The document was taken to Stalin and Churchill. Both signed it. That night it was presented to Vyacheslav Molotov, Russia’s foreign minister. He signed both copies and said in English, “It is the future.”
On February 11, 1942, the British Merchant Navy freighter Arcos once more arrived back in Aberdeen’s harbor in the north of Scotland. Since October 1941, the ship had been in one of the convoys carrying arms to Murmansk to supply the Red Army. The Soviet Union lacked modern aircraft and tanks as well as a range of other equipment. In winter the ships were coated with ice and the sea was treacherous; they were also vulnerable to air attacks from the Luftwaffe bases in northern Norway as well as torpedo attacks from U-boats. A quarter of one convoy, which was code-named PQ-13, was sunk.
Churchill, determined to honor his promise to Stalin to maintain supplies, ordered the Admiralty to send another convoy, PQ-6. Six of its thirty-six ships were sunk. The next convoy, P-17, the largest sent to the Soviet Union, turned into one of the greatest Royal Navy disasters of the war. Faulty intelligence—later laid at the door of Naval Intelligence—claimed that three German battleships, Tirpitz, Admiral Hipper, and Admiral Scheer, were lying in wait for the convoy. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, ordered the convoy to scatter when it was once well into its voyage. Within hours the Luftwaffe and U-boats struck. Out of thirty-nine freighters, twenty-four ships were sunk. The loss was nearly one hundred thousand tons of arms, tanks, aircraft, and vehicles. In Berlin, Hitler ordered church bells to ring to celebrate the sinkings.
In Britain the first group of NKVD agents started to arrive aboard surviving convoy freighters that had returned from Murmansk. Initially they all would be trained in an SOE school in Scotland. Ten of them were women. One of them was onboard Arcos.
Gubbins had sent one of his senior officers, Major David Stacey, a former stockbroker who spoke Russian and Polish, to bring her to the SOE training center at Lochailort in the Highlands. Handing her a sandwich pack and a flask of coffee, he told her it would be a long drive. She told him her name was Francine Fromont.
In her midtwenties, she was petite and muscular and spoke passable English. When asked where she had learned it she told him, with pride in her voice, at the NKVD training school. He decided she was not only good-looking but perhaps a “hard type.” Under the terms of the SOE-NKVD agreement, her instructors would not be told the purpose of any mission she, or any other NKVD agents, were being trained for. As Stacey saw it, “We gave them board and lodging, tuition and cover stories, but never once asked them about being Communists.”
Fromont’s cover name would be Annette Fauberge. Stacey already knew the cover names of the other NKVD agents at the training center.
Szyfra Lypszyc was Polish, twenty-six years old, and attractive. She had been a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and had fled to Moscow after Franco’s victory. Recruited by the NKVD, she had been given the name Anna Semenovna Ouspenskaya. Having failed her parachute course, once her training at Lochailort was complete she would be sent to Beaulieu to await being escorted to the River Dart in the west of England, where a high-speed Royal Navy torpedo boat would be waiting to take her across the Channel to Brittany. She would carry a suicide pill in her lipstick tube and would make her way to Paris to work with the French Resistance and carry out acts of sabotage the way she had been instructed.
Else Noffke was a German-born journalist in her twenties who had left Berlin and gone to Moscow when Hitler seized power in 1933. For five years she eked out a living writing articles on the Communist way of life. In 1938 she had met Lavrenti Beria, who was recruiting agents to be trained by the NKVD. He offered her a chance to go to its training school on the outskirts of the city. She found herself the first woman in the class. Her language skills, English and French as well as German and Russian, and her ability to integrate with her classmates had resulted in her being selected for training with the SOE.
Her voyage to Scotland had been more demanding than the instructors at the Moscow training school. She sailed from Murmansk on a ship that had brought Hurricane fighter planes for the Soviet air force, and had been struck by a Luftwaffe attack.
