They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  Finally, he managed to get aboard a train for Narbonne, through the agencies of a railway employee who smuggled him into the engine’s fuse-box. Throughout the history of the Resistance the railwaymen were, almost 100 per cent, the keenest and most resolute resisters. Their strong sense of comradeship and their fierce independence were alike unquenchable. At Narbonne, Harry’s railwayman put him in contact with a dentist who was already involved in an escape-route, and from there he was taken down to the foothills of the Pyrenees. In mid-December, in the company of a Pyrenean guide and still suffering the agonising pains of appendicitis, Harry Morgan walked over the Pyrenees into Spain.

  VI

  From September to the end of December 1941 we were completely cut off from France. By then, none of us at headquarters in Baker Street was in a very Christmassy mood. I was continually being asked by inquisitive Generals what I was doing, and my persistent reply that Rome wasn’t built in a day became more and more hollow. In spite of the disappointing silence, however, we were recruiting with great success and more agents were being landed by a variety of means; we had not yet settled down to the parachute dropping which later became the rule, for we were handicapped by the lack of reception committees to accept the agent and to guide the planes.

  We landed men from MTBs and from feluccas, by Lysander aircraft as well as by parachute. The missions of these men were still strictly exploratory; they were not to make any bangs until we gave the word. For our part, however, we were co-operating with the Ministry of Economic Warfare in an endeavour to plot the right targets for attack when the moment came: we had to deduce what the Germans would particularly need in six months’ time and place those targets first on our list. Even at home we had always to be one step ahead of the enemy if our work was to be fruitful.

  The New Year started as gloomily as the old one had ended. Then, at four o’clock in the afternoon of 1 January 1942, my telephone rang.

  ‘Is that Major Buckmaster?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘This is Colonel Smee. I don’t suppose you know who I am. You certainly shouldn’t. Look, the point is we’ve had a message on our wire from one of your chaps. The whole thing’s a bit peculiar, because strictly speaking your chaps shouldn’t know that our chaps exist at all.’

  ‘What’s the name of the man you’ve heard from?’

  ‘Code name is Félix.’

  I knew it was de Vomécourt. ‘How the hell did he get hold of your operator whoever he is?’

  ‘That’s what worries us. It looks as if something may have gone wrong and that’s why I hesitated before I rang you. We’re a little bit suspicious this end about just how trustworthy our bloke’s messages are.’

  ‘What does Félix say?’

  ‘His message reads: ‘Gaston blown mission completed best possible await instructions suggest time come home Félix.’ Our man’s expressed willingness to take any message you want to send back. Frankly, we’re not very keen on this sort of thing, but we’ll send anything you want sent – always bearing in mind that the whole set-up may be a German blind.’

  I was faced with the first of those tremendously difficult decisions which were to continue and proliferate themselves as the scope of our operations grew. If we were to act on the assumption that Félix’s message was genuine, we might run the risk of giving the Germans an insight into the way in which we were organised. On the other hand, if we were to ignore it we might be losing one of the best men we had and a source of information which at this time we vitally needed. On consideration, it seemed to me that there was every chance that the message was in fact genuine: the loss of Gaston would explain de Vomécourt’s long silence and it was indeed time for him to come back to England. I rang Colonel Smee back and told him that we would accept his offer and use his operator to contact our man.

  Meanwhile in Paris, de Vomécourt waited impatiently for a reply to his message. He was now rather nervous about what he had done, for though he had faith in the operator himself, he was uncertain about the security of the organisation into which he had blundered.

  So were we, but I decided that we must get Pierre out. I sent a message to him that he should leave Paris at once and go to Sarthe, about 150 miles from Paris. I arranged that a Lysander should pick him up from a field near Le Mans. We had to arrange the whole operation before he left Paris, for there would be no means of contacting Pierre once he had left the city. The date and place and time of the pick-up were fixed and it was up to us to stick to the arrangement.

  On the evening of the agreed date I was very worried. Should the flight be cancelled we might never see Pierre again and not only would a good man be lost but vital information about conditions in occupied France would remain unheard. The RAF had to succeed.

  The Lysander was spotted by the German ground defences just as it came in to land. Pierre, crouched in a hedge, praying the plane would spot his torch signals, saw a great star shell go up, giving the general alarm to German troops in the area. The plane seemed to stutter in mid-air, as if the pilot was thinking of pulling out. Pierre held his breath. The plane straightened and came in to land. The star shell drifted slowly down in a shower of phosphorescence. Pierre ran to the plane. A rifle shot cracked from the gate of the field. The plane moved off bumpily across the field.

  ‘Halt!’

  The plane rose slowly and made off through the curtain of flak which now blossomed in the sky. Looking down, Pierre could see the lights of Gestapo cars on the road from Le Mans. He turned to the pilot. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ was the sardonic retort.

  † Elder brother of the actor Sir John Gielgud.

  † Code name for Noël Burdeyron.

