by Ann Kramer
‘The job of a courier was terribly, terribly, terribly tiring… We never wrote and we never phoned. Any messages were taken from A to B and the territory we were working on was really very big… apart from Paris we had Chateauroux, Montlucon, down to Toulousee, from Toulouse to Tarbes, up to Poitiers. It meant mostly travelling by night and the trains were unheated. One of the jobs I did regularly was going from Toulouse to Riom near Clermont-Ferrand. I’d leave Toulouse at seven o’clock at night and get to Riom at eleven o’clock the next morning, absolutely frozen stiff… and having had nothing much to eat. Then I went into the safe house… where there was no heating either.’
It was extremely rare for a woman to actually run a circuit – men almost invariably did this job – but Pearl Witherington was an exception. Born in Paris in 1916 to British parents, she had been raised in France and was working with the British Embassy in Paris as assistant to the Air Attaché when the Germans arrived. With her mother and sisters, she escaped from occupied France and arrived in England in July 1941. She found work with the Air Ministry but wanted to do something that she considered more worthwhile; eventually her name came to the attention of SOE, and she was recruited. Her final training report stated that she was ‘cool, resourceful and brave’ and that ‘although a woman, has got leader’s qualities.’ She was also considered to be probably the best shot – male or female – that the instructors had seen. From September 1943 until February 1944 she worked as a courier for Stationer network but in May 1944 her circuit leader Maurice Southgate was captured by the Germans and Pearl Witherington took over. With the coolness mentioned in her training report, she re-organized the circuit as well as organizing and supplying some 2,600 maquisards (French resistance fighters). On one occasion she and only forty maquis were attacked by 2,000 Germans; they put up a terrific fight in a battle which lasted fourteen hours. German losses were eighty-six and the maquis lost twenty-four men. Pearl managed to escape, hiding in a cornfield. Over the next few months she organized more than twenty air drops of weapons and supplies and led the maquis in various acts of sabotage on German communication lines. Following the war she was recommended for a military award but instead was awarded a civil award – the MBE. She refused it saying there was nothing civil about what she had done. She died in 2008 aged 93.
Pearl Witherington survived the war but many female agents did not. SOE sent thirty-nine women into France as special agents. They needed every ounce of what Selwyn Jepson had described as their ‘cool and lonely courage’ because thirteen never returned.
Other women who operated as couriers behind enemy lines included Nancy Wake, who acted as a courier for the French Resistance before joining SOE. She had lived an exciting double life under the noses of the Germans, living a respectable life by day married to a French businessman and helping Allied airmen to escape to safety by night. The Germans, who were a constant threat, nicknamed her ‘White Mouse’ and she eventually escaped to England where she joined the SOE and did sterling work in France, working with the Resistance in preparation for the Normandy landings. Other courageous couriers included Diana Rowden, who liaised between agents and resistants between Marseille, Lyon and Paris, Vera Leigh, who was also involved with the Resistance before joining SOE, and Violette Szabo.
Violette Szabo
Immortalized in the film Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), described by fellow agent Odette Sansom as ‘the bravest of us all’, and the subject of many books, Violette Szabo is known today as one of SOE’s most famous female couriers. She was born Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell in Paris on 26 June 1921. Her mother was French, a dressmaker, and her father was English. He did various jobs – working as a bus driver, selling used cars and as a storekeeper. The family spent time in both France and England but eventually settled in Burnley Road, Stockwell, London. Violette went to school in Brixton. She was very athletic and had a reputation for being something of a tomboy. She left school at the age of 14 and started working; when war broke out she was a sales assistant on the perfume counter in what was then the Bon Marché department store on the Brixton Road. With the Fall of France in 1940, Violette, like many women who had roots in France, felt she needed to contribute to the war effort and joined the Women’s Land Army but only for a brief period. French men and women who had escaped from France were arriving in London and on 14 July – Bastille Day – the Free French held a parade in London. There she met Etienne Szabo and, after a rapid romance, they married in August. Days later Etienne was deployed to North Africa and Violette joined the Auxiliary Transport Service (ATS) but left when she discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter Tania was born in 1942, but Etienne was killed at the Battle of El Alamein, never having seen his daughter. Shocked and distraught, Violette was left a war widow with a very young child, uncertain what her next move should be.
