11
Vera's First Mission in an Open War
Vera left for Poland again six days before its invasion. A Left Wing team was hastily put together by Gubby, equipped with secret service communications gear and self-invented as Military Mission No. 4 (MM-4) to prevent interference from the Well-Bred Horse Brigade, led by a prime minister still worried about provoking Hitler. Young army officers squashed their uniforms into suitcases and wore business suits. “They looked like traveling salesmen,” Vera recalled. “I had no clothing problems. I was just a humble secretary-translator.”
MM-4 could not cut directly through Europe, nor go through Scandinavia. It had no official existence. If exposed, it would be plausibly denied. Gubby had been told to “inspire confidence among the Polish General Staff” even while Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence was instructed by the chiefs of staff that “no priority is to be given to relieving pressure on Poland.” It looked to Vera as if exponents of irregular warfare were intended to be discredited by the failure of this impossible mission. The chiefs of staff were on record as lamenting “underhand methods” that challenged their highly conservative authority.
Waiting in Warsaw was the intransigent one-eyed, one-armed General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. He had spent years in Poland and had formed a nucleus of war emergency “stay-behind parties” made up of locally based British businessmen and British embassy specialists. All that MM-4 had to do was find a way to reach him.
On August 24, 1939, Vera joined the MM-4 team in Paris to board a regular passenger train for Marseilles, where a British warship was waiting for them. Five on the team came from a Polish military mission already in London. Traveling through France, Vera saw it was on a war footing, in startling contrast to the unruffled calm in England. Emergency French troop trains took priority over other rail traffic. This meant that Vera's train was sidetracked so often that it reached Marseilles thirty-six hours late. The captain of the waiting British cruiser HMS Shropshire had been told nothing about this scruffy little band of thirty civilians except that they must be deposited in Egypt. For the captain, it was more important to get his bigger cargo of colonial officials, plus wives, to British India. He came close to sailing without the mission. MM-4's quarters were so cramped that only Vera and two senior officers had cabins. The others slept on deck. The Poles huddled with secret papers in an open lifeboat, looking glum.
In this last week of peace, Sidney Cotton flew for the bogus company set up in Paris, and waited on the runway at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the two engines of his Lockheed Electra running. He had been told that Air Marshal Hermann Göring was joining him to fly to London and discuss peace with Chamberlain. Suddenly a car screamed alongside and Luftwaffe officers jumped out and waggled the plane's wing flaps to catch the pilot's attention. Cotton opened a side door. A Luftwaffe pilot, who knew that Cotton, though in civilian clothes, was also in the RAF, shouted a fraternal warning. Göring was not coming. The secret police were. Cotton took straight off without bothering to turn into the wind. Göring had never intended to fly to London. His peace mission was another trick to deceive the British. Dirty tricks set the tone of Hitler's foreign policy, and dirty tricks were to launch the war with a deception the Nazis code-named Canned Goods. It was anticipated by Elizabeth Wiskemann, a British journalist in Berlin, but her warning was not taken seriously in London. She would later serve as an agent in Switzerland.
Hitler telegraphed the Duke of Windsor, now in Paris: “It depends on Britain whether my wishes for the future development of German-British relations can be realized.” The duke wired Hitler on Sunday, August 27, assuring him of Britain's peaceful intent.
On Friday, September 1, 1939, Churchill, out of office and out of favor, got a call from Gubby's friend the Polish ambassador in London, Count Raczynski. The Germans had invaded Poland.
Rebels against Prime Minister Chamberlain now included some within his own cabinet, who burst into 10 Downing Street during a violent thunderstorm on the evening of September 2 and announced that they would not leave until Chamberlain swore to abandon all thought of negotiating with Hitler. It was midnight before the rebels, numbering seven or eight, got the Umbrella Man to see things their way.
