Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The relationship between MI6 and Dutch intelligence officials, which at times had been extremely hostile, also showed considerable improvement. Like SOE, MI6 officers began treating their Dutch counterparts more like partners than like useless subordinates. These partnerships, as Giskes admitted, resulted in “a highly efficient espionage organization, possessing good courier lines and numerous radio links between Holland and England. We never succeeded in destroying or even seriously weakening this operation.” Its value was reflected in the greatly increased quantity and quality of intelligence reports from Holland. From 1940 until late 1943, only sixty-eight had been sent; from then until the end of the war, there were more than ten thousand.

  After years of frustration and betrayal, the Dutch resistance movement was enjoying a period of explosive growth, stimulated primarily by Germany’s compulsory labor program. Just as in France and elsewhere in occupied Europe, tens of thousands of young Dutch citizens went into hiding rather than comply with orders to work as forced laborers in German factories and agriculture.

  Throughout the country, German security forces conducted what the Dutch called razzias—door-to-door searches to root out the young evaders, who came to be known as “underdivers.” During the razzias, the Germans kicked down doors and shot through floors and into walls and wardrobes. When they found underdivers, they often killed them and whoever was sheltering them on the spot.

  In response to the razzias, a group known as the National Organization for Assistance to People in Hiding sprang up across the country. Known as LO, it soon became the largest resistance organization in Holland. At first, its main goal was to protect underdivers and find hiding places for them. But it soon broadened its focus, working to shelter members of other groups hunted by the Nazis, including Jews, downed Allied airmen, and resistance fighters.

  LO’s work included the moving of those under its care from cities to more sparsely settled, safer agricultural areas, as well as collecting money, food, and clothing for its charges. It created its own teams of forgers, responsible for creating false identity papers and food rationing coupons. It also organized small assault bands to raid official food distribution centers. Some of the groups went on to engage in actual sabotage, destroying railroad tracks and munition dumps and cutting telegraph lines.

  Despite heavy casualties, LO expanded rapidly, as did several other Dutch resistance organizations. By 1944, virtually every town of any size had at least one such group. In a report to the German high command in Holland, local officials across the country said that, in their opinion, the Dutch population would actively support Allied troops in the event of an invasion. “To a greater extent than ever before, hatred of the Germans had taken hold of the Dutch people, and Dutch and Germans faced each other as belligerents committed to fight to the finish,” the historian Werner Warmbrunn noted.

  Among the mushrooming number of resistance members was a thirteen-year-old aspiring ballerina named Audrey Kathleen Ruston, later to be known to the world as Audrey Hepburn, who lived with her mother and brothers in the resort town of Arnhem. The future movie star was intimately acquainted with the underdiver phenomenon. Her older brother was an underdiver himself, having escaped the razzias to join the underground. Her younger brother was not so fortunate: caught by the Nazis, he was sent to work in a munitions factory in Berlin. Audrey herself worked as an occasional courier for the resistance.

  —

  UNTIL LATE 1943, MEMBERS of the Belgian underground found themselves mired in troubles strikingly similar to those afflicting their Dutch counterparts. Like N Section, SOE’s Belgian section had been headed by amateurs who knew little or nothing about clandestine warfare, among them Hardy Amies, who later became Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite fashion designer.

  As in the Netherlands, the Abwehr in Belgium was able to play back the wireless sets of several SOE operators it had captured, allowing the Germans to mount a successful counterespionage campaign that snagged a dozen or so additional London-sent agents, as well as large caches of weapons and explosives. The Abwehr also penetrated several intelligence networks controlled by MI6 and rounded up resistance members affiliated with those operations.

  The German infiltration of SOE and MI6 operations in Belgium was discovered in 1942, but neither recovered until 1943, when the two British agencies instituted the same kind of drastic reforms in Belgium that had worked in Holland. At the same time, the Belgian resistance movement exploded in size, again spurred by Germany’s plan for forced labor conscription. By early 1944, many thousands of labor evaders had joined the resistance.

