Shadow Warriors of World War II

by Gordon Thomas

  Jacqueline was one of the first agents to be trained as part of a group made up entirely of women. Her fellow students were Odette Sansom, Lise de Baissac, and Mary Herbert. The group was sent directly to the finishing course at Beaulieu.

  The nature of the group’s training, which missed out on some of the preliminary stages and a paramilitary course in Scotland, may be indicative of the SOE’s inexperience at training groups of women. Within Baker Street there had been an early fear that captured female agents might not face the same hardships as their male counterparts. It was a misconception that Gubbins quickly corrected in a memo on recruitment and training.

  While enduring parachute training, which she hated, Nearne became close friends with de Baissac, who was thirty-seven and whose brother, Claude, was already an SOE agent. Born in Mauritius—then under British rule—she had lived in France from the age of fourteen. Like Nearne, she spoke fluent French and was intensely loyal to Britain.

  The four women parted company after their time at the finishing school in the New Forest. De Baissac was the first into action, parachuting into the countryside to the north of Bordeaux. She dropped from a Whitley, seconds after Andrée Borrel, the agent whose file had so impressed Vera Atkins.

  De Baissac’s mission was to establish a safe house in Poitiers where subsequent agents could be settled and to set up a new network, Artist. Borrel traveled to Paris to work for Francis Suttill’s Physician network as a courier. Both would become involved in the extended network, Prosper, which would spread across large parts of the occupied zone between autumn 1942 and summer 1943.

  Mary Herbert and Odette Sansom landed by felucca on the south coast of France on October 30, 1942. Herbert headed to Bordeaux to act as a courier for Claude de Baissac, with whom she would have a relationship and a child, to whom she gave birth while living her double life. Sansom traveled to Cannes and would also become involved in a relationship with an agent, Peter Churchill.

  Nearne was given a cover story as Josette Norville, a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, and would work with Maurice Southgate, an Englishman born in Paris. He and Nearne would create a network, code-named Stationer, which would operate across almost half the area of France, from Châteauroux in central France to Tarbes, sixty miles from the Spanish border.

  After a number of aborted attempts to get into France, Nearne and Southgate dropped from a Halifax of 161 Squadron into fields in the Auvergne on January 25, 1943.

  Landing blind without a reception committee, they hurried to hide their parachutes and began to walk. Tired and slightly disorientated, they eventually saw a peasant woman cycling toward them and agreed to ask her if they were on the correct road for the small town of Brioude. What followed was a stark and sudden warning as to how easily things could go wrong.

  Southgate stopped the lady and spoke to her. She looked bewildered: Southgate had asked the question in English. Nearne turned pale and hissed “Speak French!” before jumping in to ask the question in the right language. The woman smiled weakly and nodded, before moving on down the road. They realized by her slightly jumpy manner that she had thought they were Germans. Southgate, considered “one of the greats” by Vera Atkins, had made a simple but potentially fatal mistake within hours of arriving in France. His blood ran cold.

  They headed to the railway station and caught a train for Clermont-Ferrand. Nearne avoided the attentions of a German soldier who shared a railway carriage with her by burying her face in a French newspaper.

  One female SOE agent had already been living an undercover life for six months by the time Jacqueline Nearne arrived. She was Yvonne Rudellat, the French-born divorcée who had met Buckmaster when he visited the hotel she worked in and had told him she “wanted to do something to help France.”

  Rudellat had landed by felucca on France’s Riviera coast under the moonlight on July 30, 1942. Vivacious and charming, Rudellat was one of the oldest female agents and, at forty-five, she was not only a mother but a grandmother.

  However, her air of vulnerability was deceptive, and she was calm as she boarded a train and headed to Lyon, where she had collected forged papers from Virginia Hall. She now had to cross the demarcation line, which split the country in two. Crossing the line required an Ausweis, an official permit, but many résistants chose to smuggle themselves across. Only two months before, an agent, Henry Labit, had tried to cross by train. While being searched at the crossing checkpoint a spare, blank set of forged papers fell out of his pocket. The two German guards took him off the train and opened his suitcase, which contained his radio set. Labit took out a revolver and shot them both. Chased and surrounded by a large number of troops, he took out his cyanide pill and crunched it. He was dead in seconds.

