All had degrees in chemistry and biology, and their work would be to use a mixture of chemicals. Potassium and chlorine would be combined with sulfuric acid to create time switches to detonate bombs that would blow a train engine off the rails; incendiary bombs would be fitted inside fountain pens, filled with a liquid chemical that would demolish a room.
Between them they converted the Barn into workshops with Nissen huts around the grounds. The Ministry of Munitions had built a magazine to store explosives to be used in experiments. A hut had been equipped with drawing boards on which weapons were designed. Another hut contained a printing press to run off instructions on how to use new weapons. A small team of FANYs typed the instructions in French. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk and proofread the typing. The instructions would be later dropped by the RAF to the Resistance.
In other workshops technicians worked in an atmosphere of good humor as they adapted scientific principles to produce limpet mines, incendiary liquids, and plastic containers to carry messages by secret agents. Those had been designed to be hidden in the anal and vaginal orifices of the human body and had been tested on FANYs on the Barn staff.
In the swimming pool, the first midget submarines were tested. In a workshop, technicians who had built motorcycles for prewar international races created a small motorbike that could be folded to fit into a parachute container to be dropped to agents. In another workshop, women made a device designed to explode under pressure when camouflaged inside a small stone, a lump of mud, or a cow pie. The tire busters were intended to be placed in the path of a German convoy.
Every day a van arrived with boxes of dead mice and rats. The two vets on the staff scooped out their innards, replaced them with plastic explosives, and sewed them up. The rodents were to be placed near furnaces in German weapons factories in the expectation the corpses would be thrown into the furnace.
In another hut, explosive coal was prepared. Each lump consisted of a hollow shape that could be packed with explosives and painted black. These could be dropped with other arms and supplies to the Resistance, who could hide them among the fuel supplied for locomotives. The charges were capable of destroying an engine’s boiler.
Elsewhere in the grounds of the Thatched Barn were blast walls behind which incendiaries were tested. Behind one wall was a small pond into which researchers tossed bars of soap that exploded in the water. The soap was being tested to leave in German barracks’ washrooms.
Marjorie Hindley worked in the Gun Room, where she was one of the women assembling silencers for guns. They were tested on a small shooting range at the back of the hut. For Hindley, “The work was motivated by keeping company with so many talented people.”
It was a view echoed by the staff of Experimental Station XV as they gathered in the evening in the bar and sang wartime songs around the piano.
Gubbins started each day with a meeting with his operational staff to discuss the overnight reports from training schools and their recommendations as to who should be sent to one of the Finishing Schools to complete their preparations before being sent into occupied Europe. Meetings ended with discussions on the latest reports from the research and experimental stations and their latest gadgets and weapons.
Station VI-A was housed in what had been a prewar factory producing cheap clothes for the mass market. It now produced French clothing, which was copied from French newspaper photographs and catalogs; the garments had to be perfect down to the last stitch and button for an agent to wear and pass scrutiny by the Germans.
Station VII-E had been a factory making cough mixtures for High Street shops. Now it produced German bicycle pumps that exploded when used. Stations VII-B and VII-C before the war had produced materials for the building trade. Now they assembled radio transmitter sets for wireless operators, which contained seventy-foot-long aerials and specially tuned crystals to avoid German detection vans when transmitting. Gubbins had visited the radio training school at Thame Park in Oxfordshire and told the staff their work and equipment was “the most valuable link in our chain of operations.” He had met, for the first time, the women who would be trained to be secret agents.
In Washington, DC, Donovan continued to plan the role women would play. Some he decided would “be the invisible apron strings sat behind desks and filing secret reports or answering the telephone. Tasks like that would ensure the flawless performance of my organization.”
But he envisaged there would be more in the future for women to do. They would be a key part of the five branches he had already created on paper. There would be Research and Analysis (R&A) for the collection of overt and covert material for use in planning subversive operations. Special Operations (SO) would carry out sabotage and guerrilla warfare. Maritime Unit (MU) would carry out attacks on enemy shipping. Counter Intelligence (X-2) would work closely with the SOE. Morale Operations (MO) would use persuasion, penetration, and intimidation by disguising the truth, slanting stories, and spreading rumors against the enemy. Donovan had devised the branches to protect America once it entered the war.
The women he would select would have linguistic skills that would allow them to operate in occupied Europe, train and organize Resistance groups, unmask traitors, and destroy the morale of the enemy.
“They have much to learn, how to burgle, blow safes, and steam open letters,” Eloise Page, his secretary, would recall him telling her as she typed his ideas for the future. “He could be an unreasonable man with an Irish temper, but he could also charm the birds off the trees as he kept on dictating his ideas for me to type as the night wore on,” she remembered.
SOE agents received their wings after parachute training at Ringway Airfield, Manchester. Each had to make five jumps, two at night, in a camouflaged jumpsuit and padded helmet. The suit pockets contained a folding shovel, flashlight, pistol, dagger, medical kit, and money (paper and coins). The suits had a full-length zipper to allow the jumper to “walk out” upon landing. Beneath their suits each agent wore his or her civilian clothes, made by Station VI-A.
