by John Lodwick
Experiments with false refugees, with enthusiastic Swedes, Afrikaners and Chinese, conducted upon a cash down and bonus-for-action basis had always proved unsuccessful: the devotion of the agent to his cause being in the last resort unequal to the strain of life in enemy territory.
A textbook could be written about German attempts to infiltrate British subversive organisations. A second textbook could be written about the training to which agents were subjected in either country. King’s Regulations being, however, likely to intervene, the place of neither textbook can be here. Suffice it to say, by way of contrasting the two methods, that if an Englishman designed for despatch to France were described upon his false identity card as a waiter, he would wear, when he set off upon his mission, clothes in keeping with his supposed income level, would have endured, had he been previously ignorant of the profession, a course in waiting, and would have been fully conversant with the peculiar argot of that trade.
The Germans, despite their supposed reputation for thoroughness, knew nothing of such subtleties. One has only to recall the case of the gentleman, arrested at Bristol upon some trivial charge, who claimed to be a salesman for a Tyneside fish-canning firm. Upon examination it was found that he knew the name of no fish to be found in the Tyne estuary, nor indeed in the entire North Sea.
This is why the case of Pieter Sluys stands—and, as far as that war is concerned, will always stand—alone. No great credit can be allowed to the Germans for discovering Pieter. He discovered himself, and his advantages were only too obvious: he was young, impressionable, superficially innocent, and, by birth at least, half an Englishman. No! the credit must go to the Germans, not upon these counts, but because of the superb way in which, within the course of a few days, they first awakened, then directed down well prepared channels, the latent cupidity, the brutality, and the yearning of the boy for adventure.
Forty-nine persons were later executed as the result of direct betrayal or of information laid by Pieter Sluys. Many more were tortured, transported or killed, as the result of the torture of these forty-nine. An organisation previously regarded, in the country of its origin at least, as impregnable was all but shattered. So that now . . . since it concerns the main stream of this story very intimately we might as well see how it was done.
Sluys entered Spain through the Urepel gap. He took no trouble to conceal himself, and was immediately arrested and interned, together with some thousands of fellow-refugees from Fascism, in the concentration camp of Miranda-del-Ebro. The arrangements between the British and Spanish Governments were at that time of a vague, yet, in the last resort, of a gentlemanly nature. In return for a monthly quota of petrol, the Madrid authorities were prepared to release from their camps a monthly quota of human beings. This quota was never very large, and was also subject to sudden reductions when the Spaniards, under pressure from Berlin, became intransigent. British Embassy officials visited the camps and established lists of priority. Sluys’ priority was not very high.
Thus, he did not leave Miranda for seven months, and then it was to travel to England the dangerous way, as supernumerary passenger in a tanker from Gibraltar. On reaching England he was examined by immigration and other authorities. His story concerning relatives in Yorkshire was checked and found to be true. Asked what he now wished to do, Sluys, after some hesitation, required to be allowed to enlist in a North Country regiment. This request was granted, and Sluys was drafted to a training depot. He spent the greater part of the next year in Yorkshire, in Lancashire, and finally near Carlisle. In accent, in appearance and in behaviour he was quite indistinguishable from his fellow soldiers.
Sluys’ state of mind during this period must have been curious. It seems likely that, although he had not forgotten his interviews at Hasselt with von Krebs, he was quite content with things as they were: to be an Englishman now among Englishmen; a German, at some future date, among Germans. On arrival he had no doubt been led to expect an approach from one or other of the mysterious organisations, the activities of which had been outlined to him. When no such approach was made, he adapted himself without difficulty to his new circumstances, for though a brutal he was far from being either an intelligent or an introspective young man. Certainly, during that year, he possessed no contacts with other agents, and it is unlikely that he had ever been entrusted with any. Popular with his comrades, a favourite with his officers, he passed twelve months in obscurity. He did, it is true, have an affair with a girl, employed in an Army cipher office, but this appears to have been irrelevant to his subsequent activities.
Von Krebs, having decided that the English had ignored the bait, had probably written off Sluys as a loss. If this is so, he was too impatient. The talent spotters, whose task was to choose the few from among the many, took a long time to find Sluys, but they found him in the end. They examined his credentials, which were good. They reviewed his brief army career, and were satisfied by it. They investigated the aunt and the three second cousins who were all that remained of his English relatives. Finally, they called him to London, where, having put certain propositions to him, they obtained his immediate agreement.
They could not know that this was what the Germans hoped they would do. They could not know because Sluys was fool-and-security proof. His youth, his English birth, his apparent innocence: all these were in his favour; but overshadowing them, lulling any suspicions which might have been entertained, was the fact that he had already spent over a year in the country, during all of which time his behaviour had been irreproachable.
And this is where Rumbold comes in . . . Lance-Corporal Rumbold, recruited from his tank depot at Catterick, marked down by the scouts by reason of his evident intrepidity and long service in a Paris bank.
