Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The Germans’ Englandspiel triumph also eviscerated the Dutch resistance movement itself. Scattered remnants continued to operate, but without weapons and effective direction, there was little they could accomplish. “The attempt of the Allied secret services to gain a foothold in Holland had been delayed by two years,” Giskes noted in his postwar memoirs. “The establishment of armed sabotage and terror organizations, which might have…crippled our defenses at the critical moment of invasion, had been prevented.”

  After the war, rumors swirled in Holland that the Englandspiel disaster was, in fact, the work of a traitor in SOE’s N Section or perhaps a deliberate sacrifice of Dutch agents by the British to mislead the Germans about a possible Allied invasion of the Netherlands. Despite all the astonishing wartime blunders made by SOE and MI6, the myth of the infallibility of the British secret services continued to hold sway in Holland, as it did in much of the rest of the world. For many, it was simply impossible to fathom how the devastation caused by das Englandspiel could have been the result of stupidity and ineptness.

  The British response to an investigation of das Englandspiel by the Dutch government four years after the war’s end muddied the story even further. When a parliamentary commission from Holland arrived in London in October 1949 to begin its inquiry, MI6, which had been made the custodian of SOE wartime records, claimed that most of the N Section archives no longer existed. Indeed, those reports—along with many other SOE records that, according to one agency operative, were “time bombs waiting to explode”—had been destroyed in a mysterious fire in early 1946. Among the missing papers were lengthy postwar reports by Leo Marks about das Englandspiel and N Section’s overall dismal performance in the first three years of the war. “I’d worked too long for SOE to believe that the fire was accidental,” Marks said years later. His was a belief shared by many former colleagues.

  Stymied in its quest for written evidence about what had really happened, the Dutch investigating commission was also allowed little formal access to SOE and MI6 officials who’d been involved with secret operations in Holland. Richard Laming, N Section’s hapless first chief, was the only former official who provided official testimony, which largely consisted of explaining the intricacies of Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Off the record, several ex-SOE officials, including Colin Gubbins, agreed to meet with the commission; all denied that SOE had had any part in Germany’s highly successful roundup of its agents in Holland.

  The Dutch commission declared in its final report that “errors of judgment” had been responsible for das Englandspiel—“errors” that some in the British government had done their best to keep secret during and after the war. The commission added that no evidence existed for charges of “treachery on either the British or Netherlands side.” As the British historian M.R.D. Foot put it, “The truth is more mundane: the agents were victims of sound police work on the German side, assisted by…incompetence in London.”

  In 1943, as it happened, that same sorry scenario was playing out in France, with far more serious implications.

  In early 1943, Leo Marks was preoccupied with the disastrous situation in Holland and could think of little else. But on a cold, gray afternoon in February, he forced himself to preside over a final coding session with a problem agent who was due to go to France the following month.

  Few people at SOE had anything good to say about twenty-six-year-old Francis Cammaerts. His instructors acknowledged that he was highly intelligent but complained that he had no flair for subversion or leadership—major problems for someone assigned to organize and head a sabotage network in France. “Rather lacking in dash,” read the final report on Cammaerts. “He lacks drive and has a somewhat negative personality.” According to his coding instructor, he was “a plodder who does his best to follow instructions but seems unable to grasp the basic principles.”

  Having read Cammaerts’s lackluster file, Marks resolved to spend as little time with him as possible. But soon after entering the briefing room, he changed his mind. The fair-haired, extraordinarily tall Cammaerts “wasn’t plodding at all,” Marks concluded. In fact, he was much like Marks himself—passionate, skeptical, and fiercely independent—traits unappreciated by the SOE brass, as Marks knew from personal experience.

  Cammaerts’s reputation as a plodder, Marks observed, stemmed from his refusal to accept anything at face value. He tested “the logic of it all…taking nothing and no one for granted, least of all his various instructors,” Marks added. SOE’s codes chief left his session with Cammaerts “feeling very sorry for anyone who made the mistake of writing this man off.”

