Hall saw that Lyon had become an increasingly dangerous place to be based. The Resistance activity in the area had caused the Germans and the Vichy government severe devastation. The curfew was being rigidly enforced and safe houses were being blown. On October 24, detector vans picked up Brian Stonehouse’s radio signals, and the Milice, the French militia, arrested him and Charlet when she arrived for a prearranged meeting. Both were handed over to the Gestapo.
To maintain her cover, Hall filed a number of stories for the New York Post, each creating a picture of the changing nature of life in Vichy France. On September 4, 1941, she wrote, “The years have rolled back here in Vichy. There are no taxis at the station, only half a dozen buses, and a few one-horse shays. I took a bus using gazogène, charcoal instead of gas, to my hotel. I haven’t seen any butter and there is very little milk.”
Another story revealed the new restrictions on Jews, forbidding them from a number of occupations, including barber, merchant, and real estate work. On January 22, 1942, in one of her last news stories, she said theft of food had become commonplace as the people went hungry. “The average weight loss today is 12 pounds per person not only from lack of food, but increased physical activity and mental strain,” she reported.
Following Pearl Harbor, Hall was classed as an enemy alien and her work moved underground. In the summer of 1942, she took on a new identity, Marie Monin, and became increasingly aware that the Germans were pursuing her. Soon after, she discovered she was on the most-wanted list of Schutzstaffel (SS) Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie, who had recently arrived in Dijon.
Hall’s work for the SOE in France had begun almost a year before Buckmaster formally started to infiltrate women into the country. In November 1942, when the Germans crossed the demarcation line, ending any pretense of Vichy’s independence, many agents and résistants chose to flee south toward the Pyrenees. The Gestapo closed in on Lyon, with officers ordered to track down Hall, the operative the Resistance called “La dame qui boite” (“the limping lady”). “The woman who limps is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France,” declared the Gestapo order. “We must find and destroy her.”
By the time the Gestapo reached Lyon, she had gone south to the Perpignan. She then made a grueling forty-eight-hour climb over the Pyrenees and down into Spain. By the time she reached Spanish soil, her left leg was a bleeding stump.
Back in London she resolved that her war was not over. She told Buckmaster that her own country would soon land agents in occupied Europe. She would be emblematic of the growing cooperation between the SOE and the Americans. The SOE sent her on a wireless training course and prepared to send her back into France.
The morning after Donovan read Gubbins’s memo on the SOE’s use of female agents on the flight back to Washington from London, he was shown into the Oval Office by Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary. She told him that the president had scheduled him a full hour before he chaired a cabinet meeting on defense and foreign affairs.
After FDR greeted him, Donovan began by describing London at war—the spirit of the people, the blackouts, the air defenses—and moved on to Menzies and Gubbins, deftly painting portraits of their lifestyles and how impressed he was with the plans for the SOE and the idea to use women.
Roosevelt listened attentively, occasionally nodding and chuckling at what Donovan called the prime minister’s “complete frankness” and the unprecedented access he had been given.
The president asked, “So what does Churchill want?”
Donovan told him Churchill needed more planes to search for and bomb the U-boats in the Atlantic and more bombers to be fitted with America’s Sperry bombsights to hit more German targets in the Ruhr. Above all, he wanted destroyers to protect convoys bringing supplies to Britain, especially from Canada and South America.
Roosevelt paused before saying it was a large order to fulfill but it would be done. He said after Donovan had gone to London, Stephenson had come to Washington and had been lobbying those in the administration who agreed it was essential for the United States to find every way to partner the United Kingdom.
As his scheduled hour came to an end, Donovan turned to the subject he wanted to raise. He said America needed an organization capable of collecting and analyzing information and data that could threaten national security. It should be like Britain’s SIS.
The president said the idea of a new intelligence department was very much along the lines he had been considering. The promise of support from British intelligence was important, but an American organization would need someone who knew the setup in London and had met practically every European leader in prewar time. Roosevelt offered Donovan the job.
Donovan accepted.
The president called in Grace Tully. She should prepare an executive order for him to sign to create a new office. It would be known as the Coordinator of Information, COI. All government departments would be required to cooperate. Its director would be William Donovan, who would report directly to the president.
3
The Magician’s Airfield
GUBBINS SUGGESTED TO WINSTON Churchill that the SOE should consist of three groups: agents recruited to harass the enemy, instructors to train them, and scientists and technicians to invent and manufacture devices for undercover warfare. The training schools and research and development sites would be in country houses requisitioned at the outbreak of the war. The prime minister came to regard them as “my Academy of Ungentlemanly Warfare” with Gubbins as its headmaster.
Many of the instructors were British soldiers who had returned from Dunkirk and Norway initially to be trained to defend the British mainland against the German forces assembling across the Channel. When the threat of invasion faded, Churchill told the War Cabinet that the troops would be used to train SOE recruits and “provide a swift means of our return to the coast of France.”