On its way back to Britain bearing its scars, her ship was one of three freighters sunk by a U-boat. Noffke was among twenty-five on board who abandoned ship and were rescued by one of the convoy’s escorting destroyers. She had left behind on board her documents that identified her as an NKVD agent. When the ship reached Scapa Flow in Scotland she was closely questioned by an MI6 intelligence officer, and then brought to one of its safe houses at Loughton, Essex. There she was photographed and given a new wardrobe of clothes and documents that had been created by the SOE. Moscow confirmed that she had been selected by the NKVD for SOE training. Weeks later Else Noffke arrived at the training center at Lochailort and was given the cover name Elene Nekitina. She would be trained to return to Germany as a spy and saboteur. Weekly reports on her training described her as clever, calm, a natural leader, and “despite her Communist beliefs, not much taken with talking about political convictions.”
Daily, Noffke sat in a classroom and listened to an instructor teaching her how to use an incendiary bomb, time pencils, pressure switches, and gelignite. She learned that the object of any lecture was how to destroy targets quickly. She began to develop a philosophy of irregular war that her instructors saw chimed with her own beliefs.
Noffke, like other NKVD agents, especially the women, was sent down to England from Lochailort for short training courses on forgery, microphotography, picking locks, safecracking, and industrial sabotage. The courses had not been taught at the NKVD’s training school in Moscow. The SOE instructors were often ex-burglars, felons, sometimes released from prison by the Home Office, to teach how to successfully commit crimes for which they had been imprisoned.
All fully trained NKVD agents were finally sent to Beaulieu, the SOE’s Finishing School in the New Forest, to have a final assessment before they would be sent into Nazi-occupied territory where the NKVD had already established the foundation of its empire of espionage. Its network of informers stretched from Switzerland to Mexico and beyond. Nevertheless, missions that required sending Russian agents from England into occupied France needed clearance from de Gaulle. The Nazis had allowed half of France to be freely administrated from the town of Vichy by the French premier, Pierre Laval, while the Germans ruled the remainder of France from Paris. Since France’s humiliating Armistice on June 22, 1940, Vichy was known as the unoccupied zone.
The feisty French general told Gubbins that Vichy “has its quantity of left-wing Communists, some of whom are working with the Germans and could betray your training methods.”
Gubbins seriously considered the possibility and discussed it with Menzies. Both agreed that no NKVD agent should risk entering the unoccupied zone.
It was late afternoon on that winter February day when Major Stacey arrived with Francine Fromont at the SOE training center. The rain had turned into mist while they drove through the hills past the occasional hunting lodge, and Stacey had remained alert to avoid the deer that darted across the road. She told him the animals reminded her of the time she had hunted in the steppes.
In the distance stood the Victorian-Gothic castle of the training center. Stacey stopped at a checkpoint, returned the guard’s salute, and drove on to the castle. Carrying Fromont’s baggage, he led the way into the castle, saying, “We call it the Big House.”
Standing in the hall was a group of students near the staircase, staring at the landing at the top. Among them Fromont recognized some of her NKVD colleagues. Two men in battledress and webbing belts were looking down at the students.
Stacey whispered to her that they were instructors about to start a lesson. To her they looked older than many of her NKVD instructors in Moscow. They were William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, the school’s experts in fast shooting and silent killing, who worked as a team and had created the double-edged fighting knife. Sudd
enly they removed their spectacles, stepped to the edge of the staircase, and proceeded to fall down the stairs together and ended at the bottom in battle-crouch position, each with a gun in one hand and a fighting knife in the other.
Replacing their spectacles, in the voices of the double act they were, the instructors promised they would show the agents how to fall down the stairs and be ready to attack.
Sykes motioned for Stacey to bring Fromont forward to be introduced to him and Fairbairn. He told her there were twenty-two points in the human body where lethal blows could be delivered and pointed them out with his finger, adding she would be given a special dummy to practice on. Sykes handed her a knife and said she could keep it. Fairbairn handed her his gun and told the students that action is “faster than reaction” as he swiftly disarmed her by one movement.
Stacey led the students in applause.