Agents at the training schools in Scotland were shown how to live off the countryside by trapping rabbits and cooking various plants, which would later help them to subsist in the Pyrenean foothills and other areas. They also became experts in using plastic explosive. The color of butter, it had a distinct almond smell. Agents were shown how to disguise the explosive by molding it into a chocolate bar shape and breaking off a piece to embed it in a target. The hills of Inverness echoed with explosions as old trucks or deserted sheds were blown up as part of their training in guerrilla war tactics.
In the winter the slopes of the Highlands saw SOE trainees undergoing various tests on the iron-hard snow, their skis crunching as they hauled a sleigh through an obstacle course known as Sniper Valley, where live rounds were fired at targets in the image of enemy soldiers.
Yvonne Baseden, slim and gifted with a natural grace, had joined the WAAF at the age of eighteen after leaving a convent school. Posted to the Air Ministry in London, the only daughter of an engineer in the Royal Flying Corps and of a French château owner, she was assigned to translate technical documents from French into English. She had applied to join the SOE and had been selected to become a wireless operator and had been sent to Scotland. She would recall, “Lectures were held in a hut on an island in a Highland river.”
Agents had to wade through the ice-cold water to reach the hut to be briefed on their next exercise as they sat in wet clothes. “We were either wet up to the waist or perhaps even the chest. Discomfort went with the training.” Baseden would be among the first twenty women agents.
An eclectic group of trainees, men and women whom Selwyn Jepson had recruited, were being made ready for operational service. The last stage was to send them to Finishing Schools.
Schools were established among the tall trees and around the medieval ruins of Beaulieu Abbey and its cloisters on the estate of Edward, Lord Montagu Beaulieu, deep in the New Forest of Hampshire. It had been amon
g the first properties requisitioned for SOE use because its cottages, lodges, and large private houses provided ready-made accommodation for agents and their instructors. FANYs performed the duties of housekeeping.
There were twenty officers on the teaching staff and a dozen more listed as “house masters,” one for each school. They sat with trainees at meals and accompanied them on their walks through the estate to enjoy the peace of the cloisters while students were encouraged to discuss their class work. The house masters reported the conversation to the teaching staff to judge agents’ progress.
Their syllabus had been created by Gubbins and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Gubbins had established a strong working relationship with its head, Stewart Menzies. The courses at Beaulieu had been designed not only to expand upon what agents had learned at other training schools but to ensure they understood that life in occupied France was regularly changing. Women were no longer given a cigarette ration; coffee was only available in cafés or restaurants without milk, and to put milk into a teacup would be a giveaway that an agent was English. To look right, and not left, before crossing a busy French road was another mistake that would be spotted, along with cycling on the wrong side of a road.
It was stressed to agents that they must live how the person of their cover story would live, according to their social class or income. A wireless operator, Yvonne Cormeau, was warned by a peasant woman while posing as a farm worker: “The farmer’s wife told me, ‘Don’t wear a watch. No woman who looks after cows would be able to afford a watch.’”
An entire class was shown how to spot if an agent was being followed and how to use the right level of self-confidence if stopped by a German patrol and ordered to produce papers.
While French women did not smoke in public, women agents were taught to write a message on a thin roll of onionskin and insert it into a cigarette with a needle. To test this method of passing messages, agents were selected to work in pairs. One was told to take a few puffs while his partner waited at a prearranged place. The smoker would extinguish his cigarette as he approached his partner, drop the butt, and walk on. His partner would discreetly pick up the stub, pocket it, and remove the message. The test was constantly repeated until their tutor was satisfied they had the confidence to do it in France, in the street. All agents, male and female, learned how to choose hiding places where messages could be left among the Beaulieu Abbey ruins, placing them under a stone or in the cracks of a cloister wall.
Upon arrival each potential agent underwent a clinical interview by one of the psychologists at Beaulieu to assess any sign of nerve failure in an agent that the training staff had noted during a previous course and that suggested an agent could be a security risk to send into France.
“[The agent] would have known the other agents on a course, even if their names were aliases. Caught by the Gestapo the agent would be tortured for their identities and missions and the training they had undergone. Beaulieu and SOE would be at serious risk,” recalled psychologist Andrew Knott.
To avoid that happening, agents who received adverse security reports that did not encourage trust in them were sent to what was known as the “refractory cooler” in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands at Inverlair. Guarded by prison wardens, they were held there until all the other agents they had known at Beaulieu were judged to be safe when the time came to send them to France. Those held in the refractory were constantly reminded of the Beaulieu motto: “He that has learned a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.”
Only when the reminder had been drummed into him at Inverlair was a failed agent posted to a military unit to fill the general manpower shortage. Some found themselves on coastal guard duty looking out toward the France they would never go to.
There are no records that female agents were ever sent to the “refractor cooler.” Vera Atkins would recall it “was a matter of pride that I made sure that every woman, from the moment she was selected to the moment she landed in France, that she never committed a breach of security.”
