Canaris had been busy elsewhere, too: his Abwehr organized an attempt to abduct Queen Wilhelmina. She was to be quarantined at the moment of the invasion to prevent her from leaving Holland. Hitler had been gravely disturbed by King Haakon’s flight from Norway, an unexpected move that led to certain political complications, serious in aspect, during the consolidation of that conquest. Now, in the Netherlands, he was determined to foil any such attempt on Queen Wilhelmina’s part, lest she become, like the King, the focal point of resistance. Commander Protze in Wassenaar and Klewen of the Abwehr’s Dutch desk were ordered to pin down the Queen at The Hague. The plans went astray; she was gone by the time a delegation of Protze’s thugs reached her palace to carry out Hitler’s order.
The Queen had no intention of leaving Holland and was absent by a misunderstanding. She had asked the British to send some fighter planes to go into action against the German bombers. Her telegram was garbled in translation and in London it was thought she was asking for a plane to fly her out of Holland. No plane could be sent, but a destroyer was diverted to take the Queen on board.
The Queen embarked and told the captain to take her to Flushing in Holland; no matter how he tried, however, the captain could not enter the harbor. In the end, he told the Queen there was nothing to do except to head for a British port. She arrived at Buckingham Palace at 5 p.m. on May 10, wearing a tin hat, bedraggled and worn, still moaning that she could not stay with her people in their darkest hour. So if anybody succeeded in kidnaping Wilhelmina, it was the British, but whether or not there was any premeditation in the act, nobody will say, even today.
The Netherlands resisted for only five days. The King of the Belgians, refusing to leave despite Churchill’s entreaties, surrendered his armies on May 28. France’s turn came next, and then the Battle of Europe was over.
9
Churchill At the Helm
The outbreak of the war had ended the isolation of Churchill, and on September 3, 1939, he was brought back into His Majesty’s Government as First Lord of the Admiralty. Hardly was he settled in his old chair in front of the wooden map stand he had placed in the First Lord’s spacious office way back in 1911, when the signal was flashed to the Fleet: “Winston is back!” His electrifying presence was felt instantly by all. It was felt especially by Intelligence.
Throughout his colorful career, Churchill was an advocate and adherent of the Intelligence Service. In World War I, his relations with the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division were intimate. Later, when he held no official position, he maintained a secret service of his own that enabled him to talk on the issues of the day with specific knowledge.
Virtually his first act in the Admiralty was to review the intelligence set-up. What he found did not displease him. The intelligence services of the armed forces were not afflicted by the anarchy and impotence that paralyzed the secret service of the Foreign Office. Although badly understaffed, as was every branch of the military establishment, they had an excellent core of officers serving under capable directors. The algebraic MI (Directorate of Military Intelligence) of the War Office was headed by the popular, forty-six-year-old Major General Frederick George (Paddy) Beaumont-Nesbitt. Air Intelligence was under Group Captain K. C. Buss, a gallant RAF officer who, after the war, attained a high position in the Foreign Office’s intelligence set-up.
In the person of Admiral John Henry Godfrey, Naval Intelligence had an able and experienced, energetic and imaginative director. Godfrey’s staff was small to begin with, but it was rapidly augmented by newcomers, most of them officers of the reserve. A great many were foreign correspondents who brought to their new assignment the ability to smell out the news.
Only a few hours after his arrival at the Admiralty, Churchill personally penned his first note to the D.N.I., asking him for detailed information about the German U-boat force. Churchill was pleasantly surprised by the promptness with which the information was supplied (within twenty-four hours) and its convincing authoritativeness. The D.N.I, told him that Germany had sixty U-boats available for immediate action and that she would have a hundred early in 1940. This was but three boats off the mark; in fact, Germany then had fifty-seven submarines built and forty building.
Churchill continued to bombard the D.N.I, with a flow of notes. On September 6, for instance, he inquired about the situation on the west coast of Ireland, which he accurately expected to become an important area for some of Canaris’ clandestine machinations. “Are there any signs of succouring U-boats in Irish creeks or inlets?” he asked, and then suggested: “It would seem that money should be spent to secure a trustworthy body of Irish agents to keep most vigilant watch.” This was a timely warning, because, as we will soon see, neutral Eire became a lively battlefield in the secret war.
At one point, Mr. Churchill recommended to the D.N.I. that confidential documents and manuals be printed on a special paper made of cellulose nitrate that would explode when lighted. Another suggestion that he put forth was to reduce secret papers to tiny proportions that could be read only by some powerful projecting apparatus. Though nothing yet was known of the Abwehr’s phenomenal microdot system, Churchill correctly anticipated its existence. How his keen mind deduced vital information from telltale evidence was shown on the eve of the Battle of Europe. On March 30, 1940, he read a brief item in the Daily Telegraph reporting that some twenty German ships stranded in Dutch ports were apparently getting ready to run the British blockade. Churchill assumed that such a mass exodus foreshadowed an imminent Nazi move on Holland and promptly aroused the D.N.L. to the possibility.