  Yvonne Rudellat decided not to risk her false papers at the checkpoint. Instead she snuggled down into the coal bunker of a steam train and crossed safely, eventually reaching Paris and then Tours, where she was to be a courier. Through August and September she worked with a local Resistance leader, Pierre Culioli, to pinpoint landing grounds and carry wirelesses and explosives, traveling mainly by bicycle.

  After the arrival of Prosper—Francis Suttill’s code name in the field—Rudellat and Culioli met parachuted agents joining his network, including Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac.

  One day she came to her rented room to find that someone had left a mass of incriminating evidence, including a radio set and code books, on her bed. Unsure if her landlord had seen them, Rudellat decided to move. She and Culioli went to a district of the Loire Valley known as the Sologne to create a subnetwork.

  There, between November 1942 and the summer of 1943, they carried out a series of sabotage operations that caused chaos for the Germans over a 250-mile area between Caen in the north and Romorantin in the Sologne. Working with local Resistance groups, but sometimes alone, they destroyed trains, railway bridges, and a food store, as well as welcoming and supporting new SOE agents into the area.

  On June 21, 1943, she and Culioli were driving in their Citroën toward the railway station at Beaugency. Using a car was often dangerous in occupied France, drawing unwanted attention. On this occasion there was an additional risk: in the back they were carrying two Canadians, a wireless operator and a courier, who had just arrived from England. As they passed through Dhuizon, about twenty minutes from their destination, they were stopped at a roadblock where the German on guard had some questions about the Canadians’ papers. Both were ordered to leave the car and walk to the town hall.

  Rudellat and Culioli waited in the car, the engine still running. They looked at each other anxiously, knowing that any French official at the town hall would know immediately that the Canadians, whose French was heavily accented, were foreigners. After a few moments, a German at the roadblock ordered them to switch off the engine and walk to the town hall. Culioli hit the accelerator hard and the Citroën leaped forward, careering down the road. Three German cars set off in pursuit.

  Determined to shake them off, they ran into another roadblock, where the Germans had laid a barricade across the road. Machine gun bullets peppered the car, and one hit Rudellat in the head. She fell across Culioli and, believing his friend dead, he accelerated the car into a wall, hoping to kill himself as well.

  Instead, the car rebounded off the wall and spun back into the road. Culioli managed to fire on the advancing Germans but was shot in the leg and forced to give up. He was sent to a military hospital, given minimal care, and then taken to Paris for interrogation.

  Rudellat was dragged from the car, still alive. She was treated sympathetically at a civil hospital, where it was decided it was safer to leave the bullet in her skull than to operate. Despite the German guard on her door, the nuns nursing her managed to sedate her unnecessarily every time interrogators arrived to question her. Eventually, though, the Germans saw through the ruse and Rudellat was transferred to Frèsnes prison in Paris, the Gestapo having been unable to get any information from her.


  8

  The Russians Arrive

  SINCE JUNE 1940, WHEN the British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated back to England, Bill Donovan had followed events in Europe. King Leopold had ordered the Belgian Army to surrender. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her government went into exile in London, followed by the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and the members of Belgium’s government. Along with Poland’s government-in-exile, all were diplomatically recognized by Churchill’s coalition government.

  A number of their citizens who had arrived in London had been recruited into the SOE. French Air Force pilots who had escaped to England were recruited and trained and attached to the French Section of the SOE. Together with Polish pilots, they would later carry out missions deep into occupied Europe.

  Polish pilots had arrived in England during the winter of 1939–40. When Poland had been overrun they had flown west to find a base from where they could carry on the fight against the Luftwaffe. Cut off from their families suffering cruelly under the Nazi occupation, they found a welcome in Britain.

