Shock then reverberated throughout Fourteenth Army when Lieutenant General Sir Oliver Leese arrived from Italy to take command of Eleventh Army Group. His Chief of Intelligence in Italy was Brigadier Donald Prater, who had joined the Intelligence Corps as a lieutenant in 1941, surely one of the quicker promotions and a notable feature of the Intelligence Corps promotions during the Second World War compared to the stagnation of the First World War. Under controversial circumstances, Leese sacked General Slim in May just as the occupation of Rangoon was being consolidated but such was the political furore that Slim was reinstated as Commander Allied Forces, South East Asia within six weeks.
By the time the monsoon broke, the Japanese Fifteenth and Thirty-Third Armies had been destroyed and the weakened Twenty-Eighth Army was trapped west of the Irrawaddy and cut off from Burma Area Army to the east by the flooded River Sittang. By Christmas Day 1944, 6 Special Wireless Section/6 Wireless Intelligence Section had advanced to Imphal and by the end of April had crossed the Irrawaddy to find that the increasing difficulties of Japanese command and control had led to commanders of the Japanese Twenty-Eighth Army sending messages in clear. The decoding of Japanese Army water returns had led to the devastating ambush of a battalion. Captain Frost, now commanding 636 FSS supporting 19th Indian Division, had reached Toungoo in May and within a month had assembled an intelligence network of villagers spread across a wide area, most connected by field telephones supported by several ex-Burma Rifles left behind during the 1942 Retreat, a Burma Rifles platoon and two Chindits. Sources of information included an inscribed flag used to wrap the decapitated head of a 55 Division Japanese officer, several prisoners and a comfort girl.
The intelligence was tentatively suggesting that the Twenty-Eighth Army intended to join the remnants of Burma Area Army and then, on 2 July, a 1/7 Gurkha Rifles company ambushed a Japanese patrol and recovered a rain-and blood-soaked despatch bag containing documents, paybooks, photographs and letters from the body of an officer. Within a few hours the contents were being examined at HQ 17th Indian Division at Pedwegon by Lieutenant Lionel Levy and US Nisei Sergeant Katsu Tabata from a mobile Detailed Interrogation Centre. Both had spent several days interrogating a few exhausted and ill prisoners. Deciphering their paybook entries was a welcome distraction. Watched by Captains Charles and Kay, Levy gingerly opened the bag and removed several documents, including fragile overlays laid over a captured British map and a diary, which he translated. One document was an operation order dated 14 June detailing the break-out of the 55th Division Infantry Group over the Rangoon-Mandalay road and across the Sittang River, and listed routes, stream and river crossing points and road and railways bridges to be prepared for demolition. Communications was to be by couriers and visual, such as flags. Patrols were to check the state of the Sittang’s banks and approach and exit routes, speed of the current and identify landmarks as navigation markers. Stores and casualties had priority and horses and oxen were to be taken. No weapons were to be abandoned. In Levy’s words ‘It was a peach of a document from the intelligence point of view.’ Reports from 6 Wireless Intelligence Section, V Force and prisoners provided co-lateral to the intelligence. The satchel was sent to IV Corps at Pegu and then flown to South-East Asia Command Rear Headquarters in Delhi where its integrity was confirmed. Only the date was missing; however, the prediction it would be 20 July was confirmed by the interrogation of an officer and a Kempei Tei sergeant. Two weeks later, in pouring rain and unaware that their plan had been compromised, the Twenty-Eighth Army broke out but ran into ambushes and blocked escape routes. Captain Frost witnessed the results helped in interrogations of captured officers and soldiers. Over the next three months, the Japanese suffered 15,000 casualties.
During the day of 8 August, CSM Harold Cavers and an Indian NCO of 574 FSS and a Burma Intelligence Corps, searching for Japanese infiltrators and fifth columnists north-east of Pegu on the eastern bank of the Sittang, had set up for the night in a damaged village courthouse. During the night there was a barrage of flares and, expecting an attack, Cavers and the local police took up defensive positions. Next morning, he and the Indian crossed the river and learnt at section HQ that ‘they’ve dropped a new sort of bomb on Japan and the Japs are going to surrender’. Collecting a bottle of whisky, he returned to the village and finished it with the local police inspector and the village doctor.
