Shadow Warriors of World War II

by Gordon Thomas

  Waem nodded his agreement. He would help. It was now seven in the evening. They had two hours: the execution was set for nine.

  With the minutes ticking down to his execution, Cammaerts—an agent who had achieved so much—thought about how close he had come to seeing the liberation of France. He did not feel fear; he just felt that to be shot now was such a pity.

  He, Fielding, and Sorensen received what seemed like a decent last meal of vegetable soup and brown bread, and then the man who had arrested them came to take them from their cells. There was a summer drizzle in the air as they crossed the prison courtyard at gunpoint.

  Cammaerts had been in France for the best part of a year and a half. As he walked, he realized the potential fate of all agents, the one he had pushed to the back of his mind for so long, was about to become his reality. He and the others savored the sound of their feet on the stone, the thin rain on their face, as last reminders of what it meant to be alive.

  Outside the prison gates they stopped, the men’s heads turning toward the athletic field, where the firing squad usually carried out its orders.

  And then, suddenly, Waem turned to him and said, “What a wonderful woman you have,” and herded all three toward a waiting Citroën. The driver, whom none of them knew—it was Schenck—screeched off through the growing gloom and into the countryside. Cammaerts and the other two had no idea what was happening. Then the Citroën slowed where a woman was standing against the wall of a barn.

  The door opened and the woman got in. It was Granville.

  Arriving back at their Resistance hideout in Seynes-les-Alpes, Cammaerts felt unable to say anything to the remarkable woman who had saved his life.

  He simply held her hand.

  12

  Afterward

  AFTER HER ROLE IN stealing the Vichy French naval codes from its embassy in Washington, Betty Pack had been considered for a mission in occupied France.

  William Stephenson pondered the idea of having Pack brought to Britain for training, but there remained work for her to do spying on the by now interned Vichy diplomats in the United States. When her cover had been blown, she settled into a life away from the service, living with Charles Brousse as if they were husband and wife, despite the fact that they were both still married to other people.

  Pack did make it to France, but not until after the liberation. By the winter of 1944 she and Brousse were living in Paris, and after the war they settled in an old château in the tiny village of Castellnou in the Pyrenees. Arthur Pack had always promised to grant Betty her divorce when the war was over. The week after VE day, proceedings were opened in an English court, and a couple of months later the divorce was granted. On the night of November 1, 1945, Arthur shot himself.

  Betty had her daughter Denise join her in France. Her son Tony joined the British Army and fought in the Korean War. He won the Military Cross for bravery but was shot dead on July 10, 1952, before he had the opportunity to receive it. Both children had suffered emotionally because of the way their parents had abandoned them. While Betty was a resourceful and brave agent, she was a terrible parent.

  During Betty’s stay in Paris she had met Charles’s first wife’s sister, who had had a relationship with a senior Gestapo officer during the occupation. It became apparent that information about Pack had been passed to the Germans after her cover had been blown in the United States, and that the Gestapo were expecting her to eventually come to France as an agent, as Stephenson had once planned. They had a full description of her and Brousse, and they were waiting. Had that mission gone ahead, agent Cynthia might well have found herself facing a Nazi firing squad. In the end, it was cancer that killed her, on December 1, 1963. She was fifty-three.

  Following her arrest in Paris in 1944, Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester was taken to Frèsnes prison, where she maintained the story that she was a US citizen who had recently returned to France from Switzerland. When the Germans withdrew from Paris they left her in prison, and she was released when the city was liberated. She remained in France for the rest of her life and enjoyed a career in advertising.

  On her return to the United States, Virginia Hall received a Distinguished Service Cross in a simple ceremony in Donovan’s office. She went on to work for the CIA, where one colleague suggested her incredible war service made her a “sort of embarrassment to the non-combatant CIA types,” and she never achieved the promotions she was perhaps due. She died in 1982.

  Andrée Borrel’s colleague Gilbert Norman, who had also tried to alert the SOE to his own capture, was hanged at Mauthausen. His circuit leader Francis Suttill died in Sachsenhausen.

  Yvonne Rudellat and Pierre Culioli, who had made such a successful team but had been caught after a gunfight at a roadblock, were both sent to concentration camps.

  Culioli survived Buchenwald; he was the only male agent caught during the Prosper betrayal who escaped execution.

  Rudellat arrived at Ravensbrück toward the end of August 1944 but was later transferred to Belsen, where starvation, typhus, and dysentery condemned thousands to a terrible death. Already weak, Rudellat survived until liberation on April 5, 1945, but died a few weeks later. After the war Vera Atkins tracked down a Polish woman who remembered Rudellat. The woman told her, “She arrived morally strong but became very ill and by April 10, she knew she was dying. I do hope she lived to know the camp was liberated so she rested quietly knowing her work had been of use and rewarded.”

  The female agents of the SOE-NKVD pact also paid dearly for their bravery. Francine Fromont, who spent more than sixteen months as a wireless operator in southern France, was executed on August 5, 1944. A number of streets in France and a school in Paris bear her name. Her colleague Guyot, who it was later revealed was her husband, returned to France after the war and became a prominent politician in the French Senate.

