I am able to add here a detail, unrevealed in my own book twenty years ago, as it was still too sensitive then for publication. Major-General Sir Stuart Menzies, the wartime Head of British Intelligence, to whom in his Westminster office in October 1942 I explained my theory that his opposite number in Germany was in reality working against Hitler with the object of shortening the war, interrupted the conversation, saying with a smile: ‘I think I know what is going on in his mind. Would you like to meet Canaris?’
As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, an earlier myth runs that Menzies had been sent to Spain to eliminate Canaris during the First World War. Astonishingly, Colvin then went on to relate that in 1942 Menzies (whose Christian name he spelt incorrectly) considered sending him abroad in order to establish contact with the head of the Abwehr. Perhaps Colvin considered that the glowing testimonial later provided by Churchill in The Gathering Storm was proof enough of his credentials for the job:
He [Colvin] plunged very deeply into German politics, and established contacts of a most secret character with some of the important German generals, and also with independent men of character and quality in Germany who saw in the Hitler movement the approaching ruin of their native land.
Even bearing in mind this lavish praise, quite why the head of MI6 would have chosen a journalist working in the German section of the Foreign Office to undertake such a sensitive assignment is not explained by Colvin. In the event, however, the mooted rendezvous was overtaken by events:
The matter was left that Sir Stuart required a week or two to obtain official approval for myself and one of his staff to meet Canaris … When I next saw Sir Stuart, however, he appeared disturbed and embarrassed by some awkward press reference that had been made in the interim to Admiral Canaris by the British propaganda services. It had been reported in a London newspaper that the Admiral was a disaffected anti-Nazi. ‘Every time we build something up,’ said Sir Stuart sadly, ‘something like this happens and destroys what we have built.’
He then went on to say that he could no longer proceed with the plan for a meeting with Canaris. ‘It has also been pointed out to me,’ he explained, ‘that you are a friend of Winston Churchill. We have to protect the old man and we have to be very careful not to offend the Russians.’
Colvin then went on to pin the press leak on Kim Philby, the MI6 section head and communist mole who defected to Moscow in 1963. In this way Colvin helped fuel the legend that during the war Philby did all he could to sabotage contact between British intelligence and the Abwehr for fear that collaboration might lead to peace in the West, leaving Germany free to fight the Soviet Union on a single front. Colvin’s supposed sources, Warner and Menzies, died in 1957 and 1969 respectively, and thus were conveniently unable to contradict his version of events. The idea that Colvin would have been sent to meet Canaris is most unlikely, and the whole intrigue almost certainly invented. Since by 1942 British intelligence had already been in touch with Canaris for at least two years, via Halina Szymanska, it must be assumed that Colvin’s memoir is fiction.
Just as falsehoods about Canaris have multiplied down the years, a rich seam of myth and legend has arisen around the vexed question of whether the Abwehr as a whole were engaged in a secret war against the Nazi regime. Certainly some Abwehr personnel served the Allies as double-agents, and some were involved in the July 1944 bomb plot which came close to killing Hitler. Moreover several senior officers testified for the prosecution at Nuremberg, including Erwin von Lahousen and Hans Bernd Gisevius. In recent years it has been noted with increasing regularity that certain operations against Britain were conducted in such a thoroughly incompetent manner that the very intent behind them may be called into question. David Mure, who served under Brigadier Dudley Clarke in the deception unit known as A Force, questioned whether the Abwehr were ‘suckers or saints’, observing that:
I had not been the chairman of a deception committee controlling several agents for more than a couple of months before I began to suspect, from my own transmissions and from the study of previous traffic, that the complacency and inefficiency displayed by my opposite numbers might well be deliberate … Let me give three examples which strain the credibility to suggest otherwise than that the Abwehr was doing all in its power to help.
The examples cited by Mure include the cases of Tricycle, the Yugoslavian double-agent Dusko Popov, who the Abwehr continued to trust long after others would have smelt an entire midden of rats, and of a notional White Russian operative code-named Lambert, who proved useful to the Allied cause in the North African and Mediterranean theatres:
It never appeared odd to the Abwehr that over a period of three years their star ‘agent’ Lambert, whilst right in detail, was invariably wrong in effect. Also that he was so apparently devoted to the Abwehr cause that having arrived in 1940 with £1500 he had survived without replenishment for three years.
Other examples discussed elsewhere in this book include the remarkable speed at which Operation Sealion’s planners were made aware of notional British flame defences in July and August 1940, conducting their own trials six days before the first British flame barrage was tested successfully. There is also the enthusiastic manner in which The Man Who Never Was and his forged papers were accepted as genuine by the Abwehr in April 1943.
Another possible example of deliberate Abwehr incompetence is provided by the four spies landed by sea near Hythe and Dungeness on 3 September 1940, all of whom were swept up in a matter of hours. One, Charles Kieboom, was a conspicuous Dutch Eurasian, discovered with binoculars and a spare pair of shoes draped around his neck, while another was arrested after attempting to order champagne cider in a public house at 9.30 in the morning. Because their capture had been public, and because one, Jose Waldberg, managed to remain at large for a day, and send back three valueless signals by wireless, they could not be turned by MI5, and were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. One, Sjoerd Pons, was acquitted, but the others received mandatory death sentences under the 1940 Treachery Act.