The dropping of the Atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese capitulation on 15 August led to formal negotiations at diplomatic level, one result being HQ South-East Asia Command ordering no contact with the enemy until Japan had formally surrendered to US General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, as had been agreed by the Allies.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Special Operations Executive
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.
Isaac Asimov
Of the 30,000 or so people who were associated with the Special Operations Executive in 1943 as Section Head, agents, wireless operators and packers of equipment into containers, were about 400 officers and 200 other ranks of the Intelligence Corps. This was approximately ten per cent of the Corps strength with a skill, experience or a talent of value. At least fifty Intelligence Corps were instructors at the Special Training Schools.
By 1941, the area north of Fort William and Glenmore in Scotland was divided into two Protected Areas with anyone living inside or requiring access issued with identity cards by the Scottish Commands. Photographs and covertly-gathered information was sent to MI5. Contributing to the security of No.1 Protected Area, which ran north of Glenmore to the northern coast, was 207 FSS. Inside were MI6, SOE and Combined Operations training areas, including the Commando Forces Depot and Training Centre at Achnacarry. Inverailort, a few miles east of the SOE Special Training School 21 (Military Training) at Arisaig, consisted of the railway station, a small shop and a hotel frequented by hard-drinking Irish labourers employed in the camps. Dances in the village hall usually started at dusk and ended at dawn. No. 2 Protected Area was covered by 208 FSS and included the Orkneys, Shetlands and Western Isles. Lerwick was an important Coastal Forces base for motor torpedo boats that sometimes took No. 5 (Norwegian) Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando on raids. Railway Security was provided at Thurso for the nightly ‘Admiral Jellicoe’ troop train that departed for the long journey to Euston. Named after the First World War British Grand Fleet admiral, it was first waved off in 1917 taking naval personnel to and from HM Naval Base Scapa Flow. Carrying kit bags, webbing order and personal weapons, a few shillings and the obligatory Woodbines, an estimated 500,000 Service personnel crammed into the carriages in which luggage racks became makeshift beds. Port Security covered ferries servicing the Western Isles. Harbourmasters and Customs officers reported ship movements, with those arriving from South America of particular interest.
After passing out of the Depot at Winchester, Corporal Humphrey Searle, a composer, spent eighteen months with 141 Home Port Security Section, which was commanded by Major Gavin Brown, a First World War officer and Stowe School master. Section HQ was at Granite House, Fort William with the NCOs scattered in detachments at Corpach, Mallaig and Spean Bridge. Searle and a colleague, determined to maintain an air of mystery about their activities while stationed at Lochailort, were accommodated in a small room in the NAAFI and every week motor-cycled to Fort William for a section conference and pay parade. In between taking afternoon tea and scones with the estate manager living in the middle of the camp, Searle found time to compose Music for Piano, Strings and Percussion, a work that was performed in London during the middle of the war.
In 1942, Searle applied for a commission but when he learnt at the London Transit Centre, Great Central Hotel, Marylebone that potential officers were being sent to India for officer training, he decided to exploit his French and German and popped around to Baker Street, where he explained his predicament to a colonel, who he had regularly met at
the SOE training schools in Scotland. Searle was commissioned and posted to F (French) Section and then sent to Training School 27b–31 (Finishing School) at Dunham House, Beaulieu where Captain Paul Dehn, the film critic, screenwriter and columnist, taught propaganda and planned imaginative exercises. Famed for his rollicking sense of humour, he is described in the US Office of Strategic Services official history as ‘the finest lecturer to grace a classroom.’ Bill Brooker (later founder of Association of British Tourist Agents), a former Corps sergeant instructor at Mytchett, was Commandant, Training School 31 until he had a disagreement with Brigadier Gubbins and was sent to Canada to command Camp X in Ottawa.