  Under an agreement on January 4, 1941, with the Polish government-in-exile, Britain agreed it would take twenty-three hundred Polish pilots to be trained in RAF operational methods, including use of the radio-based detection systems linking ground control with aircraft, which was a key part of Britain’s defense system. Frontline RAF pilots from thirty-four squadrons would teach the Polish pilots using about four hundred aircraft, including Spitfires, Hurricanes, Defiants, and Blenheims.

  The Battle of Britain had begun in the late summer, and the first Polish pilots had flown in British squadrons. They soon had claimed over thirty enemy aircraft shot down, and their British comrades were quick to give them credit for reaching RAF tactical standards. Most of the Polish victories were scored in Hurricanes. The kills were not reported in the press, for fear of causing reprisals against their families in Poland.

  In the meantime, while the air battle was being decisively and brilliantly won in three hectic months, other Polish pilots, themselves already trained bomber pilots in the Polish Air Force, were being trained by Bomber Command. Increasingly, as men joined the service from around the British Empire, the production of heavy bombers increased—including the Lancaster. There were complex instruction manuals to be learned in a few days and questions to answer in class from instructors who often spoke only English. However, as their training progressed, the Poles were attached to RAF bomber crews to observe their work and bombing tactics.

  Navigators learned how to set a course by celestial navigation, using a clear sky to fix their position. Those pilots who had gone for conversion training from the bombers they had flown in Poland, had spent hours in link trainers before being allowed to take control of a new bomber. Wireless operators, sitting huddled in darkness behind the flight deck, took radio bearings. Gunners waited behind their guns, having spent hours at drogue-target shooting, before being assigned to a crew.

  On February 23, 1942, Sir Arthur Harris became commander in chief of Bomber Command, which by then included four fully operational Polish squadrons. Along with the RAF roundels on their aircraft wings, each had the Polish Air Force standard painted on the fuselage: a red and white checkerboard pattern, often with the words of the national motto, “God, Honor, Country,” added in Polish.

  For strategic reasons and prestige, Berlin was a high-priority target following the Luftwaffe’s merciless bombing of London and Warsaw. Two of the Polish squadrons—304 and 305—were chosen for the first mass bombing raid on Berlin, a distant and well-defended target. Within weeks all four squadrons were attacking targets at Mannheim, Cologne, Bremen, and the ports of Brest and Le Havre.

  After debriefings they gathered in their mess halls around its fireplace, remembered their time in Poland, and discussed their missions. Their conversations were peppered with words like “flak,” “tracer trails,” and “dazzling searchlights.”

  By 1942 the Polish squadrons in Bomber Command had flown between them 15,365 hours on 18,000 missions and dropped 1,795 tons of bombs.

  When the underground movement in Warsaw asked for an airdrop of equipment, volunteers from the Polish squadrons were selected for Special Duties operations. From the rush of volunteers, three air crews were selected. The operational crews were withdrawn from bombing operations and posted to RAF Tempsford to join 138 Special Duties Squadron.

  Bill Donovan flew to London to discuss the formation of an OSS air wing to work with the SOE. It would be a major operation to supply Resistance movements in France and elsewhere in occupied Europe. The operation would be code-named Carpetbaggers, a word dating from the American Civil War. The name had been chosen by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington who had ordered that the OSS—which until then had only supplemented SOE operations—should now have a full role “in the Organization and Conduct of Guerrilla warfare.” A copy of the document was given to Donovan to take with him to London to hand to the two key commanders in the joint OSS-SOE operation.

  Group Captain Edward Fielden was the commanding officer at Tempsford when it became a secret airfield. He had been King George VII’s personal pilot and had arrived at Tempsford in the Royal Family’s own aircraft, with Churchill’s order to be ready to fly the queen and her two daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, to Canada in the event of a German invasion. The aircraft, a Handley Page, remained in one of the airfield’s disguised hangars, “Fuelled and ready to go,” Fielden later told the king and queen when they visited the airfield during the war.

