The Spark of Resistance: Women Spies in WWII

by Sergeant, Kit

  Once the agents had been recruited, it was also Mathilde’s job to explain to them what kind of information Interallié was expecting. As Armand put it, “To defeat the enemy, you have to know where he is.” This was more complicated than it sounded, so Mathilde devised a detailed questionnaire, which asked how many troops they’d seen and requested descriptions of their uniform insignias, and any identifying marks on their vehicles. It was enough for their operatives to document these markings and up to Mathilde to determine their significance. She bought a book at a bookstore on the boulevard Saint-Michel which helped to identify each section of the German army. In this way, she could follow the movements of German troops throughout Paris.

  Since telephone calls could be recorded and the mail censored, there had to be another way of exchanging information. Mathilde came up with the idea of placing letter boxes in the homes and businesses of Resistance-sympathizers throughout the city.

  That evening was like so many others, with Mathilde pouring through the agents’ reports retrieved from the letter boxes while Armand repositioned the marker pins he used to represent the German positions.

  “Where is the signal battalion which left Niort now?” Armand asked.

  Mathilde, quite proudly, replied with the correct information.

  “Ma petite chatte,” he said as he ruffled her hair. “She can accomplish anything she wishes.”

  Chapter 7

  Didi

  Didi joined Bingham’s Unit, a section of SOE’s women decoders and wireless operators named after its founder, Phyllis Bingham. It was an arm of the SOE, but, like Jackie, Didi told everyone she worked for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANY.

  The best part about using FANY as a cover was the uniform: a khaki jacket and skirt complete with a shiny brown leather belt, wide enough to flatter any figure. When Didi was handed her kit at Lilywhites Department Store in Piccadilly Circus, she was told to keep her shoes and belt polished at all times as well as to make sure the lines of her linen-colored stockings were always straight.

  As she left the store in full dress, she encountered two men in officer’s uniforms, who promptly saluted her. Didi mimicked them, touching her fingers to her right eyebrow, unsure if she was doing it properly. One of the men shot her a leering look as she passed, and Didi felt her face heat up. Was she ready for the attention her new attire was bound to attract?

  Didi’s wireless training took place in STS 54, otherwise known as Fawley Court, a beautiful red-bricked mansion in Buckinghamshire. She and a group of other girls were installed in the attic of the house. Other than the attic being stifling hot at night, even in September, the whole place had a college-dormitory atmosphere about it. Though the FANYs were cautioned to conduct themselves like ladies at all times during the day, after lights-out, they told each other coarse jokes about their instructors and giggled late into the night.

  Didi didn’t socialize much with the other girls. She was determined to be the best wireless operator the SOE had ever seen, and dedicated herself to memorizing all the nuances and dots and dashes of Morse code.

  The lessons also included map reading and first aid, which, while recognizing the necessity of the drilling, Didi found somewhat boring. Though she was able to master the required Morse rate of twenty-two words per minute relatively quickly—it reminded her of taking piano lessons when she was younger—she ached for something more exciting.

  She got her chance when she was informed by the head instructor, Mr. S. H. Gray, that she was being posted to Hut 6 to learn how to send and receive messages.

  Hut 6 was one of many half-cylindrical Nissen huts set on the back lawn of the mansion. The concrete floor, combined with the iron siding, meant that, like the attic, the hut was a furnace in the summer.

  When Didi entered the cavernous shed for the first time, the door banged shut behind her, but the women hunched over their desks did not seem to hear it through their headsets.

  “Ah, you must be Miss Nearne,” the aging officer in a too-tight uniform greeted her.

  “Yes, sir, Didi Nearne, reporting for duty.” As it often did lately, a Morse equivalent flashed through her mind. D-i-d-i: Dash-dot-dot, dot-dot, Dash-dot-dot, dot-dot.

  “Captain Charles Smith. I’ve been told you are quite the sharp one,” he turned and started marching across the floor, Didi following him, “but I’m sure you’ll find that coding agent messages is a different field from learning Morse.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He paused in front of an empty chair. “This will be your station.”

  Didi nodded as she pulled out the hard-backed chair.

  “The wireless is the best link we have to our agents on the ground in France. Obviously we can’t send straightforward messages out: the Germans are always listening. We use a special coding system here that is impossible for the Boches to break. Your first job will be to learn the codes, and then, if you’re good enough, we’ll eventually get you on a regular sked.”

  She quickly surmised that ‘sked’ was a shortening of schedule.

  Captain Smith tried, unsuccessfully, to pull his jacket over his protruding belly. “Are you any good at crosswords?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The ability to complete crosswords often results in exceptional coders.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “But not always.” He leaned over the desk, placing a pencil and square pad of grid paper in front of Didi. “Okay, the first thing you need to understand is that the field agents use poem codes.”

  Didi had no idea what a poem code was, but was too afraid to ask.

  Her instructor seemed unaware of her ignorance. “Or Bible verses, or famous quotations, something they can easily remember.”

  She finally caught on. The agents used poems as the basis for their ciphers. “So it doesn’t have to be written down in case they are ever searched,” she finished aloud.

