORT. A passport-size photo was pinned to the cover on which was written the woman’s date of birth and nationality. Each file contained reports from instructors and psychologists on every stage of the women’s training, which had been designed to push them to the limit of endurance.

  At Arisaig on the west coast of Inverness, Scotland, they had each undergone a grueling twenty-four-hour trek through the mountains to learn how to live off the land and how to plan an attack by using small ravines as cover. They had been taught to throw themselves off swings and slides and keep their legs together to practice parachute landings without breaking a limb.

  All students had been given demolition training and had been shown how to use plastic explosives to derail trains. The combat course had taught them how to use the knife each had been given, and how to adopt a crouch position when using a revolver and to shoot twice at a target in quick succession.

  Beaulieu was the climax of their training. On arrival Lieutenant Colonel S. H. C. Wooldridge, the commandant, had invited them to dinner in the staff mess and introduced them to their instructors and domestic staff, and had set out to make them feel at home. They would each have their own bedroom in one of the estate houses, but they should observe the government notice in bathrooms to use only five inches of water for a bath to save fuel. Meals would be plentiful, and tea and coffee would always be available. Alcohol, on the other hand, would only be served in the bar in the main house. The curriculum would cover all they had learned at other training camps but was intended to refresh them at this final stage of their training.

  The commandant told them they would all have cover stories that had been created to enable them to survive in France. They would be taken to London to the SOE clothing section to select the clothes they would wear in France. These had either been produced in France or made to look as if they were. They would start to wear the garments so the items would look well worn and not arouse the suspicion of the police or Gestapo in France.

  The instructors came from various backgrounds. One had been a Scotland Yard Murder Squad detective. Another a radio operator on a ship. A gamekeeper at Balmoral, the Royal estate in Scotland, had taught the students that hill climbing at night strengthened their legs while they searched for the perfect field for receiving parachute drops. Another instructor showed them how to hold a flashlight to send a recognition signal in Morse code to the aircraft approaching with supplies. Students had been taught how to prepare a landing strip for aircraft that would deliver and collect agents.

  The instructors included Harold Philby. The son of the great Arabist, Sir Harry St. John Philby, friend and adviser to King Ibn Sa‘ūd of Saudi Arabia, he was born at Ambala in India’s Punjab. Despite his crippling stutter his lectures made him a popular member of the Beaulieu staff. Nicknamed “Kim” after the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, he had the captivating charm of his father and had won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. Fluent in German, French, and Spanish, he had graduated with a degree in economics.

  In February 1937 he had become a foreign correspondent for the London Times in the Spanish Civil War. His reports from the pro-Franco forces were noted by Stewart Menzies at MI6. The Times editor was asked to switch Philby to cover the Republican side. On Christmas Eve that year, the car he was in with three other correspondents was hit by a shell. The other reporters were killed. Philby suffered a head wound.

  In July 1939 he returned to the Times office in London and became the paper’s correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force until the Dunkirk evacuation. In July 1940 Philby joined MI6 as a counterintelligence officer. Months later, on the strength of his knowledge and experience in Spain and France, he joined the SOE as an instructor.

  Philby’s arrival in the SOE followed after Atkins heard him lecture on sabotage and subversion. She told Gubbins that the training curriculum should include his lectures.

  Philby had been given a cottage on the Beaulieu estate where he would prepare his lectures for students. He would start with their cover story. It not only had to be memorized but also required that the students think not in English but in the regional dialect from where they would be operating. Above all they must be familiar with their papers—work passes, travel documents, and identity papers that had been forged for their cover story.

  At the end of his lecture Philby would choose students to test on their cover story. He would often remind students to make a will and write a letter to a loved one, which would be kept by the SOE and, in the event of their death, sent to their next of kin.

  At Beaulieu, Army Captain John Taylor gave a lecture he called “Surviving.” He began in a soft voice: “Being in the field sounds glamorous, but is also very lonely. You are cut off from your family, from your friends, from your country. You will have a cover story which you must live by as you set out to undermine the morale of the enemy and raise the morale of those you will be working with, the Resistance.”

  As he spoke he moved among the students, watching their reaction, knowing they were waiting for the gruesome things that he had to tell them. “Over the past weeks you will have learned from other lectures all aspects of the underground life you will lead. What I am going to tell you does not guarantee
your safety. Your motto must be ‘Kill—or be killed.’ But remember that while the chance to be caught is small, the mistake of thinking the enemy is asleep is a mistake not to make.”