A cloudless evening in May 1942 would soon see the rise of the moon, which for another week would provide enough light to enable Tempsford to go about its work. Already the first aircraft engines began to turn, their propellers cutting fitfully through the air, and the ground crew retreated from the swirling dust. WAAFs positioned their bomb-trains—a small tractor pulling a series of trailers carrying the bombs—under the aircraft doors of the Polish pathfinder squadron. As well as high explosives, the squadron also carried marker bombs that exploded with pretty colors—red, yellow, and green—to light the way for the main bomber force. The prettiest was called the “Pink Knickers.” Their bomb case was stuffed with rubber, phosphorus, and benzene, a combination that ignited on impact with a flash of fire visible to the bomb-aimers in their aircraft.
The WAAFs waited until the bombs were winched up into the bomb bays and positioned so that when the bomb-aimers pressed the button bombs would release in sequence without unbalancing the airplane’s center of gravity. More than one WAAF wrote some suitable anti-Nazi message on the bomb casing before she drove her bomb-train clear of an aircraft’s belly.
In the base chapel—identified by the sign OPEN TO ALL FAITHS—the Catholic priest finished saying Mass for his congregation of Poles. Afterward a WAAF ladled out soup with an engaging smile. She worked in the kitchen and had taught herself to speak Polish.
That evening in the briefing room used by the three Polish squadrons posted to Tempsford, Squadron Leader Kurylowicz—tall, blue-eyed, thirty years old with the build of the middle-weight amateur boxing champion in the Polish Air Force—studied the map he had prepared and pinned on the route board, and the meteorological reports he had received about the weather over the North Sea.
The Operation Office had sanctioned sufficient fuel for the Halifax’s extra fuel tanks. Flying Control had provided the take-off time and the Morse signals needed to clear British airspace and return to base. Kurylowicz had been told that if there were any changes he would be telephoned. There had been no calls.
The ground crew report said the Halifax had been fully serviced since the last mission, from the formers in the aircraft’s nose to the tail section. The hinges on the trapdoor inside the fuselage through which agents were dropped had been oiled and tested. The extra fuel tanks were checked to be full. The aircraft’s tires had been inspected. The chemical toilet had been flushed. The map rack in the navigator’s compartment and the wireless operator’s cabin had been checked; the equipment was in working order. The static line to which the agent’s parachute would be attached was finger-checked from its anchor in the fuselage to above the trapdoor. The bomb-bay doors had been opened and closed. The crew chief had signed off with the assurance, “Skipper, she is now in as good mettle as the day you first flew her.”
Kurylowicz laughed, “OK, another round of drinks for the ground crew in the Mess.” It was a saying among pilots that their ground crew regarded planes as if they belonged to them; beers after a service was their expectation and always honored.
His own crew returned from dinner in the NAAFI and sat on chairs before the stage where he stood by the route board. Some smoked; others had their notebooks open ready to take notes to later jog their memories. All studied the map.
The red blotches indicated German flak positions around the cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague. All had been heavily defended when their Halifax had flown on bombing raids there. The white tape on the map showed a familiar route, known as Route One. They had flown it several times to drop supplies to the Polish Home Army around Warsaw. Each flight had been a round trip of two thousand miles. With its range of twenty-seven hundred miles, even with its extra fuel tanks, the Halifax had little fuel left by the time they had returned to Tempsford.
Kurylowicz turned to the map, using his pointer to follow the mission to its destination. North to Scotland, across the North Sea, over Denmark, across the Baltic as far as the coast just northeast of Kolobrzeg, then southward over Poland, inland to the Tatra Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia. Kurylowicz tapped an area on the slopes: the drop zone.
Containers would be loaded in the bomb bays, each one to carry ten kilos of supplies for Czech partisans and the Polish Armie Krajowa, its Resistance, fighting the Germans in the mountains. They had asked for snowshoes, skis, and sleds to replace those they had lost in battles. Rifles and ammunition, along with medical equipment for doctors who had joined the Resistance, would be dropped, as would food in the form of concentrated blocks of sugar, tea, coffee, and dried milk. Cartons of Polish cigarettes and matches replicating those available on the streets of Warsaw would fill some containers. Each one would contain a message of goodwill from the Czech and Polish governments-in-exile in London congratulating the Resistance on the fight they were waging.