When the fortunes of war brought Churchill to the Prime Minister’s chair, he wasted not a moment in moving to revamp and rebuild Britain’s intelligence operations. One of his first moves was to appoint, as his personal aide for intelligence, Major Desmond Morton, his next door neighbor at Charwell and his longtime adviser on such matters. The two men had first met during World War I when Morton, then on the staff of Field Marshal Haig, served as Churchill’s guide during his visits to the front. When Churchill became Secretary for War and Air in 1919, he named Morton to an important post in secret intelligence.
Their friendship survived Churchill’s eclipse in power and, between the two wars, Morton remained, with official permission, the source of much of Churchill’s confidential information. Morton was Churchill’s personal adviser on intelligence matters throughout World War II and at the end of the war was rewarded with a knighthood.
On the Cabinet staff, two men performed important intelligence functions and linked the political leadership to the Secret Service. They were Sir Edward Bridges, secretary to the War Cabinet, and Colonel Edward Ian Claud Jacob, military assistant secretary.
However, the appointment of good men to such positions as these was far from enough, and in June, 1940, Churchill proceeded to break the stifling domination of the Foreign Office over the Secret Service. He created two new top-echelon groups at the apex of a new pyramid.
A civilian triumvirate, officially called the Committee of Three and nicknamed by insiders “the Secret Three of White-hall”, was appointed under the chairmanship of Lord Swinton, a former Secretary for Air. This was supposed to be the highest British agency dealing with espionage, responsible solely to Churchill and reporting directly to him. The committee had, according to Stanley Firmin, “absolute and co-ordinating control over every single phase of British Intelligence work, wherever and however it was carried out.” In practice, however, its major influence turned out to be in the field of counter-espionage.
The second top group was the Joint Intelligence Committee, composed of the directors of the various service intelligence agencies. The directors were to meet, co-ordinate and evaluate the material that had been gathered by their agencies and funnel it, with conclusions, to the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet on the one hand, and to the Imperial General Staff and the heads of the services on the other.
It was the J.I.C. which, in the perilous summer of 1940,
kept Churchill almost hourly informed of German plans to invade England in defiance of Napoleon’s melancholy experience. Churchill was not always happy with the material he received from J.I.C. He rarely disputed the facts, but he frequently disagreed with the conclusions. He was always impatient when others sifted and digested intelligence for him and preferred to see “authentic documents in their original form” so that he could make his own deductions.
Under these committees Intelligence began to function with a unity of purpose and in an orchestrated manner. There was the Secret Service proper, with a revamped apparatus and rejuvenated personnel; the Directorate of Military Intelligence with some eighteen or nineteen branches, including a special branch for espionage and sabotage in MI.6 (Special Operations) ; the Division of Naval Intelligence that was soon to come under the expert leadership of Commodore Rushbrook (who was to head it until the end of the war) ; Air Intelligence under Buss; the security branches of Military Intelligence (MI.5), Scotland Yard (C.I.D. and Special Branch), the Royal Air Force, and the Foreign Office.
Throughout its history, the quality of the British Secret Service had been inexorably tied to the man who headed it, the director-general of the whole complex organization. His identity is never officially revealed, not even after his retirement—not even in his obituary notice. Britain was fond of making quite a show of the secrecy in which it traditionally shrouded the supreme spymaster of the Empire. Paul Dukes, who was knighted for his brilliant espionage work during the Russian Revolution, wrote, “It was eighteen months before I was allowed to know his real name and title, and even then I was careful never to use it.”
In an organization like the Secret Service, which, because of its tight discipline and ironclad secrecy is well-nigh totalitarian in character, this supersecret chief plays a dominant role. The whole secret service is molded in his image. It reflects his qualities and character, indeed, his whims.
Now, a new star appeared in the firmament of the secret service, Stewart Graham Menzies by name. At the time of his appointment he was forty-nine years old, a proper gentleman and a gallant soldier. The son of Lady Holford, he was the product of three of those British institutions which are supposed to mold men for this kind of job: Eton, the Grenadier Guards, and the Life Guards. He was married and was related to Anthony Eden by one of his two marriages.
Just what else qualified Colonel Menzies for his important new job was difficult to ascertain. Yet Britain was fortunate in having him. He revamped and revitalized the moribund secret service until it again became worthy of its prestige and tradition. He served with exceptional distinction and gallantry, throughout the Second World War and during the difficult years of the Cold War, until his retirement in 1951. Grateful England made him a general and a knight twice over.
Menzies was also made a grand officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold and was awarded Poland, Holland and Norway’s highest decorations. The United States bestowed upon him the Legion of Merit. As we shall see, he well deserved these honors for services, which, however, were not specified in the citations.
Old General Kell retired from the War Office, and his place at the head of the vastly enlarged MI.5 was taken by Sir David Petrie, a policeman with a brilliant record of service in India. Although only a few years younger than Kell, this dour Scot brought to MI.5 a youthful drive combined with the methodical investigating practice of the veteran policeman and the stern discipline of the colonial official.
In addition to the renovation of the old agencies, however, new ones were needed to fight this new kind of war, and they began to blossom overnight: the Censorship Division of the Post Office; Wireless Intelligence; a special Anti-Sabotage Division composed of acrobatic young daredevils under the dreamy-eyed, soft-voiced and elegant Lord Rothschild, scion of the famous banking family who abandoned finance for science.