  Chapter 3

  Recruiting and Training

  Throughout our years of battle with the Germans, our objective was to do them active harm. Our role at Special Operations Headquarters was not that of spy-masters, but of active and belligerent planners of operations to be carried out in advance of the Allied landing. The usual picture of an agent is of a man lying up and watching enemy movements and reporting them back to his home base, in short an essentially passive undercover man. The agents of SOE were essentially active. At the beginning, we were, naturally, not absolutely certain which kinds of men would make the best agents and sometimes we made mistakes. For instance, I remember early on a chap called Nigel Low was sent to our office by a well-meaning person in another branch of the service to whom Nigel Low had spun an attractive yarn.

  Low was a very plausible chap, tall and good-looking, and his plausibility was, at first, very pleasing; it seemed to me that this confident and easy man with his slightly worn charm and his thorough knowledge of French and of France, particularly of the Riviera, would be of great service to our embryo organisation. I questioned him thoroughly about France and told him about the sort of thing he would have to do.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you know all about me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling, ‘I know.’ The fact was Nigel Low was a professional gambler and he was not above a spot of confidence trickery if things were not going too well for him at the tables. All this I had found out from Scotland Yard when I first heard about Low.

  The Yard were at all times at our service and they were immensely helpful in a number of ways: not only did they provide us with a thorough account of the history of possible recruits to our work, but they also put at our disposal experts whose job it was to detect enemy agents in this country and who were therefore able to help us protect our own men against mistakes which might make professional counter-espionage men suspicious. With their help we searched every agent before he left the country, checked laundry marks and tailors’ labels, brushed English tobacco out of jacket pockets and added French dust (and dust appropriate to the area in which the agent was due to work) to the turn-ups of French-tailored clothes.

  The Yard had not failed to tell me that Nigel Low had a long record of convictions in this co
untry, yet by a stroke of what I thought was good fortune he had never been convicted or apprehended in France, hence he would not be known to the Sûreté; plainly his method of operation had been to draw his funds in England and try his luck in France. I decided he should be given the chance to try his luck there once more. After much heart-searching, we resolved to use him. He was, after all, a man accustomed to playing a part and he knew all the tricks of the underworld as far as concealment and bluff were concerned.

  I explained to him in some detail what sort of things we wanted him to do. In these early days, this was largely to get as much information as possible about the day-to-day routine of living in an occupied country – ration books, permits, controls, train services and so forth were to be checked and reports sent back to us at Head Office. In this way our briefing of future agents would become more and more exact. I told Low that since he was going, so to speak, into the blue, it would be up to him to bluff his way through where our lack of information led him into difficulties.

  ‘Sounds right up my street,’ was his comment.

  ‘The important thing,’ I said, ‘is to get the information back to us.’

  Low went down to the country house which we had commandeered for our training centre and there went through all the courses we had devised. These courses were very thorough and were based, of course, on the routine ‘spy school’ model. The use of codes, unarmed combat, fieldcraft, shooting, sabotage (which included the use of explosive and the knowledge of where to use it to inflict the maximum damage on specified targets), methods of contact, psychological tests were all included in the curriculum.

  Often I would go down together with others from headquarters and would cross-question recruits, taking on the roles of Gestapo men, in order to try and break their cover stories. By this means the story itself would become ingrained in their minds and they themselves would gain some small idea of the rigours of interrogation. If they survived without cracking, their confidence would be greatly increased and they could face the thought of genuine German interrogation in the knowledge that they had already withstood a similar grilling successfully. These rehearsals were grim affairs and we spared the recruits nothing. They were stripped and made to stand for hours in the light of bright lamps and though, of course, we never used any physical violence on them, they certainly knew what it was to go through it by the time we had finished.

  If they cracked badly under the strain, it was tolerably sure that we would not send them, for it was clear that a man who caved in when questioned by HQ staff, in however realistic conditions, would be only too likely to wilt in the face of the Boches. A minor slip would not be held against a man, but too general a collapse most certainly would; we derived no pleasure, I need hardly say, from those occasions when our cruel jibes, our reiterated and shouted questions and our implacable persistence broke a man’s spirit, but we could console ourselves with the fact that his cracking at a rehearsal might well have saved his life – and others’ – by preventing the possibility of his doing the same thing with the enemy. We were not playing a game.

  Nigel Low passed all these tests with credit and it seemed to us that he had found a vocation admirably suited to his talents and one in which he would be able finally to prove himself. In the spring of 1942 he went to France by MTB. He had with him a largish sum of money in old French notes, for at this time we had no other way of financing our men. Low reached the Riviera and from that day to this we have never heard of him again. He had worked his greatest confidence trick. As usual, it may be noted, he had raised his funds in this country and had taken them with him to France. He was, so far as we know, never caught and certainly he betrayed no one. I suppose he is knocking around somewhere in one of the world’s gambling centres, but he must be doing better for he has never set foot in this country again in search of further funds.

