by Max Hastings
Rachel Düberndorfer – ‘Sisi’ – after being arrested by the Swiss and charged with espionage claimed at her trial that she was working for the British secret service, in hopes that this would secure more generous treatment from the local authorities. Although sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, she was indeed soon bailed and allowed to disappear. But the claim fuelled the NKVD’s darkest suspicions, and caused her arrest and confinement in the Lubyanka on arrival in Moscow in 1945. Alexander Radó went into hiding following the arrests of his wireless-operators, and eventually crossed secretly into France, where he lived underground until the liberation. Rudolf Rössler was arrested by the Swiss police in May 1944 and remained in custody until September. He was then released, but the ‘Lucy’ Ring’s game was played out.
The Russians afterwards claimed that in early 1944 they had ninety-seven agents operating inside Germany, of whom ten were Germans. Among the most active (said Moscow) was ‘Ian’ – Ferenz Pataki, a Hungarian who had once worked for the Cheka, who was eventually betrayed and executed. ‘Dozen’, Hermann Salinger, was a former International Brigade fighter who was dropped into Germany in January 1944 – with British help, according to the Russians, though there is no record of ‘Dozen’ in Western files. ‘Sharp’, Heinz Glodjai, was parachuted into East Prussia in 1943, and provided intelligence until he was killed in the RAF’s August 1944 bombing of Königsberg.
Nonetheless, it is one thing to boast, as do the modern official chroniclers of Russian intelligence, about the NKVD’s and GRU’s German sources in the latter phases of the war, and another to show that these produced useful, usable information, which seems unlikely. Following the break-up of the Red Orchestra, Abwehr interceptors failed to find any further evidence of Allied agents transmitting out of Germany, and it seems reasonable to discount suggestions that the NKVD and GRU deployed substantial numbers of active agents inside the Reich between 1943 and 1945. Certainly no Russian covert source in Germany generated intelligence remotely as authoritative as that produced earlier by the Red Orchestra and the ‘Lucy’ Ring. In the last years of the war, however, strategic intelligence had become much less important, because Russian dominance of the battlefield was overwhelming. Moreover, despite the Soviets’ conviction that the Western Allies denied them important material, the British and Americans routinely informed Moscow about all German military activity revealed by Ultra which threatened their interests, or might assist Soviet operations. Centre did not, of course, return the courtesy.
10
Guerrilla
1 RESISTERS AND RAIDERS
Very occasionally in the course of the war, a marriage between intelligence and military action proved perfectly arranged. At his Paris flat in the avenue de la Motte-Picquet, on the night of 24 January 1942, Gilbert Renault – the Gaullist Resistance network chief ‘Colonel Rémy’ – decrypted a radio message from London. It delivered a request which constituted a very tall order indeed: to obtain, at utmost speed, details of conditions prevailing around a German Channel coastal installation at Saint-Bruneval, near Cap d’Antifer in Normandy; and meanwhile ‘to deceive boches in event your agent taken be ready to reply to same question not only for place chosen, but for three or four other similar places on coast’. Renault, thirty-seven years old, lean and intensely patriotic but rejected as over-age for military service in 1939, was one of the more remarkable figures of the secret war. His Catholicism was a significant motivational force in his work as an agent, and he wrote fervently later: ‘I would never have been able to carry out this assignment in a foreign country or for a less righteous cause.’ He described his Resistance role as ‘putting living tile upon living tile’, and recruited informants from a remarkable range of backgrounds: ex-military men and architects, peasants and aristocrats. Though himself an extreme conservative, in the sacred cause of France he supped with communists. He was viewed in London as too careless about security and tradecraft to be a great spymaster, but he enjoyed a remarkable run before these weaknesses undid him. Now he dispatched Roger Dumont, a former air force officer codenamed ‘Pol’ – for Pol Roger champagne – to reconnoitre Bruneval.