Even before the fall of France, Churchill had envisaged the need of organizing the Continent for continued resistance. He wished for a special force that could harass the enemy at his soft points, inflict sudden and painful damage, collect vital information and move instantly in the defense of Britain, if necessary. “There ought to be,” he wrote to General Ismay, his military aide, “at least twenty thousand storm troops or ‘Leopards,’ drawn from existing units, ready to spring at the throat of any small landings or descents.”
At the same time, Colonel Dudley Clarke, an officer of the General Staff, thought of guerrilla warfare and remembered the Boer Commandos. He jotted down his ideas on a single sheet of paper, which eventually reached Churchill’s eyes and obtained immediate approval. Clarke and a staff were installed in a private house in Grosvenor Crescent, where, in civilian clothes, they posed as the board of trustees of a mythical charity.
There was much about the effort that was grimly hilarious. Churchill had proposed that each of the twenty thousand “Leopards” be equipped with a Tommy gun, and it turned out that there were exactly forty Tommy guns available in the whole of Britain. Only half a dozen boats could be found to ferry the raiders across the Channel, and in two of those the engines failed. When it was decided that the Commandos should blacken their faces in night action, no black greasepaint could be found in the entire military establishment. It had to be bought from a Wardour Street stage costumer.
It was hardly surprising that their first raid, near Le Tou-quet, was no great shakes. In the words of the official historian of the Commandos, “It had accomplished little and yet, at the same time, much. The military information brought back had no very great value, but the raid had a most heartening effect upon the people of England.”
A later raid was far more successful. Radar was becoming a vital weapon in the battle for air supremacy, and the Germans had established a major station at Bruneval on the French coast between Fecamp and Le Havre. A resident British agent discovered its existence and a team of specialists was sent to recon-noiter and make sure of its importance. On the basis of their report, a team of one hundred and twenty Commandos was dropped from the air on the night of February 7, 1942, while thirty-two others were landed from the sea in support. They succeeded in dismantling and taking away the important parts of the apparatus intact and in blowing up what they left behind. The equipment they brought back revealed to England some of Germany’s most jealously-guarded electronic secrets.
In due course, however, the intelligence function of the Commandos was largely superseded by its military activities and so its detailed history, fascinating though it is, would be out of place here. The intelligence work fell largely to another brand new organization created in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., for short.
The S.O.E. developed from a brief note Churchill had sent to General Ismay on June 24, 1940, after France’s total collapse. “It seems most important,” he wrote, “to establish now before the trap closes an organization for enabling French officers and soldiers, as well as important technicians, who wish to fight, to make their way to various ports. A sort of ‘underground railway’ as in the olden days of slavery should be established and a Scarlet Pimpernel organization set up. I have no doubt there will be a steady flow of determined men, and we need all we can get for the defense of the French colonies.” The Prime Minister could afford to propose such unorthodox ideas to the hidebound military Tories of the War Office, but when lesser lights came forward with similar suggestions, they were frowned upon and even punished.
How dangerous it was to voice such ideas was shown by the fate of a lieutenant colonel of the First Royal Dragoons, named A. D. Wintle. At the time of Dunkirk, he hit upon the idea of dropping in at French airfields to recruit airmen for continued resistance to the Nazis. His idea scandalized his senior officer. It came to a bitter quarrel, the end of which found Colonel Wintle in the Tower of London on charges of insubordination and threatening a senior officer. He was later acquitted, but, in the light of his experience, few of his contemporaries dared to annoy Colonel Blimp with original ideas.
“The shock of initial German success was profound, particularly in the occupied territories of Western Europe. France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway lay as if stunned; only the Poles, toughened by centuries of oppression, were spiritually uncrushed. Yet in all these countries there were hundreds of thousands of individuals who refused to accept defeat and who prayed for the means to continue the struggle.
“The British Commonwealth was on the defensive and it was clear that it would be years before invasion would be possible; what could, however, be done in the meantime was to attack the enemy by unorthodox methods: attack his war potential wherever it was exposed and at least create some running sores to drain his strength and to disperse his forces. This would give the maximum of assistance to the forces of liberation when invasion of the Continent finally did take place. To undertake this task, an organization, Special Operations Executive, was created.”
According to General Gubbins, this was the plan: “To encourage and enable the peoples of the occupied countries to harass the German war effort at every possible point, by sabotage, subversion, go-slow practices, coup de main raids, etc., and at the same time to build up secret forces therein, organized, armed, and trained to take their part only when the final assault began. …”
Churchill’s (or, for that matter, Colonel Wintle’s) original idea was subsequently broadened. On July 23, Churchill wrote to the Secretary for War: “It is, of course, urgent and indispensable that every effort should be made to obtain secretly the best possible information about the German forces in the various areas overrun, and to establish intimate contacts with local people, and to plant agents. This, I hope, is being done on the largest scale, as opportunity serves, by the new organization [S.O.E.] under M.E.W. [Ministry of Economic Warfare].”
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