The pair, together with about fifteen others (Armenians, Mediterranean Jews, French-speakers from Mauritius: surprisingly few Englishmen), were given their first month of sabotage-training at a country house in Surrey. Then they went North, beyond the Caledonian Canal, then came South again to parachute at Ringway, then dispersed to attend the lectures of the theorists.
At this stage, before the pupils took the field in earnest, it was customary to classify them; to adapt the pegs, few of which were entirely round, to the shape of hole which would suit each best. Thus men of the greatest strength of character and initiative were chosen to be organisers, to take over existing movements, to direct and attune the efforts of these movements to the common aim. Others, no less talented, but of a more mechanical turn of mind, became radio operators and endured further training to this end. Still others . . . we are in the middle ranks of talent now . . . worked in a more restricted sphere: they were couriers: they were selectors of landing strips for parachute supplies: they were pay-masters (travelling with fabulous sums with which to sweeten the faithful): they were pamphleteers, scribbling for some ancient printing press concealed in a hayloft or a lady’s bedchamber.
But when all these had been disposed of, there still remained the hard, the irreducible core of near-unemployables; the timid, the temperamentally unsuitable, the fractious and the slow of thought. The timid and the temperamental did not long enjoy their pay in ease and comfort. They left—sometimes willingly, sometimes helped upon their way by polite threats of sanctions—and afterwards were to be encountered, shorn of their glory, in the most surprising places: an Army bakery, for example, the workshop of a jobbing tailor, the cloakroom of a night club. But for the fractious and the slow of thought a hope would still remain . . . a lowly hope, it is true, but still a hope, a future, and in its humble way, a calling.
They were the hit-and-run men, the in-and-out boys. Not for them the heavy pay-packets, the swift rise in rank, the Military Cross. They were the simple Myrmidons, the condottieri, the licensed brigands of their age: five days in France (or Belgium, or Holland . . . name the country that you please), a simple objective and a swift run across the border, where, if you were
lucky, you reached your Consulate; if unlucky, suffered your head to be shaved and ate bean soup in a Spanish prison for a month.
Such a one, an aristocrat of his profession, was Rumbold. People liked Rumbold, and they liked him the better because he was successful and preferred to work alone. Three times in ten months Rumbold went to France, and not once was he caught in Spain on his way out: Rumbold always made Bilbao even if, as on the first occasion, he had to push two policemen aside as he ran in through the doors of the Consulate. And after Bilbao . . . Lisbon. Rumbold used to spend rather a lot of money in Lisbon, but in the opinion of the firm, his achievements justified it.
Rumbold was generators . . . dynamos and generators, electrical equipment always easy to replace on the Clyde or in Pittsburgh, but not so easy to replace in the occupied Europe of that time. Not any generator, of course, not any dynamo, but, for preference, a dozen of each in a locomotive factory, which meant that no locomotive would leave the factory until the wrecked equipment had been replaced . . . four months later. Which saved the lives of a number of airmen, who would otherwise have had to dive daily, with uncertain rocket aim, above the flak guns of armoured trains.
A sideline of Rumbold’s which, circumstances permitting, he might have carried further had been E-boats. On his first job, dropping near Meulan, a small town upon the River Seine, he had there destroyed, with thermite charges, ten out of thirteen hulls ready to be floated down to the sea.
This had meant a certain decrease in German shipping protection in the English Channel.
But, while Rumbold had been thus employed, Pieter Sluys, and several others with him, had done nothing . . . not, to be sure, from any lack of enthusiasm upon their part, but rather because the authorities did not care to entrust them with independent endeavour. The authorities were retaining them for the Invasion, that period in which the foot-soldier would realise that the war had begun and in the anarchy of which their lack of talent and perspicacity might well pass unnoticed.
Rumbold met Sluys several times during his short rests in England. He met him at that gloomy Elizabethan mansion near Oxford, upon the banks of the sluggish Cherwell, where prospective “in-and-out” men were detained. The pair were not fond of one another. Sluys envied Rumbold his success, his assurance. Rumbold, though divining nothing of the truth, disliked Sluys for the freedom of his behaviour before women, his general coarseness, his entire lack of the quality which the gentry call breeding. Rumbold, it must be remembered, was seven years older than Sluys.
Ah! those damp November days of mid-war in the Thames Valley, when the mist would not rise from the ground until the sun was at its zenith. At nine in the morning, before the explosives class, the Instructor Fernandez, a Spaniard with admixture of Devonian blood, would call the reluctant residents from breakfast, to box: “Hit me! Hit me with your right, man.” The pupil, a young Jew, would strike out, indenting the Spaniard’s thorax with feeble force, to be immediately felled by an uppercut. “What are you? Corner-house Commandos or cry-babies? Is there nobody here who has guts?”
Rumbold, watching Pieter Sluys step forward to be battered in his turn, decided that the child possessed courage. He decided that he might take him upon his next job, if official opinion would permit it.