  After being incarcerated in Ravensbrück, Else Noffke—who had tried and failed to commit suicide to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo—was shot in November 1943.

  Emilie Boretzky, who had confessed all to the Gestapo, was later sent to Ravensbrück, where she was liberated by Soviet forces only to be deported as a traitor to a labor camp. Her comrade, Hermann Köhler, was executed in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945.

  Others survived.

  Brian Stonehouse, who had been arrested in October 1941, was at Natzweiler-Struthof when Andrée Borrel arrived. He was later moved to Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops at the end of April 1945. After the war he returned to his work as an artist, and died in 1998.

  Blanche Charlet, with whom he had been arrested, was held in the prison in Castres for more than a year. Having made friends with a sympathetic wardress, she got hold of pistols and spare keys and took part in a mass breakout. She found refuge in a monastery and was eventually picked up in a boat arranged by the SOE from the coast of Brittany.

  Maurice Southgate survived Buchenwald concentration camp and later settled in France. He died in 1990.

  Mary Herbert, who had given birth while an agent in France, was reunited with her lover, Claude de Baissac, soon after the liberation of Paris. It was then that Claude first set eyes on his baby daughter, Claudine. They were married in November 1944 in London.

  Claude and his sister Lise were liberated by the British Army in Normandy in July 1944. Lise de Baissac died in 2004, age ninety-eight.

  Their wireless operator, Phyllis Latour, was liberated by the Americans early in August 1944. When the troops arrived she stood in the street with local villagers and waved them in.

  Three female SOE agents survived Ravensbrück.

  Odette Sansom and Peter Churchill managed to communicate after their arrest, and she persuaded him to say that they were married and that he was Winston Churchill’s nephew. It was a piece of bravura that saved her life.

  Sansom was imprisoned in Frèsnes and brought to the Avenue Foch a number of times for interrogation and torture. In June 1943 she was informed that she had been officially
condemned to death. She was eventually moved to Ravensbrück, where she was kept in an underground isolation cell. In April 1945 the camp commandant, who believed her story about her link to Churchill, drove her to the advancing Americans, using her as a hostage for his own life.

  After the war, Sansom received the George Cross. Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan were awarded theirs posthumously.

  Yvonne Baseden, who had been arrested in July 1944, and Eileen Nearne survived Ravensbrück by maintaining their cover stories that they were French and not British.

  Baseden developed tuberculosis during her incarceration, and the intervention of the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945 saved her life.

  Eileen Nearne died in 2010, age eighty-nine. Her sister, Jacqueline, who served for a nerve-shredding fifteen months in France, went on to work for the United Nations Organization in New York. She died in 1982.

  After returning from France, Anne-Marie Walters attempted to return to active service in August 1944, but was unsuccessful. She resigned her commission and left the SOE. She spent her life in France and Spain, working as a translator, and died in 1998.

  After the war, despite her service to Britain, Christine Granville struggled to make a life in the country. She found work as a stewardess on an ocean liner, where she met a man who became obsessed with her. In June 1952, the man arrived at her lodgings in the Shelbourne Hotel in Kensington, London, and stabbed her to death.

  Francis Cammaerts returned to his former career as a teacher after the war. He retired to France and died in 2006.

  Neither of the two men promised safety in return for Cammaerts’s life are believed to have survived for long. The Gestapo man, Schenck, returned to his apartment—against Cammaerts’s advice—and was shot by the Resistance. Granville had reported to the SOE that it was important her promise to Waem, the man from the Milice, was honored. Exactly what happened to him is unclear, but he was probably executed by the French.

  The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945 left Bill Donovan without his political patron just as the war was coming to a close and the US government was reassessing its intelligence capability for the years ahead. The new president, Harry S. Truman, disliked Donovan and disbanded the OSS soon after VJ Day. Donovan returned to the law and was a special assistant to the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. He died in 1959, age seventy-six.

  Although Donovan had no official role to play in the CIA—the successor to the OSS—Allen Dulles did. Dulles went on to be its director from 1953 until he was forced to resign after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. He died in 1969.

  Maurice Buckmaster went back into civilian life and returned to a job with the Ford Motor Company. He died at age ninety in 1992.

  Colin Gubbins was knighted in 1946. The SOE was disbanded the same year, and Gubbins retired to work as a textile merchant. He retired to a home in the Hebrides and died in 1976, age seventy-nine.

  Selwyn Jepson returned to writing crime novels after the war. He died in 1989.

  Following the disbandment of the SOE, Vera Atkins headed to Germany in search of her missing agents. She compiled information on those who had been incarcerated in camps and had been executed, and was a prosecution witness at the trials of Nazi officers. She worked hard to ensure that memorial plaques were installed to remember the agents killed at Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, and Ravensbrück. She died in a nursing home in June 2000.

