The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  In promoting raids and Resistance, the prime minister had four objectives. The first, and least important, was to fulfil military purposes, wherein there were many fiascos such as Operation ‘Colossus’, a 1941 Combined Operations parachute drop to destroy a Calabrian rail viaduct, the August 1942 Dieppe raid, and some early sabotage attempts in Norway. The second purpose was to promote among British people and across the world a belief – ill-founded until at least late 1942 – that the war was being energetically and effectively carried on; what this author has elsewhere dubbed ‘military theatre’. A third objective was to oblige Hitler to expend resources on the internal security of his empire. The fourth, and most important, was to stimulate tension, recrimination, hatred between the Nazis and their subject peoples. Far from acknowledging that acts of repression should prompt a curb on Resistance activity, Churchill saw Nazi savagery as furthering his aims. ‘The blood of the martyrs,’ he told a meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee on 2 August 1943, ‘was the seed of the Church.’ The fact that by the war’s end most of Europe’s occupied peoples loathed the Germans was partly a consequence of policies Hitler anyway adopted; but it was also attributable to the insurgencies sponsored by Britain and later the US. The military achievements of Resistance were very modest, the moral ones immense.

  Operations by armed civilians behind enemy lines were far remote from the doings of bespectacled mathematicians and chess players huddled over cryptograms at Bletchley Park, Arlington Hall and the NKVD’s sigint centre in the old Select hotel on Dzerzhinsky Street. Nonetheless, guerrilla campaigns became critical elements of the secret war, eventually commanding resources as large as those expended on intelligence-gathering, and often overlapping with it. In July 1940 Special Operations Executive received the prime minister’s mandate to ‘set Europe ablaze’. In his determination to wage a new kind of war with new men and new means, he entrusted his brainchild to Hugh Dalton, the raffish minister of economic warfare and a Labour MP, rather than to the chiefs of staff or Broadway. A cabinet colleague told the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, ‘You should never be consulted because you would never consent to everything; you will never make a gangster.’ Though the old secret service fought as fiercely against its upstart rival as it did against the Germans, SOE eventually became a more effective body than MI6, and was run by abler people.

  Between 1940 and 1943, however, its operations were dogged by the fact of the Axis Powers’ domination of the struggle. Germany and Japan were seen by most inhabitants of occupied territories as winners, whom it was madness to challenge. Bentinck of the JIC told Dalton he was thoroughly opposed to rousing the civilian populations of Europe: ‘The time is not ripe, and a lot of unfortunate people will be shot.’ Dalton shrugged: ‘These are the prime minister’s orders, and must be carried out.’ The minister, an ambitious and indiscreet man mistrusted by most of his colleagues, yearned for a livelier role in the war effort than his arid responsibility for administering blockade: stewardship of Britain’s guerrilla operations promised to provide this. An SOE officer wrote later that Dalton, who aspired to supplant Anthony Eden as foreign secretary, ‘tended to give Churchill and other cabinet ministers forecasts of Resistance activities based on assumptions of a will to resist in excess of any realistic views, until the accession of the Soviet Union and United States to the Allied cause gave the peoples of occupied Europe a real hope for an Allied victory’.

  Until 1944, when it became plain that Hitler would soon be defeated, most of the Continental societies wanted to have nothing to do with revolt, the frightful perils to their own homes and families of assisting the distant allies. Jean Cocteau, among the more notorious French intellectual collaborators with the Nazis, said scornfully to a young poet who told him that he intended to join the Resistance, ‘Vous avez tort. La vie est plus grave que ça’ – ‘You are wrong. Life is more serious than that.’ Posterity is confident that it was Cocteau who was wrong, but especially in the early war years his view was widely shared among the social and political elites of the European nations. In the days before the Germans occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, SOE distributed seven wireless sets to prospective local stay-behind operators, but none ever transmitted. The handful of extraordinarily brave inhabitants of the occupied nations who started Resistance networks in those early days, such people as Michel Hollard and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade in France – in their cases working with MI6 –deserve the highest admiration for breaking ranks with their cowed fellow-countrymen long before the Allied cause became fashionable.

