Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  Before long, like rumours were being noted by civilian diarists, including Vere Hodgson, who wrote early in October that:

  It is said that the advert for Sylvan Soap Flakes showing a Dieppe Beach Coat was a cryptogram advising the Germans. I remember seeing the advert and wondering why – Dieppe. Scotland Yard is said to be investigating it. No wonder we lost half our forces.

  The legend of betrayal gained new impetus in 1963 with the publication of the book Of Spies and Stratagems, a war memoir by Stanley Lovell, formerly a senior officer in the OSS, the American military intelligence service which later became the CIA. Then, as now, the book carried some weight, since fully nine years before the publication of The Double Cross System it revealed that British intelligence agencies had run a string of double agents in order to pass back false information to their German counterparts. Indeed this might explain why the book did not find a British publisher.

  According to Lovell, SIS tipped off the enemy about the Dieppe raid by accident. The raid should have taken place on 18 August, a Tuesday, but was unexpectedly postponed for 24 hours. News of the delay was not passed on to SIS, who therefore proceeded with their plan to bolster the credentials of a particular agent, who had been used in a similar manner during the commando raid on St Nazaire three months earlier. The spy was supposed to have sent ‘accurate but retarded information’ after the commandos had already achieved their objective, and was to repeat the exercise at Dieppe:

  The message was to be sent late Monday evening and this would be another accurate but ‘just too late’ bit of intelligence… After an agreed upon waiting period, the German radio operator was given a message to flash to Berlin. ‘A great Commando raid is laid on, destination Dieppe. Biggest operation since Dunkirk evacuation. Scheduled for Dieppe’ … Late Monday evening the message went over the air to Berlin… The dangerous game of maintaining a supposed London spy ring information service to the Germans had by chance and a delay at a rendezvous caused the death of perhaps 2,000 brave Commandos.

  A broadly similar idea was advanced by Anthony Cave Brown in Bodyguard of Lies, published some years later. In 1972, when The Double-Cross System was finally published, Sir John Masterman confirmed that the Dieppe raid had been launched without the benefit of any cover plan or deception. Nevertheless, in 1977 a German writer named Gunter Peis repeated Lovell’s contrary claim in his own book, The Mirror of Deception:

  A great question mark hangs over the dead of Dieppe. Was their heroic sacrifice merely staged in order to test German preparedness on the Channel coast? I found the double agents, intermediaries, radio operators and officers at the German end of the secret ‘London sources’ who were still able to confirm the fatal advance warning of the attack on Dieppe. The same picture came from several different sources.

  By way of evidence, Peis quoted several former Abwehr officers, including Herbert Wichmann of the Hamburg Stelle, who said that advance warning of the raid had been received from ‘a very reliable, proven agent’ in the south of England. These claims possibly inspired the British historian Leonard Mosley, who in 1981 published his controversial work The Druid, which claimed to reconstruct the extraordinary career of ‘the spy who double-crossed the double-cross system’. The entire book, published by Eyre Methuen as non-fiction, has been comprehensively rubbished by Nigel West in his valuable books Unreliable Witness (1984) and Counterfeit Spies (1988), and has no credibility as a factual account. Nevertheless, according to Mosley the massacre at Dieppe was the phantom Druid’s first success:

  It was quite obvious from the start that the Wehrmacht knew they were coming, and had made all the necessary preparations … Dieppe was one of the costliest disasters of the war, and the Druid helped make it so.

  The major problem with this particular betrayal myth is that it is not substantiated by German records captured during the battle, and at the end of the war. As early as July Hitler had already guessed that a landing would probably take place in ‘the area between Dieppe and Le Havre’, and defence units stationed on the Channel coast were warned accordingly. The War Diary of 302 Division records that the general alert was cancelled on the evening of 18 July, a day before the Allies landed, while a guardbook seized by commandos on the day logged an order issued on 10 August by the commander of the 571st Infantry Regiment garrisoned at Dieppe. This revealed that:

  The information in our hands makes it clear that the Anglo-Americans will be forced, in spite of themselves, by the wretched predicament of the Russians to undertake some operation in the West in the near future.