At some point Violette received a letter from a Mr Potter asking her to come for an interview: she went for the interview but what she did not know at the time was that Mr Potter was actually Selwyn Jepson, chief recruiting office for SOE, who in their search for suitable recruits must have spotted Violette Szabo. Given her fluent French and her knowledge of the country she would have been exactly the sort of person to interest SOE. According to her biographer, Susan Ottaway, the actual details of how Violette was found and the details of her interview are uncertain, but during the second interview Violette eagerly volunteered, no doubt keen to play a role in bringing down the people she held responsible for her husband’s death. She later told another agent, Frenchman Bob Maloubier, that she wanted to kill Germans. By July 1943 Violette had been security cleared and by September was going through SOE’s intensive training course, learning demolition techniques, Morse coding, tradecraft and so on. She also went to Ringway for parachute training, spraining her ankle during her second jump, which delayed her departure for France. Her instructors’ reports were ambivalent: there was some doubt that she had the right temperament for an agent in the field, she spoke French with an English accent, and it was also noted that she was concerned about her young daughter being looked after properly. Even so, it was decided to send Violette to France as a courier. Tania would stay with her grandmother. First though, Violette needed to improve her coding, which was causing difficulties and she was sent to see Leo Marks, SOE’s chief cryptographer. He writes about their meeting in his book Between Silk and Cyanide and was obviously very taken by the young, rather striking woman in front of him. Each agent used a poem individual to them that they used for coding purposes, and it was clear that Violette was having difficulty with hers. It was a French nursery rhyme that she knew well, but she kept mis-spelling the words. Marks therefore presented her with a poem, The Life that I Have, which he had written following the death of his fiancée, who had been killed in a plane crash not long before. Violette loved the poem and immediately produced perfectly-coded messages. The following day she returned and gave him a chess set as a thank you gift. When Violette left the room, Marks had a strong feeling he would not see her again. He kept the chess set for many years, later giving it to a terminally sick child. Her code poem became one of the best-known poems of the Second World War.
The Life That I Have
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours
(Leo Marks: code poem given to Violette Szabo. With thanks to The History Press for permission to reprint.)
Violette’s first mission was to find out whatever she could about the Salesman circuit, which operated in the Rouen and Le Havre areas: its co-founder Philippe Liewer (code name Clémont) had arriv
ed back in England and while he was there the circuit had been badly compromised: SOE needed up-to-date information. On 5 April 1944 Violette (code name Louise), using the identity Corinne Reine Leroy, a commercial secretary from Le Havre, was flown into France with Philippe Liewer. They were parachuted in and a reception committee met them and took them to a safe house. From there they went to Paris; it was too dangerous for Liewer to go to Rouen so Violette went on her own, travelling by train, surrounded by German soldiers. Once in Rouen, Violette established that the circuit had been seriously compromised: members of the circuit and resisters had been arrested, some had been tortured, and there were ‘wanted’ posters on the walls of some of the leading figures, including Philippe Liewer and Bob Maloubier. Violette removed one of the posters, which she took back to London. She also made a brief visit to Le Havre where she obtained valuable information about V1 sites on the Normandy coast. Armed with this information, Violette returned to Paris, did some clothes shopping in one of the smart department stores still operating, and together with Liewer, returned to England.
Violette spent a brief time in England catching up with her family and Tania, and then volunteered for a second mission: to return with Liewer to resurrect a Salesman circuit – Salesman 2 – between Limoges and Pèrigeux in the Haute Vienne, south of networks formed by Pearl Witherington and others. On 8 June 1944, two days after the Normandy landings had begun, Violette, (now code-named Corinne) operating as Madame Villaret, the widow of an antique dealer, Liewer (now code-named ‘Hamlet’) and Maloubier were parachuted back into France, some kilometres south-east of Limoges. Members of the local maquis met them, they gathered up their supplies and parachutes and they were taken to a grocer shop in the village of Sussac where they spent the night. The local maquis, while enthusiastic, were poorly organized and it was decided that Violette, as courier, should make contact with another circuit leader Jacques Poirier (code name Nestor) some 50 km (31 miles) away. The following day Violette, armed with a Sten gun, set out with another agent, Jacques Dufour (code name Anastasie); they were travelling part of the way by car. According to Dufour’s account, they arrived at a roadblock where German soldiers waved them to stop. Dufour stopped the car, he and Violette jumped out and started firing at the Germans, while at the same time retreating back through a wheat field. Violette urged Dufour to make good his escape, she continued firing but, after a brief while, was captured.
Violette was taken to the German headquarters in Limoges, where she was interrogated and tortured but revealed no information about the circuit. Her circuit made an attempt to rescue her but it was too late. On 16 June she was sent to Paris to Gestapo headquarters at the Avenue Foch, where she was tortured again. Once more she said nothing more and was sent to Fresnes Prison. On 8 August she was put on a train to Ravensbrück, together with other SOE agents who had also been captured, among them Lilian Rolfe, wireless operator with the Historian network, and Denise Bloch, who had worked with the Clergyman circuit. All of them were chained in pairs by their ankles. It was very hot and while they were on the train, there was an air raid. The train stopped and while their guards were absent, taking cover from the air raid, Violette and Denise crawled along the train getting water from the lavatory for other SOE prisoners, including a well-known agent Yeo-Thomas, who, despite appalling torture and imprisonment, survived the war and was able to give an account.
After harsh labour and punishment in various different camps, Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, by now exhausted and suffering illness, were executed at Ravensbrück and their bodies cremated. Violette was aged just 23.
