The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy

by Judith L. Pearson

  At the same time, all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty received notification of their liability for military service. Certain occupations were exempt, as their skills were needed in factories to keep up the furious pace of the industry of war. Material resources were mobilized as effectively as was labor. Consumption of every kind was cut and massive rationing was put into place, with gasoline leading the way in September 1939. Food rationing began in January 1940. Bacon, ham, sugar, and butter became available only with a coupon book.

  By the time Virginia arrived in London in late August of 1940, other foods had been added to the ration list. Spam canned meat became a meal staple and powdered eggs replaced the genuine article. Mrs. Tipton served the eggs periodically to her boarders and when Virginia first tasted them, she was shocked by their runny consistency. The gentleman boarder across the dining room table watched her face and chuckled softly.

  Mrs. Tipton’s war efforts went further than runny artificial eggs. She, like most of her neighbors, had turned her flower bed into a vegetable garden, raising as much of her own produce as possible so that the farmers’ crops could be reserved for the troops. The British government’s “Dig for Victory” program made every Londoner a patriot.

  Britain had not sued for peace after France fell in June as Hitler had expected, so the Führer launched Operation SEELÖWE, or SEALION, whose goal was to overpower the Royal Air Force (RAF) to prepare for the invasion of Britain. SEALION, had begun in July 1940 with the Luftwaffe attacking British airfields and radar stations. But rather than achieving Hitler’s goal, the attacks allowed the world to see that the Luftwaffe was poorly prepared for the conflict. And although the sheer weight of their bombardment was sometimes overwhelming, the British prevailed.

  Hitler next approved a heavy bombing offensive “for disruptive attacks on the population and air defences of major British cities, including London, by day and night.” At 4:00 PM on Saturday, September 7, just two weeks after Virginia had arrived in the capital city, 348 German bombers along with 617 fighters began blasting London and continued until 6:00 PM. Two hours later, using the fires set by the first assault as guides, a second group began another attack. The first targets were the docks and the East End, but soon the entire city fell within the Luftwaffe’s crosshairs. The blitzkrieg of London had begun. And the city’s 8.5 million people would experience a hell they had never seen before.

  Virginia and her six fellow boarders, along with Mrs. Tipton, had just settled in to enjoy their Saturday tea when the first air raid siren shrieked. Two of the women jumped up and shrieked along with it. A discussion ensued on whether or not the siren was a warning or the real thing. The debate halted abruptly when a second siren sounded with a simultaneous thunder that Virginia felt throughout her body.

  “It’s the real thing!” one of the men shouted, and the eight of them high-tailed it to the door leading to the basement. Just weeks earlier, following the advice of government radio announcements and flyers, Mrs. Tipton had outfitted a well-reinforced corner of her basement with mats, blankets, water, and tins of food. They hadn’t even made it to the corner when the next bomb hit.

  The timid woman who lived in the room next to Virginia’s began praying immediately. A couple of the men paced like caged lions and the other boarders just sat staring into space, seemingly pondering their fate and that of friends and family living elsewhere in the city. Mrs. Tipton was particularly distraught over the fact that her cat, Raleigh, had been out in the garden when the bombardment began. Virginia sat next to her, and tried to be reassuring.

  In truth, soothing Mrs. Tipton was a welcome personal diversion. Throughout her months on the French front, although she was near the fighting and certainly saw her share of its destruction, Virginia never felt as though she, personally, was a target. Here in London, the situation was vastly different. The Nazi bombs would not spare her simply because she held an American passport.

  After several hours, and as suddenly as it had begun, the deafening roar was replaced by a deafening silence. The men looked at each other and silently agreed to chance a look upstairs. Virginia rose as well, and Mrs. Tipton pleaded for her to check on Raleigh.

  The house was untouched, although some of the windows in the parlor and dining room had been shattered from the bombs’ concussion. They ventured out the front door to the street. The sight was indescribably horrific. But it was the smell that Virginia most noticed. The air was thick with an acrid smoke caused by the explosives. Gritty dust from powdered brickwork and masonry made breathing a chore. A dark haze swirled around them as fires burned hot at several houses up and down the street. And the smell of sewer gas from broken pipelines leached up from the gutters, combining with the other foul odors. Before the scene had fully sunk in, Virginia and the men felt, rather than heard, another round of bombardment moving in their direction. They raced back into the house and down the basement stairs.

  This drill repeated itself multiple times over the course of the night. Each time the bombing subsided, a group from the basement would timidly climb the stairs to check on the status of the house and the cat. After the third foray, it occurred to Virginia how ludicrous it all was. It made little difference whether the house had been hit or not—there was nowhere else for them to go and at least they had shelter and water and food.

  Finally, at four-thirty the next morning, the quiet extended beyond its previous five or ten minutes and the group in Mrs. Tipton’s basement agreed that the bombing had subsided for the night. They were further put at ease when the all-clear siren sounded shortly after the last of them had climbed the basement stairs. Wandering around the still-standing house, they all marveled at how little damage it had suffered. Save for the broken windows and one shattered teacup in the parlor, nothing had been disturbed. And much to Mrs. Tipton’s delight, Raleigh made an appearance from under the divan he had used as his evening’s bomb shelter.