  It is therefore clear that although the defenders were expecting some unspecified form of attack ‘in the near future’, no specific warning had identified Dieppe as the actual target. Haase had also ordered that off-duty gun crews should sleep fully clothed, so as to be ready for immediate action, yet the commandos found many had ignored the instruction. A detailed analysis of Wehrmacht records by Professor John Campbell of McMaster University in Ontario also established that no detailed advance warning had been passed on to Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s headquarters. The Dieppe attack had already been cancelled, reinstated and postponed over a seven-week period before the men finally stormed the beaches on 19 August, and it is likely that British signal traffic alerted the Germans to a likely operation on the Channel coast, as the order from Haase indicated. Despite this, the legend that the defenders knew the time and place of the attack lives on.

  Another Dieppe myth holds that although the raid was a failure, it provided a rich harvest of lessons which were put to good use in Normandy two years later. This falsehood was first offered in several censor-approved books published in 1943, including Rehearsal for Invasion by Wallace Reyburn, Dress Rehearsal by Quentin Reynolds and We Landed at Dawn by A.B. Austin, which described ‘a testing and rehearsing of all our combined military, naval and Air Force staff work, a detailed working out of plans on which once completed, weeks could be saved another time’. According to Major-General Sir Leslie Hollis, the lessons learned at Dieppe were merely that ‘a frontal attack on a strongly defended position was of little use’ and that ‘army units destined for amphibious operations must be trained’. The naval commander at Dieppe, Captain John Hughes-Hallett, offered the equally specious assertion that ‘we proved once and for all that a frontal assault on a strongly defended port was not on’. The Jubilee planners might have done well to remember that it is not necessary to visit the North Pole to verify that it is cold. True, in July 1944 Eisenhower credited Dieppe as having provided valuable lessons, while Churchill later wrote that in tactical terms the raid was ‘a mine of experience’, yet this smacks of hindsight. In his book Unauthorized Action historian Brian Villa mounts a convincing argument that these later rationalisations were simply part of a smokescreen to obscure the true extent of Mountbatten’s culpability for the disaster. Perhaps the best that may be said of Dieppe is that it convinced the German High Command that the Allies would try to take a large port during the early stages of an invasion, and disposed their forces accordingly, when in fact the Allies took their own ports to Normandy. Reynolds’s book Dress Rehearsal even dared to imply that the Canadians themselves had insisted on undertaking the raid, even though Mountbatten preferred to use more experienced troops, and themselves switched the plan from a flanking to frontal assault. Neither suggestion was true.

  Like Dieppe, the facts of Operation Market Garden in September 1944 are well known. On 17 September almost 10,000 men of the British 1st Airborne Division, together with 20,000 American airborne troops, were dropped over Holland at Arnhem, Grave and Nijmegen, in what was the largest airborne operation in the history of warfare. Their task was to secure bridgeheads over the Waal and the Rhine, while an armoured spearhead from 30 Corps plunged down the narrow road to Arnhem, more than 60 miles from the start line. Given that airborne troops are lightly equipped and entirely reliant upon supply from the air, the element of surprise was of paramount importance if the operation was to succeed. Certainly man
y of the participants were taken unawares, for the planning of Operation Market Garden was completed in little more than a week. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was hopeful that it might end the war by Christmas, but in the event the operation was a disaster. Faced with an impossible schedule, 30 Corps failed to relieve the 1st Airborne at Arnhem, who found themselves fighting two crack Panzer divisions, and lost some 6,630 men killed, wounded or captured. Montgomery later described Market Garden as 90 per cent successful, although the result was little more than a sixty-mile corridor leading nowhere, and the King of Holland came closer to the truth in voicing the hope that his people would be spared another of Montgomery’s victories.