Violette Szabo was awarded the George Cross posthumously in 1946, the highest civilian award available. The citation was published in the London Gazette. The details were incorrect but nevertheless it stated that: ‘Madame Szabo volunteered to undertake a particularly dangerous mission in France. She… undertook the task with enthusiasm… She was arrested and… atrociously tortured but never by word or deed gave away any of her acquaintances or told the enemy anything of any value. She was ultimately executed. Madame Szabo made a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness.’ She was also awarded the French Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Resistance. In the 1950s, Dame Irene Ward mounted a campaign for Violette to be awarded the Victoria Cross, a military award, on the grounds that she had taken military action against the Germans, but there was opposition and it was unsuccessful. Dame Irene Ward remained convinced that this was because Violette was a woman. Since then there have been various films and books about Violette Szabo, including one by her daughter Tania, Young, Brave and Beautiful (2007). In 2008 a bronze bust of Violette Szabo was unveiled on the Albert Embankment, London.
Wireless operators
A number of women, including Denise Bloch, Patricia (Paddy) O’Sullivan, Lilian Rolfe, Noor Inayat Khan and Yvonne Cormeau were sent to France as wireless, or W/T (wireless telegraphy) operators. It was a hazardous job, considered by many to be the most dangerous mission of all in Nazi-occupied territory, and it was often very isolated. Because of the risks attached to wireless operators, they often worked separately from other members of the circuit, spending long hours or days alone hiding and waiting until it was time to send messages to SOE. Unless there was an emergency, all operators had to transmit at scheduled times, or ‘skeds’. Every message that agents sent to and received from SOE had to be transposed into code or cipher – each circuit had its own system – and then sent in Morse code. It was a laborious task.
Transmitting and receiving messages took time, which made the job very dangerous, particularly if transmitting in towns. The Germans constantly monitored all wireless wavelengths and it took their armed direction finders only twenty or thirty minutes to get within a metre or so of an operator. Relays of thirty clerks with cathode-ray tubes in the Gestapo headquarters in the Avenue Foch in Paris kept a constant watch on frequencies and when a new set started up, they were aware of it immediately and were able to alert mobile direction finders. Agents were told to keep their transmissions as short as possible and to always keep on the move so they did not transmit from the same place but this was not always possible and many operators were picked up because they had stayed on the air too long or had transmitted from the same place too often.
One of the W/T operators captured in this way was Yolande Beekman (née Unternaharer). Born in Paris to a Swiss mother and a Dutch father, she was educated in Paris, London and Switzerland and had excellent language skills, although according to her instructors, spoke French with a slight Swiss accent. In 1941 she joined the WAAF and was trained as a wireless operator. SOE found and recruited her in 1943 and recommended her for training as an ‘agent in the field’. She did her advanced wireless training alongside Yvonne Cormeau and Noor Inayat Khan. Described as having fair hair, blue-grey eyes and a fresh complexion, she was assessed by her instructors as having a ‘quiet self-confidence and serenely cheerful outlook on life… She shows any amount of determination in mastering the intricacies of W/T.’ According to her personal file in The National Archives, she was popular, had a good sense of humour and was very conscientious. One or two of the reports commented that she was ‘not over-imaginative’, and one particularly disparaging comment was that she was ‘a nice girl… would make an excellent wife for an unimaginative man’, which may well say something about that individual instructor’s view of women. Either way it was generally considered that Yolande would make an excellent wireless operator. Her motive for volunteering for such dangerous work was ‘idealism, the “good of the cause” and devotion to duty’.
Yolande was sent into France in September 1943 to work as a W/T operator for the Musician circuit in the Lille-Saint Quentin area; the circuit leader was a French-Canadian Gustav Bieler (code name Guy). She was landed in Tours and because the reception committee was unable to help her, she made her way, alone, to Lille via Paris, carrying her wireless equipment. For the next four months she worked closely with Bieler; as a resul
t of her efficient and important transmissions at least twenty deliveries of weapons and other supplies were dropped into the area to be used by the resistance. Yolande herself often met the drops and helped to distribute supplies. While in the area Yolande stayed in various places, being put up by sympathetic French men and women but unfortunately ended up consistently transmitting from the same place – an attic above a chemist’s shop where she stored her wireless equipment. She had to transmit three times a week at exactly the same time so it was not surprising that the German detector vans eventually tracked down her wireless signals and she was arrested, together with Bieler, in a café just outside Saint Quentin on or around 15 January 1944. She was taken to Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, Paris, then to Fresnes Prison, where other women – Odette Sansom, Diana Rowden, Noor Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh and Andrée Borrel – were also being held. From there she and others were taken to Karlsruhe. She was shot at Dachau on 13 September 1944 at the age of 32. She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre.
If the process of transmission was not sufficiently dangerous in itself – SOE estimated that a wireless operator could stay free for no longer than six weeks – the transmitters themselves were heavy and bulky, particularly during the early years. They also had an extremely long aerial, which brought its own difficulties and agents had to tune in the sets before they could even begin to transmit.