  Fielden had brought with him some of the pilots of the Royal Flight, airmen whose previous work had been to transport the Royal Family on their various duties. All had logged at least four thousand flying hours, five hundred of which were night flying. Their qualifications made them suitable for the Moon Squadrons—138 Squadron and 161 Squadron.

  Pilot Officer Lewis Hodges recalled “there was a tremendous spirit which penetrated into squadrons. We had Lysanders and Halifaxes to fly. I joined the Halifax flight that did most of the parachute operations, dropping containers and agents. Our lives were governed by the phases of the moon. We needed moonlight to map-read; we needed moonlight to find our way to the dropping zones for parachuting and to the small fields that served as landing grounds; and we needed moonlight to be able to see the ground clearly enough to make a safe landing. We needed moonlight as we carried agents to and from the Continent on their intelligence and sabotage tasks.”

  At 3:00 on the morning of June 22, 1941, German armies and the Luftwaffe had swept across the Russian border on a two-thousand-mile front. Operation Barbarossa had become the defining event of the Second World War. Winston Churchill, who less than twenty years before had expressed the need for “a crusade” to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution, had decided that the Kremlin must fight on against the Nazis.

  On August 12, 1942, with his chief of staff and Menzies, the prime minister flew to Moscow to explain why the Western Allies could not invade Europe that year, and to assure Stalin that Britain would continue to send convoys of Merchant Navy ships with armaments to support the Red Army.

  Churchill suspected Stalin was unlikely to forget his words about “a crusade” or that Britain after World War I had sent fifteen thousand troops to Russia or that Gubbins had spent five months with those troops in North Russia in 1919 as one of their commanders fighting Bolsheviks, and had returned to England with “a hatred for Communism and all it stood for.” For those reasons, Churchill had decided not to take Gubbins with him to Moscow.

  The two leaders met for the first time beneath the portraits of Stalin and Lenin in the Kremlin. Stalin wore a lilac-colored tunic with his trousers tucked into his boots. Churchill’s military secretary, Colonel Ian Jacob, noted in his diary that Stalin was “Cold, crude, and calculating. Making friends with him seemed the equal of making friends with a python.”

  Stalin asked through his interpreter, “Why is Britain so afraid to attack Germany?” The bristling prime minister rep
lied: “We are making plans to deal with Hitler—and show him when we land in France we will stay and drive him out.”

  Jacob’s diary caught the atmosphere. “Churchill did not say when or where the operation would be, but it would draw off the Nazi strength from Russia. Stalin asked, ‘So there will be a Second Front?’” Churchill “burst into a speech that sounded like he was back in the House of Commons.” Stalin held out his hand and declared he did not understand the words, “but by God I like your spirit, Mr. Churchill.”

  The following day was taken up in an exchange of memorandum between the leaders in written rather than spoken words between their delegations. Suddenly, Churchill told Stalin about the SOE.

  Stalin turned to Lavrenti Beria, who had been introduced to Churchill as the head of the NKVD, Soviet intelligence. He had sat at the meetings beside Menzies, so far not saying a word until Stalin ordered his spy chief to find out all he could from Menzies about the SOE.

  Like Churchill, Stalin had a deep interest in intelligence and espionage, and in December 1938 had appointed Beria to head the NKVD and develop the service so that Stalin’s enemies could be discovered and often executed, if they were a threat to him.

  Some Russians had fled from Moscow into Germany, France, Spain, and other nations, and became supporters of fascism, which they saw as a higher cause. Tracked down by the NKVD, some were killed. Others were told that if they became informers about their new countries, one day they would be able to renew their Party membership and return home.

  Churchill told Menzies to explain to Beria the roles of MI6 and the SOE. By the end of the evening, Beria and Menzies had each drafted an agreement in Russian and English. Both copies carried the same heading: MI6—SOE—NKVD. Menzies and Beria signed and exchanged their copies. The agreement called for an exchange of both countries’ secret intelligence about Germany and that both the SOE and NKVD would do everything to work to fight the Hitler regime. Britain would supply Russia with arms. The final clause stated that the SOE would agree to share its training methods with NKVD agents.