  The blitz continued for fifty-seven consecutive nights. The German goal was to kill and destroy as much as possible. Hitler figured that the carnage and the constant terror of the prospect of more bombing would bring the populace to its collective knees. The Luftwaffe dropped about three hundred tons of high explosive bombs on Mrs. Tipton’s borough of Westminster alone. Even the British government expected the worst. In addition to hospitals preparing to accept the wounded, they also expected patients who would be driven mad by the air raids.

  But quite the contrary occurred: the bombs tended to heal psychological maladies. Many people who were neurotic about the prospect of war were cured by its reality. They had too much to do to have time to be frightened. And they enjoyed finding themselves braver than they ever knew they could be.

  As defense against the death raining from the sky, more shelters were needed in the city. Some buildings weren’t fortunate to have sturdy basements like Mrs. Tipton’s. Those that did have basements weren’t sufficient to house all of the population. And although the Nazi raids seemed to occur only at night, it wasn’t out of the question that an attack might also come during the day. It was vital, therefore, for citizens going about their daily business, to know precisely where the closest shelter was no matter where they were in the city. The official shelters were insufficient, but the vast network of Underground stations supplied just what was needed. While the trains continued to run through most of the city, seventy-nine stations were adapted and could accommodate up to 177,000 people each. The British government boarded up the tracks and equipped the stations with running water. An entire city burgeoned beneath London’s surface.

  The Underground shelters did, however, take some getting used to. The stench of so many humans and so little fresh air was overwhelming at times. Initially, fights broke out as people vied for space to camp out on for the night. But soon routine set in and families would roll up their blankets and pillows and make the pilgrimage, often before dark each night. Some brought food and had dinner, others brought diversions to share: a harmoni
ca or guitar to serenade the crowds, or books to read aloud.

  The only bright side to the all-out attacks on London, and later, other British cities, was that it gave RAF Fighter Command a much-needed break to rebuild outlying damaged airfields, train new pilots, and repair aircraft. As Winston Churchill said, “It was therefore with a sense of relief that Fighter Command felt the German attack turn on to London.”

  Oddly, in the face of this new round of death and destruction, the rituals of everyday life continued for Virginia as they did for those around her. The milkman picked his steps carefully across the newly ruined street in front of Virginia’s boarding house to make his rounds each morning. The postman routinely collected mail from a letter box mysteriously left intact in the middle of the wasteland that had once been a café on the corner. And Virginia went to work each morning at the embassy as if the rubble in the streets were nothing out of the ordinary.

  The newspaper reports from Paris were just as surreal. The German soldiers, hated by generations of French, were behaving like perfect gentlemen. The picture of culture, the Nazis were frequenting bookstores and cafés. An air of normalcy reigned by day, while fear was supreme in the dark of night. A knock on the door could mean one or all of the inhabitants would be carted off for questioning by the authorities. Overt actions of resistance always brought immediate death.

  And there was much to resist. The Reich had installed a ministry in Paris to control all press, radio, and film. Only word of mouth brought any news about Vichy government failures or the war waging with Britain. Food shortages among the French increased, while the Germans consumed whatever they pleased. With the complicity of Vichy, manufacturing was redirected to the German war effort and rural areas became the target of acquisition. A dismal winter had descended over France.

  Virginia had made contact with most of the people whose names George Bellows had given her. They, as well as several other clerks at the embassy, had become great chums and she saw them frequently at parties and gatherings, such as the one held at the home of Vera Atkins on January 14, 1941. Another of Bellows’s friends, Larry Pulver, had suggested Virginia accompany him to Vera’s soirée.

  The home, not far from Virginia’s boarding house, was a tall, narrow Victorian, painted a pale blue with yellow awnings, as yet untouched by Hitler’s bombs. The owner was as distinctive as her house. Virginia judged Vera to be close to her own age. While Virginia was tall and lanky, Vera was petite. Pulver had told Virginia that Vera worked for the War Office in some capacity. Virginia watched as the hostess buzzed from guest to guest like a hummingbird, anxious to make certain all were having a good time and well supplied with grilled Spam appetizers and bad wine. It was a particularly special night as both the water and the electricity were working in Vera’s home. Since the bombing, most homes experienced outages of some sort nearly every day.

  As the evening continued, one of the guests shared his experiences as an ambulance driver during the height of the blitz. He worked in the East End, around the docks. The people there were truly something, he said, warm, affectionate, rather reckless, and incredibly brave. He once came across a young boy who was crying and when he asked what the matter was, the child said, “They burned up me mum today.”

  The man assumed the boy was speaking about injuries his mother had suffered so he asked if the child’s mother had been badly burned. The boy looked at him through tears and said, “Oh, yes sir. They don’t muck about in crematoriums.”