Nine hours later, Chamberlain's ultimatum was sent to Berlin: If Germany did not halt its attack on Poland by noon, London time, Britain would be at war. The Germans gave no reply. Chamberlain broadcast a somber message that a state of war existed. Air-raid sirens sounded. It was a Sunday, and the 25th East Ham Boy Scout Troop was on church parade in the narrow streets of terraced housing that would suffer heavily from the German bombing to come. The young sister of a future Royal Navy fighter pilot, Kenneth Boardman, would find her thick black hair turned white when others in the family were killed. Boardman, one of the boys in that Sunday parade, would tell Vera later: “All us kids had known for a year that war was unavoidable. I felt relief and a sort of serenity.”
In Morpeth Mansion, Churchill had an apartment. He had to be coaxed to walk down to an open basement “not even sand bagged,” where he stood in the doorway and imagined “ruin and carnage and vast explosions.” When he spoke in Parliament later that day, he still had to fight a powerful group hoping to stumble out of the war they had just stumbled into. He grasped the weapon on which he could count: the Royal Navy, through which swept the signal “Winston is back!” He was again, after more than thirty years, First Lord of the Admiralty. His friends in naval intelligence, who had arranged the warship carrying Vera's companions to Cairo, confided that Washington's naval establishment had passed along serious intelligence leaks from SIS cipher traffic. “Awful revelations” wrote Alexander Felix Cadogan at the British Foreign Office, in his diary entry for September 21, 1939, underscoring the word “awful.” The normally unflappable Cadogan continued: “The whole Department [SIS] apparently recruited by haphazard methods, must be reorganized.” This was the first hint of a massive collapse of SIS networks, and the future internecine warfare between SIS and Gubbins's unorthodox secret organization.1
The warning came too late to save MM-4, which was dependent on the SIS signals system now compromised, although the mission knew nothing of this. Members were trying desperately to get out of Alexandria naval base on August 31 after being dumped on the quayside by Shropshire. The cruiser had sped off with its colonial administrators. Gubby's appeals for assistance to “the MI(R) element” impressed none of the local British administration, which ran Egypt like a colony, nor army officers in conflict with Jewish settlers next door in Palestine.
Vera got her first taste of special operations in an open war, not the domestic skirmishes between Mutual Friends and appeasers. Boats that were to take the mission to the Romanian port of Constana in the Danube estuary had been requisitioned by British authorities. Vera went with Gubby to see what could be scrounged. There was no way to fly directly to Poland without clipping German-controlled airspace. Gubby had a few gold sovereigns provided by the Secret Fund for emergencies. One gold sovereign yielded a large wad of local currency from the money changers. Vera bundled into a broken-down Egyptian taxi that sputtered through the crowded streets to the British Imperial Airways office. The local manager examined in some wonderment this woman who appeared to have taken a wrong turn on her way to fashionable Piccadilly. There was absolutely no reason, she said in her best clipped accent, why he could not find a flying boat for charter immediately, and waved the wad of notes for emphasis.
Gubby guardedly disclosed to the local RAF commander the nature of his mission. RAF pilots could not care less about forms and regulations. Two Sunderland flying boats were “liberated” to fly MM-4 to Athens. Under Vera's spell, the Imperial Airways manager came through with a third flying boat. All three aircraft landed to refuel at Piraeus.
But once there, the RAF crews were recalled to Egypt, where Poland's invasion meant “the balloon's gone up.” The Imperial Airways captain was a reserve RAF officer and, with the best will in the world, could not see himsel
f swiftly ferrying back and forth between Greece and Romania with split loads of bags, eighteen large cases packed with secret signaling gear, and many more passengers than he could carry in less than a dozen runs.
At the Polish legation in Athens, Gubby discovered pilots of LOT, the Polish airline. Their two Lockheed Electras were grounded. Normally, one staged through Bucharest, the other through Haifa. Unarmed civilian aircraft heading for Warsaw were certain to be shot down. The Polish crews agreed to fly to Romania after being told their passengers were “British secret service.” But there was no room for the mission's packing cases. This precious cargo had to be shipped by sea to Constana. A Greek shipowner agreed, dazzled by a gold sovereign or two, to dispatch an old tub with the cargo at top speed to the Romanian port.