  Francis Cammaerts

  Marks’s evaluation turned out to be exactly right. Francis Cammaerts would become one of the most successful SOE agents operating in western Europe during the war. The son of a noted Belgian poet and a British actress, he had been born and raised in England. Like many others his age, he had been appalled by the senseless slaughter of the Great War. He had become a pacifist while at Cambridge and was teaching history at a small, innovative grammar school in southeast London when World War II broke out. After registering as a conscientious objector, he was assigned to work as a laborer at a farming commune in eastern England.

  In 1942, Cammaerts’s younger brother, Pieter, was killed in a RAF bombing mission over Germany. Shattered by his brother’s death, Francis decided that although he still believed in the general idea of pacifism, he must get involved in this war. Through a friend, he was put in touch with SOE.

  From the beginning, he, like Marks, was bemused by the slapdash, careless nature of the place. Although the need for secrecy was endlessly preached, files were left open on desks, and agents who were supposed to be kept apart for security reasons were constantly bumping into one another. Convinced that he and his colleagues were not being given adequate training to match wits with the enemy, Cammaerts later remarked, “I never believed that we amateurs could play clever buggers with the German security services; they were the pros.”

  Even more dismaying to him was the chaos of SOE’s French operations at a time when D-Day planners, in a top secret decision, had chosen the Normandy coast as the epicenter of the invasion of Europe. France’s resistance movement was thus slated to play an important part in the initial stages of liberating the Continent, hindering German troop movements by sabotaging power supplies, bridges, railways, roads, arms dumps, and communications.

  The invasion’s planners envisioned the resistance effort as a unified, coordinated campaign. But where France was concerned, SOE was as divided as it could possibly be, thanks largely to the contentious relationship between the British government and de Gaulle’s Free French. Whereas other countries had one SOE section in London to direct their resistance activities, France had six, only two of which—F and RF sections—would, in the end, play significant roles. F Section had been created in late 1940 after the Foreign Office, at Churchill’s behest, had instructed SOE to operate in France without Free French participation, in an effort to appease anti-German, anti–de Gaulle elements in the Vichy government. Most of its agents were French-speaking British subjects, with a sprinkling of other nationalities, including Americans and Canadians. De Gaulle, who was not supposed to know about F Section’s existence, quickly found out about it and protested that the creation of British-run resistance networks in France infringed the sovereignty of his country.

  In addition to further poisoning the British–Free French relationship, de Gaulle’s exclusion from SOE activities was anathema in French noncommunist resistance circles, which were already beginning to rally around the general as their leader. To mollify them and de Gaulle, SOE created RF [Republique Française] Section, a British-staffed department that worked with de Gaulle’s intelligence and sabotage operations. Its job was to supply money, transportation, weapons, and communications equipment to agents recruited and trained by the Free French. But this did not make de Gaulle happy either. Intensely resentful of his dependence on the
British, he hated the fact that SOE officials could veto his agents’ orders and had control over Free French communications with France.

  Adding to his anger were efforts by F Section and MI6 to recruit prospective agents from the growing tide of young Frenchmen coming to Britain to join the general’s forces. During the war, all new arrivals from Europe and elsewhere had to undergo questioning by British security services at an interrogation center in southwest London. As a result, those services could sweep up the most promising potential agents for themselves before de Gaulle’s men had a chance to contact them.

  With all these feuds and rivalries, it’s hardly surprising that there was fierce internecine warfare between the Free French and SOE, as well as within the agency’s French sections. At one point, according to Leo Marks, RF Section officers and their Free French counterparts were not allowed to speak to each other and had to meet in safe houses as if they were in France. Infuriated by all the bureaucratic jealousy and intrigue, one RF agent exclaimed to Marks, “I can tell you what [this war in SOE] is not about. It’s not about killing Germans or helping agents to survive or shortening the war, though that’s what they all pretend it is.”