  “In parts of Belgium, conditions verged on civil war,” Hermann Giskes reported. “The number of ambushes, attacks and incidents involving use of explosives by the Belgian underground increased slowly but steadily….Any [German] who was known to be engaged in intelligence work against the enemy or working against its agents could expect to receive a salvo of machine gun bullets round every corner. Bloody frays in which Abwehr officers and other [German security] officials were shot to bits increased in number and forced us to take additional security measures.”

  —

  IN FRANCE, THE SITUATION was murkier. While SOE-run resistance groups thrived in the south, life was harder in the north, thanks to the collapse of Prosper and other networks there. Unlike SOE’s Dutch and Belgian departments, no changes were made in the leadership of F Section, and Maurice Buckmaster, despite many warnings, continued unknowingly to dispatch new operatives to German-run networks until May 1944, less than a month before D-Day.

  In February 1944, new allegations of treachery were made against Henri Déricourt, and Buckmaster was forced to bring him back to London for interrogation. When questioned about his dealings with the Germans in Paris, Déricourt, according to one witness, replied, “Well, of course, I have to cooperate with the Germans and give them some black market oranges from Spain and be friendly toward them, so that I can get on with my work for you.”

  Inexplicably, the investigators cleared Déricourt of any wrongdoing, although they did bar him from any further participation in SOE operations. As one observer put it, Déricourt “had powerful protectors in London,” among whom were Buckmaster and his deputy, Nicholas Bodington. Free to go, he transferred to the Free French, for whom he flew reconnaissance missions until the end of the war. “There was no shadow of a doubt that he was a traitor,” Francis Cammaerts later observed, “and he never paid for it properly.”

  The German deception campaign in France had run its course by D-Day, and Hitler himself had the idea of sending a message to F Section boasting of its success. “We thank you for the large deliveries of arms and ammunitions which you have been kind enough to send us,” said the cable, signed by the Gestapo. “We also appreciate the many tips you have given us regarding your plans and intentions which we have carefully noted.” Unfortunately, it added, “certain of the agents have had to be shot.”

  Although a few SOE operatives survived and continued to operate in the north, they and the resistance fighters with whom they worked would play a relatively small part in the D-Day landings and the ensuing offensive. In the south, where resistance had infected much of the population, it was a far different story.

  Francis Cammaerts discovered that for himself when he returned to France in February 1944 after spending several weeks in England. The RAF plane in which he was flying was shot down over the Drôme Valley, in the southeast, near the French Alps, and Cammaerts parachuted out, landing near a farmhouse. A few months earlier, he might have been wary about approaching an unknown house for fear of being turned in to the Germans. Now, however, “I knew that…nine out of ten people would welcome me with open arms, one out of ten might be frightened and send me away, and one in a thousand would ring up the police.” He walked up to the farmhouse and knocked on the door. The farmer who opened it exclaimed, “Oh, you’re an airman!” Ushering Cammaerts in, he shouted to his wife, “Go and get the wine out! We’ll make him an omelet!”


  Like giant spiderwebs, several SOE sabotage networks, each made up of hundreds of resistance fighters, crisscrossed the region. In the southeast, there were Cammaerts’s Jockey circuit and Tony Brooks’s Pimento group. To the west, George Starr, a former mining engineer, ran Wheelwright, and, in the area around Bordeaux, Roger Landes, an ex–land surveyor, was in charge of Actor. In early 1944, several new circuits were created in the south by veteran SOE agents transferred to France from other posts.

  For all of them, the D-Day assignment would be the same: prevent enemy reinforcements from reaching the landing areas by destroying all forms of German transportation and communication. But, extensive as the circuits had become, they faced a major difficulty in preparing for their mission: none of them had been provided with enough arms and explosives. In late 1943 and early 1944, more than 150 reception committees throughout France stood by each month for munitions drops, but fewer than ten operations were actually carried out. Spurred on by MI6, RAF officials had insisted that they could not spare planes from bombing raids.