The Halifax had been given a take-off slot at 11:30 that night. Kurylowicz told the crew they would be carrying an extra passenger: a female secret agent. He reminded them that they could offer her a cigarette but no attempt should be made to engage her in personal conversation. It was a Standing Order issued by the SOE, not to be ignored. She would have a sleeping bag on the fuselage floor close to the trapdoor. Kurylowicz told one of the crew he would be her dispatcher.
Dark-haired and energetic, the agent had a code name of Maria and a cover story that had been created from her background. She had distant cousins in the Tatra Mountains. When her parents had died she had gone to live with a relative in Bucharest. She had escaped the Nazis with a group of Polish families from a Black Sea port and arrived in France. From Marseilles she had made her way to England. The nineteen-year-old had found work in London. There was a need for French speakers, and her employer took notice of her background. He recommended her to the War Office, and she had been called for an interview with Jepson. Her knowledge of the Tatra Mountains had resulted in her being sent to the training center at Lochailort. With its mountains, lochs, and rugged terrain, the Highlands had the same landscape as the Tatra Mountains.
She had learned how to instruct Resistance fighters to launch attacks against the German SS who occupied the mountains in her homeland. She had been taught to plant road spikes that would stop SS convoys so that the waiting Resistance fighters could machine-gun the vehicles. “They must kill every one of the lice worms,” the instructor had said. She had been told the importance of working with the local population while making sure they never betrayed her to the Germans. A betrayer was to be summarily executed.
On her twenty-third birthday she had been sent to Beaulieu and briefed on her mission. Two days later she was waiting in the departure lounge in Gibraltar Farm at Tempsford to board the Halifax.
By 11:00 PM, Squadron Leader Kurylowicz had completed his usual walk around the parked black-matte aircraft on the hard standing while its crew had clambered on board. Joining them, he took his seat in the cockpit beside the copilot and together they ran through the take-off checks. The dispatcher was by the closed trapdoor with the sleeping bag.
Shortly before Kurylowicz called Flying Control to report he was ready for take-off, a car drove up and Maria emerged in a ju
mpsuit and jump boots, carrying her helmet. The car driver helped to push her up through the belly hatch, and the dispatcher reached down to bring her aboard. The driver handed up her two suitcases before the dispatcher closed the hatch.
When the car drove away the aircraft engines came to life, and Kurylowicz pushed forward the throttle and the Halifax moved off the hardstand. He released the brakes and began to roll down the runway, then lifted off, banked, and settled into the first leg of the journey to deliver the containers and the secret agent.
Maria settled in the sleeping bag, using her suitcase as a pillow. It contained the winter-weight clothes she had worn for a few days so that they would not raise suspicion by looking new. Her helmet lay beside her on top of the suitcase containing her wireless transmitter.
After take-off the dispatcher brought her a mug of coffee and said he would be back to get her ready when they reached the drop zone. He returned to his station as a gunner.
Maria finally opened the small paper-wrapped box she had been given in the departure lounge at Gibraltar Farm. The WAAF had said it was a gift from Colonel Buckmaster with the best wishes of all the SOE. It was a gold powder compact. He gave these gifts to every female agent; men received gold cigarette boxes or cufflinks before their missions. They were intended to be reminders that he was thinking of them while they were behind enemy lines.
In the cockpit the two pilots guided the Halifax along its given route at twenty thousand feet, in air negative sixty degrees Fahrenheit. From time to time the other crew members reported there was not another airplane in sight as they stared out into the night. The navigator continued to calculate their position on his plotting chart, linking their progress with pencil dots to record how much farther it would be before they arrived over the drop zone. The radio officer heard nothing to alert the skipper. The sound of the Halifax high-performance engines coming through the fuselage was reassuring.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 19