by Max Hastings
Britain’s rulers, particularly the home secretary Herbert Morrison, remained deeply concerned about the threat posed by the Germans’ as yet uncommitted rocket, the V-2. It was Morrison who attempted to frustrate one of R.V. Jones’s inspired strokes – using Double Cross Abwehr agents to inform the Germans that the V-1s were overshooting London, so that they shifted their aiming point southwards: the home secretary objected, absurdly and fortunately in vain, that this would represent a malign interference in the workings of Providence. In July, at his behest the war cabinet considered a proposal for evacuating two million Londoners and removing the government from the capital if a bombardment proved sufficiently devastating. There was still speculation that the V-2’s warhead might be as heavy as ten tons. A July estimate from Air Ministry experts, who travelled to Sweden to inspect prototype crash wreckage, suggested five tons. On that basis, the Germans could rain eight hundred tons of explosives a month on Britain, though this would still be only a fraction of the volume descending upon Germany. Reg Jones conceded on 16 July that the Germans had brought a technically impressive missile to a stage where it could probably mount ‘at least a desultory bombardment of London’, but he thought the warhead unlikely to weigh much more than a ton – as indeed it did not.
On the night of 25 July 1944 an unarmed RAF C-47, piloted by a young New Zealander, Flt Lt. Guy Culliford, undertook an extraordinary long-haul flight from Italy to the remotenesses of Nazi-occupied Poland, accompanied by a Polish navigator, F/O Szrajer. In deep darkness, Culliford descended near the village of Zaborow, twelve miles north-west of Tarnow. Four hundred Germans were bivouacked a mile away, and the airstrip on which the Dakota landed was used by the Luftwaffe during the daylight hours. At night, however, it was sometimes exploited by the Poles: Culliford was guided in by UHF S-Phone, and safely met by a reception committee of partisans arranged by SOE. They manhandled through the aircraft doors nineteen suitcases containing wreckage from a V-2 which had landed beside the river Bug, together with scores of photographs and drawings, and five members of the Polish Resistance. After just five minutes on the ground, Culliford revved his engines for take-off. And stuck. The Dakota’s brakes jammed, and its wheels sank into the soft earth.
Only after an hour of frenzied digging by the ground party, and by cutting the plane’s hydraulic lines, did Culliford manage to stagger into the air at his fourth attempt. The Dakota droned away southwards with agonising sluggishness, slowed by its undercarriage, which remained partially extended. As dawn was coming up, the plane and its exhausted crew and passengers made a clumsy landing at Brindisi; the V-2 parts were flown to London, reaching R.V. Jones and his colleagues two days later. Culliford received the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest air decoration, which was assuredly richly deserved. It would be satisfying to record that this remarkable episode solved the riddle of the German rocket. It did not, however. The British remained as puzzled as ever about the technical specifications of the V-2.
In the course of the summer and autumn, just over 10,000 flying bombs were launched against England, of which 7,488 crossed the coast; but only 2,419 reached London, and most of the balance were shot down. They inflicted 6,184 deaths, cause for grief enough, but nothing like the devastating campaign Hitler had intended and the British feared. The consequence was a surge of premature euphoria. Early in September the vice-chiefs of staff delivered a remarkably reckless report: ‘All those areas from which the flying bomb or the rocket might be launched against London have been, or are about to be, occupied by Allied troops. There should thus shortly be no further danger to this country from either of these causes.’ At a press conference on 7 September, Sandys stated publicly: ‘Except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over.’ Yet the very next day the first V-2 rockets, fired from Holland, landed on Paris and Chiswick, and soon three or four a day were exploding around the British capital. The scale of attack rose until an average of fourteen a day were landing – albeit with wild imprecision – on Holland and south-east England.