Official opinion not only permitted but even encouraged the idea, for, as it so happened, Rumbold’s next job was not one which could conveniently be performed alone. A system of canal locks near Valenciennes, affecting two main waterways from Belgium into France, had been marked down for early destruction. A very considerable weight of explosive would be necessary together with its transport from the dropping ground to the target area, seven kilometres distant. Four others, besides Sluys, were designated to accompany Rumbold.
At first, all went according to plan. The party dropped, towards the end of a moon period, from two Halifax bombers. The drop was without incident. The containers were salvaged, buried, the explosive transferred to individual valises. Before dawn on the same day, all six men were lying up within sight of the objective. They lay up separately, as a precaution, several hundred yards apart, with a rendezvous fixed for their meeting at dark. The attack was to be made that same night.
Throughout the early part of the day there was no special activity in the neighbourhood of the locks, but in the late afternoon, Rumbold, inspecting the scene through binoculars, was amazed to see a full company of German infantry moving along the canal banks, halting, dragging up field-kitchens and settling down as if to bivouac.
At the evening conference, fully persuaded that the arrival of the Germans was an unlucky mischance and that they would move off in the morning, Rumbold postponed the attack for twenty-four hours. He was quite comfortable in his wood, and he was prepared to wait.
But the Germans did not move on the following morning, nor upon the morning after that. If anything, their numbers were reinforced, and it became clear that intelligence of the proposed attack must have reached them. Such, in any case, was Rumbold’s conclusion, although he found it hard to reconcile it with the absolute inactivity of the enemy and their failure to search the surrounding countryside.
He was not to know that the capture of six men crouching in brambly thickets was of small importance to the Germans when set beside that of the organisation to which the men might lead them when they set off upon their journey to the South.
On the fourth day Rumbold cancelled the attack. He buried the explosive and instructed the party to disperse. His own escape route, and that of one other man, lay through Soissons and Auxerre. This saved their lives. Sluys, with three companions, was to travel to Paris. They travelled separately, to be sure, but in the capital they were to meet, and to be lodged in the same “safe-house”, before attempting the long journey to Spain.
None of those four, apart from Sluys, ever reached Spain. The “safe-house”, it was learnt later, had been blown; Sluys’ story being that, returning to it one evening, he had found the place in the hands of the Gestapo, his companions arrested, and himself with just sufficient time to scuttle round a street corner in order to avoid a similar fate.
Oh, it was very artistically done, very thoroughly. Sluys had even gone to the trouble to have himself arrested in Spain, so that he arrived in London with a shaven head and a month’s delay. Everybody believed him. Everybody was rather sympathetic, in fact. Poor little Pieter Sluys, they said, for the arrests had gone just far enough: they were not so widespread and so crippling as to cause doubts to arise.
In Paris Sluys was interviewed by Germans very much more important than his original acquaintance, von Krebs. These gentlemen were well satisfied with his performance, his loyalty, but somewhat less satisfied with the information which he was able to give them . . . nearly all of which they knew already. To be brief, they were not prepared to rest content with the capture of a few unimportant “in-and-out” men, with the liquidation of a safe-house, with the trimming of small corners from the vast pattern of the Underground. They wanted the big men. They wanted the couriers, and the false names employed by them; the date of departure from London of radio operators, their description, the area to which they had been directed.
And this, of course, was precisely the kind of information with which Sluys was unable to provide them. A humble and hitherto unemployed operative, his opportunities for research work were far from brilliant. True, upon his occasional visits to London, his long waits in a flat close to Selfridge’s, he had seen men whose faces he had attempted to memorise, but the rules governing security in that overcrowded and unfurnished flat were such that he could never hope, without dangerous indiscretion, to learn more.
But the Germans were no longer interested in descriptions of life in British sabotage schools, any more than the British were interested in the parallel establishments at Potsdam. Each was well aware of the methods of the other, each well aware, too, of the numbers, the facial peculiarities
of the pupils introduced into both each month. The Germans wished to know where the trained agent was going. His face they knew, his antecedents they knew. But the one thing they did not know, was . . . where he was going, what he would have to do, and under what name he would pass.
They relied upon Pieter Sluys for that information. His explanations, his excuses, they brushed aside. For now they had him, and that firmly, in their grip, for even a brief note, allowed casually to fall into the hands of Resistance circles, would have meant his doom. Of this they were well aware. They returned him to England. “Come back with something better,” were their last words to him.
If Sluys had been unaware previously of the magnitude of his undertaking, he became aware of it now. He was trapped. Just one word too many, just one impulse towards virtue, and his German employers would have had no further qualms about betraying him. He was trapped, indeed, but this is not to say that Sluys felt greater remorse than that of any wrongdoer threatened from two sides.
He was a most practical young man, with his baby blue eyes and his crinkled hair and his nails bitten down to the quick. He was most practical . . . and also most unsentimental.
When he arrived in London Sluys was granted leave. His leave expired, he should by rights have returned to the Holding School, near Oxford, there to await his next briefing. He contrived, however—upon some such pretext as the requirement of dental treatment—to remain in London, and not only to remain there, but also to pay frequent visits to the flat which was used as the Organisational briefing rooms.