The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish

by Noreen Riols

  Another of my little brother’s contributions to the war effort, when home from school for the holidays, was to organize his friends into a window-cleaning brigade. Carrying ladders, buckets and cloths, Geoffrey would marshal his troops at our house at 8 a.m. and set off. They were always in demand since, apart from there being no other window cleaners available during the war (it was not a ‘reserved occupation’, so they were all working in munitions factories or serving in the armed forces), the ‘Geoffrey brigade’ was less expensive, only asking for a contribution to their boxes.

  One summer evening, a friend of ours heard her elderly mother scream with terror. My bro had suddenly appeared on a ladder at her bedroom window at 11 p.m. and started furiously polishing. Her daughter telephoned my mother, who was out scouring the streets looking for her son.

  ‘Is your brother going to clean windows all night?’ she enquired, when I answered the phone.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Only until a bomb knocks him off his ladder.’ We didn’t have television to entertain us in those days, much less computers, the internet, Twitter, Facebook – or mobile phones. We had to find other ways of amusing ourselves!

  Chapter 2

  Looking back, I cannot help wondering whether during the war there hadn’t been some collusion between the Labour Office, the Lycée and SOE. It’s the only explanation I can find for the strange way my entry into this secret organization came about. SOE desperately needed people fluent in foreign languages, something the Brits are not famous for. And where better to find them than at the French Lycée?

  Recruitment was usually by word of mouth. For obvious reasons, it wasn’t possible to put an announcement in the newspapers. Citizens of occupied countries who had escaped and made their way to England, in the hope of continuing the combat, were first sent to the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth, the London Reception Centre. Many resented this, but it was necessary for security reasons, since not all escapees were loyal patriots, nor even always from the country they claimed to have escaped from. German agents frequently posed as refugees and they had to be weeded out, as did other enemy aliens. At the Patriotic School, after being questioned over a few days as to their sympathies, those deemed suitable for recruitment to SOE were sent, without being given any explanation, to Wanborough Manor, a country house near Guildford. At Wanborough, they were again questioned, closely watched to determine whether they could hold their drink and what their relationships were with other prospective candidates, and given various psychological tests to determine whether they were ‘agent material’ or not.

  If they were considered unsuitable, they were either returned to their squadrons or units, if that’s where they had come from, or dispersed among the different allied forces in England with none of them being any the wiser! Those who passed the test were asked whether they were prepared to be infiltrated behind the lines into enemy-occupied countries as Allied spies. Those who agreed were sent to begin their long training – six months, or eight to nine if they were to become radio operators. The French refugees would be interviewed by a Colonel Bodington, who would go to Wanborough to offer them the choice of joining SOE or General de Gaulle’s Free French unit, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action).

  It was F Section that I now joined. F for France was the largest country section, which from 1941 was headed by the now legendary Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, or ‘Buck’, as we affectionately called him. He was a major when I started, and I remember drinking champagne in his office out of Army-issue cups when he got his red tabs. He was democratic, generous, warm – most of the time with twinkling blue eyes. But the twinkle could disappear in a flash and quite without warning when something displeased him. He had a lot on his plate, it is true, but when Buck flew off the handle and ‘blew a fuse’ it was best to keep out of his way. But the explosion never lasted long and, like a bowl of soapsuds, his temper would rise swiftly to the surface, froth over and as rapidly subside. And the twinkle would come back into his amazing blue eyes, as he patted his pocket, searching for his pipe.

  The Section was staffed by English, French and, like my children, ‘half-and-halfs’. It was an everyday entente cordiale. We didn’t have any set hours. We worked throughout the night when necessary. Weekends didn’t exist, we took a day off when we could, and as for holidays, I don’t remember ever having any. I suppose I did, but they must have been very fragmentary and spasmodic. Strangely enough, I don’t ever remember feeling exhausted, or even particularly tired. I sometimes wonder what it was that kept us going. Perhaps it was the exuberance of youth or the excitement of the life we lived.

  SOE was a family. But it was an enclosed, watertight family. We couldn’t talk to anyone outside ‘the racket’, as we were called in-house, about our activities. But it was also enclosed on the inside. Although I soon learned that members of every occupied country were working in the building doing the same thing as we did, there was no contact between us. The secret was absolute.

  Being part of Churchill’s Secret Army was fascinating. It was a stimulating, thrilling life, full of action – and emotion. I was recruited as a bilingual secretary, but that was only a minor part of my job. As far as I remember I didn’t really have a job title. I was a general dogsbody to begin with: preparing and delivering messages personnels, which were broadcast to France every evening by the BBC, and typing up agents’ reports after they returned from the field. Later, at Beaulieu, I was involved in training new agents, wishing them luck when they left and being present at their debriefing sessions on their return.