  He started scribbling on the top sheet of paper. “Exactly. To encode his information, an agent chooses five words from his poem. You will know which five words he chose because the first thing he will send will be what’s called ‘an indicator group.’” He turned the paper so Didi could read what he’d written: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

  Captain Smith drew a line after the first ‘king.’ “Now let’s say he uses the words ‘my-name-is-Ozymandias-king.’ You will put a number 1 under the first ‘A', then a 2 under the second ‘A’, and a 3 under the third ‘A,’ then the next letter in alphabetical order is ‘D’, so that will get a 4, and so on.” He handed her the pencil and Didi finished writing numbers underneath the phrase so that it looked like this:

  “Good,” Captain Smith told her. “That’s your transposition key. Now let’s say you wanted to send a message for a Lysander pick-up in Le Mons at 9 pm Thursday.” Captain Smith started writing underneath all of the numbers.

  “Just fill in the extra spots with Xs. Now using the transposition key, the letters under 1 are a, o and the numbers under 2 are u, a…” He continued writing. At long last he showed her the new version:

  aouar9aadsdxetrtgxnmllnnsmkdpyexpurhapyecsir

  It looked like gibberish to Didi, but Captain Smith wasn’t done yet. “Your job is actually to decode the messages coming in from the field, and usually they are much longer, at least 200 letters. But if you have the transposition key, you can easily go backwards.” He then went on to show her how to interpret the message by relining the letters in numerical order under the words from the poem.

  Didi peered at the columns he was making on the square paper. It seemed ridiculously easy now that she knew how to do it. Maybe too easy. “Let’s say the Germans managed to crack one message and get an agent’s poem code. Couldn’t they then know exactly what the message was every time he sent one after that?”

  Captain Smith paused his writing. “I suppose that’s possible, but it hasn’t happened thus far.”

  “But how can you know?”

  He put his penci
l down with a sigh. “Our duty is not to question why. I do as I’m told. And so should you, especially as a FANY with no experience in the field.”

  No experience yet, she thought resentfully.

  “Now for the security checks,” Captain Smith continued.

  Didi sat straighter, hoping these security checks would be more impressive than the poem codes.

  “They are different for each agent, but usually consist of three ‘dummy’ letters inserted throughout the message, such as KIO in the first sentence and HRP in another. In some cases, the field operator is instructed to purposefully misspell certain words. The absence of these ‘mistakes’ may indicate that the agent is in trouble.”

  “So I should always make sure they’ve inserted their security checks.”

  “Well,” he scratched at his chin. “Don’t be too vigilant—sometimes the agents just forget to use them.”

  “Forget to use them?” Now Didi was completely exasperated. “If these security checks are the difference between the SOE knowing their men are safe or possibly sending messages with the nozzle of a Luger to their temple, how could someone ‘just forget?’”

  “They might not be typing with a gun pointed at their head, little girl,” he spat out, “but they’re under pressure enough as it is. We can afford them a little leeway in forgetting minor details.”

  Didi didn’t consider them ‘minor details,’ but she kept her tone deferentially neutral as she recited his instructions back to him. It wouldn’t do her any good to get kicked out of wireless training. “So be aware of occasional security checks, but don’t assume their absence means the agent has been compromised.”

  “Exactly.” He appeared mollified. “And be mindful of Morse mutilation.” Taking note of Didi’s confused look, he clarified. “That could be from the agent typing the Morse in wrong, or it could be from atmospheric interference in the transmission.” A FANY at another station motioned frantically at Captain Smith. “You’ll get the hang of it,” he told Didi as he walked away.

  Her head spinning with all she had just learned, Didi’s eyes roamed around the room. On the wall opposite her desk was a poster with the words, “Remember, the enemy is listening.” Next to that was a green chalkboard with a list of each of the agents’ code names and scheduled time. She peered at it, wondering which agent was to be Jackie’s wireless operator when she left for France.

  When Didi returned to the attic, one of her roommates, Yvonne Baseden, informed her that the girls were going to sneak out to a nearby officer’s club.

  “Sneak out?” Didi replied incredulously. “How can you do that? We work for the SOE. It’s their job to know everything.”

  “Shh.” Yvonne held a finger to her lips. “You and I know we work for the SOE, but most of the others don’t.”

  “What do you mean?” Didi lowered her voice slightly. “We had to sign that document promising we would never speak of anything confidential to anyone. It’s pretty clear that we’re employed by an underground government agency.”

  “Most of the other women think we are actual FANYs and, since no one else has ever bothered to correct them, I didn’t think it was my place.” Yvonne paused to catch her breath and looked reluctant to continue, but did so anyway. “You might have noticed yourself if you’d ever deigned to talk to anyone else.”

  “It’s not my job to make friends here.” Yvonne was even younger than Didi, but somehow made it seem like she was eons older.

  “Still… it wouldn’t kill you to get out and have some fun.” Yvonne shed her jacket and shook out her hair.

  “What are you doing? You’re never supposed to be out of uniform.” Even Didi could hear the goody-two-shoes whine in her own voice.

