by Max Hastings
SIXTEEN
Setting Europe Ablaze
THE SPRING and summer of 1944 witnessed a flowering, albeit imperfect in the prime minister’s eyes, of one of his most cherished inspirations: resistance movements in occupied Europe and the Balkans. Back in 1940, Churchill famously ordered the minister of economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, to “set Europe ablaze.” This instruction prompted the creation of the Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation charged with promoting resistance—explicitly terrorism, armed action by nonuniformed civilians—everywhere that the Axis held sway. By submarine and small boat, plane and parachute, British-trained agents descended on Europe, and later Southeast Asia, to establish contact with those willing to raise the banner of opposition to tyranny, albeit by means unsanctioned in the Geneva Conventions. Events in France have received most attention from postwar chroniclers, though the partisans in Yugoslavia achieved much greater strategic significance, as Churchill perceived from 1943 onwards.
The men and women of the SOE helped to create one of the enduring legends of World War II. It seemed then, as it still does today, especially heroic to risk torture and death alone, far behind enemy lines. Support for domestic insurrection represented a personal act of faith by the prime minister, which ran contrary to the views of many of his service advisers. He treasured a belief that the peoples of Europe could play an important part in their own liberation, declaring on June 10, 1941: “We shall aid and stir the people of every conquered country to resistance and revolt. We shall break up and derange every effort which Hitler makes to systematize and consolidate his subjugation.” At the prime minister’s behest, a War Office planning document the same month addressed the promotion of resistance movements: “Subjugated peoples must be caused869 to rise against their oppressors, but not until the stage is set. The ‘attack from within’ is the basic concept of such operations—and we should be able to do it in a bigger way than did the Germans. They had but a few Quislings to help them, and we have whole populations. The Patriots must be secretly organised and armed with personal weapons to be delivered to them by air if necessary.”
Churchill anticipated that indigenous peoples would play a major part in their own liberation. If the United States entered the war, he wrote in a minute to Portal, the chief of the Air Staff, on October 7, 1941, there would be “simultaneous attacks by armoured forces870 in many of the conquered countries which were ripe for revolt.” In a paper of June 15, 1942, he cited “rousing the populations” among the first objectives of Allied landings on the Continent. The mission of the SOE was to hasten such ripening and “rousing.” In many books published even in the twenty-first century, accounts of what took place in the attempt to fulfil his vision are heavily coloured by romance. Reality was at least as interesting, but much more complex.
In June 1940, expressing to Canadian premier Mackenzie King his uncertainty about whether France would stay in the war, Churchill wrote: “I hope they will, even at the worst, maintain a gigantic guerrilla.”871 In the event, through the first years of occupation, France and the rest of western Europe remained passive. Acts of violent opposition were sporadic. It took time for the trauma of defeat to be overcome, for like-minded defiant spirits to meet and coalesce into groups. The British were in no condition to offer assistance. Most important, only a tiny minority of people were willing actively to oppose the Germans. In the matter of resistance, as in so much else, Churchill’s heroic enthusiasm struck little resonance with the mood of Europe’s citizens, preoccupied with more humdrum concerns. They needed to feed their families, earn wages, preserve roofs above their heads. All these simple human purposes were put at risk—mortal risk—by any defiance of the occupiers.
Violent demonstrations flew in the face of national consensuses. It was not that people liked the Germans, but that acquiescence in their hegemony appeared to represent the only rational course. Such prominent figures as the French writer André Gide, who utterly rejected collaboration with the occupiers, nonetheless dismissed the notion of violent opposition. Until the Soviet Union and United States entered the war, Hitler’s grasp upon his empire was beyond military challenge. Britain’s prime minister uttered stirring words, echoed by broadcasters speaking from London in many languages to oppressed peoples, but no British army was capable of reentering the Continent. This made most people in Hitler’s new dominions unwilling to threaten the welfare of their own communities by actions which promised retribution.