  Allegations that the operation was betrayed to the Germans in advance first surfaced in the book Spycatcher (1952) by Oreste Pinto, whose loose attitude towards historical fact was touched on in Chapter Ten. In a chapter titled ‘The Traitor of Arnhem’, Pinto gave a highly questionable account of ‘perhaps the most important spy case in the whole history of espionage’, which centred on the activities of the Dutch resistance leader Christiaan Lindemans. Nicknamed ‘King Kong’ because of his enormous size, Lindemans was arrested on 28 October 1944 after allegations that, far from being a Dutch patriot, he was in fact a German spy. After an intensive two-week interrogation by MI5 he was returned to Dutch custody, where he suffered a nervous breakdown and subsequently committed suicide in a prison hospital in July 1946. Lindemans was never charged or convicted of any crime, but nonetheless he became the peg on which any number of espionage legends were hung, so much so that it is unlikely that the whole truth will ever be established.

  What is known is that in September 1944 Lindemans was cleared for operational intelligence duties by the 21st Army Group, and on 13 September crossed the German lines into occupied Holland with the intention of locating a group of Allied evaders near Eindhoven. The mission had been sanctioned by Colonel J.M. Langley of MI9, despite the fact that Oreste Pinto had already warned Langley privately that Lindemans was untrustworthy. Pinto was unequivocal in his appraisal of King Kong’s role in the Arnhem disaster:

  One man – and one man only – made the Arnhem landings a doomed venture from the start. He was a Dutchman named Christiaan Lindemans. Whether or not we can blame him for the final six months’ prolongation of the European war with all its attendant sacrifices and tragedies, we can certainly charge him with the 7,000 casualties suffered by the gallant Airborne Forces during the ten days in which the trap they had dropped into slowly closed its jaws on them. Few spies turned traitors could claim responsibility for dealing such damage at one blow to their country’s cause and the cause of their country’s allies.

  In October 1944 Lindemans was arrested in Eindhoven on information provided by an Abwehr informant, Cornelius Verloop, who claimed that King Kong had betrayed Market Garden to a Major Wiesekotter on 15 September, at the Abwehr station in Driebergen. According to Pinto, Lindemans made a ‘full and detailed’ statement in which he confessed that he had met Wiesekotter and told him ‘all the secret facts’ two days before the Allied airborne carpet arrived on Dutch soil. Pinto went on to assert:

  It is true that Lindemans did not mention the word ‘Arnhem.’ A certain section of the Dutch press subsequently tried to make much of this and claimed that Lindemans could not have betrayed Arnhem because he did not know the exact area of the landings. This argument is puerile nonsense. Lindemans may not have mentioned the actual name but he did tell Wiesekotter that the landings were to take place north of Eindhoven. He said as much in his signed confession … One glance at the map would suffice to tell the German military experts what points these airborne troops would be concentrated … The obvious targets were the bridges at Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem.

  However the following year Pinto was contradicted by Hermann Giskes, the former Abwehr counter-espionage chief in the Low Countries and northern France, whose account of their operations in Holland was published as London Calling North Pole. Giskes revealed that although Lindemans had indeed made contact with the Abwehr, and warned that Allied troops were standing by for a large-scale airborne landing, his information had been vague:

  He knew that English and American parachute and airborne divisions were standing by in England for a big airborne operation … In any case there was no mention of Arnhem – King Kong had not mentioned it probably because he simply did not know in what area the airborne attack was going to be made … To the IC of the General Staff in Holland he was simply a suspicious foreigner who could well have been sent across for deception purposes.

  Giskes took the view that if anything had betrayed Operation Market Garden, it was signals intelligence:

  The traffic heard on 15th September was a conclusive indication of the imminence of a large-scale enemy air operation. Apart from this, on the afternoon of the 15th two English aircraft made a reconnaissance of some hours’ duration over Nijmegen and Arnhem [and] were given a very large fighter escort … I heard that the German Command in Holland attributed this to the fact that a personal reconnaissance was being flown by the commanders of the attacking divisions being held in readiness in England.

