Already word perfect in French, she went to Radcliffe in 1937. Her history teacher, Arthur Schlesinger, saw her as “charmingly seductive and quietly amusing; she knows what she wants.” In 1942 she met Donovan and was recruited into the OSS to work in London. She was given the demanding responsibility of ensuring there were no inconsistencies in the forged documents that retouch artists, photographers, and printers produced.
When finally checking the documents, Bell would pore over the French permits embossed on them. A permit was needed to own a bicycle, to possess a food ration book, or to purchase a rail ticket. Sometimes an engraving plate would be made for a hospital certificate to be attached to a cover story to explain why its holder was not at work. A forged letter from a friend would feature condolences for a death in a family and details of a funeral, and so could explain why someone needed to travel to a particular area.
She made regular visits to the clothes unit in the headquarters attic to complete cover stories. For an agent posing as a French farmer she would select patched blue work clothes, heavy hand-knit socks, and a beret. She checked that buttons had been sewn with parallel threading, not the usual British cross-stitch style. Teams of women did the sewing. Others crumpled French notes in small denominations, the way many workers carried their money.
At headquarters the OSS accommodation officer, Lieutenant Jane Tanner, handed out billets to the newly arrived recruits, using a wall map of Mayfair to point out the townhouses and saying they were all within walking distance from their workplaces. She issued bicycles for those who wanted them and informed agents they would be responsible for their own bikes, adding that having one stolen was part of day-to-day living. One recruit would recall she was billeted in an apartment behind Marble Arch, overlooking Hyde Park. It had a housekeeper who shopped and cooked for her and two colleagues.
Tanner told the women there was an OSS mess in the basement, as well as several restaurants in the area. “The British call them cafés, but don’t serve what we call coffee.”
Their work day would officially end at 6:00 PM, and they would have to wash their clothes and often bathe in cold water. They would live by army regulations, which included keeping their billets spotless and submitting to spot inspections. During an air raid they must wear their helmets in their offices.
Lieutenant Tanner ended with a warning. “You can expect when you go out at night you will attract wolf-calls and whistles, not so much from the British but our GIs. They will tell you that you were [sent] overseas to sleep with our men.”
David Bruce, the new OSS London chief, completed their briefing by stressing the importance of the relationship between the OSS, SOE, MI5, and MI6. Each had a liaison officer with the OSS.
“It will be vital from the beginning that you develop a good working relationship with all of them, if you are to have an effective role in helping win the war. You must derive the fullest benefit from what you have already been taught. You will be working under air raids on London that its citizens have come to live with. You will have night duty on the top of your headquarters to watch out for any fires that could threaten the building. The view will show you that the great church of St. Paul’s is still standing, its dome radiating defiance to the Luftwaffe. You will find that your sisters in SOE will welcome you as warmly as you should welcome them,” Bruce said.
When Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester arrived in England, she went straight to the War Office to plead for weapons for the Resistance fighters she knew across France. Officials heard her plea and listened to her own story.
A WAAF, dressed in air force blue and a cap, drove Rochester in a staff car through the dimly lit streets to a building near Baker Street. There she was handed over to a man in an army officer’s uniform. He explained this was a reception center, speaking English with a French accent. He led her to a kitchen, where a cold supper waited. The officer sat opposite her as she ate, explaining as she had recently arrived from France, she would spend the night here. He led her upstairs to a small bedroom.
After breakfast the officer brought her down a corridor to a door, knocked, and motioned Rochester to enter. Perched on a corner of a desk was a tall, slim man with a narrow face and fair hair. He came forward, smiling, shook her hand, and introduced himself in French. It was Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F Section. He led Rochester to one of two armchairs facing the desk. On a table between the chairs was a tray with two cups and a coffee pot. He poured and handed one to Rochester.
Continuing to speak French, he explained that she had come highly recommended by a Resistance chief in Paris. He then began to inquire about her background, pausing to listen carefully as she described some of her adventures as an ambulance driver. He told her that her fluent French was good as it would be essential to speak and dress like a Frenchwoman. While she had shown exceptional skills in getting Jews and pilots out of France by pitting her wits against the Gestapo and the Milice, there would be nothing glamorous in what she would be taught, and a close watch would be kept on her during training, as it was with all agents. In her case, her American habits would be corrected, even how she used a knife and fork. There would be weekly reports about her progress, including if she still used the occasional American colloquialism.
Buckmaster told her she could still change her mind. But she said she wanted to help her friends in France. He went to his desk and handed her a copy of the Official Secrets Act. He waited while she read it, and explained that if she signed the document it would be binding her not to reveal anything she learned. She signed the paper where he indicated.
Rochester sensed the satisfaction in Buckmaster’s voice as he continued to describe the training she would undergo. Her body would be conditioned to withstand fatigue. There would be ten-mile walks, swimming in cold lakes, bicycling for thirty miles. In between she would learn how to avoid making herself conspicuous as a silhouette against the skyline, move silently through undergrowth, and use the natural background of rough country to travel unobserved from one point to another. She would learn to climb crags and cliffs and practice rifle, Sten gun, and Bren gun shooting. She would live the life of the Maquis, the Resistance in France.
Her instructors would also teach her to be a wireless operator and courier. She would learn to pass messages in a crowded place without being spotted, and to transmit and receive them without alerting the enemy. There would be secret codes to memorize and still more exercises to take part in. She would be sent for training exercises, such as penetrating a dock or a guarded factory. The chance of being arrested by police would be high, and her response if caught would indicate to her instructors her ability to resist interrogation.
Buckmaster finally told Rochester her clandestine experience working with the Resistance escape line in France had given her some direct knowledge of what would be required in the SOE.
He slowly nodded and smiled. He told her he had seen many men and women volunteers and was convinced she was among the best of them. He picked up the desk phone to summon a FANY officer to the room. Buckmaster told her to take Rochester to the clothes store and outfit her as a FANY. She would wear the uniform throughout her training.
During periods when the moon was full, the Tempsford pilots had started to fly every night. Those on pickup missions often returned to base with gifts of wine or perfume thrust into the cockpit by grateful Resistance fighters.
A Lysander was sent to pick up the pregnant wife of a Resistance leader who had been caught by the Gestapo and was awaiting execution. His one request to Baker Street was that his baby should be born in England. The child was delivered shortly after the mother arrived at Tempsford.
Another pilot was sent to collect a wireless operator who had been hidden by an undertaker in his mortuary. He had placed the agent in a coffin and driven his hearse to the pickup point.
A Resistance fighter asked the SOE for a replacement wooden leg after he lost his own stump while escaping from a German patrol. It was air-dropped to him.
> Vera Atkins worked so incessantly with the departing agents that her mother, who knew nothing of her daughter’s secret role, wondered where she was at night. One morning, as Atkins arrived home from Tempsford for breakfast, her mother—who lived with her but knew little of her secret life—commented, “Well, I hope at the end of all this he makes an honest woman of you, dear.”
Increasingly in the moonlit nights of the war, Resistance fighters took up their positions in preselected fields in France. They included farm workers, shopkeepers, often the local pharmacist, and the church gravedigger. They made their way to the field by separate routes, breaking the 6:00 PM curfew enforced by the police patrols and German checkpoints. Some came on foot, others by bicycle. Usually they had young women with them who acted as lookouts around the field.
The local Resistance leader, Chef de terrain, often brought a secret agent with him to the field, a man or a woman being flown back to England after a mission, or a French political figure who was a comrade in arms of General de Gaulle, who had requested that the SOE pick him up as he had important intelligence secrets of value to the war effort.
In the dark of night or in slanting rain, the fighters in the field gathered protectively around the passengers while the women positioned in the hedgerows waited for the sound of an approaching engine. If it came from the nearest road it could be a German patrol. But if the sound came from the air it signified the message the Chef de terrain had received over the BBC coded transmission on the 9:00 nightly French news was arriving on its “deliver and collect mission.”
The Chef pointed his flashlight at the sky at the sound of the Lysander descending toward the field and flashed a coded signal that the broadcast had included. The pilot responded with a flash from his landing light. From the hedgerows came silence; there was no signal of a patrol from the women.
The fighters formed a makeshift runway with flashlights they switched on as the Lysander descended over a hedgerow where some of the women crouched, watching the wheels flick up grass in their wake as the plane landed on its rubber tires, taxied between the flashlights, turned, and stopped, its engine idling while facing into the wind.
The cockpit canopy slid open and a figure in civilian clothes climbed down the fixed ladder on the fuselage to the ground. The Chef de terrain ran forward, picked up the suitcase that had been thrown from the cockpit, and motioned for the passengers for England to climb the ladder. In moments the cockpit canopy closed and the aircraft was airborne on its dangerous flight over occupied France back to England.
Long before the Lysander touched down at Tempsford, the Chef and the new arrival had reached the safety of the hideout he had chosen for the passengers. The other fighters had gone home. Later the Chef tuned in to the next BBC transmission to listen for word of the next operation to transport agents to and from France to support the activities of the French Resistance.
The Air Liaison Section on the fourth floor of the SOE headquarters in Baker Street had been alerted that another “Joe” was ready. The section planned the clandestine flights of 138 and 161 squadrons. Operations took place between the eight nights of the full moon every month.
Vera Atkins drove to an SOE safe house in a north London suburb and was let in by a FANY housekeeper. She led Atkins into a lounge, where Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester waited, and served them tea and cake. Atkins told Rochester her departure for France would be soon and reminded her that what she would be doing was never easy, and she must never forget her own life depended on her training. Finally, shaking Rochester’s hand, Atkins left the house.
Two days later a Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the safe house. The driver was a young woman in a FANY uniform. Smiling at Rochester’s surprise she said, “The car used to belong to a big-wig in a bank who donated it to the war effort as his petrol ration made it not possible to keep on the road.” The car drove farther and farther away from London, and gardens gave way to fields as the traffic thinned out. It was late afternoon when the Rolls-Royce was stopped by a soldier at the tall iron gates set in high stone walls with the words GAYNES HALL carved above. He checked his clipboard, peered at Rochester, and opened the gates, motioning for the FANY driver to continue up the drive to a large mansion, its three-story yellow brick walls set in twenty acres of parkland.