  Robert Bruce Lockhart, director-general of the Political Warfare Executive and a veteran of British secret service operations in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, spoke to the chiefs of staff on 29 May 1942 about the limitations of Resistance. Enthusiasts, he said, sometimes forgot that local support must ebb and flow with the Allies’ perceived military success or failure. British prestige had been grievously damaged by years of defeats. Moreover, a ruthless occupier enjoyed great advantages over civilian Resisters: ‘In the Russian revolution of 1905–6 workers with rifles could still get behind barricades and put up a show against troops,’ read Bruce Lockhart’s notes of the meeting. ‘Today no chance against a few tanks and a dive-bomber or two. Task of controlling much easier … Gestapo, anti-sabotage units very ruthless.’ He concluded: ‘I don’t think much hope of stimulating resistance to a more active stage until there is some considerable measure of Anglo-American military success. Propaganda can’t replace military success … We should not try to promote a premature revolt which can be easily crushed.’ The German policy of repression was highly effective in stifling revolt among most of the occupied peoples.

  SOE’s chiefs attributed the slow growth of Resistance, especially in France, to lack of arms: the RAF declined to divert bombers in significant numbers to supply partisans until 1944, when Downing Street insisted. However, the only likely consequence of arming Resisters earlier in the war would have been that the Germans killed more of them. Untrained civilians given guns were capable of assassinations and nuisance attacks, but large-scale clashes with the Wehrmacht and SS could have only one outcome – bloody defeat – as was repeatedly proven as late as 1944–45. An OSS officer, Macdonald Austin, said of the maquis: ‘Sometimes they would do marvellous things, but one had to realise that on the next operation they could have forgotten to crank up the gazogènes’ – the charcoal-fuelled cars on which occupied France depended for mobility. A British SHAEF intelligence officer said: ‘You could never make any military plan dependent on the participation of guerrillas, because you could never be sure they would turn up.’

  From 1938 until the establishment of SOE, MI6 maintained a small sabotage unit known as ‘Section D’, run by a tall, lanky, absurd sapper major named Laurence Grand, who affected a long cigarette-holder and a carnation in his buttonhole. Grand was a fount of exotic ideas, none of which came to much. In the early days of the war he promoted such stunts as paying Slovenian gangs to pour sand into the axle-boxes of rolling stock bound for Germany. A new assistant who joined Grand was disbelieving when ordered to fund some East European sabotage groups by sending them cash through the post. Nobody believed in Grand. The Foreign Office’s Gladwyn Jebb pressed for his removal, writing contemptuously to Cadogan: ‘The only good point that I have been able to discover is that he is generous & liked by his staff, which includes one or two able persons. But to pit such a man against the German General Staff & the German Military Intelligence Service is like arranging an attack on a Panzer division by an actor mounted on a donkey.’

  Hearing all this, the prime minister intervened to insist that a new organisation should be established to make mayhem across Europe, the Balkans and later the Far East. Special Operations Executive was initially run by Sir Frank Nelson, a former imperial merchant, MP and 1914–18 intelligence officer. Nelson was replaced in May 1942 by the banker Sir Charles Hambro, of whom de Gaulle’s intelligence chief André Dewavrin said: ‘A charming fellow, but almost invisible
because of his innumerable responsibilities elsewhere.’ From an early stage SOE’s most effective personality proved to be Colin Gubbins, its director of operations, a Highland soldier with a background in military intelligence who had served at the War Office under the famously imaginative irregular warrior Col. John Holland. In September 1943 Gubbins became a major-general and succeeded Hambro as head of the organisation.

  SOE – ‘the racket’, as many of its staff irreverently referred to it – started life at 64 Baker Street, with a cover name as the Inter-Service Research Bureau. By 1945 it had expanded to occupy six acres of office space between Baker Street tube station and Portman Square. It recruited staff variously among service personnel, civilians with specialist knowledge of occupied countries, refugees, and adventurers who fitted in nowhere else. It established training schools in sabotage at Stevenage, black propaganda at Watford, fieldcraft at Loch Ailort and guerrilla techniques at Arisaig. The most celebrated instructors at the school for subversion, based in Aston House near Knebworth, were two ex-Shanghai policemen, Captains Fairburn and Sykes, who were alleged to conclude all lessons in unarmed combat with the words, ‘and then kick him in the balls’. A notable failing of MI6 was that it made little attempt to train its personnel, who were expected to learn on the job, in its gentleman-amateur tradition. Even Broadway’s official historian acknowledges that SOE provided good instruction: several of its training schools were incorporated into the post-war secret service.

  Field duty with SOE demanded almost entirely different skills from those of MI6’s people. ‘The man who is interested in obtaining intelligence must have peace and quiet, and the agents he employs must never if possible be found out,’ wrote Bickham Sweet-Escott, who served in both organisations. By contrast, the agent sent into the field to promote guerrilla war is bound to make a noise, ‘and it is only too likely that some of the men he uses will not escape’. In the early days, SOE made many mistakes that emphasised its inexperience. Jack Beevor, a lawyer and World War I gunner officer, was posted to its station in neutral Lisbon, where he rented a flat in his own name. He then allowed his MI6 counterparts to use it for a meeting with informants, which the landlord reported to the Portuguese authorities, who promptly expelled the SOE representative. In the spring of 1942 a member of an SOE landing party was captured by the Italians on the Mediterranean island of Antiparos; he proved to be carrying a list of British contacts in Athens, an act of carelessness which cost those hapless Greeks their lives. In Istanbul harbour, SOE planted limpet mines which failed to explode on tankers carrying Romanian oil for the Axis.

  Sweet-Escott described how, in the worst early days, he shared the widespread Whitehall belief that the new organisation was ‘nothing more than a wicked waste of time, effort, and money … Our record of achievement … was negligible. But our success or failure depended in the last resort on the willingness of men and women in enemy-occupied territory to risk their lives in the Allied cause … Their readiness to do so was tempered by doubts as to our final victory. This attitude on their part limited the scope for successful operations on ours.’ In 1941–42, SOE was besieged with requests to attack targets deep in enemy territory – for instance, the Luftwaffe’s Condor long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft, based at airfields around Brest – but its French section lacked any local supporters to undertake sabotage. The Abwehr was bemused that the British did not attack Germany’s vital Romanian oilfields, as they had done in World War I, but there again Baker Street lacked means.

  Among SOE’s early assignments was to organise demolition parties to destroy vital installations in the wake of a German invasion of Britain. Thereafter, it set about training young men and women to be landed in occupied countries wherever contact could be made with local sympathisers – no easy task – and whenever the RAF would provide aircraft, an even bigger constraint. Baker Street’s first big success was Operation ‘Rubble’ in March 1941, wherein George Binney stage-managed the escape from Gothenburg of a convoy of eight freighters laden with scarce commodities and industrial materials, a mission that uniformed personnel could not undertake, because it breached Swedish neutrality; a second similar coup was staged later in the year. Meanwhile the flamboyant Gus March-Phillips led a West African raid to ‘cut out’ the 7,600-ton Italian liner Duchessa d’Aosta, which was enjoying Portuguese sanctuary off Fernando Pó. He severed the ship’s cable before towing it into international waters, where the Royal Navy took over. Operation ‘Postmaster’, as March-Phillips’ raid was christened, made useful propaganda, because it showed the length of Britain’s reach.

  Some SOE schemes explored the wilder shores of fantasy in a fashion worthy of the Abwehr. A January 1942 Baker Street paper proposed that agents should be dispatched to rally Afghan tribes – Barakzais, Fopalzais and Alizais – on a prospective German line of advance to India. There was also a plan to launch biological warfare against Japan by parachuting hostile insects onto its crops. An officer who discussed ways and means with one of the Natural History Museum’s experts in London reported afterwards: ‘He tells me that boll weevil is not the best insect. A far more serious threat would be the pink boll worm, platyedra Gossypiella Saunders, which does ten million pounds’ worth of damage annually in Egypt.’ Unlike the Japanese, however, who did indeed launch biological warfare in China, Baker Street neither experimented on human guinea pigs, nor implemented the boll worm plan.

  SOE had many critics. A scornful 1941 cable to London from the British embassy in Belgrade denounced such young officers as Julian Amery, committed to ‘action for action’s sake’. This was a widespread complaint by diplomats who failed to understand that ‘action for action’s sake’ was exactly what the prime minister wanted. While the European governments in exile in London favoured a low-profile policy towards Resistance until the day of liberation was at hand, Churchill sought immediate, conspicuous acts of armed defiance. There were further criticisms about the real usefulness of SOE’s proclaimed achievements. The destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct in Greece was a notable feat of arms, but the long-intended demolition did not take place until the end of November 1942, when Britain’s Eighth Army was already advancing westwards from Egypt, and thus the German supply line through Greece had become irrelevant to the North African campaign.

  Even Baker Street’s own men considered that some operations did more to fulfil the fantasies of its adventurous young officers in the field than to hasten Allied victory. Bickham Sweet-Escott opposed one of the organisation’s most famous coups, the Cretan kidnapping of a German divisional commander, because of the inevitability of local reprisals. ‘The sacrifice might possibly have been worthwhile in the black winter of 1941 when things were going badly,’ he later wrote. By April 1944, however, when SOE’s intrepid buccaneers carried out the operation which brought them fame, the murderous Gen. Friedrich Müller had been replaced by a ‘comparatively harmless general called [Heinrich] Kreipe … The result of carrying it out in 1944, when everyone knew that victory was merely a matter of months would, I thought, hardly justify the cost.’

  Many local peoples in all occupied countries were more interested in their own factional struggles than in accepting orders from London about how to serve the Allied cause. Bold, brash young men and a few women from SOE and OSS arrived on their thresholds demanding that they should set aside local differences to pursue the supreme purpose of defeating the Axis. But many Frenchmen, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians, Albanians, Malays and Burmese spurned such arguments. It might suit foreigners’ interests to fight the Germans, Italians, Japanese to the exclusion of all else, but it did not suit many partisans. None of these British or US officers planned to live in their countries after the war; the visitors had no stake, beyond their own lives, which they held cheap as the young and unattached do, in the societies on which they so eagerly urged revolt.

  Nigel Clive of MI6 signalled a report from Greece in April 1944 which emphasised the popular expectation of liberation by mid-summer, and offered a
shrewd forecast: ‘What matters most is what will happen thereafter. There is universal apprehension of the immediate aftermath of liberation when it looks as if the towns will become the battlefields of what is now a mountain civil war. Public clamour is for the following things in this order: food, freedom from the German occupation and a minimum of security so that a semblance of democratic life may begin again. No political movement in free Greece is capable of meeting the last requirement. All armed political mountain parties engender different degrees of mistrust.’ The same was true in Yugoslavia, where unorthodox local rules of the game prevailed: the Germans were infuriated to discover from a wireless intercept that an Italian general captured by Gen. Mihailović and his Cetniks had subsequently been freed in exchange for the surrender of a field gun and ammunition to the partisans.

  In January 1943 Stewart Menzies staged one of his frequent explosions of wrath about SOE to Robert Bruce Lockhart, who recorded the conversation: ‘Could nothing be done about this show, which was bogus through and through?’ ‘C’ demanded. ‘They never achieved anything, they compromised all his agents, and they were amateurs in political matters … [Menzies] reckoned that if they could be suppressed our Intelligence would benefit enormously.’ Guy Liddell of MI5 wrote on 3 April 1943: ‘Lack of unity between ourselves, [MI6] and SOE is a serious menace.’ Fractious horse-trading, as well as bitter squabbles, some of them comic, dogged the relationships. In November 1941 there was a negotiation about codenames which resulted in Air Commodore Archie Boyle of SOE minuting Claude Dansey at Broadway: ‘The Greek Alphabet, together with names of motor cars, big game, fruit and colours are reserved for [MI6] … I have abandoned fruits for SOE purposes … I understand that you will suggest to [MI6] as additional categories, musicians and poets, and I shall therefore keep off them.’ Childish rivalry caused Broadway and Baker Street to run separate wireless organisations. Differences in the field could become extreme: SOE officer Spike Moran shot dead Costa Lawrence of MI6, an unhinged Greek who became so fanatically enthusiastic about the communist ELAS faction that he tried to betray to the Germans the British team attached to the rival EDES.