  Henri Déricourt, whose work as a double agent had enabled the SD to destroy the Prosper network, survived the war. Most of those he betrayed did not. Déricourt was put on trial in a French court after the war. There was little information in the public arena at the time, and although the circumstantial evidence against him was immense, there was no definite proof. He was acquitted. In 1962, having returned to his work as a pilot, his plane went missing over Laos. He was presumed dead.

  Roger Bardet, who also betrayed his comrades in the Resistance, was convicted of treason and served a prison sentence.

  In October 1942 Hitler gave his so-called “commando order,” instructing that all such personnel as spies “are to be exterminated.” A supplementary directive added that “all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception. . . . The chance of their escaping with their lives is nil.” The instruction confirmed that agents would face no mercy, only torture and death; even the Hague Convention offered no protection for those captured as spies.

  As Selwyn Jepson told prospective agents during their interviews, “I have to decide whether I can risk your life and you have to decide whether you’re willing to risk it.” SOE historian M. R. D. Foot recorded that 117 of the 470 agents of F Section who went into the field did not come back. Thirteen of the section’s thirty-nine female agents died.

  After the war, Francine Agazarian went to the cell in Flossenberg concentration camp where her husband, Jack, had been held. She then walked to the spot where he had been executed. It was an agonizing and courageous thing to do, but it had to be done—his sacrifice had to be remembered.

  Agents had known the dangers they faced as they carried out their undercover work, but most claimed to be concentrating so hard that the fear seldom came through. Francine herself said, “Germans were everywhere in Paris; one absorbed the sight of them and went on with the job of living as ordinarily as possible and applying oneself to one’s job.”

  Lise de Baissac recalled, “You know that you’re in danger all the time but you always think that you will go through. I have never been afraid, really, that I should be caught. It never occurred to me. I think that we’re all like that. If you’re frightened, you can’t do anything.”

  Women agents in the field, particularly those who took part in the open warfare that followed D-day, witnessed the violence of battle that had previously typically been experienced only by men. Phyllis Latour found it particularly difficult to deal with the devastating damage caused by bombers in the streets where she lived her secret life. “I can imagine the bomber pilots patting each other on the back and offering congratulations after a strike,” she said. “But they never saw the carnage that was left. I always saw it, and I don’t think I will ever forget it.”

  Instructors’ and male agents’ early impressions were that women could help men become more “invisible.” Peter Churchill noted that “there is no better cover in this country [France] than to be seen in the company of a girl.” Once they had seen women at work in the field, opinions changed. Another agent, Philippe de Vomécourt, concluded that women “showed more single-mindedness in their duties” than men.

  The women in this book showed that they were every bit as skilled as male agents—and often combatants—during World War II. Never again would a counterintelligence force naively assume that a woman could not be a dangerous agent.

  After the war Nancy Wake, who received medals from Britain, the United States, France, Australia, and her native New Zealand, said, “I hate wars and violence, but if they come then I don’t see why we women should just wave a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.”

  Her role in khaki put her on an equal footing with the men at a time when such equality was possible in few areas of society. When Wake realized her fellow maquisards were watching her take a pee in the woods, she understood but did not want it to affect her standing in the group. “They were men living in the forest without women,” she said, “so my presence among them caused quite a stir, so I could sort of understand them wanting to do that, once . . . but I also had to put a stop to it. I wanted their respect, not their leering eyes, and I couldn’t have both.”

  The Maquis leader, Henri Tardivat, confirmed after the war that Wake had been accorded the respect she deserved: “She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts. Then she is like five men.”

  When Wake died in 2011, age ninety-eight, her ashes were scattered in the forests near Montluçon where she had proved herself among the bravest of the brave during 1944.

  Pearl Wit
heringon, who married her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, after the war and settled in France, had seen gun battles and the execution of a German prisoner by the Maquis. Through her planning and battlefield leadership, she was responsible for the deaths of many enemy soldiers, and although she said she could have killed if she was threatened, she added: “I didn’t go out and fight with a gun. I don’t think it’s a woman’s job. We’re made to give life, not take it. I couldn’t have stood up and coldly shot somebody.”

  Most of the SOE women received awards and medals of some kind—and many received the Croix de Guerre from France—but the protocol that governed military decorations was not laid out to recognize their contribution.

  Pearl Witherington’s story is instructive. She was recommended for the Military Cross but was ineligible because she was a woman.

  She was then awarded the civilian MBE, a medal usually given to people for work in their community. She returned it with the note:

  The work which I undertook was of a purely military nature in enemy occupied country. When the time for open warfare came we planned and executed open attacks on the enemy. I spent a year in the field and had I been caught I would have been shot, or worse still, sent to a concentration camp. I consider it most unjust to be given a civilian decoration. The men received military decorations. Why this discrimination with women when they put the best of themselves into the accomplishment of their duties?

  There was nothing “civil” about her work, she said. The men—and it was mostly men—who had arranged for women to be armed agents during the Second World War had never planned for them to be “civil.” They were trained to fight and kill, to bring bombing raids down on targets, to lead sabotage operations, and to turn large, sometimes vast numbers of men into underground armies.