  The guest’s story was followed by head shaking and chuckles and then another man who had been on the fire brigade spoke up. They were hauling people out of a burning building that had collapsed, he explained, bringing them out on anything they could find, even corrugated metal. One man he had helped bring out had lost an entire side of his body: half of his face, his arm, and his leg. He looked up at the volunteer and asked for “a cigarette, mate.” The volunteer lit one for him and put it between his lips. He took a couple of drags and said, “Will you tell me landlady I shall not be home to tea?” Then he closed his eyes and died.

  This story brought an awkward silence to the group, quickly broken by the gravelly voice of their hostess asking Virginia to tell them what she thought of the Nazis when she met them. While Virginia might have been cautious about her feelings months earlier on the train with Bellows, she had long given up the need to be circumspect. She told them after what she had seen in France and lived through in London, she’d like nothing better than to go back and take on “the filthy Jerries.”

  While anyone at the party, including Vera, might have been a Nazi sympathizer, or even a spy, Virginia continued with customary outspokenness. She had heard that the Quakers were being allowed into France on goodwill missions. She figured she could get back into the country via Barcelona or Lisbon on a fictitious benevolent undertaking. It would be fairly simple as she was a citizen of a noncombatant country. Vera didn’t comment, but Virginia’s words did not go unnoticed. The hostess merely smiled sweetly and offered her another appetizer.

  7

  The Making of a Spy

  The morning after her cocktail party, Vera Atkins typed a memo and filed it in her folder marked, “Prospects.”

  Miss VH who works at the American embassy talked in my house last night of wanting to go to France via Barcelona or Lisbon. She talked of joining the Quaker organisation as an excuse. I am getting fuller details and will put her through the cards at the same time continuing approaches.

  Two days later a message arrived at the embassy for Virginia. It requested her to join Vera for lunch the following day and included a phone number to which she could RSVP. When Virginia called, a woman answered the phone saying, “Inter-Services Research Bureau.” When asked, she told Virginia that Vera wasn’t in, but she was happy to take the message that Virginia would be at the appointed place at noon.

  As Virginia strode up to the restaurant the next day, Vera was arriving at the same time. She was smartly dressed, but like so many other women, including Virginia, Vera had taken to wearing stockings with ladders in them, the British name for a run. Silk had to be preserved for parachutes, and women were doing their part for the war effort.

  Once they’d settled at a table and began to consult menus, Vera told Virginia that she would take care of lunch with her ration coupons. She had found a couple of extras, she said, and encouraged Virginia to order whatever she liked. Such an extravagance was quite a treat and Virginia nodded a thank-you to Vera.

  Once their soup had been served, Vera leaned in closer to Virginia to speak in a softer voice. There were many positions in the British government she felt that Virginia would be uniquely qualified for, she said. Virginia waited as the waiter came and went and then asked what she meant.

  Vera summarized what she perceived as Virginia’s assets: she was self-confident, had said she spoke French fluently, and knew the country. She looked strong and healthy. No one, Vera said, would ever guess Virginia was missing a leg. Virginia was shocked at this bombshell, but Vera squinted slyly through a haze of cigarette smoke and simply said she had a great many connections who knew a lot of things about a lot of people.

  Their lunch conversation then took a different course. Vera said she was interested in Virginia’s work with the French ambulance service. How had she found the position? For whom specifically did she work? What was her training? Sympathetic clucks and nods were woven in among her questions, and her comments about the ugliness of war were peppered with expletives. More questions followed, about Virginia’s acquaintances in France. Without ever being aware, Virginia had given Vera her resumé, and it contained exactly the kind of information the latter was seeking.

  As they were parting, Vera told Virginia that if she was interested in further discussions about aiding the war effort, she should meet her at the Northumberland Hotel at two o’clock the next day. With a curt nod that assumed Virginia’s consent, Vera turned and walked away.

  Clandestine oper
ations are as old as warfare itself, the Trojan Horse being probably one of the most famous examples of an early paramilitary undertaking.

  The British government had been considering such operations when it developed Section D in 1938 under the authority of the Foreign Office. The organization’s purpose was as nebulous as its name. Its employees were “to investigate every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces.”

  Section D was to consider sabotage targets within Germany and to look into employing those who might be persuaded to undertake these actions, such as the Jews or the Communists. Meanwhile in France, everyone in the government refused to consider the possibility of the country’s collapse. But someone in Section D had the forethought to leave ten small caches of sabotage stores in northern France, each with two Frenchmen in charge of them. They were scattered over 150 miles between Rouen and Chalons-sur-Marne.

  When the fall of France became apparent to the British government in June of 1940, and Nazi Germany’s ruthless dealings with their captured nations were publicized, Winston Churchill became highly enthused over creating an organization to specialize in irregular warfare. It wasn’t until later that he was informed of the existence of Section D. On July 16, 1940, Churchill invited then Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton to take charge of subversion, and the Special Operations Executive—the SOE— was born.

  SOE’s purpose was, in the words of its founding charter, “to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas.” Simply put, Hitler had presented the world with a very unorthodox war. It was necessary to create an unorthodox organization to fight such an enemy. Once SOE had been officially created, Churchill gave Dalton a simple directive: “And now set Europe ablaze.”