In 1952 Colonel Oreste Pinto gave an account of the capture of this ill-starred quartet which merits mention, if only as a reminder that even memoirs by former serving officers must sometimes be treated with caution. Pinto served as head of the Dutch section at the Royal Victorian Patriotic School, the interrogation centre at which refugees were screened after arriving in Britain. In his popular book Spycatcher, Pinto claimed to have played a key role in the capture and interrogation of all four spies, at a location very far from Dungeness, and offered a wholly fictitious account of the action. By this account, at dawn on 8 September Pinto received a decoded message from an agent in France that four spies would be landed on the south coast by U-boat, at map reference 432925. Accompanied by a dozen Field Security men, dressed in plain clothes, Pinto drove west from London for five hours to reach a ‘small, secluded cove’ where his group lay in wait for the Abwehr visitors. After a brief struggle three were detained, but the fourth spy could not be found. At daybreak the FS men fanned out to search ‘every inch’ of the cove thoroughly, but still to no avail. Pinto:
I clenched my fists in my exasperation and watched the approaching line of searchers. It was light enough to see the white blur of each face but not to recognise the owner. I looked along the line from right to left and then back again. Suddenly the solution hit me and I laughed aloud … The captain and I strolled along the line of searchers, long enough to recognise each one. Eight, nine, ten. We were nearing the end of the line. Eleven, twelve and – we halted and I put a hand on the last man’s shoulder. ‘Good morning, Van der Kieboom,’ I said. He was the thirteenth man.
In reality Kieboom had been arrested on the coast road near Hythe by a sentry from the Somerset Light Infantry, replete with shoes and binoculars, having demonstrated no guile whatsoever. Map reference 432925 is a fictional location, and it is said that Pinto’s account was so at variance with the facts of the case, and the others examined, that both his books were passed for pu
blication by the War Office without amendment. His other study, The Boys’ Book of Secret Agents (1955), is unlikely to have troubled the Whitehall censor. While Defence Notice approval might excuse a certain degree of factual manipulation, it is clear that Pinto’s motives in publishing Spycatcher and Friend or Foe? were self-aggrandisement and financial gain. Spycatcher was later televised by the BBC, and the book issued with a cover quotation attributed to Eisenhower that Pinto was ‘the greatest living expert on security’. It is highly unlikely that the former Allied Supreme Commander ever expressed such a view, even as an act of charity.
Even reliable accounts may on occasion give rise to misconceptions. One myth surrounding the Abwehr espionage network in Britain arose after 1972, in the wake of the publication of The Double Cross System by Sir John Masterman. Masterman had completed his official report into the workings of the Twenty Committee in September 1945 while still a serving MI5 officer. The text was published by Yale University Press in 1972, thus avoiding the need for Defence Notice clearance in Britain, where permission to publish had been denied to Masterman since the early 1950s. The report detailed how every enemy agent sent to Britain (bar one) had been expected by MI5, since the Abwehr had unwisely given prior notice of their arrival to the Welsh double agent SNOW (Arthur Owens), and also explained how most were turned into double agents after capture, to send back false information to their Abwehr controllers. Few doubted Masterman’s startling claim that ‘by means of the double agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country,’ while the implication that MI5 had exercised complete control over the notional enemy network was reinforced by the following passage:
Innumerable precautions had to be taken with every agent and indeed with every message on the assumption (which later turned out to be false) that the Germans had several and perhaps many independent agents of whom we had no knowledge, and that these agents’ reports could be used to check the reports of our own controlled agents.
Over the years several dubious accounts have emerged of alleged German agents who double-crossed the double-cross system, notably The Druid by Leonard Mosley in 1981, which claimed an SD agent had operated undetected by MI5 from May 1941 onwards. This account was exposed as false by Nigel West in his myth-busting study Counterfeit Spies, although West himself uncovered circumstantial evidence that an independent spy may have been at liberty on the south coast as early as September 1940, whose reports on defence dispositions near Rye and Beachy Head appear in German files. West suggests that at this time the Soviet military intelligence service, the GRU, ran several active networks in Britain, and that some intelligence gathered for Moscow may also have reached Berlin. One member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a merchant seaman named George Armstrong, was tried at the Old Bailey in May 1941, having offered to supply details of Atlantic convoys to the German consul in Boston. His appeal against the death penalty was dismissed on 23 June, the day after the German invasion of the Soviet Union reversed CPGB policy overnight. Against this background, Masterman’s account may not stand as the last word on German intelligence operations in wartime Britain after all, at least as far as the period between September 1930 and June 1941 is concerned.