  —

  ORGANIZED EARLIER THAN ITS Free French counterpart, F Section still got off to a slow start. Its first agents were not sent to France until the spring of 1941, and their numbers were not significant until the summer of 1942. Even then neither they nor RF’s agents had been able to accomplish much by early 1943. After the war, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Germany’s supreme army commander in the west, noted that “during the year 1942, the underground movement in France was still confined to bearable limits. Murders and attacks on members of the Wehrmacht, as well as sabotage, were common, and trains were frequently derailed. A real danger for the German troops and real obstruction of troop movements did not, however, exist.”

  Like N Section in Holland, F Section was pressured hard by the SOE brass to accelerate its efforts. It resembled the Dutch operation, too, in the weakness of its London-based staff members, particularly those at the top. Its head, Maurice Buckmaster, was an Eton-educated businessman with no training or experience in clandestine warfare. A senior manager of Ford Motor Company in France before the war, he was recruited by SOE because of his knowledge of French industry. Tall and genial, the forty-one-year-old Buckmaster “brought the optimism of a sales director into Baker Street,” said a colleague. No one seemed to know why or how he had been selected to lead one of the agency’s most important sections. Colin Gubbins later acknowledged that Buckmaster had gotten the job because “there was nobody else.”

  According to Philippe de Vomécourt, one of the relatively few native French agents in F Section, Buckmaster was a remote department head, unable to comprehend the “fears and excitements of those who worked in the field.” He also left much to be desired as a leader. “He was not firm enough in his orders to us—leaving dangerous doubts in our minds about who was responsible and who was subordinate in the field,” noted de Vomécourt, an aristocrat who built up a key sabotage network in south-central France. “And he was not determined enough in fighting his superiors on our behalf. He was too readily submissive to higher ranks.”

  De Vomécourt, who was described by an SOE official as “one of the most exceptional men ever to go into the field,” also faulted Buckmaster for the poor quality of some of the agents he dispatched: “those whose French accents were so bad that they were a danger to themselves and to those with whom they worked.” Under severe pressure to send over an ever-increasing number of operatives, Buckmaster “lowered his standards to recruit men and women who really did not possess all the necessary qualities and qualifications for the work.”

  Adding to the problem, in de Vomécourt’s view, was Buckmaster’s and F Section’s dangerous lack of understanding of the conditions in occupied France: “the all-important details of existence, a knowledge of which might mean the difference between life and death.”

  —

  WHEN FRANCIS CAMMAERTS LANDED in France on March 22, 1943, he felt like Alice on the other side of the looking glass. Compared to this strange new world, the bureaucratic warfare in London seemed like child’s play.

  France was now a much more dangerous place than in the first years of the war. The discipline and politeness of its German occupiers had long since vanished. With the Allied triumphs in North Africa and at Stalingrad, the Reich, once seemingly omnipotent, was now under threat and on the defensive, which made life even more perilous and menacing for those under its thumb.

  Eight months before Cammaerts arrived, the SS in France had wrested control of policing and security from the German military, and it had immediately set out to destroy the increasingly audacious French resistance movement. “If there had been any bridle upon the terror before 1943, it was swept away now,” recalled de Vomécourt.

  In its first year after taking control, the SS and French police arrested some 16,000 resistance members, many of whom were tortured and put to death. Also taking part in the purge was a brutal new French paramilitary force called the Milice, whose members, according to Vomécourt, were “almost to a man, thugs on the make.”

  When Cammaerts arrived, one of his first assignments was to check out the security and effectiveness of a large F Section network called Carte, whose territory covered much of southeastern France, including Provence and the French Riviera. From the moment he landed on French soil, an hour’s car drive away from Paris, he was horrified by Carte’s egregious indifference to safety. Met by a reception committee of five young Frenchmen late at night, he was bundled into a car and driven to Paris, which was under a strict nighttime curfew. “There appeared to be very little security consciousness in [the Frenchmen’s] chatter,” he recalled. “My whole reception couldn’t have felt more insecure [and] dangerous.”