Gubbins had decided the perfect place for training schools was in the West Highlands of Scotland. Its mountains, ravines, and lochs had for centuries been breeding grounds for generations of fierce-fighting, tartan-kilted warriors. Thousands of Highlanders had served in British battalions in the Great War, on the Western Front, Gallipoli, Macedonia, and Salonika. Some had served under Gubbins in North Russia in 1918 to deny both German and Bolshevik forces access to the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. He had handpicked a number of them to become SOE instructors. Some would be sent to Canada, where the first training camp overseas was to be based.
The camp was set up after William Stephenson, Britain’s intelligence chief in North America, had proposed to Donovan that although the United States had not yet entered the war, Americans should be trained alongside SOE agents in preparation for the fast-approaching time they would be needed. They should be taught “to be calculating and reckless with disciplined daring.”
On December 6, 1941, Stephenson flew to Ottawa to lease 260 acres of Canadian government–owned land on the north shore of Lake Ontario at Whitby. It had been a training camp for soldiers. With accommodation and facilities for five hundred men and women, it was located between the sleepy towns of Oshawa and Whitby. On the leasing agreement between Canada and Britain it was identified as “Military Camp 103.” Within the SOE it was referred to as Camp X.
Its acres of Canadian farmland were separated from the United States by forty miles of cold lake water and guarded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and British commandos. After the lease document was signed by Stephenson and the Canadian government, it was sent to the Crown Office in London, and the land was registered as British property.
Soon one-man submarines and underwater demolition devices were being tested in the lake. Radio aerials were erected that linked Camp X to London.
As well as instructors from SOE training camps in Scotland, WAAFs, FANYs, and cooks had been flown in from England to service the staff and recruits. Camp X had its own cinema, athletic fields, and an airfield and aircraft for parachute training.
Among the in
structors was William Fairbairn. He was tall, with thick lips and hair so fine it appeared to be hardly there at all. He spoke fluent Mandarin, a language he had mastered during thirty years with the police in Shanghai, China’s most chaotic and violent city. His body, arms, and legs were covered with the scars of knife wounds inflicted during street fights while he made arrests. A master in the art of jujitsu, he was also an expert pistol shot and a strict disciplinarian, who commanded a strong sense of loyalty from those who followed him.
When Fairbairn had joined the city’s police force, Shanghai was known as the “whore of Asia” with its estimated seven thousand prostitutes, many working in opium dens in a city where the annual gambling turnover was estimated at four times that of Monte Carlo. Its criminals specialized in kidnapping and armed robbery, and hurled homemade bombs at the police in what became nightly battles.
Fairbairn had opened a training school to teach the police. He had furnished it like a Chinese gambling house: dark inside with creaking wooden staircases and dummy figures in the rooms each holding a gun. These were booby-trapped with firecrackers and triggered by trip wires on the floorboards. Fairbairn had told his trainees they must take in the situation in a flash and shoot to kill. The old building echoed day and night with gunfire hitting the dummy targets. Within months the Shanghai Municipal Police Force became the most feared across Asia.
Fairbairn had furthered his own reputation as the author of a bestselling textbook, Scientific Self Defense. Required reading for all his police officers, it also had become widely read in the United States under the title Get Tough. It had a preface by the Hollywood star Douglas Fairbanks: “I do not know of any more interesting book to study and the author has an intensive and practical knowledge of his art. I commend this book to all those who have not been born with great physical strength.”
In trenchant prose, its pages detailed how to deliver blows with the side of the hand, how to kick, and how to make use of knees, elbows, and finger jabs.
Gubbins had read the book by the time Fairbairn had returned to England in 1940. He had sent for the police chief and offered him a post as an SOE instructor with the rank of a major and a brief to go to Scotland where six SOE training camps had been set up. Fairbairn was to teach close-quarter combat, knife work, shooting, and hand-to-hand fighting. “It will be essential to confine the teaching to what is simple, easily learned, and deadly,” Gubbins had told him.
Fairbairn had described how he would teach recruits how to shoot accurately in the dark, when all that could be seen was the shadow of a target, and how to fire in two-shot bursts—what he called his double tap system—to make certain an opponent was dead. They would be instructed in using catapults to fire stones or nails against a sentry and how to deliver stunning blows to the solar plexus, neck, or under the nose. He would also show them how to use the coshes he had developed for his officers to use in Shanghai.
Each cosh was a metal tube with a spring inside attached to a lump of lead at the end. Fairbairn had demonstrated to Gubbins that as he swung a cosh at a tailor’s dummy, the spring ejected the lead against the target. Gubbins had ordered boxes of coshes to be made and special dummies produced for agents to practice on.
When Fairbairn had arrived at Camp X, he assembled his class and repeated what he had told trainees in the SOE camps in Scotland.
“Some of you are going to be shocked by the methods you will be shown. In war you cannot afford the luxury of squeamishness. The methods you will be taught I have developed over years.”
On the classroom blackboard he wrote his rules. “You must practice every day what you have learned and become instinctive and automatic in all your movements. You must perform your action with maximum speed. You will always remember you are being trained to disable and kill your enemy. The knife you have each been given is your silent weapon. Its blade is double-edged and the grip designed to protect your hand when you use it to stab or cut a throat. All this you will learn. I teach Gutter Fighting. Fair play is not on the curriculum.”