  At best, therefore, the warning given by Lindemans was simply one of several factors which alerted the Germans in Holland to the coming assault from the sky. As Nigel West points out in Unreliable Witness, Lindemans may still have thought that such warning as he did give was sufficient, and this, coupled with the disastrous outcome of the operation, persuaded him to sign the confession described by Pinto. Yet even this is doubtful, for according to Pinto when a trial was mooted the Lindemans dossier quickly went missing:

  When I went to get the vital file it was not in its proper place. I searched carefully on neighbouring shelves and in nearby filing cabinets in case it had been accidently filed away in the wrong place. There was no sign of it … There was no entry to show that there had ever been a file on the Lindemans case. In fact the very name ‘Lindemans’ had been carefully and completely expunged!

  The legend of Lindemans as the butcher of Arnhem should have died with the publication of London Calling North Pole, but was revived by John Bulloch in Akin to Treason in 1966, and exhumed again in 1969 by the Dutch writer Anne Laurens. In her somewhat convoluted account, The Lindemans Affair, Laurens concluded that King Kong had been a double agent, and had acted in furtherance of a complicated Allied deception plan:

  The Abwehr had poisoned so many networks that they [the Allies] no longer knew where they were. It was imperative that they retaliate by infiltrating an agent into Colonel Giske’s organisation. A double agent who would arrive telling such a plausible story that the Germans would swallow it completely.

  Laurens also believed that Lindemans had been sacrificed by his Allied controllers:

  Finally, the last most diabolical stroke, a double [agent] was needed who could be sacrificed if need be, if the operation went wrong or if his services became useless, a double therefore who could not pride himself on having many influential relationships.

  Although Laurens was unable to identify those responsible for the scheme on the Allied side, she felt certain that:

  They had only forgotten one thing, these Machiavellian leaders, and that was to warn Christiaan that if ever someone from his side accused him of treason, nobody would lift a finger to help him. Indeed, if necessary, they would plunge him in deeper, if it served their purposes.

  None of this makes any sense at all, or explains why Lindemans chose to take his own life. Nonetheless, Laurens went further still, and claimed that the clash between Pinto and Lindemans had its root in the fairer sex. In Spycatcher Pinto made several references to King Kong’s ‘countless amours and intrigues’ and ‘gross appetites’, and wrote that the traitor was both a ‘superb muscular athlete with a reputation for turning girls’ heads’ and ‘famed for his sexual prowess’. According to Laurens, this was simply jealousy on the part of Pinto, and represented:

  A curious moral judgment by a man whose private life was, t
o say the least, stormy. He himself had been accused by his superiors of having had intimate relations with women ‘with whom he dropped his guard’, even though they were, beyond doubt, enemy agents.

  Oddly, Laurens accepted Pinto’s claims about a 24-page confession at face value, and was obliged to concoct a fantastical explanation in which Lindemans betrayed Arnhem to the Abwehr on the orders of his British spymasters. The notion is quite absurd, and is directly contradicted by a number of other German officers besides Giske. General Kurt Student, chief of Germany’s own airborne forces, later stated that nothing was known about the attack until it happened, and described the story that Lindemans had been questioned at his HQ at Vught as ‘a big fat lie’. Moreover the two SS Panzer divisions refitting in the area were already in position before 10 September, when Montgomery and Eisenhower met and agreed to execute Market Garden. Furthermore many crucial details of the Allied plan, such as placement of drop zones, were not settled until after Lindemans had crossed the German lines.

  The only accurate account of the affair was given by Colonel J.M. Langley himself, who had authorised Lindemans’s supposed mission in 1944 and published Fight Another Day 22 years later. Of King Kong he recalled: