They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  If at home there were problems, my task soon became clear as far as France itself was concerned. Co-ordination was a vital part of the sabotage picture. We had to convey and pass on information about targets, synchronising the attacks and briefing the different Réseaux about German dispositions. Then we had to plan the actual operations with a view to doing the maximum harm to the Germans while occasioning a minimum of reprisals against the civilian population. One of our ways of doing this, when aircraft became more readily available to us, was to arrange that the RAF should pass over a given target area at a given time so that the detonations which took place on the ground could be attributed to the aircraft which were flying over it. Strangely enough, the Germans would always co-operate in ascribing the damage to the bombers for this helped to hide from the French the presence of so active and powerful a resistance force in their midst.

  It might seem that the RAF could just as well have done the job if they had to be overhead anyway. The answer is that the men on the ground were able to be much more accurate (in spite of the RAF’s amazing precision) and so could cause more vital, though less widespread, damage. Apart from this, the RAF would in this way be able to do two jobs on the same night, one sham, one genuine.

  The actual planning of an operation, for example, the destruction of a power station, might be done in two ways: either we would construct a dummy replica of the station in this country and train a man or group of men especially for the mission, or we would pass the order, together with every detail we could discover about the lay-out, sentries and so forth, to a group already in the field. In the latter case, I would ensure nothing was omitted which might make the saboteur’s job easier; we might, for instance, arrange for a diversionary action in the same Kommandantur area, so that the German security forces would be split and indecisive. Speed was essential and our men were trained to get in and out before the Germans knew what had hit them. Large-scale operations were usually planned in London by our staff but there was also a good deal of individual enterprise on the part of the Réseaux chiefs who often had special knowledge of tempting targets.

  Planning combination also worked between men in the field and ourselves at Baker Street. Information was filtered to us through a series of post-boxes which took messages from Paris all the way down to the Spanish border, over the mountains and so to our various agents in neutral capitals. It would not be discreet for me to explain exactly how these worked. The messages reached us largely through the efforts of our men who carried them with them over the border. They might arrive some months after they were written but their strategic value would not necessarily be impaired. One such message came from a foreman at the airscrew factory at Figeac. It was a detailed explanation of how an attack could be mounted against the factory. There was a plan of the installations and an account of the security arrangements.

  I asked our planning officer to arrange for a large-scale replica of the factory to be made. Aerial photographs were used to supplement the foreman’s drawings. The replica was exact to the smallest detail and almost filled one of the rooms at our briefing flat at Orchard Court. One of the best men whom we had in training at that time, an agent who went under the name of Maxime,† was now brought in to be in charge of the operation. He had under him an explosives expert called Eustache.‡ These two would form the nucleus of a team whose other members would be recruited in France. Maxime and Eustache were taken over the whole lay-out and planned the best means of wrecking the plant. When they were thoroughly familiar with the whole lay-out and adept in the use of the plastic explosive they would be using we prepared to mount the mission. The foreman was alerted to stand by. The Réseau chief in the Figeac area was told to expect two ‘bods’.

  Maxime and Eustache dropped in the next moon period. Within two days they had met with the foreman and his gang who were all set to go. The foreman was able, through his friends in the factory, to smuggle Eustache and Maxime into a disused storeroom where they were able to lie up when the rest of the workers went home for the night. The factory was completely blacked out, of course, but their experience with the model now proved its value: Eustache and Maxime were able to move through the darkened factory with complete confidence. They made their rendezvous with the foreman who showed them exactly where their explosive would do the most damage – in fact on the valves which connected the power presses with the generating plant – and within minutes the charges were in place and the fuses set. Maxime and his men left the factory, led by the foreman. Half an hour later the charges went up. The mission was a complete success. It set the pattern for co-operation between planners at home and informants in the field. The pattern was followed many times subsequently.

  Rehearsals reached a very high standard. The LNER lent us several old engines and we had the use of a disused branch line in the Midlands where our railway saboteurs practised derailing and knocking out the old engines. A railway engine is a pretty hardy affair and it needs exact knowledge of where to put a charge of explosive if it is to be put out of service for good. LNER engineers provided that knowledge. We provided the explosives. In the end, the Germans had a large number of engines out of service.

  As the number of our agents – and of the Réseaux which they founded – increased from a meagre seven in 1941 to fifty by the middle of 1942 and 120 by June 1943, so we in Baker Street were able to plan more and more ambitious and destructive raids against the German supply machine. By February 1944, at the stage of some of our most important work, we had 200 agents in the field – many of them veterans of more than one tour of duty – all either in liaison with large sections of Maquisards or acting as wireless operators. On D-Day itself, there were 220 agents putting into effect the plans which we relayed to them from headquarters in Baker Street. In all, 480 active agents were employed by the French section of SOE. From uncertainty even as to its purpose, the section grew to be a confident and deadly fighting force.

  By the beginning of 1943 we had managed to organise ourselves in a manner which was to set the pattern for the duration of the war. We had our headquarters in Baker Street where all operations were planned and where intelligence was collated and filed and where new reports from agents in the field were received. We held our briefing sessions at a flat in Orchard Court, not far away. Here men who were about to be dropped into France were given the latest details about conditions, both generally and as they affected their own particular districts. It might be that a certain operator was suspected of working with the Germans. We would warn the outgoing agent and tell him in what circumstances he should take appropriate action to silence the man. This flat in Orchard Court was the one which contained the famous ‘black bathroom’.

  This bathroom contained a black tiled bath in which from time to time Peter Churchill might be found, fully clothed in the dry tub, his feet resting on the taps, doing The Times crossword.

  The Orchard Court flat was presided over by Park. Park had been a bank messenger in the Paris branch of the Westminster Bank and he had a prodigious memory. He knew every agent by his training pseudonym and made each one personally welcome when they arrived at the flat for briefing. His cheerful countenance was beloved by all the members of the French section and his tact was responsible for avoiding many awkward meetings between men who were not supposed to know each other’s appearance.

  We wanted to discourage our men from meeting each other in the field and the best way to do that was to see that they did not meet each other in England more than we could help. Park would spirit people from room to room in the nick of time. Of course people did meet each other and we were not silly about forbidding it – our agents were far too intelligent to need petty regulations of that kind; but there was one thing which was absolutely against orders, that was to tell anyone where one was going. There was a particular danger of this happening when two agents met in the flat and knew that they were due to be sent off at the same time. Park tried his best to stop them knowing this. In general he succeeded admira
bly, his tact and popularity enabling him to move people from briefing room to briefing room (and into the bathroom) with the agility of the characters in a French farce.

  No device of spy literature was used. There were no hollow fountain pens or detachable heels, for we thought them, on the whole, more trouble than they were worth. One man did ask for a suitcase with a false bottom. He was quite insistent that he could not go without it. I eventually conceded that he might have one but I was equally insistent about its use. ‘I don’t mind you having the case,’ I said, ‘but I forbid you absolutely to carry anything in it.’ The Abwehr were trained CID men. They would rumble a false bottomed suitcase in no time at all. It was no use having secret devices, for once they were discovered the game was up. It was much better to carry messages folded in a newspaper, for instance. In a tight spot the paper could be chucked away and no one would think anything of it. In principle, of course, nothing should have been written at all, but this was not always possible: one’s memory can only absorb so much.

  On the other hand, immense pains were taken to ensure that the agent looked to the very last detail the part he was supposed to be playing. This applied not only to the appearance but also, for instance, to a man’s accent. It is easy to speak perfect French and yet still retain traces of a foreign inflection. If this were so, we would account for the deviation by a Canadian background or a Belgian education or whatever was most appropriate in the cover story which the agent was given to learn.

  Once the agent was absolutely clear on the purpose and the background of his mission he would be passed on to an escorting officer who would stay with him until the very moment when he boarded the plane. This officer was responsible for making sure that no English cigarettes or money were slipped into a pocket at the last moment – for such a small lapse of memory could cost a life and wreck weeks of careful planning. For my part, I always made a practice of seeing each officer personally before he left and I always tried to have some memento to give to each one – a pair of cuff-links or a cigarette case or something of that sort – so that when he was alone in France he might be reminded of the fact that we at home cared about him and were thinking of him. I tried as often as my work at the office allowed, to accompany the men to the aerodrome, for this moment before take-off was the most upsetting to the nerves; it was then that melancholy or morbid presentiments could most easily assert themselves.

  One group had been trained for a raid against a munitions factory in the Lyons area. They were all keyed up and ready to go when, on the actual runway, the flight had to be cancelled. This was but the first of many cancellations. That particular group was doomed. Whenever they got to the aerodrome the weather would close in or something would prevent them from taking off. If they took off, then the reception committee would not show up and the aircraft would return with them still aboard. After three months, the leader of the group came to my office.

  ‘I am sorry, mon Colonel,’ he said, ‘but my men cannot go on with this mission. Their morale is gone.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes, well, I quite understand,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault. I’m glad you came and told me. Don’t blame yourselves.’

  I arranged for the men to be returned to their units. I meant what I said: it was no one’s fault. It was just one of those cases of waiting finally exhausting men’s patience and confidence.

  When the agent had finally gone, we could only wait to hear from the RAF that they had dropped him and eventually from the man himself that he was in contact with those whom he had been sent to meet.

  The messages from France came to a large country house which was situated near Sevenoaks in Kent. Over 500 men and women were stationed there whose business it was to send and receive wireless messages, working with agents in all the occupied European countries. Each operator in France had his own ‘godmother’ or ‘godfather’, usually the former (a FANY) at Sevenoaks. She would always be on duty when her own particular operator was due to come on the air. The FANY would take down the message and would be better able, by virtue of her knowledge of the agent’s ‘fist’, or morse technique, to detect any irregularities or impostures.

  If an agent was doing skeds at fixed times and was having no difficulty in adhering to them the FANY would come on duty about half an hour before the sked was due to begin and would set about listening to the wavelength on which her man might be expected, perhaps oscillating slightly from side to side in case something was slightly off beam. One does the same sort of thing when trying to get exactly on a station when tuning-in one’s radio at home. It was this need to tune-in which sometimes led a FANY to miss the very first part of a message, a section of the code call-sign for instance, and she would then have to make up for lost time and get down the rest of the message as best she could. At other times, only a fragment of a message would be audible at all, owing to interference. We always insisted on being sent the mutilated portion and we at headquarters would make what we could of it.

  It was this lack of precision which occasionally led us – and some other sections of SOE – to accept as genuine messages which were in fact German-controlled. It has been suggested that we should have known that an operator was warning us that he was being controlled by the Germans because he left out the first part of his call-sign; in other words, he gave his name (his code name, that is) as, for instance, Master instead of Buckmaster.

  Such mutilations were everyday occurrences; had we suspected all such minute deviations as indicative of attempts to warn us of German control we should have been quite hamstrung. Furthermore we should have had a large number of irate agents demanding to know why we ignored their messages and doubted their loyalty. Morale would have plummeted. In secret wireless work under far from perfect conditions, we were quite unable to ask for repetitions of doubtful passages and to employ all those aids to accuracy and checks of sources which are so easy in peacetime radio work.

  The FANY who had taken down the message had no idea of the meaning of the coded groups she had written down on her pad. She passed the encoded form, including any mutilated or incomplete groups exactly as she had written them, to the decoding officers. They worked in a separate wing of the same house. They decoded the groups of coded letters and passed them in sealed envelopes to a dispatch rider who signed for them. He then came as fast as he could to Baker Street and handed the envelopes to us.

  We did not like using the telephone, though at times when we were desperate for news of the outcome of some mission or anxious to know if a certain job of sabotage could be handled by the group we had contacted, we would use the ‘scrambler’ for added speed.

  I always insisted that the decoded groups were sent to me exactly as they had been taken down, regardless of any apparent ‘mistakes.’ The decoding officers started off, in the early days, by airing their skill at textual emendation; they changed words which ‘obviously’ should have been different. For instance, the message as they had decoded it might read ‘HAVE PREPARED ONION WITH GASNOT.’ The decoding officer, in an excess of scholarly zeal, would interpret this as, ‘HAVE PREPARED UNION WITH GASTON.’ Now while he was probably right to put GASTON for GASNOT it might be that UNION for ONION was totally wrong ONION might be a code name for a particular operation or a dropping ground, of which the decoding officer knew nothing. At Baker Street we would be flabbergasted.

  ‘What the hell is Armand doing ‘preparing union with Gaston?’ I would say. ‘We told him Gaston was no good. He was supposed to make everyone sever contact with him.’

  We would then check back and Vera Atkins would find that severing contact with Gaston was to have been known as operation ONION. We would have to check back with our decoding officer and then we would find that it had been ONION all along. Nerves were frayed and time was lost. If the situation were more complex, it might take hours to unravel and hours were precious. We might even have to refer back to the agent on his next sked. He would then lose
confidence in our ability to understand his code and become jittery and unsure of himself and of us. Therefore I insisted that all messages, however ridiculous they might superficially appear, should be sent to us at headquarters exactly as they had been taken down. The decoding officer was very firmly discouraged from using his wits.

  As a result of this, messages used to come to us which appeared to be totally and irrevocably indecipherable, even though they were in fact ‘in clear,’ i.e. decoded. They should have been ready to read. Instead they might look like this (a simple example):

  IMI THMRY SAYG ABLE TAKE TWHGVE CONTTTN?S G??U?D AFFLY BBR MASSAGE MIEUW TORT KUE???IIS.

  The question marks indicated letters the operator had been unable to take down.

  Now for the interpretation: IMI was a code device showing that a request was being made. The rest of the message could be read off by us at Baker Street to the following effect:

  IMI TOMMY SAYS ABLE TAKE TWELVE CONTAINERS GROUND APPLE BBC MESSAGE MIEUX TARD QUE JAMAIS.

  The last part is, of course, a French phrase meaning, ‘Better late than never,’ and it was the phrase which our man wanted the BBC French service to broadcast when the operation was about to be undertaken. You can see that there are several places where the decoding officer could have gone wrong – he might have taken AFFLY to be APPLY, not realising that we had given various dropping grounds in a certain area the names of fruits. As a result of this, he might then change the last part of the message to accord with the ‘correction’ he thought he had already made. Chaos would follow. Equally, BBR MASSAGE might have been intended to be read as just that, in which case a correction to BBC MESSAGE would have given quite the wrong sense to us who were ‘in the know’.