After its formation, Gubbins had come to terms with the fact that the SOE would be resented by some government departments, especially the Foreign Office where staff dismissed it as “having a philosophy of action for action’s sake.”
Such infighting was conducted at the highest level, nowhere more so than Gubbins’s relations with the Air Ministry over the matter of providing aircraft to fly agents to France. Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the commander in chief of Bomber Command, had an obsessive belief that his bombers would win the war. More than once at staff meetings he had said, “SOE should be regarded as no more than an unorthodox instrument.”
Gubbins knew that Harris had refused to support the request of Resistance groups in Poland and Czechoslovakia for RAF long-range aircraft to fly to those two countries and drop supplies to support sabotage and subversion. Harris felt such missions would “be at the expense of RAF bombing operations on German targets.” Harris had written to Charles Portal, the chief of the Air Staff, that “parting with even a few of my precious aircrews will decimate my reserves. My bombing offensive is not a gamble; it is a gilt-edged investment. I cannot divert aircraft from a certainty, to a gamble which may be completely worthless.”
The decision had caused great upset for the Polish and Czech governments-in-exile. Their pilots had arrived in Britain to fight in the Battle of Britain and had volunteered to become aircrews for bombing raids on Germany. Their request to be allowed to fly RAF planes to their homelands to supply the Resistance was largely ignored. Gubbins, who admired them, found he was fighting his own battle with the Air Ministry.
Portal, never a fan of Gubbins, wrote to Gladwyn Jebb, who was the link between the SOE and the Foreign Office, “I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of killing members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated.” The SOE agents were simply “assassins,” he stated.
Copies of the correspondence found their way to Menzies’s office at 54 Broadway, the London MI6 headquarters. From the start of their friendship, the spymaster had shown an instinctive understanding of the problems Gubbins faced. They would meet once a week at White’s Club in Piccadilly, where they were both members, and after dinner they played backgammon. He had shown the correspondence to Gubbins, who handed it back with a dismissive shrug.
Both knew that the SOE’s enemies in Whitehall were still busy planting rumors that Churchill was considering placing the SOE under the chief of staff or the Foreign Office. In the corridors of power in the War Office and Air Ministry, the talk was that the SOE had still to justify the prime minister’s call to set Europe alight.
Gubbins and his staff had been sarcastically dubbed the “Baker Street Irregulars” by those who strongly disapproved of the sort of action that the SOE was pursuing and which Portal called “the fanatics whose role has not been worked out.”
Gubbins told Menzies he would need aircraft as soon as possible to send his agents into occupied Europe. The Lysander was a single-engine, high-wing monoplane that had been designed as a spotter aircraft for the Royal Artillery. Gubbins was told while they were useless for the task for which they were built, they could be adapted to land and take off at night from a field, making them ideal to drop or pick up agents. Menzies said he would raise the matter with Churchill.
In a reshuffle of his cabinet, Churchill moved Dalton from the Ministry of Economic Warfare to the Board of Trade. His replacement was Lord Selborne, fifty-four years old, a small, stooping figure with protruding gray eyes, who would smile at any attractive woman who caught his attention. From their first meeting he told Gubbins, “I will have no desire to interfere in the everyday work of SOE. Just tell me what you need.”
Gubbins said he wanted Lysanders and an airfield for them to operate from. It must be near London and take into account prevailing winds that would affect flights to and from Europe. It would also need t
o be large enough to accommodate any other aircraft the SOE would need. Selborne replied it was a reasonable request. It was the start of a relationship in which there would be a mutual liking and respect.
Gubbins had not long to wait before Selborne told him that Churchill had authorized the secretary of air, Archibald Sinclair, to provide seven Lysanders for the SOE’s exclusive use, together with an airfield.
The Lysanders were listed as a Special Duties Squadron and given the number 138. The squadron with that designation had been originally formed six days before Armistice Day in 1918, and its planes had not taken to the air in anger over France before its pilots had returned to England and their squadron became a dusty file in the Air Ministry archives. Gubbins arranged for it to have a new squadron badge: a gleaming sword cutting a knotted rope and the motto FOR FREEDOM. Gubbins told Selborne it represented the role the Lysanders would have. He stipulated that their pilots should have a minimum 250 hours of flying experience.
RAF squadron commanders combed through their files to find pilots and ground staff to transfer to 138 Squadron at its temporary base on Newmarket Racecourse near Cambridge. The pilots would be young, all with strong personalities, and would fly their Lysanders to the racecourse.
A briefing officer told them their work would be governed by the phases of the moon since they would need its light to map-read their way to small fields where tiny pricks of light would guide them to touch down in occupied Europe. A young pilot officer, nineteen-year-old John Bridger, would recall “the sudden thrill in the briefing room as we heard what we were going to do.” Until then he had piloted a Beaufighter and always had a navigator to guide him. Now he would have to navigate himself by moonlight.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 7