At Tatoi airport, the LOT pilots started up their engines. The MM-4 team short-circuited immigration, pushed aside Greek officials, and ran with personal bags across the hot tarmac to jump into the two Lockheeds. As soon as they were off the ground, the planes banked sharply to dodge gunfire, ignoring urgent radioed orders to complete departure formalities and report their destination. They refueled in Salonika, the pilots having gambled on Tatoi air controllers not sending warnings ahead. The LOT crews were not sure where Greece stood in relation to Germany. With nothing to lose, they shot back into the air the moment their fuel tanks were topped up.
In Bucharest, Vera was in her element. Max's surviving Jewish friends had every reason to help and confide information. She learned of Whitehall's pressure to stop traffic through Romania to Palestine “by the Jewish Revisionists for political reasons and for the sake of profits to be made from the heavy fares charged.” The memo to the British legation, from a Whitehall functionary named A. W. G. Randall, had been recovered by Mossad. “I think we need not be too scrupulous about our treatment of this traffic in human beings,” Randall concluded.2
Vera saw that the real priority in the minds of those who controlled SIS in Eastern Europe was not Poland but preventing Jewish migration to Palestine. The lightning attack on Poland had pulverized Warsaw. The American architect Philip Johnson, once the darling of London's high society and now a press correspondent with the German forces, described the destruction of the Polish capital as “a stirring spectacle” in his dispatch to the U.S. publication Social Justice, whose pro-Nazi reports were distributed to British diplomatic posts.3
Vera learned from Mossad agents that Adolf Eichmann's Reich Central Office for Jewish Immigration in Prague was forcing Jews to flee through Romania to Palestine as part of a plan to deepen Arab hostility toward the mandate exercised by Britain, so its army divisions would be pinned down by Arab guerrillas. She also learned that in Poland the German SS had started to kill Jews, and the Gestapo was rounding up other Jews to be sent to Dachau. She spent two days at Bucharest's Athénée Palace Hotel, planning with MM-4 the next move. Polish airfields were in German hands. The shipped baggage was miraculously delivered to the hotel from the railway station, and a smiling Jewish boy told Vera, “No charge. Just do what you can for us.” What he knew, and who he really worked for, she did not ask. She found the drivers of nine rickety taxis who agreed to drive to the border to meet a Polish train to Lwów. Gubby was in radio contact with General Carton de Wiart. Polish army liaison would assist them with trains from Lwów to Lublin and on to Warsaw, unless the lines were already bombed.
Vera's convoy drove through the heartrendingly brilliant summer scene of oxcarts bringing in a golden harvest, with sun-yellow clusters of ripe corn hanging from the balconies of farmhouses. It was painful to share this interlude of peace in a countryside unaffected by war, and where she had spent so many pleasurable hours with Old Fritz. The roads were in bad shape now. Motoring was slow. At the border, Vera talked her way past Romanian guards, only to find MM-4 had missed its train. On the other side of the river Dniester was chaos. Polish members of the mission assured their compatriots on the border that these English civilians, claiming to be tourists, were not German secret agents.
How was the team to keep the rendezvous with their man in Lwów? Vera and her companions stumbled over a jumble of railway sidings until they came across a coach that looked as if it had been sitting idle since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Someone found a hammer and tapped the wheels and pronounced the wagon railworthy. They rolled it within striking distance of a local freight train. The Polish driver was enchanted to do Vera the small favor of hauling this imperial leftover through the night to Lwów. On the Polish side of the border, homes were in darkness, and young reservists looked for rides to military posts. The team sank into what had been plush upholstery. Vera remarked that the expedition and its frantic improvisations were useful preparation for special operations. Privately, she hoped it would not turn into black comedy.
Next morning in Lwów, the promised liaison officer commandeered a bus to the next connection at Lublin. By the time the team arrived, news had broken of Britain's entry into the war. Gubby's men threw off their civilian disguise. The sight of British uniforms raised spirits. The townsfolk showered the mission with flowers and kisses. A Scots member of the team, Hugh Curteis, donned a tartan kilt and was revealed in all his glory as a brawny bare-legged Highlander, hugged and kissed by an enormous Pole whose huge black beard tickled Curteis until he collapsed in laughter. The tourists were now soldiers, with Vera a camp follower.