At the end of January another ‘Rémy’ contact, a Le Havre garage proprietor named Charles Chauveau, drove to Paris in his Simca 5 to pick up Dumont, adopting false numberplates for the last kilometres into the capital. The two men then returned to Le Havre – amid German surveillance that mere car journey was a dangerous venture. At the port the agent took a room in a shabby hotel so cold that he could not sleep, but instead shivered through the night, fully dressed on a chair. Next morning he and Chauveau rattled twelve miles north to Bruneval, with chains on the Simca’s tyres to contend with a fresh snowfall. The owner of the little Hôtel Beauminet in the hamlet, Paul Vennier, was a friend of Chauveau, a man whom the garagiste endorsed as ‘one of the best’. Vennier was able to enumerate the Luftwaffe crew billeted in the big farm compound at Theuville, and to tell them about a guard post at a villa by the beach, ‘Stella Maris’. He reported that the local Wehrmacht garrison, a platoon strong commanded by an efficient and energetic Feldwebel, was lodged in the Beauminet. Vennier knew nothing about what was happening at the lonely house and neighbouring ‘radio station’ half a mile away on the clifftop, but at Dumont’s urging he led him down to the German wire entanglement just short of the seaside to see for themselves. A conversation with a friendly sentry revealed to the spy that a supposed minefield above the beach was a fiction, to deter intruders. Having explored the area as well as any man could, Dumont returned to Le Havre, and thence to Paris. On the night of 9 February, Gilbert Renault’s SOE-trained wireless-operator ‘Bob’ – Robert Delattre – Morsed to London the agent’s report on Bruneval. The fact that the mission had succeeded without incident should not for a moment mask the fact that it had involved all the parties concerned in mortal risk. Dumont’s account of Bruneval made plain that it was garrisoned, but not in great strength.
The quest for technical intelligence about the enemy’s weapons systems was an untiring preoccupation of every participant in the war. It was pursued through spies, photographic reconnaissance, patrolling and prisoner interrogation. If soldiers, sailors and airmen were sometimes sceptical, indeed cynical, about strategic and political intelligence, they could all grasp the importance of securing data about technology being employed by the enemy, so that means could be devised to counter it. The air war over Europe engaged the most sophisticated equipment available to both sides, and inspired correspondingly fevered efforts to understand each other’s. The Germans had the easier task, because they could explore the wreckage of British and American aircraft shot down over Europe, fitted with the latest devices to aid navigation and bomb-aiming. The British, however, separated from the air battlefield by the Channel, depended on the brainpower of their intelligence officers and scientists to penetrate the Luftwaffe’s secrets.
In the winter of 1941 they realised that German night-fighters were guided from the ground by two linked radar systems, codenamed ‘Freya’ and ‘Würzburg’. R.V. Jones, the twenty-nine-year-old assistant director of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry and adviser to MI6, together with the ‘boffins’ of the Telecommunications Research Establishment then at Swanage, identified these as key elements in the so-called ‘Kammhuber Line’, a network of guidance stations that enabled the Luftwaffe to inflict punitive losses on the RAF’s Bomber Command. They knew that Freyas, with their huge aerial arrays, monitored British bombers. They guessed that Würzburgs guided the fighters, but hungered for an opportunity to dissect a specimen. On 5 December 1941, a young Spitfire pilot of the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, Tony Hill, carried out a low-level sweep of the lonely clifftop château at Bruneval, from which 53-cm radar transmissions had been detected in Britain. Jones pored over Hill’s pictures, which showed a Freya set a short distance from the house, and what the pilot described as a ‘bowl heater’ some ten feet in diameter – obviously a parabolic receiver which was surely that
of a Würzburg – some four hundred yards southwards.
The site was only a stone’s throw from the sea, less than a quarter of a mile from a beach. It was protected by no visible obstacles, such as wire entanglements. Surely it should be possible for a daring raiding party to get in – then more important, out, having secured priceless booty. Jones had already achieved an entrée to the innermost councils of the British war machine by his brilliant 1940 work on the Luftwaffe’s electronic night-bombing guidance systems. Now, his proposal for a descent on Bruneval was enthusiastically accepted by the Air Staff, Downing Street and Combined Operations HQ. It was decided that the attackers must land from the air, then escape by sea.