The official historians of wartime intelligence note frankly that British information about the V-2 had been sketchy for many months, and ‘it was long to remain insufficient for all practical purposes’. R.V. Jones made a pretty good estimate of the weapon’s size and warhead weight on the eve of its first firing in anger, but only in December 1944 did it become understood in London that the weapon was not radio-controlled, and thus could not be jammed. The Crossbow committee and the JIC lacked any significant knowledge about the location of the V-2’s factories, depots or fuel plants in Germany. No defence against the rocket was practicable save to overrun its launch sites in Holland, which did not happen until the end of the war. It is a measure of the extravagant alarm provoked by the V-2 campaign that Herbert Morrison called for all-out Allied bomber attacks on its launchers around The Hague, heedless of the cost to Dutch civilians. The air chiefs invoked humanitarian considerations to resist saturation attacks, but Allied bombing of ski sites and other V-weapon installations in France, and of V-2 sites in Holland, nonetheless killed more French and Dutch people than Hitler’s secret weapons killed British civilians. Between 8 September 1944 and 27 March 1945, 1,054 rockets fell on England and 2,700 Londoners perished.
Since the summer of 1943, Lord Cherwell had been a consistent sceptic about the plausibility of Hitler’s rocket programme. Late in that year he said: ‘At the end of the war, when we know the full story, we shall find that the rocket was a mare’s nest.’ He has been mocked ever since for making that statement, and it is certainly true that Cherwell overstated his case, as he often did. But he was fundamentally correct that the Nazis in 1944–45 created two weapons that were remarkable within the limits of the technology of that time, but quite incapable of changing the strategic balance of the war. After the V-weapons began to explode on Britain, Cherwell reiterated his scorn: ‘The mountain hath groaned and brought forth a mouse.’ He was right that Hitler made one of his many huge errors, by diverting to V-weapons manpower and raw materials that he could have used much more profitably elsewhere – to increase tank production, or to hasten and expand the Me-262 jet fighter programme. Seven German fighters could have been built with the resources expended on each V-2.
The Nazi leadership failed to see that the only issue that mattered was not the innovatory brilliance of a gyro-stabilised ballistic missile, nor that of the flying bomb, but merely what weight of explosives either was capable of delivering to Britain. A warhead of rather less than a ton in the case of the V-1, and somewhat more in that of the V-2, was smaller than the bombload of a Heinkel or Ju-88 bomber. The moral impact of V-weapons on the British was considerable: it was a terrifying experience to go about one’s daily business beneath the ‘doodlebugs’, whose buzzing motors cut seconds before they plunged in murderous silence to earth, or the V-2s, which delivered devastation with awesome abruptness. But even had the programme created more weapons sooner, they were capable only of distressing Hitler’s enemies, not of seriously injuring their war effort. It would have been more relevant to direct them against Eisenhower’s forces in France, though neither system was sufficiently accurate to inflict serious damage upon armies in the field. It is no more useful to speculate, as do some historians to this day, about the possible effect had the Germans built and launched tens of thousands of V-weapons against Britain, than to try to compute the impact on the war of a dramatically larger Luftwaffe or U-boat fleet. Both, as Cherwell and R.V. Jones correctly surmised, were beyond Hitler’s means.
The V-weapons intelligence failure was certainly not absolute. The British discovered that there was a threat. They delayed the German programme by months through bombing Peenemünde and the French ski sites, which they correctly identified as important elements in the V-weapon project. The Crossbow group learned enough about the V-1 to prepare some moderately effective countermeasures before it began; and no Allied weapons system existed that could have destroyed V-2s in flight. It was nonetheless remarkable that
, in the last months of the war, Hitler could launch a campaign against the Allies which they could no more precisely define than they could monitor the German atomic bomb programme, such as it was. There were good reasons for this. The RAF’s photographic interpreters were highly skilled, but could nonetheless be baffled by the unfamiliar – artefacts such as they had never seen before. Resistance groups in Poland and Western Europe, which provided reports, sketches and crash fragments, displayed extraordinary bravery and determination, but their efforts yielded insufficient evidence to enable scientists and agents in London to reach firm conclusions. Finally and most important, the British intelligence machine was so Ultra-weighted that it struggled when confronted with an issue about which Bletchley Park could reveal little: the Germans were not so obliging as to dispatch wireless signals describing the exact nature of their Führer’s revenge weapons.
In the grand scheme of the war, none of this mattered much. As Lord Cherwell said, the Nazi mountain produced a mouse. But it remains striking that, for all the Ultra-driven triumphs of Allied intelligence in the latter years of the war, there was a remarkable amount the high command yearned to know, yet failed to discover.
16
‘Blunderhead’: The English Patient
Many spies of all nationalities adopted muddled or multiple loyalties, as the behaviour of a host of characters in this book illustrates. Yet few Englishmen who served in the war experienced such an odyssey as that of Ronald Seth, who is scarcely known to posterity, or even to most historians of the secret war. His doings did not influence the struggle in the smallest degree, but they nonetheless absorbed countless man-hours among the senior officers of SOE, MI5, MI6 and MI9 – and of the Abwehr and RSHA. What makes Seth even more unusual is that the documents about his case survive almost in their entirety in Britain’s National Archives. It is thus possible to recount in detail the story of one of the few wartime agents ‘turned’ by the Germans, a man who baffled both sides’ secret services in a fashion that relegates Eddie Chapman – ‘ZigZag’ – to amateur status.
Seth was born in eastern England in 1911, a metal merchant’s son who attended King’s School, Ely, and read English at Cambridge before embarking on a career as a teacher. Having considered, and finally rejected, ordination as a priest, in 1936 he accepted a post at the English College in Tallin, Estonia, and from there graduated to become assistant professor of English at the local university. He wrote a little book on Estonia entitled Baltic Corner, which was published in Britain in 1938. At the outbreak of war he returned home and spent a year as an announcer for the BBC’s Estonian Service before falling out with the Corporation and being called up for service in the RAF, becoming an administrative officer at an airfield in Wiltshire.
Although Seth was married with two small children, he hankered for a more dramatic personal role in the conflict. On 26 October 1941 he wrote a long letter to the Air Ministry, suggesting that he was just the man to raise the standard of revolt against Nazism in the Baltic states: ‘Because of my activities I became well-known to the ordinary Estonian man-in-the-street and, if I may say so, held in high esteem and admiration throughout the country. It cannot be denied that I am the best-known Englishman in Estonia. In addition to this I made friends with a very large circle of prominent and influential Estonians who included the president [and] most members of the government. All the Estonians ever wanted, and I am positive still want, is political independence … I wish to place before you the following proposal: that I should be permitted to go to Estonia and attempt to organise a [Resistance] movement … I realise the difficulties and the risks. I realise that if I am caught I shall be “a gonner”. If I succeed I shall have done a fair spot of work … In any events, I should be happier attempting it than I am now, in more or less enforced inactivity … at an Operational Training Unit.’
Many such wartime appeals from bored or unfulfilled men and women with romantic ambitions were dismissed unheeded. However, Seth’s remarkable letter was passed to SOE, which responded enthusiastically. Russia’s survival hung by a thread; the British were eager to do everything in their limited power to provide aid. The Germans were extracting hundreds of tons of shale oil from Estonia, which were fuelling Wehrmacht formations besieging Leningrad. Baker Street put the question to Ronald Seth: how would he like to be parachuted into the country, blow up the oil plants and start a local Resistance movement behind the Eastern Front? The aspiring hero embraced the scheme and completed SOE’s application form, answering a question about his political views by writing ‘vaguely socialist’. He stated that he had written ‘two novels of no consequence’ and was unable to drive a car. None of this was held against him, nor was a complaint from his former RAF station that a cheque he left behind in settlement of his final officers’ mess bill had bounced. He spent most of 1942 attending the usual schools in sabotage, tradecraft, unarmed combat and wireless transmission.
Seth performed reasonably well as an embryo secret agent. He was uncomfortable with weapon training, and weak wrists made him a poor shot, but he improved after some fitness classes. Following an exercise in Newcastle, his examiner reported: ‘This student’s work was of an unusually high quality. He is exceptionally keen and competent … Under a rigorous interrogation on his identity, his life, his past and present activities, his presence in Newcastle and his future plans, the student was superbly self-confident. He was completely unperturbable, his story was convincing.’ The parachute school at Ringway, where he jumped in his spectacles, described him as ‘a talkative but pleasant type who seemed sincere and determined … a nervous type of officer. Likeable.’ His finishing report said: ‘intelligent, but an erratic type of brain. Mentally immature. He is intensely enthusiastic, bordering on the fanatic. He appears to possess abundant self-confidence … He has a charming personality and is a good mixer but his great weakness is that he is inclined to dramatise nearly everything he does. He requires a far greater degree of security-mindedness and self-discipline if he is to succeed. It is his determination rather than his character which inspires a degree of confidence.’ The final verdict on Seth, in September 1942, was that ‘although his sublime self-confidence is … possibly somewhat excessive, it is at the same time one of his strongest weapons’.
He provided a clue to his own eccentricity, if not mental instability, by suggesting to SOE that before he jumped into Estonia he should be subjected to some bodily mutilation, such as would render him unfit for forced labour in Germany. His handlers rejected this proposal, on the somewhat cynical grounds that if they fulfilled his proposal the British government would become liable for paying him a disability pension after the war. One sensitive planner in Baker Street was troubled at the prospect of dispatching an agent on a mission which, the political runes already indicated, would raise hopes among local people that must go unfulfilled: ‘If Estonia is to be handed over to Russia at the end of the war,’ wrote an unnamed officer on 1 May 1942, ‘and the Estonians get to know Britain’s acquiescence, I do not see how R[onald] can in good faith get the Estonians to rally round him in sabotaging their way to a non-existent freedom!’
Doubts might have also have been raised about the plausibility of sending such an immediately noticeable figure as Seth – six feet two inches tall – to blend into Baltic society as a spy. But all scruples were brushed aside by SOE’s chieftains, and in October the decision was taken to dispatch him on the first suitable night an RAF aircraft was available. There was one small hitch: an Estonian seaman named Arnold Tedrekin had been selected to drop with him, but Seth baulked at undertaking the mission with a comrade who, he pointed out, seldom drew a sober breath. It was agreed that the Englishman should jump alone. The SOE operational order noted bleakly if ungrammatically: ‘there is little hope of withdrawing this personnel’.
Winston Churchill delivered a stern injunction to his service chiefs, warning them against allocating frivolous codenames. It was intolerable, said the prime minister, that a wife or mother should be ob
liged to learn that her husband or son had perished to fulfil a mission with such a codename as ‘Bunnyhug’ or ‘Ballyhoo’. SOE breached this injunction in the case of Ronald Seth, by dubbing the agent and his Baltic mission ‘Blunderhead’. Its start was inauspicious, because the take-off was three times scheduled and cancelled because of bad weather. Seth’s morale understandably plummeted, according to the RAF officer responsible for the Special Duties Squadron. But shortly before 6 o’clock on the evening of Saturday, 24 October 1942, a Polish-piloted Halifax bomber took off from Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire for the six-hour flight to Estonia. It carried the newly minted agent, dressed in a camouflaged jumpsuit, together with a wireless set, some rations and explosives.
Seth would be dropping ‘blind’, with no reception committee to meet him, because there was no known local Resistance. He had opted to land near a coastal farmhouse whose owner, Martin Saarne, he knew and trusted, having taught his son English. The pilot afterwards described how his passenger came and stood beside him in the cockpit, peering down through the clear night at the Baltic coastline until he was sure they were in the right place, above a clearing in forests at the western base of the Kolga peninsula. Seth vanished into the darkness with remarkable good cheer, followed on a second circuit by three containers that bore his equipment. He flashed a torch from the ground to confirm a safe descent, then the big bomber banked and turned for home, landing safely at 7 o’clock next morning after thirteen hours in the air. The pilot reported Seth’s delivery: ‘Agent jumped without hesitation after selecting the point with the captain of the aircraft.’
Thereafter, however, a deafening silence descended upon ‘Blunderhead’. Weeks passed, then months. A report reached SOE that a source in Tallin had heard of a British parachutist answering its man’s description, who had been captured by the Germans, then committed suicide. The agent’s handler, Major Ronald Hazell, a former shipbroker who was head of SOE’s Polish Section, was asked if ‘Blunderhead’ had been provided with poison. Yes, of course: all agents were issued with an ‘L’ for lethal potassium cyanide pill for optional use in the event of their capture, though most promptly flushed it down the nearest toilet. Hazell felt obliged to write to Josephine Seth, reporting that her husband was missing, and that it might be necessary to assume the worst. She responded with a moving letter, in which she explained that successive postings to different RAF stations meant she saw her children at schools in the West Country only every three months, so she was experiencing a difficult time. She acknowledged SOE’s interpretation of her husband’s silence, but said, ‘I shall always go on believing that Ronnie is alive’ – a phrase used by many, many wartime wives who were eventually obliged to admit themselves widows.