  “If they catch you they will try to be friendly, saying they are not barbarians, but that they want to obtain from you all you know, names, networks, and targets. If you are caught you need to hope it is by only one soldier not even a Gestapo officer. Then you need to insert your finger into the corner of his mouth and turn it in his mouth against his cheek. You will find it tears the skin easily and rips open his mouth. At the same time kick him in his testicles. As he crumbles under the pain, use your knife and insert it behind his ear. He will be dead. But remember: Never relax your cautions.”

  Judgments on students were recorded in their files in neatly penned comments by their course instructors. They were intended to provide guidance when selecting agents for missions.

  “Student shows she can work alone and has leadership qualities.” Another observed, “She had a reserved personality but has determination.” One student was described as “excellent with shooting with a pistol, coding and decoding messages.”

  The head of the training school at Thame Park in Oxfordshire, where wireless operators were taught, wrote of one student, “When she came here her transmission speed was slow, owing to her fingers being swollen by chilblain. Six weeks later with help from our doctor her speed has improved every day and she leaves here as one of our best operators.”

  A graduate’s report from Arisaig, the SOE training school in the wilds of Scotland, noted, “This student can run very fast during combat training and has become an expert in using her knees and elbows, and to chop with the side of her hand, use finger jabs to the eyes or the throat, and perform holds to snap a wrist.”

  One female agent had passed all her courses in transposing Morse into cipher at a rate of over twenty-five words a minute and had developed a “fist,” or style, that would identify her as the sender. She had also been taught how to create a “Sked,” a schedule of times and days when she should send messages, and to keep them to no more than ten minutes for each. Another had passed all her courses in clandestine communications and how to create a dead letterbox and live an illegal existence in enemy territory. Her pass-out report marked her as A-Plus.

  The psychologist reports were analytical. “This student is rather fastidious in her attitude but can be exacting in taste.” Another was “prone to self reproach and traces of perfection, but never indecisive. Makes good contact with others.”

  There were comments on student responses at classroom lectures on subjects such as map reading; making a cast of a key by using a bar of soap; silently breaking a window; recognizing the uniforms of the Gestapo, SS, SD; and using a shop window’s reflection to see if one was being watched from behind.

  Gubbins knew that as speculation grew on both sides of the Channel that an Allied invasion of the European mainland was inevitable, it was critical for the SOE to provide the Resistance with agents who had been trained to form and lead groups of patriots from all quarters of the population. Some were opponents of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had said, “It is better to become a Nazi province than to collaborate with a corpse across the Channel.” Others were encouraged by Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from London. He had regularly broadcast that Pétain was senile and betraying his country and that its people should have the confidence to stand against the Nazis. Many were Communists who, after Hitler had invaded Russia, had joined Resistance groups. In France, all men, unless they were classified as “essential war workers,” were often drafted to Germany as forced laborers.

  Gubbins had discussed with Buckmaster how the SOE could best use women to create and equip a secret force to work with the Resistance. Networks would be formed and based across France. Each would have an organizer, a courier, and a wireless operator. The organizer would be responsible for recruiting local Resistance groups and selecting targets. The couriers would be a link between other Resistance groups. The wireless operator would keep London informed on suitable drop zones for parachuting in agents, ammunition, and equipment.

  Operating a radio would be one of the most dangerous jobs for an agent. Radios needed to be transported and would be hard to explain if an agent were stopped and searched by a patrol. Soon the Germans were using sophisticated detection equipment installed in trucks to pinpoint radio transmissions. SOE operators had to transmit and receive on same “skeds,” which meant they had to stay on the air for long periods. Every wireless operator lived in constant fear that they would hear the slam of a truck’s door outside where they were tapping out the Morse code.

  Yvonne Cormeau would recall, “I’m very nervous but patient; you need that for radio work. You need the patience to do the coding and the decoding. You need the resourcefulness to be able to decide whether to go on if you think somebody’s listening in or to cut off and ask for another ‘sked.’ I must admit to butterflies floating in my tummy all the time. You had to have your eyes in the back of your head as well as in the front.”

  In February 1942 Churchill informed the War Cabinet he approved the use of women behind enemy lines. They would be enlisted into the FANY as a cover for their role in the SOE.

  Gubbins told Buckmaster that the work of couriers and wireless operators would be performed by women. They would arouse less suspicion; they had been trained to memorize messages or conceal them in the hems of their skirts or in underwear. Women could travel on trains to visit relatives or ride bicycles to go shopping with messages hidden beneath groceries. Buckmaster had promoted Vera Atkins to become F Section’s senior intelligence officer, with prime responsibility for selecting women for their missions.