  We lived very intensely. We knew many agents. There were those who had just returned from ‘the field’, by various means. Sometimes they had to escape quickly because their identity had become known to the Gestapo or they had been badly wounded, in which case a Lysander, a small light plane able to land steeply in a restricted space, was sent to fetch them. These operations were very dangerous, and many pilots were killed. Other escaping agents made their way across the Pyrenees on foot at night, following a guide. Occasionally the guide was bribed to betray them to the Spanish border police. Even if they made it safely across the frontier, often they were arrested by these same Spanish police before they could reach the farmhouse which was supposed to shelter them until they could continue their journey. They would then end up in Miranda or Lerida, euphemistically called prisons, but in reality little more than concentration camps. Mercifully, during their training they had been taught several crucial escape tactics, the first being how to rid themselves of handcuffs. Those that succeeded in escaping – and they usually did – made their way to Lisbon or Gibraltar, from where they were flown back to London. Others got to the Spanish coast and smuggled themselves onto ships leaving for North Africa and, once there, somehow managed to get to the SOE office in Cairo, from where they were also flown back to England. Sometimes it took the agents as much as six months to make their way home, during which time we often had no news, and didn’t know whether they were alive or dead.

  I remember one young agent, Harry Peulevé, who broke both his legs on landing by parachute in south-west France, not far from the Pyrenees. He was hidden in a farmhouse and treated by the local doctor, who was sympathetic to the Resistance movement. But it was dangerous for the farmer and his family to shelter Harry for long, so, temporarily patched up and hobbling on two sticks, he crossed the Pyrenees at night, following a guide. And those guides walked fast. They had to in order to cover a great deal of ground under cover of darkness. Harry finally made it back to England and, after a long stay in hospital, went straight back to active duty and was again infiltrated into France.

  We also met prospective agents who had been selected for training and were preparing to leave for Arisaig, or Group A, in the north of Scotland. At Arisaig, they were subjected to harsh physical exercises, assault courses, crawling under barbed wire, often in the middle of the night and in pouring rain, leaping over high barriers, running fast and walking for long dista
nces over hills and mountains and other rough territory carrying heavy backpacks. Or being dumped in the Highlands in the middle of nowhere, frequently in a howling gale, and left to find their own way back, living off berries or whatever they could salvage from the countryside. This arduous training was intended to get them into tip-top condition. Once ‘in the field’, they would need to be fit.

  At Group A, all trainee agents learned how to live off the land, to poach and to stalk. They also learned to map-read, use a compass, lay mines, set primers and booby traps, handle explosives, including grenades and dynamite, and assemble, dismantle and use Bren and Sten guns, commando knives and arms of all kinds, including German weapons, since the maquis (the name given to groups of résistants living together in the woods and forests) often had to rely on captured German material. They were taught to shoot at moving targets, dummy figures which suddenly appeared from nowhere and darted tantalizingly in front of them from behind trees, and to kill, silently, using the double-edged knife with which they were all provided on departure – or with their bare hands. When they left Arisaig, they had to be able to blow up a railway bridge, an aircraft or a telephone exchange, to jump out of a moving train travelling at forty miles an hour without serious risk to life or limb, and to live off the land for days, even weeks, without buying food.

  After Arisaig, the agents went on to the parachute school at Ringway, near Manchester. Here they learned how to jump from a plane and, perhaps more importantly, how to land correctly, bending their knees as they approached the ground to prevent fractures. They began by practising their jumps in a hangar, then progressing to a hot-air balloon before actually jumping from an aircraft. Many trainees said that the balloon jumps were the worst, the most frightening of all – much worse than the real thing. It was the deathly silence which was unnerving: the noise of the plane’s engines as the agents prepared to jump was almost comforting in comparison. For reasons which I never understood, the men were obliged to make six practice jumps before parachuting into enemy territory, while women only had to make five.

  From Ringway, the agents went on to the different secret training schools dotted about the country, where they were instructed in the various skills necessary in order to become a good spy: radio, sabotage, propaganda, use of arms, escape tactics, how to react under interrogation or torture. They ended their training at Group B in Beaulieu, where all the houses on Lord Montagu’s Hampshire estate had been requisitioned for SOE’s use. Group B was the most intellectually demanding of all the training schools and is still, even today, known as the ‘finishing school for secret agents’. Only once the trainees had perfected all those other skills were they welcomed at Group B. And it was there that they really learned the art of spying – and of disguise!

  Training completed, before being parachuted into France or being sent to a holding house to await departure, the agents would rendezvous at Orchard Court, a luxurious flat in Portman Square not far from Baker Street, which had also been requisitioned for the use of SOE. We wished them luck, adding ‘merde, the unusual expression the French use to wish people bonne chance or good luck, and waited for their first radio communication.

  On leaving, agents were designated to a specific area, but they were rarely infiltrated together, and they did not all arrive by parachute. Those destined for the south of France often went in by submarine, which would surface during the night about three miles from the coast. The agents would be lowered into the sea in a rubber dinghy. It was up to them to row or paddle themselves ashore, then deflate and bury the dinghy. Or, if the dinghy was attached to the submarine by a long, thick rope, to tug hard at the rope, so signalling that it could be hauled back. They then waited on the shore for daylight before venturing into the nearest town.