A company of the newly formed Parachute Regiment, the ‘Red Berets’, commanded by Major John Frost, was briefed and trained to land just east of the house and its nearby installation, then seize both in a swift coup de main. A section of engineers led by Lt. Denis Vernon was detailed to dismantle the set and remove its key components, aided by an RAF radar mechanic, Flight-Sergeant Charles Cox. Cox was rushed through the jump school at Ringway, then he and Vernon were briefed by Jones and set to practising their role on a British gun-laying radar set. All the raiders spent hours mastering the topography on a detailed scale model of Bruneval. Training on the Dorset coast was dogged by vile weather and repeated mishaps, whereby both dropping aircraft and ships made the wrong rendezvous. The last exercise, on the night of Sunday, 22 February, ended with the paratroopers struggling in chest-deep freezing water as sailors laboured to extricate the landing-craft from sandbanks. All this augured ill for the mission, as also did the gloom overhanging the Royal Navy and the British people after the Channel escape the previous week of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
The raid must take place within the five nights of a full moon, to provide light for the RAF and Frost’s men to see their objectives. On the first three possible dates the weather was unsuitable, dampening the spirits of the raiders. Friday the 27th offered the last possible window; it was a vast relief when, at 5 p.m., word came that the operation was ‘on’. The assault ship Prins Albert, carrying the seaborne element, set forth under motor gunboat escort. At 9.52 p.m. six landing-craft were lowered, each carrying Commando bren-gunners as well as naval crews. By coincidence, even as twelve Whitley bombers of the RAF’s 51 Squadron flew south across the Channel that night, bearing Frost’s paratroopers, a Lysander light aircraft passed them heading north, taking ‘Colonel Rémy’ from France for a meeting in London with de Gaulle’s intelligence chief. Rémy’s part in Operation ‘Biteback’ was done, even as that of the raiders began.
Just before take-off from Thruxton in Wiltshire, the party learned of a fresh snowfall in northern France. The white coveralls prepared for this eventuality had been left behind in their temporary barracks at Tilney, but on balance Frost thought the snow a bonus, because it would give his men more light. A bagpiper played a wailing pibroch as the parachutists boarded the aircraft, which pleased the Scots among them. The weather was suddenly clear and fine, after a wild week, and the raiders took off warmed by mugs of tea laced with rum. Once airborne they sang old favourites – ‘Annie Laurie’, ‘The Rose of Tralee’, ‘Lulu’. After two hours, at a few minutes past midnight the first ‘stick’ plunged in succession through holes in the floors of the Whitleys, and a minute later most found themselves making perfect landings in soft snow: Bruneval’s proximity to the coast made possible uncommonly accurate navigation. Most of the men urinated before doing anything else – in the air, Thruxton’s tea had wreaked havoc with bladders. As Frost assembled his men, he reflected ruefully that on this clear night they must already have lost surprise. Yet a wonderful silence persisted, and there was only one piece of bad news: two sections, twenty men in all, were missing, having obviously landed off-target.
There was no time to waste, no question of searching for absent friends. Within ten minutes of landing, Frost led his assault party at a fast trot towards ‘Lone House’ – the château where the Würzburg was installed – while a second group set forth to secure the beach for their retreat. Reaching the building, the major was astonished to find its door open. He blew his whistle and charged in, finding only one German, whom they killed as he fired at them from up the stairs. Meanwhile Lt. Peter Young’s party had overrun the Würzburg position, whose occupants fled, bewildered by the crackle of small arms. Flight-Sergeant Cox tore aside the curtain masking the entrance to the cabin in the radar pit, and found the set still warm – it had obviously been tracking a German fighter not many minutes earlier. Lt. Vernon, leader of the Royal Engineers team, began taking flashlight photographs, which provoked German gunfire from somewhere out in the darkness.
The British found that the Würzburg occupied a rotating platform on a flatbed truck, protected by thick stacks of sandbags. One sapper attacked the casing with a hammer and chisel, removing Telefunken labels and serial numbers. Cox was obliged to use a crowbar to prise off the transmitter’s fascia. Then, amid increasingly heavy though ill-directed gunfire from Germans a few hundred metres away, the British loaded key components onto a trolley they had brought for the purpose. One of Frost’s men was killed by a stray bullet, but Vernon, Cox and the others remained unscathed. The plan called for the sappers to be given thirty minutes to gut the German set. After only ten, however, truck headlights showed enemy reinforcements approaching. The major told Vernon to settle for what he and his men had got – which included all the elements that mattered to Reg Jones and his colleagues – and get moving.