The Lublin-Warsaw train rattled through the suburbs of Warsaw. Everyone became suddenly sober. German bombs and shells had flattened the area in advance of the panzer divisions. Gubbins reported to General Carton de Wiart. Hasty consultations were held with the Polish General Staff, unimpressed by MM-4's considerable feat of scrambling here within days. Marshal Smigly-Rydz, the balding Polish commander in chief, needed more. Chamberlain's declaration of war had come days after the German attack, and was broadcast by the BBC only once. Then the BBC resumed the weekend cricket results.
Gubbins dictated a scorching signal to the War Office. What the hell was going on? Englishmen played cricket while Poles suffered far heavier losses than the War Office had prepared for. He had given his word to the Polish general staff that Britain would help Poland fight back. Now there could be no hope if the War Office were to stick its head in the sand again. Vera feared that the Well-Bred Horse Brigade would carefully enter Gubby's protest into his personal file for use against him later.
Whitehall's reply was read out to grim-faced Polish senior staff officers. The War Office wished it to be known that “every week is of value to us in increasing our reserves [and] improving the security of the base from which our offensive operations will ultimately be launched.” In short, the Poles should carry on as best they could.
The Polish general staff regrouped at Luków, fifty miles southeast of Warsaw. Gubby sent back to London a personal courier, Tommy Davies, who escaped through the Baltic ports with a memorized account of devastating Polish losses. Without air defense, its arms factories destroyed, Polish cavalry riding against German tanks, the country could not “carry on” in the manner prescribed. Gold sovereigns were rescued from a cache at the British embassy to pay for two American Studebakers and a five-ton truck for Gubby's group to chase after the retreating Polish commanders. The embassy was a shambles, the butler in tears because all the stocks of wine were abandoned. The English wife of the SIS man in Warsaw, Colonel J. P. Shelley, had been killed in a raid on Luków, to which the embassy withdrew.
Ten days after London declared war, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was targeted by Stuka dive-bombers.
Marshal Smigly-Rydz was reluctant to disclose his shifting dispositions, because the War Office was now making unreasonable demands for hourly situation reports to be wirelessed in code to London. The Polish commander in chief could not risk confirming for the Germans the full extent of their victory. Military headquarters were moved to the Romanian frontier at Kolomyja, where Vera and MM-4 had crossed two weeks earlier. The remaining
gold sovereigns were entrusted to Count Stephan Zamoyski, a friend of General Carton de Wiart. On the count's lawn, for a brief afternoon, Vera took tea while hearing that fifty-five thousand Jews in Vilnius had been rounded up by the Russian Red Army, claiming its half of Poland under the secret protocol with Hitler.
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were bizarre bedfellows. Vera tried to find a student friend of Countess Krystyna Skarbek. Vera had no immediate success, but later pieced together the tribulations of the student, Stanley Orlowski. He was captured by Germans on a country road and arrested for being a Boy Scout. He escaped, but then fell into Russian hands and was dragged off to Siberia, where he lingered in slave camps until the Russians were later attacked by Germany. He was freed to go to Persia and fight Germans with Free Pole forces, whose liaison officer was then Sir Harold Mitchell, the parliamentarian industrialist and supporter of Vera as a member of Churchill's FOCUS group.
Krystyna's other young friend, Jan Zurakowski, piloting the venerable P.11 fighter, was among Warsaw's defenders who shot down 125 of the immensely superior German Bf 109s and Bf 110s at the cost of 114 Polish aircraft. Some Polish pilots ran out of ammunition. They flew until, fuel exhausted, they crash-landed in Romania. From there they would find their way to join the RAF in time for the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes. As late as August 28, 1939, on the very eve of war, such fighter aircraft were still held up in Denmark while Whitehall argued over who should pay for onward carriage to Poland.4
Vera had to think of ways through Romania to supply the Polish underground's Home Army with irregular warfare devices. Some sabotage was already being carried out by Polish regulars. It was hard to convince them of any aid coming from London. Gubbins asked an elderly reserve major commanding an artillery battery where his guns were. “Still in England!” was the wry reply.
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