  For obvious reasons infiltrations by submarine had to be carried out on moonless nights, which must have made the agents’ journey to land even more hazardous. I never heard of one who didn’t make it, although one French group came close. Having celebrated rather too copiously with the submarine crew the end of their journey and the beginning of their ‘great adventure’, when lowered into the dark waters they happily set off in the wrong direction, rowing briskly towards the coast of North Africa. They had to be rescued by the more sober members of the submarine crew, who were quickly lowered into dinghies and raced after them to turn them back in the direction of the French coast. Other agents, destined for Brittany, were taken by the Royal Navy as near to the coast as possible, where they would be met by fishing boats, often manned by Breton sailors, who would take them ashore.

  Feluccas were another matter altogether. According to one agent, the smell on board a felucca was worse than the smell in any stable. There were two of them – twenty-ton vessels used to ferry agents from Corsica or Gibraltar, landing their passengers on the beaches of the south of France at dead of night. Often a very bumpy cruise! They were manned by Polish sailors who rarely spoke any English and had been offered to SOE by General Sikorski because the Polish Navy refused to have them: they were considered too rough and tough to handle. But, as far as I know, they never gave SOE any trouble.

  Once in the field, the three agents joined up and formed what was called a réseau, or circuit, from which they recruited and trained local résistants into a fighting unit, and then organized sabotage operations, such as setting fire to arms depots and munitions factories and blowing up railway lines and bridges to prevent the German Army from moving or advancing. After D-Day, these sabotage operations seriously hampered German reinforcements being rushed to the Normandy coast. They also gained the support, rather than inciting the anger, of the local population because, being carried out on the ground, they were more accurate and rarely incurred civilian casualties, which unfortunately was not always the case with RAF bombing raids.

  During the occupation there were dozens of these réseaux dotted all over France, each known to London by a codename, usually a French Christian name followed by an English trade or professional name. The organizer, or chef de réseau, was, as his title suggests, the ‘boss’, and it was usually his codename, the one by which he was known to members of his team, which was given to the réseau. For example: Guy/Musician, Gérard/Tinker, Antoine/Ventriloquist, Prosper/Physician, Sylvestre/Farmer, Hercule/Lighterman, Gaspard/Monkeypuzzle, to mention only a few. I always thought this last one amusing, and could never understand how ‘Monkeypuzzle’ could be either a trade or a profession. Each agent had four names. His real name was kept in the files at HQ while his false name appeared on his false, ‘made in England’ identity card. Then there was the codename by which he was known to the members of his réseau, and the codename by which he was identified at HQ, plus the name of his réseau. I wonder that we didn’t end up schizophrenic, trying to juggle all this.

  Some réseau organizers had no fixed address, and, for reasons of security, the members of an organizer’s Resistance group were unable to contact him. He contacted them. Such extra security precautions were probably the reason ‘Roger’, who was tracked by the Germans for eight or nine months, was able to evade capture for so long, only to be caught at the eleventh hour through a very simple oversight.

  Each organizer was assisted by a radio operator and a courier, both SOE-trained. Occasionally, the organizer had a lieutenant, but that was not the norm. A lieutenant was sometimes ‘dropped’ when heavy arms were parachuted in. A machine-gun, for example, could not drop as it was and had to be sent in kit form, and if there was no one on the ground who knew how to assemble the kit, it was useless. So an instructor, or ‘lieutenant’, was dropped with the material to teach the members of the local réseau how to put the weapons together.

  Sometimes, their mission accomplished, lieutenants had to wait for a considerable length of time before they could be picked up and flown back to London. One of them remarked upon his return, after having been obliged to spend several weeks with a réseau before he could be repatriated, that he had always admired the courage of those agents who w
ere dropped from the night sky into enemy territory, but until he had actually shared their life he had been unaware of the dangers and the permanent psychological strains to which they were subjected. And a pilot, who had been in the same position after his Lysander had become bogged down in the waterlogged field in which it landed, in spite of the efforts of a local farmer who brought a pair of bullocks in an unsuccessful attempt to free the plane’s wheels from the mud, said exactly the same thing. This pilot finally had to abandon his aircraft and remain as a ‘guest’ of the réseau until another plane could be sent in to rescue him.

  The second member of the team, the radio operator, or ‘pianist’, as he was known in house, was really the lynchpin of the réseau. He was the focal point of the group, the pivot on which the whole réseau turned, its umbilical cord, and as such was treated rather like a prima donna. He was rarely allowed to take part in sabotage operations, or accompany the reception committee receiving drops, although, as always happens, there were exceptions to this rule, because should anything happen to the radio operator the organizer no longer had any means of communicating with HQ in London. Even if there were another réseau operating nearby, they could not call on them for help. Security was so strict that each réseau was kept in ignorance of the existence of others in the vicinity. Every réseau was water-tight and self-contained so that should a group be ‘blown’ (the code we used when a network was infiltrated or captured by the Gestapo), being ignorant of its existence, they could not, even under torture, reveal that there were other réseaux in the area. Such information in enemy hands might have a domino effect.