Even for those who wanted to fight, Churchill severely underestimated the difficulties of conducting guerrilla operations against an efficient and ruthless occupier in heavily urbanised regions of Europe. In Denmark, Holland, Belgium and large parts of France, there were few hiding places for armed bands. The Germans adopted policies designed to promote passivity. Any action against their forces brought down punishment upon entire communities. On May 27, 1941, Churchill sent872 a note to Lord Selborne, Dalton’s successor at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, suggesting providing oppressed people with simple weapons and sticks of dynamite. Yet the use of “simple weapons” by such “oppressed people” provoked determinedly disproportionate German responses. On October 20 that year, an Alsatian Communist shot dead the German military commandant of Nantes, and made good his escape. Historian Robert Gildea has written: “Far from welcoming873 this assassination as the first step towards their liberation, the population of Nantes was horrified,” not least because the dead German seemed to local bourgeois an unusually sympathetic personality though a ruthless anti-Semite. Ninety-eight civilian hostages were executed. This caused Maurice Schumann to broadcast from London on the BBC French Service, urging that such terrorist action should not be repeated. De Gaulle delivered the same message on October 23: “In war there are tactics. The war of the French must be carried out by those in charge, that is, by myself and the National Committee.”
Churchill, however, dissented. He believed that it was essential to impose maximum pain and inconvenience upon the enemy. He deemed the deaths of hostages a necessary sacrifice for enabling the French people to show that they would not bow to tyranny, as most had indeed bowed since June 1940. He once told a meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee that while acts of resistance prompted bloody reprisals, “the blood of the Martyrs was the seed of the church.” The behaviour of Hitler’s minions in occupied Europe had made the Germans hated as no other race had been hated, he said, and this sentiment must be exploited. He deplored any attempt to stifle resistance in the interests of innocent bystanders. “Nothing must be done874 which would result in the falling off of this most valuable means of harassing the enemy.” This was an extension of the view he adopted when Britain was threatened with invasion. In 1940, Generals Paget and Auchinleck urged that the civil population should be told to stay at home, rather than risk their lives offering ineffectual resistance to the Germans with scythes and brickbats. The prime minister strongly disagreed. In war, he said, quarter is given not on grounds of compassion, but to deter the enemy from fighting to the end: “Here, we want every citizen to fight875 desperately and they will do so the more if they know that the alternative is massacre.” What he expected from British civilians in 1940 he sought thereafter from those of occupied Europe.
Here was Churchill at his most ruthless. He was constantly fearful that, left to itself, Europe would lapse into subservience to Hitler’s hegemony. It provoked his chagrin that few French people rallied to de Gaulle’s standard not only in 1940, but through the years which followed. Usefully for Churchill’s aspirations, Germany adopted towards most of its European empire policies so shamelessly selfish, as well as brutal, that even the rulers of Vichy France came progressively to understand that they could forge no partnership with their occupiers. Berlin wanted only economic plunder876 for the benefit of the Reich’s citizens. Hitler’s policies thus assisted those of Churchill.
Yet, at least until after D-Day, in 1944, reprisals convinced most people in the occupied countries that the cost of violen
t acts outweighed their value. The Norwegians, though strongly anti-German, conducted resistance with notable prudence. Norwegian special forces dispatched from Britain occasionally attacked important targets, such as the Rjukan heavy water plant, but local people avoided open combat. In Czechoslovakia, the May 27, 1942, killing of Reinhard Heydrich, “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, by Czechs parachuted in from Britain, prompted shocking reprisals, most notoriously the slaughter of the 198 men of the village of Lidice, whose women were sent to concentration camps. Local resistance groups were smashed. Many Czechs believe to this day that the assassination was mistaken, because it was purchased so dearly in innocent lives.