  He had sent Atkins a memo, which she passed across the desk for Jepson to read. “Female agents must always look ordinary and in no way conspicuous. When she goes over she will have learned to pass as a French woman.”

  The all-clear siren had sounded across London on that April night as Atkins continued to discuss with Jepson the women whose files she had reviewed. She had used two judgments when reading them. Was the woman capable of carrying out a special mission? Could she remain behind enemy lines for an indefinite period?

  Atkins picked up a file with a photo on the cover of Yvonne Rudellat. Jepson recognized her from her interview six months earlier. Her dark hair had strands hanging over her broad forehead, and her eyes and cheekbones were striking features in her oval face. Her smile was relaxed as if she accepted one of the observations in her file that she was “unworldly with an innocence and anxiety to please.” That quality would be “a valuable asset,” an instructor had written.

  Born in Lille, France, Rudellat’s father had been a horse trader for the French Army in the First World War. Her mother was already a widow when she had sent Yvonne to England to find work during the Depression. She already spoke English and had become a salesgirl in Selfridges, the department store in Oxford Street. From there she had taken a job as a hotel receptionist and had met and married a waiter at the hotel. The marriage had ended in divorce.

  When the war started she had met Buckmaster when he came for dinner at the hotel and spoke to her in French. She told him she “wanted to do something to help France.” He had given her an address and told her to write there with any photos she had of France and include her own details.

  It was one of the letters that had landed on Jepson’s desk. The result was an interview, which had led to his recommendation she should be sent for training. In his own report after the interview he had described her as “someone who outshines several of those I have seen so far.”

  Yvonne had been two of the women on a course at Wanborough Manor learning how to shoot and make explosives. At night when it was completely moonlit she was taught to hide in the shadows. On other nights she was sent into a forest with a revolver in her hand to shoot as fast as she could at targets that popped up. One day she had been sent to a railway tunnel and told to study what dam
age could be done and to decide which kind of explosive devices should be used, where they should be positioned, and the time fuse needed. Her report was read out to her class as an example of excellence. She was sent to the Western Highlands of Scotland and finally to Beaulieu, where she was given the code name Jacqueline.

  Atkins told Jepson she was going to recommend Rudellat as a courier and wireless operator for the network Buckmaster was planning to establish in Paris and the surrounding region. It would have the code name Physician, chosen from the notebook of fifty names he kept to select networks for F Section. Beginning with Acolyte there was Wrestler, Hermit, Juggler, Tinker, Bricklayer, Clergyman, Freelance, and Ventriloquist. He had told Atkins that the names “reflected moments in my own life.”

  Atkins picked up another folder with a photo of a face with a dark complexion and stamped with the name Andrée Borrel. She wore her cap at a jaunty angle with a neatly knotted khaki tie, drill jacket, and khaki shirt, the FANY uniform she had worn during training.

  Born on November 18, 1919, in a working-class Paris suburb, Borrel had left school at fourteen to work in a bakery to support the household budget. Her parents were both left-wing idealists. When Borrel was seventeen they sent her to a cousin in Bilbao, Spain, to help the anti-Franco rebels in the Spanish Civil War. She had returned to Paris at the outbreak of war, and the family had moved from Paris to Toulon in the south.

  Jepson told Atkins that when he had interviewed Borrel she had produced a document confirming she had been trained as a nurse’s aid with the Association des Dames Française, the ADF. Following her training she had nursed wounded French Army soldiers in Beaucaire Hospital in Nîmes during their retreat from the advancing Wehrmacht.

  She had been nursing on that summer day, June 17, 1940, when Marshal Pétain had told the nation France had been defeated and now that he had been appointed prime minister, he would seek an armistice with Germany. Borrel, not willing to accept the defeat of her country, joined the French Resistance and, together with her lover Maurice Dufour, helped RAF pilots who had been shot down over France to escape through the Pyrenees into Spain from where they were returned to England. Together the couple ran one of the last safe houses before the Pyrenees, near Perpignan. After the escape line was betrayed in 1941, they had to escape themselves. She had found a job in the British embassy in Lisbon as a French linguist and persuaded the ambassador to support her application to go to London. On arrival she had been sent to the Patriotic School that the SOE had set up to choose agents to be interviewed by Jepson and Atkins.