  Yvonne, clad only in her slip, started filling the sink with water. “Have you any bleach?”

  “No.”

  She found some in a cabinet and dumped almost the whole bottle on top of her uniform. Didi, not wanting to reprimand her any further, watched with red eyes and burning nostrils as the khaki fabric faded into a dull pink. Yvonne pulled the plug and then began to rinse off her newly-lightened jacket. “Much better,” she said aloud.

  Didi just shook her head.

  Didi caved and accompanied Yvonne and a few other girls to the Spread-Eagle Pub. Didi knew she had made a mistake the minute she entered the brick-walled, dimly lit pub swarming with men both in plain-clothes and various uniforms. Though some of the men were quite handsome, they just seemed all the more potential interferences to her work.

  “My, oh, my,” Yvonne whispered, her eyes widening. “Jackpot.”

  “Fannies!” a dark-haired, clean-shaven man exclaimed.

  “That’s FANY,” Didi said pointedly.

  He lurched toward her. “Care for a drink?”

  “No,” she replied as Yvonne stated, “Yes.”

  He elbowed Didi out of the way to speak to her roommate. “Are you working for F Section too?”

  Before Yvonne could reply, Didi steered her clear of him. “He could be an SOE mole, seeing if we’ll confess our secrets.” She repeated something their instructors had hammered into them from Day 1: “Careless talk costs lives.”

  “I know.” Yvonne waved her hand. “I’m not interested in doing anything to get me fired. I just want to have a little fun, for once.” She began swaying to the Glenn Miller song playing on the gramophone in the corner.

  A glass of sherry was thrust toward Didi. Though she was tempted to shove it away, she didn’t want to spill it and make a scene. She reluctantly accepted it.

  “Your uniform seems darker than theirs.”

  Didi looked up at the fair-haired man who nodded toward Yvonne and a few other girls doing the swing on the dance floor.

  Unsure how to respond, Didi just shrugged.

  The blonde man took a gulp of beer. “Are you posted at Fawley Court?”

  This time she sipped at her sherry in lieu of a reply.

  “It’s okay, we’re all SOE here.”

  “I’m not—”

  He leaned against the wall, his large hand spanning multiple bricks. “We’re training to be field operators. What about you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Didi recalled what Yvonne said regarding some of the girls not knowing who they were working for. “I’m just here to learn Morse code.”

  “So you’re wireless.” He attempted a smile. “Maybe you’ll be my interpreter. I’ll send you a personal message when I get to France. What’s your middle name?”

  “You don’t even know my first name and now you want to know my middle name?”

  He shot her an apologetic grin. “I’m sorry I didn’t bother to ask for your real identity. We’re all using code names anyway.”

  “I haven’t been given a code name.” She said the first thing that came to her mind. “Dash-dot-dot, dot-dot, Dash-dot-dot, dot-dot.”

  “Didi.” His blue eyes flashed. “And your middle name, Didi?”

  She took another sip of sherry before giving him the Morse equivalent of ‘Mary.’

  “Well, Didi Mary, I’ll be sure to send you a hello one day.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes out.” It could have been a good line to bid him adieu, but she wasn’t ready to leave yet. She suddenly realized how lonely she’d been these past weeks, with Jackie gone and no one to talk to except perhaps Yvonne. And Captain Smith. “When do you think you’ll be going into the field?”

  Another grin. “You know I can’t tell you that. We’ve probably already said too much.” He tried to make his face serious as he glanced around the room. “There are spies everywhere.”

  “Not here in England.”

  “I don’t mean the Boches. I’m talking about Buck and Vera’s informants.”

  “Who are Buck and Vera?”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “You never met Maurice Buckmaster or Vera Atkins?”

  She set her drink down on a table. “I told you, I’m just here to learn Morse.”

  He too
k a sip of beer, his eyes never leaving her face. “Your job is more important than that. You’re the lifeline of the operators in the field—you keep us alive. Do you know that the average time a wireless operator can be on the ground is only a month before the gonios find them?”

  “Gonios?”

  “The Gestapo’s radio-detection vans. They can home in on signals, and they if they catch you…” he made a slicing motion across his neck. “I might not be long for this world.”

  His imploring, puppy-dog expression made Didi change the subject. “I wish I could go to France and give Hitler a piece of my mind.”

  He nearly dropped his drink. “The SOE doesn’t employ women as agents.”

  Didi folded her arms across her chest. “Shows how much you know. I happen to have inside information that they’re training a group of women right now.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted. “How did you find that out?”

  She didn’t mean to reveal so much, but it was too late now. “My sister is in that group. Maybe you’ll work with her someday.”

  “Is she as pretty as you are?”

  Didi felt the familiar twinge of jealousy whenever Jackie was brought up, but she squelched it down with another sip of sherry. “Prettier.”

  Her face grew hot under his gaze, which seemed to penetrate right into her innermost thoughts. “I doubt that.” He extended his hand. “Care to dance?”

  “You haven’t told me your name.” Clearly the sherry had gone to Didi’s head.

  “My code name is Archambault. It’s an old French surname.”