Like instructors at training camps in the United Kingdom, those at Camp X made weekly reports that evaluated the trainees’ progress in loading and dismantling a weapon in the dark and placing bombs inside vehicles. There were also assessments of their fitness after cross-country runs, long-distance swims, and obstacle courses that were constantly waterlogged in which trainees sank up to their knees in mud.
Instructors paid close attention to recruits at the shooting ranges. Live rounds were fired, bullets zipping over the heads of trainees as they stormed a derelict building where metal pop-up targets, fashioned in the image of German soldiers, had to be hit. Failure to strike every target led to being hauled out of bed to repeat the attack in the middle of the night.
The classroom sessions included memorizing the different ranks and uniforms of the Gestapo and Wehrmacht; the French Milice; the Feldgendarmerie, the equivalent of the British military police; the Geheime Feldpolizei, the secret field police; the Sicherheitspolizei, the security police; and the Kriminalpolizei, the criminal police.
Those who graduated from Camp X were told they would be sent to England to undergo further training at what were called “finishing schools.” Gubbins had told Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F Section, he would have first call on secret agents from those schools.
On Sunday morning, July 10, 1942, a camouflaged car drove through an area of the Surrey countryside in England known as the Hog’s Back. The driver was in her late thirties and wore a FANY uniform. She had been a housemistress at a girls’ boarding school before she had been recalled to the FANYs a year earlier. Sitting beside her was an officer in the uniform of a major in the Coldstream Guards, one of the oldest regiments in the British Army.
Roger Christopher de Wesselow looked about sixty, ten years older than his age. He had survived the First World War, where he had been a brother officer of Gubbins. Their relationship was the reason he was chosen as commandant of the training school for the French Section at Wanborough Manor in West Surrey.
In his baggage was a history Gubbins had given him of the manor’s past. After centuries of surviving the reigns of the Tudor kings and Elizabeth I, it had been renovated in 1527 and had become a sanctuary for Cistercian monks, who had grazed sheep on the manor land and sold the fleeces in the London wool market. For centuries afterward it had been the home of the Earls of Onslow. When the noble line died out, a succession of owners bought the estate. The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 led to its owner, Sir Algernon West, suggesting the manor could become a convalescent home for wounded officers. The War Office had ignored the offer. When West died in 1921, a millionaire timber merchant bought the estate as a family home and hired a team of landscapers to restore the grounds and build a swimming pool. The rich and famous became regular guests, but the Depression saw the merchant sell the estate along with the title of Lord of the Manor that went with it. The new owner was still there when World War II started. In 1941 he was served with a requisition order. Since then the manor had remained empty until a few months earlier, when a team from the Ministry of Works had moved in to refurbish the mansion as F Section’s training school.
De Wesselow’s driver had collected him from what had been his base for months, an orphanage on Wandsworth Common in London, which had been requisitioned to serve as a holding camp for various nationalities, the majority of whom spoke French. He had been one of the intelligence officers who had questioned them as potential agents. Buckmaster told de Wesselow he was appointing him to run the training school. Days later de Wesselow had received an MI5 security file on the driver. It was marked FULL CLEARANCE.
De Wesselow had told the driver she would be the housekeeper of the training school. There would be a kitchen and laundry staff. A quartermaster would be responsible for all supplies. Visitors and phone calls were forbidden. Staff who wanted to send letters should bring them to his office. The spoken language would be French with English kept to a minimum.
&
nbsp; By the time the car reached the north end of the Hog’s Back, de Wesselow had satisfied himself that her fluency in French was as good as his own. It was noon when the car passed the boundary marker stone of Wanborough parish. Beyond were its cottage houses and barns. Parishioners were emerging from the village church, which had stood for twelve centuries. The worshippers were mostly women and children; the armed forces had enlisted the men and teenagers of Wanborough. Some had been posted overseas; others were in the Home Guard.
Farther along the road, beyond the church graveyard, was the manor. At the estate entrance was a guard hut. A soldier checked their papers and waved them in. Wanborough Manor was entering a new phase in its history. That Sunday evening de Wesselow telephoned the switchboard at 64 Baker Street to inform the duty officer that the SOE training station was operational.
Sixty miles north of Wanborough Manor was SOE Experimental Station XV. Before the war the roadhouse, known as the Thatched Barn, was a popular stopover on the road out of London for door-to-door salesmen, lovers on their way to a weekend in the countryside, and truck drivers loaded with goods for the Midlands. It stood in its own grounds with bars and a popular restaurant, bedrooms, and a swimming pool. It had been requisitioned at the outbreak of war, and a high wire security fence had been erected around the property with a large notice announcing, GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. TRESPASS FORBIDDEN. The gated entrance had a guard hut manned around the clock.
The new occupants were middle aged and experts in their professions. They came from university science departments and research institutes or had been employed by the Air Ministry and the Admiralty. Some had worked at Woolwich Arsenal, Britain’s weapons research center, or at Porton Down, the country’s chemical and biological warfare establishment, established in 1916 to develop defenses against gas and germ warfare. All had signed the Official Secrets Act. The experts would be paid their usual salaries but would be exempt from income tax. They would all be commissioned with various ranks as officers into the army, navy, or air force during the war.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 6