For centuries the estate had been the home of the Duberly family, one of the wealthiest landowners in the area, until it was requisitioned by the government when RAF Tempsford airfield was built four miles away. The family was moved out, along with their collection of Chippendale chairs and other antiques. Gaynes Hall was assigned to the SOE and became Station 62, a staging post for agents that had the atmosphere of a country club. There were tennis and netball courts, a hockey field, and walks through the grounds.
Waiting at the steps before the front door was an elderly man in a black frock coat and bow tie. He stepped forward to open the car door and welcomed Rochester with a smile. She asked if this was a hotel. He explained it had thirteen en suite bedrooms, a ballroom, a dining room, a game room, and a library. And that the kitchen was the best in the county of Bedfordshire.
Standing in the doorway, he invited Rochester to look at the countryside. “It is a land that the Romans occupied over 1,000 years ago. When they left the Danes came. Then in the high summer of the year 916 the English rid the land of the upstart Danes. That big battle took place on the very ground you now stand on.”
He led her into the hall. “Our motto is that nothing can be too good for our special guests. One of them, of course, is you.”
A tall officer in an RAF uniform joined them and introduced himself as Michael, her conducting officer, who would take her to the airfield when the time came. In the meantime she should relax and enjoy the facilities. She could play cards and table tennis with some of the staff, listen to music, or read a book from the library. He asked if she was hungry.
She said that dinner would be fine. Michael told her that the chef was on loan from the Savoy Hotel in London. He turned to the elderly man and asked him to tell the chef to serve fresh eggs. The chef served Rochester two fried eggs. It became a ritual: from then on, every agent who stayed at Gaynes Hall was served two fried eggs before a mission.
The Operational Room in Gibraltar Farm had become the focus of the mission to fly Rochester into occupied France. Her pilot would be Johnnie Affleck, who was making his first flight with an agent in a Hudson.
That October afternoon he sat and studied the mission briefing folder. One Michelin map showed the route to the drop zone, DZ, and another marked German flak defenses close to the flight path. The details had been supplied by the RAF Reconnaissance Unit after one of its high-flying aircraft had also taken photos of the DZ and the surrounding area.
He turned to the next item in the briefing folder. The air movement officer had provided the Morse letters for the response signal he should give to allow him to reenter UK air space. Finally there was a sealed escape kit for an emergency landing. It contained a wad of French money, a map of France printed on silk, a compass, a fishing hook and line, and a tube of concentrated food tablets.
Near Tempsford was a field that had been allotted to the pilots to practice landing on grass. The night before, Affleck had made a number of what he called “circle and bumps” landings. He reckoned it did no harm to practice. His colleagues in the Moon Squadrons had warned him that landing in a field in enemy-occupied territory could test the nerves.
Rochester was flying to France with her new network leader Richard Heslop, a wireless operator named Owen Johnson, and a Resistance leader.
It was close to midnight when the Rolls-Royce, driven by the same FANY who had brought her to Gaynes Hall, stopped outside the barn beside Gibraltar Farm at RAF Tempsford. Michael, the conducting officer, stepped out of the car with Rochester’s suitcase and led her into a room. Waiting was a WAAF beside a table with cups and a tea pot. “I suppose you are glad not to be jumping,” Michael said, as he rubbed his hands together to keep off
the cold.
“You’d get chilblains,” Johnson joked. They all laughed but there was nervousness in the air.
Out on the dark tarmac, Michael had held Rochester’s rucksack as she clambered up into the Hudson. “Have a good flight,” he said. “And remember we will all be thinking of you.”
The aircraft was loaded with crates of equipment, and Rochester looked for somewhere to tuck her long legs.
“Are you comfortable, miss?” asked the dispatcher.
“No,” she said.
They flew with escort planes as far as the French coast and then ducked below the flak over France.
Rochester stretched her cold legs and squeezed into the gun turret. The gunner shuffled aside to let her see the blue, black, and silver clouds that seemed to circle the moon.
“There may be a Jerry on the prowl,” the gunner said after a while. “You better go now.”
Slim, with dark hair and a sophisticated dress style, which Buckmaster later described as “typically Parisian,” Jacqueline Nearne had been a twenty-six-year-old former convent girl with an English father and a French mother when she received a letter from Selwyn Jepson in June 1942.
Jepson said that her name had been passed to him as that of someone “possessing qualifications which may be of value in a phase of the war effort.” Nearne, who had spent much of her life in France, was intrigued by the letter and wondered whether it had anything to do with a young army cadet she had recently befriended. Out of work and keen to help in any way she could, she went to meet Jepson.
After the end of his usual interview about her life, he asked her how she would feel about returning to France. He advised her to think about it and smiled when she told him, as she was leaving, that she had a younger sister, Eileen, who might be interested in going too.
A month later, after accepting Jacqueline into the SOE, Jepson interviewed Eileen. He found her to be intelligent and sincere, but he was concerned if the twenty-one-year-old would cope with the strains of a clandestine life. He said she could become a decoder in England. She accepted but made clear she would continue to press to become an agent.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 17