The party tasked to clear the beach found themselves briefly pinned down by the Germans; machine-gun fire seriously wounded Company Sergeant-Major Strachan. As Frost, Cox and the others began to move towards the coast, they saw that the Germans had already reoccupied the château. Suddenly there was an outburst of heavy firing from the south-east: the two sections dropped off-target had doubled towards Bruneval, and now attacked the Germans from the rear, a lucky diversion which enabled their comrades to clear the way to the beach. A few minutes of acute tension followed: Frost’s radio beacon, summoning the navy, failed to elicit a response. Only after the British fired a succession of green flares did the landing-craft hasten in upon the rendezvous, to the intense relief of the waiting paratroopers. Shortly before 3 a.m. the raiders, together with Flight-Sergeant Cox and his precious cargo, were loaded aboard. Once offshore the Würzburg’s components were transferred to an MGB which dashed for Portsmouth at twenty knots, leaving Frost’s men to follow at a more sedate pace in the landing-craft, towed by other gunboats. The attackers left behind only two men killed and six missing, who spent the rest of the war in captivity; the Germans lost five, and three more were brought back to Britain as PoWs. At 6 o’clock that evening of 28 February the entire party boarded the Prins Albert, where a triumphant press conference was held. In that chill season of defeats, here was a tiny but infinitely precious triumph to warm the hearts of the British people.
The Bruneval raid was the most successful such operation of the war. Through a small investment of resources, and at negligible cost, Major Frost’s paratroopers and Flight-Sergeant Cox brought home for Britain the intimate secrets of the Würzburg radar: its aerial, receiver, receiver amplifier, modulator and transmitter. These sufficed to enable R.V. Jones and his colleagues to grasp the system on which the Kammhuber line was based – a chain of ‘boxes’, within each of which Freya and Würzburg radar sets guided a night-fighter onto the track of a bomber. Once this was understood, the RAF’s response became obvious: to push aircraft through the night sky over the line at maximum density, swamping the electronic defences. ‘Streaming’ worked, and rendered Kammhuber’s system obsolete. Although bomber losses remained severe, Bruneval provided a precious intelligence break to the Allies. Moreover, in its wake the Germans felt obliged to fortify their coastal radar chain so heavily that thereafter every station was easily pinpointed by photographic reconnaissance.
The attack represented a textbook collaboration between
the ‘boffins’, led by Jones, who identified what they needed to know; spies on the ground – ‘Colonel Rémy’s’ men – who reconnoitred the target for MI6; planners, who married the agent reports to data secured by air photography; and special forces, which executed ‘Biteback’. In addition to the decorations awarded to the airborne force, Jones was made a CBE. The attackers were aided by the fact that a coastal target was relatively easy for the RAF and navy to find and reach. In February 1942 the French coast was defended much less heavily than it became two years later. Perhaps most important, the British had luck on their side. ‘Rémy’s’ agents were not caught, as so many spies were caught; the parachute drop was relatively accurate, as many drops were not; the Germans put up little effective resistance; and Cox was able to carry away the treasure. Many times between 1940 and 1945, British planners had cause to lament that the course of secret war seldom ran so smooth.
2 SOE
Following the fall of France in June 1940, for almost four years Winston Churchill waged war with the conviction that Britain, even after the accession of Russia and the United States as fellow-foes of Hitler, lacked power to confront the Nazis’ military might on the Continent. This made it essential to challenge the enemy by other means – the strategic bomber offensive against Germany and guerrilla campaigns in the occupied countries. The creation of Britain’s SOE and the Political Warfare Executive, followed later by that of the American OSS and Office of War Information, was encouraged by a delusion that Hitler’s 1939–41 Blitzkriegs had succeeded partly by exploitation of a ‘Fifth Column’ of secret supporters within the victim nations. Many people, the prime minister notable among them, believed this had played the same role in the enemy’s onslaughts as sappers in sieges of old, who tunnelled beneath city walls before storming parties attacked. He thus sought to create his own Fifth Column to serve the Allied cause. He feared that if the peoples of occupied Europe were left to their own devices they would remain sunk in passivity, acquiescence, collaboration – and he was probably right.