In France, the detonation of a roadside bomb in Marseilles prompted the Germans to demolish the entire vieux quartier of the city, making forty thousand people homeless. Terrasson, a pretty little town in south-central France, suffered heavily both from resistance activism and German reprisals. “The cycle is simple,”877 its mayor, Georges Labarthe, wrote wretchedly to his mother in Paris in June 1944: “the maquis conduct an operation, the Germans arrive, the civil population pay the tariff, the Germans go away and the maquis reappear. Where there are casualties among the Germans, the retribution is terrible. I must confess that in these circumstances it is hard to be the representative and defender of the people.”
In western Europe resistance achieved its greatest strength in wildernesses which mattered least to Hitler strategically—those most remote from potential invasion coasts. An overwhelming majority of people with large possessions—the aristocracy and the business community—collaborated with the occupiers, because they had most to lose. Many SOE agents captured by the Germans were betrayed by local inhabitants. British officers relied for assistance and shelter chiefly upon the little people of their societies—schoolteachers, trades unionists, peasant farmers. Only 20 percent of letters opened by French censors even late in the war, in the first six months of 1944, expressed approval of “terrorism.” A typical comment was: “The maquis act in the name of patriotism, but fortunately the police are getting tough and I hope with all my heart that these youths are soon destroyed, for they commit all kinds of atrocities on innocent people.” One of the best historians of wartime France, Julian Jackson, writes: “Other evidence exists that maquis violence was widely condemned.”878 In the Jura, where terrible German acts of savagery took place in 1944, some local doctors refused to tend Resistance wounded. Many people refused fugitives shelter. Priests declined to say prayers for the dying. In Haute-Saône, the Vichyite prefect noted: “Less and less do the terrorists enjoy the complicity of the rural population.” Extreme repression and unbridled brutality fuelled hatred but also fear. German policy was notably effective in suppressing dissent.
Churchill envisaged the peoples of Europe causing such trouble for the Germans that occupation became costly, even unviable. Yet untrained and ill-organised civilians could never aspire to defeat regular troops. “What is an army without artillery, tanks and air force?” demanded Stalin contemptuously about the Polish resistance. “In modern warfare such an army is of little use.” He was by no means wrong. The objection of many decent and patriotic Europeans to resistance was that its sluggishly mounting tempo of violence sufficed to annoy the Germans, but imposed no crisis upon them. With brave and notable exceptions, it may be suggested that resistance was most enthusiastically supported by those, both British and people of the occupied nations, who had no personal stake in local communities vulnerable to reprisals.
Some senior British officers opposed the SOE’s mandate on both pragmatic and ethical grounds. They perceived the unlikelihood of stimulating successful mass revolt, such as Churchill wanted, and were uncomfortable about promoting terrorism by armed civilians. The chief of the Air Staff, Portal, in February 1941 attempted to insist that one of the first SOE parties parachuted into France should wear uniform: “I think the dropping of men879 dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated,” he told Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office. “I think you will agree that there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air, and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.” Such fastidiousness may seem ironic when displayed by one of the architects of area bombing. But it illustrates the sentiments of many senior service officers. Others, such as Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command, became fanatical foes of the SOE, because they resented the diversion of aircraft to support its networks.
Sir Stewart Menzies and his subordinates in the Secret Intelligence Service hated their amateur rivals, first, on Whitehall territorial grounds, and, second, because in the field ambushes and acts of sabotage excited the Germans and made more difficult discreet intelligence gathering by the SIS’s agents. An early SOE hand in the Middle East, Bickham Sweet-Escott, wrote of his own introduction to cloak and daggery: “Nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine880 the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during that summer of 1941.” Matters were not much better a year later, when Oliver Lyttelton was dispatched to the Mediterranean as minister resident. He recorded: “I was disturbed … by the lack of security881, waste and ineffectiveness of SOE.” The same strictures were often voiced in London.