In March 1940, Major Gubbins (late Royal Artillery), a former military intelligence officer raised several Independent Companies, later named the Commandos, for the Norwegian campaign. He was then directed by GHQ Home Forces to form Auxiliary Units as resistance groups should Great Britain be invaded. In November, Gubbins, now a Brigadier, formed the Special Operations Warfare at the request of the minister of Economic Warfare. Its job was to ‘coordinate all action by way of sabotage and subversion against the enemy overseas’ and it was expected to establish training facilities, to devise methods of operation and to establish close working relations with the Joint Planning Staff. A seemingly unfathomable aspect of intelligence operations is distrust between the various agencies, largely because of competing needs and differing methods of operation. While intelligence gathering organizations, such as MI6, preferred tranquility and inactive enemy security forces, saboteurs and raiding forces, such as SOE, set out to cause disruption and instability and thus attract attention. A good example of the failure to co-ordinate operations can be illustrated by HQ Combined Operations sending Royal Marine canoeists to attack German blockade-runners moored in Bordeaux in Operation Frankton in December 1942 on the same night that SOE planned to attack the ships. The issue was resolved by appointing regional liaison Control Officers. The Security Coordination Office in New York co-ordinated MI5 and MI6 activities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US equivalent of MI6, the Office of Strategic Services.
Searle attended parachute training at Training School 51b at Fulshaw Hall, near Wilemshaw, run alongside No. 1 Parachute Training School at Ringway, and completed his last three jumps during one afternoon. Posted to Training School 6 at Finchampstead, he instructed agents in operational security, counter-intelligence and intelligence collection. Two ex-Shanghai Police officers, William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, described by Searle as resembling ‘bishops’, taught unarmed combat using any method – fair or foul. They later developed the commando dagger. Searle often spent evenings at the Railway Inn and saw his Night Music performed by the newly-formed Society for the Promotion of New Music at the Royal College of Music, in 1944. He also wrote the piano piece Vigil (France 1940-1944) in honour of the French Resistance.
Experimental Stations, mostly in Hertfordshire, researched and developed arms and equipment. Captain Ted Edwards is listed as a member of the French (Polish Minorities) Section in July 1943. By 1944 he was Commandant of Experimental Station XIV (Forgeries) in Roydon, Essex, where Royal Engineers forged documents under the cover story of a ‘mapping research station’. Sergeant Major Gatwood, of the Pioneer Corps and a Metropolitan Police officer in civilian life, was an expert forger. Great skill was required in the production of forged documents because lives depended on excellence and accuracy. The Station produced 275,631 individual documents. Of the eighty-six officers who served in L (Intelligence) Section providing assessments, collating technical intelligence advising on sabotage and writing handbooks, twenty-three were Intelligence Corps. Strategically placed Heads of Missions masquerading as businessmen and shipping agents were spread throughout the world looking for opportunities to disrupt Axis economic and clandestine activities.
The SOE Security Section was formed in October 1940 on a small scale by the wheelchair-bound Lieutenant Colonel Edward Calthorp, who was also the liaison officer with MI6. His deputy, Major Edwin Whetmore, a First World War Intelligence Corps officer, had responsibility for Home Office and Service ministries liaison. During their tenure, the section helped the fledgling Country Sections by talent-spotting aliens from police records. By the New Year 1941, the renamed Security and Liaison Section consisted of six operational elements:
No. 2
Security and liaison with the Home Office and Armed Forces.
No. 3
Day-to-day liaison with MI5, censorship, vetting, legal matters, code-names and operational security.
No. 4
Field Security.
No. 5
Liaison with the Constabularies through a police liaison officer. The first was Dermot O’Reilly, a First World War Intelligence Corps officer who was serving with Scotland Yard Special Branch.
No. 6
Assisted No 5 and liaised with the Ministry of Labour for the employment of aliens.
No. 7
House security – Initially Major Norman Mott (Intelligence Corps).
