Before he figured out how to wire up the mill, Jean Claude had sent a coded message to his handlers in London requesting some kind of independent power source for his transceiver. They responded by sending him, in a canister dropped by parachute, a miniature steam engine. It was essentially a weaponized toy, green with polished brass accents, built to military specifications by the Stuart Turner model engine company in Henley-on-Thames.
Jean Claude took it out into the yard, filled its eight-inch boiler with water, lit a fire of twigs in its minuscule firebox, and spent the next few hours feeling a little foolish—listening to it chug, refilling the boiler, and tending the fire. He found that the engine, hooked up to a small generator, would indeed charge batteries, but so slowly that he would have to spend all his time tending to its tiny appetites for water and fire. A local French boy happily accepted it as a gift.
Deploying a toy steam engine to a war zone might seem like a quixotic military decision, but it was entirely in character for the British organization in which Jean Claude served, the Special Operations Executive. Sometimes called Churchill’s secret army, SOE was as inventive as it was enigmatic, willing to try anything that might serve to terrorize Nazis.
SOE was one of the best-kept secrets of World War II. It was a volunteer organization operating outside the bounds of international law. Officially it didn’t exist. On the rare occasions when it had to be mentioned in documents, it went by the name Inter-Services Research Bureau. It employed warriors, engineers, cryptographers, forgers, actors, murderers, burglars, and thieves. It was set up to give the British government deniability for its agents’ actions, which were sometimes heroic, occasionally disastrous, and often shocking. After the war, generals on both sides expressed the view that SOE’s activities had shortened the conflict in Europe by about six months, saving many thousands of lives.1
SOE was an important progenitor of modern special forces. As the historian Mark Seaman writes, “While France and Germany made a huge investment in military leviathans such as the fortifications of the Maginot and Siegfried Lines, Britain, in contrast, was seeking to explore the radical potential of clandestine warfare.”2 More than one scholar has noted that as an imperial power, Great Britain had broader experience with guerrilla tactics—because it had to defend against them—than most nations.
Yet SOE was neither an intelligence service nor a military special operations group. It was unlike any organization that has existed before or since, an underground militia with global reach, dedicated to sabotage, assassination, and—especially—armed resistance in every region of the globe occupied by the Axis powers. Its field agents, carefully chosen and trained, were scholars of mayhem.
For all its accomplishments, SOE remains far less well understood than other clandestine ventures that contributed to the Nazis’ defeat, like the development of radar, or the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. That’s partly because of the wholesale destruction of its records. Researchers in Britain have combed through what remains, but they haven’t had much to work with: an estimated 87 percent of SOE’s original archive no longer exists. Outside the U.K., national pride has also helped keep the memory of SOE relatively obscure. Countries that fell under Nazi occupation have naturally celebrated their homegrown resistance movements and played down the contributions of outside agents. In France especially, the Gaullist mythology of the Free French has all but excluded SOE from history books. Charles de Gaulle himself, less than a month after his triumphal return to Paris in 1944, was introduced to a British SOE agent and told him, “You have no business here. Go home.”
And yet there is no doubt: While resistance movements around the world had plenty of heart to stand up to the Axis powers, it was SOE that gave them teeth and claws. Thanks to SOE’s work, when the Allied invasion of Western Europe finally came, it was aided on the ground by a large, coordinated guerrilla campaign—a first for modern warfare. As the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, put it in a letter in 1945:
In no previous war, and in no other theatre during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort. . . . I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on the German war economy and internal security services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.3
As totalitarian regimes are wont to do, the Nazis called resisters “terrorists.” In the case of SOE, they were sometimes not far wrong; this too has likely contributed to a certain fuzziness in recollections of the organization and its exploits. Agents who wrote memoirs in some cases understated the savagery of what they were called upon to do.
Jean Claude was one such memoirist. He wrote an account of his extraordinary wartime experience for his children and grandchildren, and gave it the title “One Man’s Lovely Little War.” It is forthright, but demure, with many upsetting and lurid events omitted for the sake of the grandchildren. And yet the present volume owes much to it. Wherever, in the pages that follow, there are descriptions of things that Jean Claude saw, heard, said, or thought, readers may be assured that they are not liberties taken in hindsight, but details set down by the secret agent himself.
SOE was a child of desperation, born in one of the darkest periods of the twentieth century: the summer of 1940, after the fall of France crushed the hopes of antifascists, but before the Battle of Britain revived them. The shadow of the Third Reich extended over nearly all of Europe, and Adolf Hitler was preparing to launch Operation Sea Lion, as he called his plan to invade Great Britain. Winston Churchill, the newly appointed prime minister, ordered the formation of a sabotage agency to take the fight to the enemy. (He gave the job of drafting its charter to the ailing Neville Chamberlain, notorious for his appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938. As Foot observes, “By a nice irony, Chamberlain’s last political act was to devise a tool for felling Hitler.”)4
Churchill put his minister of economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, in charge of the new secret service with a famous instruction: “And now, go and set Europe ablaze.” To his chiefs of staff, Churchill gave a slightly more explicit order: “Prepare hunter troops for a butcher-and-bolt reign of terror.”
By the time Jean Claude enlisted in the buildup to D-Day, SOE had about five thousand agents in the field worldwide, and another eight thousand support staff at home in Great Britain. It had two large secret radio stations, weapons laboratories, commando schools, a hidden airfield, and fleets of trawlers and caïques from the Shetland Islands to Ceylon. Its workshops devised an arsenal of deadly inventions, from the exploding rat to the one-shot cigarette to the Welrod assassin’s pistol, so effective that it remains classified to this day. Some of these novel weapons were devised to attack conventional military targets, like the submersible, motorized canoe that agents used to attach limpet mines to ships. Others were plainly instruments of terror, intended to instill dread in the occupiers. Many German soldiers traveled by bicycle, so SOE devised an exploding bicycle pump. An agent coming across a German’s unattended bicycle would swap out the pump and deflate the tires. When the soldier returned to find his tires flat, he would attach the pump, press on the handle, and have his hands blown off.
The goals of SOE’s operations ran the gamut from relatively trivial—slipping itching powder into a shipment of shirts bound for a U-boat crew—to momentous: It was SOE agents in Norway who destroyed the German heavy-water plant at Vemork, thwarting Hitler’s drive to create atomic weapons. SOE agents also assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general who was called—by Hitler himself— “the man with the iron heart,” and who convened the Wannsee Conference to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Occupied France was, of course, a major theater of operations for SOE. In the course of the war, SOE dropped ten thousand tons of weapons into the country. As Foot writes, “Arms are to active resisters what rain is to farmers—nothing can be done without them—and SOE was often the only serious source of supply.”5
In the early war years the weapons were used mainly for sabotage. SOE infiltrated agents with false identities into France to establish networks—“circuits,” as they were called—of brave French men and women willing to attack military and industrial targets. Train engineers were given grease guns rigged to inject abrasives into bearings. Factory workers and sailors were given lumps of coal with explosives inside, to drop into the fireboxes of steam engines. Sentries vanished.
As D-Day approached, and Allied troops massed in England for Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion, SOE’s mission changed. Now, the Allied commanders thought, was the time for massive, armed insurrections by Resistance fighters to aid the advancing regular troops. But they would need weapons, supplies, training, and leadership. Galvanizing these secret armies, deep behind enemy lines, became SOE’s job.
How Jean Claude ended up in this harrowing role is one of those strange tales arising from the organized chaos of warfare. He was a draftee who happened to speak idiomatic French. And he was a big admirer of the tall leather boots issued to paratroopers.