  Once in Paris, Cammaerts was taken to the apartment of a Frenchman who was a key member of Carte. Following several hours of discussion, he left for a safe house after making plans to meet the Frenchman again the following morning. But when he returned, he found that his contact had been arrested by the Gestapo. Leaving Paris immediately, Cammaerts, posing as a French citizen, traveled southeast by bus to the tiny village of Saint-Jorioz, some sixty miles from Lyon.

  In this beautiful setting, surrounded by the snow-covered peaks of the French Alps, several F Section officers, acting as organizers for Carte, had set up an ad hoc headquarters. When Cammaerts arrived in Saint-Jorioz, his concerns increased when “five or six young men, looking not a jot like the villagers, got off when I did and made straight for a nearby villa” where Carte members congregated. The house “was public,” he recalled, “far from silent, full of mysterious comings and goings, unsafe.”

  As Cammaerts knew, the avoidance of any kind of central gathering place was a cardinal rule of clandestine work. He quickly concluded that Carte was a shambles, lacking any sense of security or organizational rigor. “That kind of stupidity, to my mind, was unpardonable,” he later said. “Lots of people lost their lives because of it.” Concluding that the network was beyond repair, he decided to move on and set up a group of his own elsewhere. Weeks later, the Germans descended on Saint-Jorioz, arrested Carte’s SOE liaison officers, and rolled up the network.

  Cammaerts, meanwhile, traveled to the verdant Rhône Valley, noted for its Roman ruins and hillside vineyards, where he began to create what was to be code-named the Jockey network. Traveling by bicycle, on foot, and only infrequently by car or bus, the tall, gangling young agent covered hundreds of miles and reached out to scores of farmers, tradesmen, mechanics, grocers, teachers, and other residents of southeast France, many of whom joined him in the fight. Within a few months, he had organized about fifty small groups to be trained in sabotage techniques; he also set up drop zones for weapons, explosives, and other supplies from Britain.

  Cammaerts, it turned out, had an instinctive talent for covert operations. Unlike many of his SOE colleagues, he was ext
remely security-conscious. Adopting methods long used by communist organizers and resistance fighters, he established cells of no more than fifteen men; each cell was to have minimal contact with the others. To join a cell, a new member had to be recommended by someone already in it.

  Members of the network were given other strict rules. The use of telephones was forbidden, as was carrying written messages or reports on one’s person. Agents were not to sleep in the same place more than two or three nights in a row, and they were not to gather in the same spot. They were to avoid spending nights in hotels and boardinghouses as much as possible, because anyone staying in them had to fill out a detailed registration form, which the Germans could easily acquire. If one member of a cell was arrested, its other members must immediately change locations.

  Above all, no one was to divulge his or her real identity—a rule that Cammaerts himself religiously followed. “From the moment of landing in France, for my own good, but especially for the safety of anyone I came in contact with, no one would ever know my real name,” he recalled. His code name was “Roger.”

  In the course of organizing his network, Cammaerts formed an extraordinary bond not only with the members of his groups but with the hundreds of ordinary French citizens—men, women, and children—who sheltered, clothed, and fed him during his eighteen months in the country. As he traveled throughout the region, he was passed from one family to another, putting his life in their hands while risking theirs.

  There were hundreds of thousands of these caregivers all over France—people who never carried a gun or threw a grenade but whose willingness to provide safe houses for those who did made them invaluable members of the resistance. “Without any of the vainglorious conceit that characterized some of the self-styled ‘chefs,’ and with no thought of reward or glory, they had placed their homes at our disposal…thereby endangering their lives far more than any member of an armed maquis band,” noted Xan Fielding, an SOE officer who worked closely with Cammaerts.