  We learned our lesson with Low and we never again employed any of those who, according to many fictional accounts, are qualified by virtue of their underworld lives to carry out espionage activity. The training courses took careful account, in all future cases, of the gambling habits of recruits. They were also primed with spirits to see how they behaved under the influence and whether their tongues were loosened in agreeable company. Everything that the men did they had to do in the French manner, whether it was combing their hair or leaving their knives and forks on their plates (or removing them from them), answering the telephone or calling for a waiter. Often a man could give himself away by using an incorrect idiom in French, even though his accent and the individual words of a phrase might be perfectly correct.

  For instance, when on the telephone the French never say Tenez la ligne (hold the line) as we do; instead they always say: Ne quittez pas l’écoute (literally: ‘Don’t quit listening’) or more simply: Ne quittez pas. The use of any other phrase would automatically make a Frenchman suspicious – and if that Frenchman were a supporter of Vichy, so trivial an error might lead to the death of an agent. Similarly, we would keep watch on a man to see if he talked in his sleep – and if so, in what language and about what.

  We could never be sure that a pattern of behaviour would be repeated or that a new one would not develop and we had (as always) to act on probabilities, not certainties. Probabilities can go wrong and so did we. All we could do was to keep the number of errors to a minimum. For instance, it might have been that another confidence man would have done better than Nigel Low did, but we took no further risks – the next one might do better, but he might also do worse; that was a risk we dared not take.

  I decided against any further attempt to employ those whose records were not in every respect first-class; sometimes a man’s personal qualities might lead me to override this ruling if I thought that the blot on his copybook was due to the prejudice or undue rigidity of the man or service which had marked it against him: I did not feel myself bound to worry too much about a man’s proficiency on the parade ground, for example. General slovenliness was quite another matter, however, for a man who was a slack soldier might very well become a slack agent. One could not risk a man who might forget to burn used codes or whose memory was liable to let him down or force him to take notes of secret orders. I tried to judge each man on his merits, but there was one thing we could never afford to do – give a man the benefit of any doubts.

  General de Gaulle tended to discourage contact between his officers and mine and he never lost his dislike of the fact that our agents were working in France. He felt that their presence, no matter what their individual merits, infringed the sovereignty he was so eager to preserve. As I have said, I managed to make personal friendships with some of his staff, but the General himself never relented and never really brought himself to a realisation of our common objective – the conquest of the Germans and the liberation of France.

  On several occasions we found that dropping grounds which our men in France had already scouted out and which we had incorporated into our operational maps became the subject of dispute because the Free French considered that they had a right to them. De Gaulle’s insistence on French sovereignty gave him the idea that he was entitled to the best dropping grounds regardless of our prior claim on them.

  On one occasion we arranged a drop to some partisans in the Gironde area. The planes returned without dropping the supplies. I was naturally very alarmed when I saw the ops report. The captain of the plane concerned reported that they had seen lights in the dropping zone designated but that they had failed to give the pre-arranged signals and had replied in a totally wrong way to his own attempts to make contact. He thought it wiser not to drop the supplies and had turned for home. This was the kind of hitch that was doubly worrying to me. We had failed to arm our men and we were faced with the possibility that the Réseau† had been permeated by the enemy. It was necessary to check up as quickly as possible.

  The next day I sent a message to the Réseau leader to report fully on the hitch. We would probably be able to tell from the tone of t
he reply whether or not the Germans had rooted them out. The reply was not long in coming. The explanation was perfectly simple. Our men had arrived on the dropping ground to find another party of résistants already in control of it. Rather than risk the possibility of these men being agents provocateurs my men had withdrawn with all speed. The next day my Réseau chief made contact with the head of the Free French Réseau which was acting, of course, quite independently and the muddle had been cleared up at their end. I managed to get onto the Free French HQ in Dorset Square and put it to them that as our chaps had scouted out the dropping ground first it was only fair that we should have first use of it. De Gaulle would not concede this point at all and we were forced to come to an amicable arrangement about it without the General knowing.

  This kind of coincidence was inevitable and we found it rather amusing; what was less amusing was the effort necessary to sort it out. There was never any clash in the actual field of operations. In France all the various résistants did their best to co-operate as far as they could without infringing each other’s secrecy.

  The conflict between de Gaulle’s Réseau and ours was also a factor which had to be taken into account when we were planning operations in France. We did our best to turn these rivalries to good purpose and we hoped that the competitive element in our relations would lead each group to outdo the other. This may not have been the ideal way of running things, but it did make the best of conditions as they actually were. What liaison did exist between us at Baker Street and de Gaulle was conducted unofficially by individual officers whose tact and charm was the only weapon against jealousy and intransigence.

  Another executive headache was the fact that there was, in the first year or two, some confusion in the minds of my superiors about the exact role which they wanted SOE to play. At one moment they would doubt the value of having us exist at all, while at another they would ask of us much more than, at that time, we could possibly encompass. They demanded miracles and when we failed to work them they became disillusioned and sarcastic. Perhaps their scepticism as to our efficiency served a good purpose, for it spurred us on to fresh efforts.