Between 1940 and 1943, the highest achievement of the SOE in most occupied countries was to keep agents alive and wireless transmitters functioning, with most success in rural areas. The Soviet Union’s entry into the war prompted a dramatic accession of strength to resistance groups from Europe’s Communists. A second critical development in France was Germany’s 1943 introduction of massed forced labour, known as the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Tens of thousands of young men fled into hiding in the countryside, to the maquis, to escape deportation to Germany. They formed bands under leaders of differing and often mutually hostile political hues. Most were preoccupied with feeding themselves through banditry which enraged its bourgeois victims, rather than with fighting the Germans. Many French people882 asserted bitterly after the war, in private at least, that the Germans behaved better than did Communist maquisards. There is a widespread delusion that resistance groups were commanded by SOE officers, but this was rarely so. Most British agents fulfilled a liaison role, exercising varying degrees of influence upon French group leaders through their control of cash and supply drops.
Above all, until the spring of 1944 resistance groups were poorly armed. Only then did the Allies possess sufficient aircraft and weapons to begin equipping maquisards wholesale. A whimsical November 1941 proposal883 from Lord Cherwell to drop containers of arms randomly across occupied Europe to encourage spontaneous acts of violence was rejected as a waste of scarce air resources. Until the last months before liberation, sabotage and guerrilla operations in most European countries—with the notable exception of Yugoslavia, of which more below—were on a relatively tiny scale. The so-called Armée Secrète, which recognised the authority of de Gaulle, generally respected instructions from London to remain passive until the approach of D-Day. Communist bands of the FTP—Franc-Tireurs et Partisans—adopted more activist tactics, with ruthless disregard for the interests of local people.
Churchill loved to meet British agents and Frenchmen, returned from their hazardous missions. He entertained at Downing Street Wing Commander Edward Yeo-Thomas—“the White Rabbit”—Jean Moulin and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. Such encounters invariably prompted him to urge the RAF to divert more aircraft to aid their struggle. His personal enthusiasm for resistance was critical in overcoming the scepticism of conventional warriors. It was sometimes said of the “Baker Street Irregulars” that Britain was tipped on its side, and everything loose fell into the SOE. Many of its personnel, unsurprisingly, were individualists and eccentrics. Their perspicacity often failed to match their e
nthusiasm. They cherished extravagant faith in their unseen protégés in occupied Europe. A sceptic remarked of Col. Maurice Buckmaster, chief of the SOE’s French Section: “He believed that all his geese884 were swans.”
The SOE’s most conspicuous security lapse was its failure, despite many warnings, to perceive that the Germans had so deeply penetrated its Dutch operations that almost every agent parachuted into Holland in 1942–43 landed into enemy hands. The revelation of this disaster, at the end of 1943, precipitated a crisis in the organisation’s affairs. Its Whitehall foes, of whom there were many, crowded forward to demand curtailment of its operations and calls on resources. Menzies and his colleagues at the SIS argued that the debacle reflected the chronic amateurishness and lack of tradecraft prevailing at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters and pervading its operations in the field. They were by no means wrong. The SOE since 1940 had indeed been learning on the job, at severe cost in lives and wasted effort. Meanwhile in September 1943, the army’s exasperation with the SOE’s Balkan operations, which it claimed were out of control, caused the C-in-C Middle East to demand that the organisation should be brought under his orders. This issue was still unresolved when the Dutch scandal broke.
On Churchill’s return from Marrakesh in January 1944, the row was appealed to him for decision. He renewed the SOE’s mandate (though rejecting its presumptuous demand for a seat on the Chiefs of Staff Committee), confirmed its independence, and ordered the RAF to release more aircraft for arms dropping. The organisation’s internal historian wrote later: “There is no doubt that, in this critical phase885 of its development, SOE and the Resistance movements which it led were sustained very largely by the personal influence of Mr. Churchill.” The prime minister took the view that the SOE’s enthusiasm and activism outweighed its deficiencies. It was too late in the war to undertake wholesale restructuring. Much of the criticism of the SOE, he believed, derived from Whitehall jealousies. It was impossible to conduct a secret war of such an unprecedented kind without misfortunes which cost lives, as do all mistakes in conflict.