  As D-Day loomed, the morale of the resistance fighters and their SOE organizers plummeted. How could they possibly have an impact on the outcome if they had no means of doing so? In January 1944, two men—a fiery French resistance leader and a rebellious SOE officer—separately decided they’d had enough of British bureaucratic stonewalling. Each of them went straight to the one man who could transform the situation in an instant: Winston Churchill himself.

  “Without Churchill, there was nothing to be done,” noted the Frenchman—Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, the forty-four-year-old head of the Libération-Sud movement. “English secret services wanted to treat the French uprising as if it did not exist. Popular struggle meant nothing to them.”

  Astier was a charismatic, romantic figure, just the type to appeal to Churchill, who later described him to FDR as “a man of the Scarlet Pimpernel type.” Astier felt the same about Churchill. “Like de Gaulle,” he later wrote, “Churchill was a hero out of the Iliad, the lone and jealous governor of the British war effort.”

  In his meeting with the prime minister, Astier spun stories of the thousands of maquis in his movement who were desperate to fight Germans but had no arms or ammunition. Churchill was enthralled. “Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy,” he declared, “and it [is] right that we should do all in our power to foster and stimulate so valuable an aid to Allied strategy.”

  Now that Astier had Churchill on the hook, it was up to SOE agent Forest Yeo-Thomas to reel him in. Like the Frenchman, Yeo-Thomas, who worked in SOE’s RF Section, had much in common with Churchill: he was volatile, impetuous, physically courageous, obstinate, often unruly—and, most important, a passionate lover of France.

  Born into an English family with extensive business interests in France, Yeo-Thomas, who was known as Tommy, had spent much of his life there. Before the war, he had worked as general manager of Molyneux, one of Paris’s most noted fashion houses. Following a brief wartime stint in the RAF, he had joined SOE.

  “After Churchill, the man Tommy most admired was de Gaulle,” said Leo Marks, a close friend of Yeo-Thomas’s. “To his superiors’ astonishment, he was able to criticize the Free French to their faces without causing a national temper tantrum and was the only Englishman actually welcomed” at de Gaulle’s headquarters. According to Marks, Yeo-Thomas refused to obey SOE regulations forbidding officers of different country sections from exchanging information. “Tommy was always prepared to compare notes on the Gestapo…with anyone in SOE of whatever nationality.”

  In early January 1944, Yeo-Thomas vented his fury over the resistance fighters’ lack of arms in a series of meetings with officials from various British ministries. “Our present puny efforts are as likely to succeed as a man trying to fill a swimming pool with a fountain pen filler,” he stormed to Air Ministry higher-ups. With them, as with everyone else he met in Whitehall, he got nowhere.

  On February 1, two days after Astier’s meeting with Churchill, Yeo-Thomas managed to wangle an appointment with him as well. The prime minister gave him five minutes to make his case, then listened to him for more than an hour. Again Churchill was treated to riveting tales of men and women who risked torture and death to “carry messages through the crowded, police-ridden streets of Paris and to wait for agents to land in the windy wilderness of central France.” In his presentation, Yeo-Thomas emphasized the resisters’ appalling lack of arms and the desperate need for hundreds more RAF supply flights to make up the shortfall.

  When Yeo-Thomas finished, Churchill remarked with a slight smile, “You have chosen an unorthodox way of doing things, and you have short-circuited official channels. It might mean trouble for you, but I shall see that no such thing happens.” He ordered the Air Ministry to supply SOE with at least a hundred aircraft capable of carrying out 250 missions over France each month. Almost overnight, the arming of the French resistance had become a top British priority.

  Throughout the next four months, RAF bombers regularly swooped over drop zones in France, parachuting more than three thousand tons of arms and supplies to resistance fighters waiting below. The planes also brought in dozens more SOE radio operators and organizers to help mold the maquis into an effective fighting force.