In response to a request to Major General Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence, from Major Whetmore, the Corps formed 63, 64 and 65 FSS, and, in April 1942, 84 FSS. All were trained at Winchester and were specially selected officers and NCOs interviewed at the Depot, Intelligence Corps for their ability to assess a person’s character without prejudice. In order to ensure that their conclusions were objective, the sections were not provided with any information on the students. The sections were placed under the command of the senior FSO, the first being Captain Peter Lee. He could call up a wide range of languages and men who had good knowledge of occupied countries. The Head of Security could also draw on the sections on matters affecting Baker Street and the training schools. Whetmore proved to be popular with the sections. Their duties were threefold:
Accompanying Parties. ‘Conducting officers’ to accompany and help students throughout the courses until they reached the Holding School before deployment. This could be physically demanding. Following the principle of getting to know people by living with them, the NCOs were expected to use their linguistic skills and knowledge of countries and write reports highlighting any personality traits that might undermine the role of agents, for instance attitudes to money, drink and women. These reports were of considerable value. They also conducted investigations and passed any that proved inconclusive to MI5.
External Security. The detachments had links to local police, local authorities, military units, publicans, postmen and shops, and maintained a watching brief for local reactions to the presence of foreign troops. Local and transient populations were vetted by censoring mail at post offices, reviewing hotel and guest house registers, liaising with local authority officials and passing reports of strangers to the police, who were usually happy to detain suspects.
Special Duties. General protective security responsibilities by meeting foreign students ‘of interest’ and supervising their hotel requirements, acting as couriers carrying diplomatic bags, and paying periodic visits to the neighbourhoods of the Training Schools. They also watched students who had not completed training and whose discretion was in doubt.
The four Field Security Officers and their Company Sergeant Majors provided the direct link to Headquarters and submitted weekly reports to the Field Security Desk. The FS presence was sometimes seen as intrusive, particularly by foreign students recently arrived from Europe who equated it to the Gestapo. Some Training School commandants, all Regular Army, were equally suspicious and regarded security as something to do with spies, as opposed to a protective mechanism and means to help the students take their operational security seriously. In July 1941, Calthorp was replaced by Major General John Lakin (late Indian Army) and a former MI5 officer, whose appointment had been supported by Brigadier Petrie, former Intelligence Corps and now MI5 Director General. In November, Whetmore was levered from SOE under allegations that he did not fit in and was posted to Gibraltar where, under controversial circumstances,
he formed the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was replaced by John Senter, an unpopular. autocratic, self-made barrister.
The external security of the sparsely populated Highlands was also provided by 49 FSS, which reported to Central Scottish Command. Lance Corporal Alfred Fyffe was with the section in 1940 when he was asked by his Field Security Officer, Major Brown, to use his local knowledge and suggest training school locations to several officers from Baker Street. A year later, Colonel Gubbins, now the SOE Director of Operations and Training, visited the area and was sufficiently impressed by Fyffe’s application of the need to know principle that he recommended him for commission and made him responsible for the security of SOE Training Schools in the Western Area of Central Scottish Command. This included Special Training Schools 21, 25 (Garamor House) and 26 at Aviemore, and three lodges being used by the Norwegian Free Forces because the terrain was reasonably similar to Norway. He was later appointed Camp Commandant, No. 6 Special Workshop School, or the Cooler, at Inverlair Lodge, a holding facility for students who had discontinued courses and needed to be kept incommunicado for several weeks.
D (Norwegian) Section and operations in Denmark were controlled by Lieutenant Colonel John Wilson, a former Indian Police officer and strong supporter of the Scout Movement. Its most famous operation was the three-stage attack on the Norsk hydroelectric and heavy water plant at Vemork, Operation Freshman. During Phase Two, a 89 (Airborne) FSS detachment provided Field Security cover for 9th (Airborne) Field Company and 261st (Airborne) Field Park RE training to attack the plant and used the cover that they were training for a glider-borne sapper competition against US Army engineers. During the fly-in to Norway, all the gliders crashed and the surviving sappers, Royal Army Service Corps drivers and aircrew were executed under Hitler’s infamous Commando Order in brutal circumstances. Nevertheless, the Official History of British Airborne operations records that:
Sharing the Secret Page 17