In fact Masterman contradicted his own assessment in respect of one German agent, a hapless male in his late twenties whose body was discovered in a Cambridge air raid shelter on 1 April 1941, and who carried forged papers in the name of Jan Willem Ter Braak. Given the implications of an active enemy agent remaining at large for some six months, the published version of Masterman’s account covers Ter Braak with surprising brevity:
It is more than probable that he was a parachute agent (perhaps the only agent) who succeeded in eluding capture, but who was unable to make contact with the Germans … It is not altogether fanciful to speculate how much more happy and useful his career might have been if he could have fallen into the hands of the Security Service and become a double agent.
Although some accounts claim that Ter Braak was tailed and investigated while still alive, the truth is that MI5 only learned of his existence after his death. It was established that Ter Braak first surfaced in the city early in November 1940, claiming to be a Dutch refugee. As well as lodgings he also rented an office in Rose Crescent. In addition to a wireless transmitter, his possessions were found to include a number of bus tickets, which suggested that he had been touring airfields around the country. His true identity was never established, and the MI5 report concluded that he had probably taken his own life after running out of ration books and funds. It was impossible to guess at the nature or value of any intelligence he may have managed to pass back to Germany, although later anecdotal evidence connected him with air raids on marshalling yards used by the military.
Today he remains buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery at Great Shelford, the only German spy known to have succeeded in double-crossing the double-cross system.
11
Myths in the Field
The following chapter is necessarily something of a mixed bag, being a collection of assorted wartime myths whose common denominator is that they all concern armies and land operations.
Of all the myths to emerge from the Polish campaign, the most persistent is that Polish cavalry units charged German armoured columns, broke their sabres and lances on tanks, and were massacred in droves. A further elaboration offered that the Poles had mistakenly believed that the enemy ‘tanks’ were no more than cars dummied-up with wood and canvas, of the type used by Germany in pre-war exercises. Although the tale is rarely mentioned in official histories, the following brief paragraph from the Eastern Daily Press is typical:
An instance of the useless sacrifice of brave men was an order to 2000 or 3000 cavalry to charge tanks in the Katowice area in the first days of the war. Only 100 cavalry returned from the desperate encounter.
In fact this never happened. Although the Polish army of 1939 boasted eight cavalry brigades, and considered its mounted troops an elite force, they fought chiefly as dismounted infantry. On 1 September the 18th Lancer Regiment of the Pomorska Cavalry Brigade charged an unprepared German infantry unit at Krojanty, and caused considerable panic until several armoured cars appeared and turned the Polish riders under a barrage of withering automatic fire. This single incident was reported in exaggerated form first by Italian journalists, and quickly exploited by German propagandists. In truth, in a month of fighting the Polish army gave a far better account of itself than did the French, Belgian and British forces in May 1940, and managed to account for 674 German tanks lost or damaged. Polish anti-tank gunners were particularly effective, and obliged the Panzer arm to abandon the large white Balkankreuz as its standard marking on armoured vehicles. Nor is it true that the Polish air force was destroyed on the ground during the first few days of the campaign. The Poles had sensibly withdrawn most of their modern aircraft to secluded airfields days before the invasion, leaving only obsolete machines on the targeted bases. In this way most of Poland’s first line aircraft survived to fight another day, even if they were themselves outnumbered and outclassed by the Luftwaffe.
Myths about spies and parachutists were rife in Poland, as they were in the West as Hitler strove to complete the conquest of Europe in 1940. Although Britain was not invaded, rumours of landings by German troops were commonplace, particularly in the wake of the celebrated Cromwell alert issued on Saturday 7 September. The many stories of bodies on beaches have already been examined in Chapter Six, while bemused accounts of nocturnal panics and false alarms are legion. Countless sticks of German paratroops were said to have met a sticky end, such as that reported by a Mass Observer near Newport on 10 September, to the effect that 500 Germans had landed nearby, 499 of whom were shot in three seconds. The last was said to have escaped. A similar story was recorded by Anthony Armstrong, a Home Guard in the Sussex village of East Downing, in his book Village at War (1941):
We never found out the real truth of that alarm. Rumours
varied from a sentry’s mistake in identifying baled-out British airman to mines being layed [sic] by parachute off Dover harbour. One good blood-thirsty story, circumstantial of course in every detail as these stories are, had it that 14 German parachutists had been dropped to capture a big aerodrome behind Dover and ‘every man jack of them was riddled before he reached the ground.’ Why, within a week, one of our people had met a chap whose brother had a cousin who had himself got three of them; and later I met another man whose friend had written him to say he’s accounted for two himself. At that rate it began to look as if half a battalion had been shot on the wing.
One post-Cromwell rumour which spread in Dover held that Folkestone had already been taken, and that German aircraft were operating from Hawkinge airfield. In his 1971 book How We Lived Then, Norman Longmate wrote that ‘in East Anglia some enthusiastic engineers blew up bridges and laid mines, which killed several Guards officers’, although this much-quoted yarn has never been confirmed. Several stories told of a landing at Sandwich Bay. Meanwhile:
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 22