  At the same time, Churchill put a definitive end to MI6’s ceaseless efforts to obstruct SOE. He was responding to yet another complaint by Stewart Menzies that the campaign to arm the French resistance was diverting aircraft from his own intelligence operations. In addition, Claude Dansey had submitted a memo suggesting that SOE had greatly exaggerated the strength of the underground in France and that fewer than two thousand resisters were likely to take up arms against their occupiers. Impatient with all the bureacratic games being played, Churchill issued a statement of unequivocal support for SOE. Menzies and Dansey finally got the message: there was to be no more talk of abolishing SOE or handing it over to MI6.

  With the infusion of arms and ammunition, the French resistance groups stepped up their sabotage efforts. Francis Cammaerts’s and Tony Brooks’s networks blew up trains, railway tracks, turntables, and locomotive sheds. So did the groups run by Roger Landes and George Starr. SOE circuits also destroyed hydroelectric plants, cut phone and power lines, and ambushed German military units. “From January 1944, the state of affairs in southern France became so dangerous that all commanders reported a general revolt,” Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt recalled. “The lives of German troops there were seriously menaced and became a doubtful proposition.” He added, “It was impossible to dispatch single members of the Wehrmacht, ambulances, couriers, or supply columns without armed protection.”

  The Germans, who now viewed the maquis as a genuine military threat, moved strong reinforcements into southern France, including Gestapo squads and several Waffen-SS regiments, which ranked among the Reich’s most fearsome military units. “By now, France was a furnace,” Philippe de Vomécourt observed. “Everyone knew that D-Day was imminent. The Germans were killing indiscriminately in an attempt to wipe out the Resistance.”

  In a report to London in March 1944, Cammaerts wrote, “These are very difficult days. The Germans are attacking everybody, even those who are only slightly suspect. A reign of terror [exists], with farms burnt, shootings, and hangings. In centers where resistance is strong, there is a state of siege.” Cammaerts himself had a bounty of 3 million francs on his head.

  The vicious German reprisals added to a major new difficulty facing Cammaerts and other SOE organizers: how to keep their increasingly restless fighters under control. After waiting months for the invasion to take place, the maquis began to question whether it would ever happen. Those in charge worried that their underlings might decide to take matters into their own hands.

  At the same time, concerns were mounting in London about the effectiveness of the resistance groups once the Allied assault began. The most skeptical were the Allied military commanders, who never
had put much faith in the usefulness of these unconventionally trained partisans.

  “No one man could know, either in London or in France, just how many men there were, how strong they were, how well they would perform as individual units,” Philippe de Vomécourt observed. “It was not, and never could be, disposed like a trained and well-organized regular army. But what we did know, and what we were to prove, was that however untidy and irregular the underground forces might be, they were more single-minded in their courage and resolution than any regular army could ever be.”

  * * *

  * He wasn’t joking.

  On February 22, 1944, three weeks after his decision to arm French resistance fighters, Winston Churchill appeared before the House of Commons to make a major announcement. Among the many spectators who crowded into the visitors’ gallery to hear him was Jan Nowak, a twenty-nine-year-old member of the Polish resistance. Nowak, who had organized the underground’s radio network in Poland, had been dispatched by Home Army commanders to London several months before, carrying with him reports documenting German atrocities in Poland, including detailed evidence about the extermination of Jews in Nazi death camps.

  Like many if not most of his compatriots, Nowak idolized Churchill. Poles, he later observed, “lived by faith in the Allies, in Churchill and Roosevelt.” To a devastated people struggling to survive the savagery of German occupation, the United States and Britain were the embodiment of “the ideals of justice, truth, and freedom.” Yet once Nowak heard what Churchill had to say that day, his trust in the Allies and what they represented gave way to bitter disillusion.

  Six weeks earlier, Soviet forces, having pushed the Germans out of Russia and now surging west toward Germany, had crossed the border of prewar eastern Poland, reentering the Polish lands they had seized in September 1939. In his speech to the House, Churchill had announced that Britain supported Stalin’s intention to keep that territory once the war was over.