The earliest evaders to return to the British lines were coming in even before the Dunkirk evacuation was completed in the first week of June 1940. Pilots shot down among friendly French or Belgians were mixed in with the stream of army stragglers. A flight lieutenant in bomber command called Parkinson, for example, survived the famous attack on the Meuse bridges on 14 May, though his aircraft did not; only thirty-two out of sixty-seven Fairey Battles returned. He got as far as the French battle-line, but was then mistaken for a German, and shot up. Langley met him in Marseilles, severely wounded, in January 1941. He found his way back to England, and became a Halifax pilot in a squadron which was engaged in drops to resistance; on one of these operations he was killed.
Quite possibly there was a light dusting of German agents in the evaders’ mixture as well. Langley’s battalion commander, the future Lord Skelmersdale, observed in the beach-head on 2 June that:
About midday a strange figure in French peasant clothes, and speaking English, was brought in under escort to Divisional Headquarters. He said he was a pilot who had been shot down some ten days before near Abbeville. He had bailed out, and a French farmer had given him some clothes. He had made his way across country to Dunkirk. He said that the Germans were not making any attempt to break into the perimeter, that on the road by which he had come into Dunkirk they had only the equivalent of a platoon position; all their columns were pushing on to the south and towards Paris. I believed his story 70and for the first time I felt that we should be allowed to get away from Dunkirk.
First Division may have swallowed this tale; in retrospect, scepticism is indicated. Had the pilot known anything at all about the land battle, and about his own whereabouts when shot down, he would have moved south from Abbeville, crossing the Somme somehow; stealing a boat, or swimming, if he could find no unguarded bridge. Then he could have joined the French. Instead, he implied he had travelled eighty miles, across several rivers and canals – all with their bridges broken or under German guard – through territory held by the newly victorious Wehrmacht. His tactical information moreover was clean contrary to the truth: on 2 June a severe German attack was made on the Dunkirk rearguard, repelled by Admiral Abrial’s French troops. He was brave and resourceful; whether he was a genuine evader, or a German speaking excellent English and reconnoitring the English segment of the beachhead, remains unclear.
Conditions that summer were fine for evaders. Not only was the weather set fair, but the Germans were almost as surprised by the suddenness and completeness of their victory as the French and Belgians were staggered by the extent of their defeat. The best German intelligence officers were busy reaping the harvest of Venlo and The Hague, cleaning up MI 6’s prearranged networks; no one had yet done much about organising those controls over movements that are so detestable a feature of any dictatorship.
Moreover, there was tremendous readiness to help the Allied cause in that originally small but uncommonly tough segment of the newly conquered populations which refused to accept the fact of conquest. People like Madame Fraser at Arras or Langley’s helper the Veuve Samiez at Lille were rare and splendid enough, but neither was unique. Every large town had a few, almost every village might have one at least. The Poles, the 71Belgians and the Dutch, with memories of centuries of occupation behind them, had more than the French or the Norwegians, but they might crop up anywhere. Many were priests; many were women; all were brave, far beyond the ordinary. The more successful of them were prudent as well, and so survived. (Of the two people just named, Madame Fraser lived to receive a George Medal; Madame Samiez disappeared altogether.)
A word is perhaps needed here to explain why this book has so far been written so largely in the masculine gender. The truth is that hardly any women in Allied uniform were taken prisoner; the world of prisoner of war camps was an almost exclusively male one. Indeed one of the major social horrors of being a prisoner of war, almost as bad as – some ardent spirits would say, even worse than – being deprived of one’s liberty to move outside the wire, was that officer prisoners, who seldom left their camps, often had to go for months on end without setting eyes on a woman at all. On the other hand, evaders often found that they had to trust themselves entirely to women; and without the courage and devotion of its couriers and safe-house keepers, nearly all of them women, no evasion line could keep going at all. Several lines – we shall come to one in a moment – had women as their leaders. Evasion, like other forms of resistance, was one of the spheres of action in which women proved themselves again and again to be at least as effective as men, and earned the equality that the other sex has at last begun to re-acknowledge.
What in fact was MI 9 doing about helping to set lines up?
Darling found his cover of vice-consul in charge of repatriation at Lisbon useful. It gave him opportunities for meeting people who were travelling to or from Marseilles, and through some American acquaintances he began to exchange letters with Garrow, and to send money in to him. He was helped by various Americans, and by Madge Hoist, the English-born wife of a Norwegian Quaker shipbroker who had an office in Marseilles. Her husband, perhaps without Darling’s knowledge, was working 72with SOE, which was in process of setting up the earliest of its own extra-secret evasion lines for moving agents in and out of France. These lines have been described in detail elsewhere. They were run by Leslie Humphreys, a friend of Langley’s; and there was a good deal more interchange between them and MI 9’s lines than the senior staffs of SOE or SIS were ever told of.
Indeed it was from an accidental and unintended by-product of a seaborne operation for SOE that one of the best and biggest evasion lines developed. Very early on Anzac Day, 25 April 1941, a Pole and a Maltese working for SOE were put ashore on a beach near the Etang de Canet, a few miles north of the eastern end of the Pyrenees. Modern tourism has turned the beach into a crowded bathing resort; at the time it was almost empty. They were landed by a skiff from HMS Fidelity, a 1,500-ton heavily armed merchantman of Marseillais origin and obscure purpose, lost with almost all hands not long afterwards. Later that night, the skiff overturned in a squall, before it could regain its parent ship; one man from it swam ashore.
He told the gendarme who shortly arrested him that he was Patrick Albert O’Leary, an evading Canadian airman. He was sent to St Hippolyte du Fort near Nimes, to join the British prisoners who had been moved there from Fort St Jean in Marseilles. Garrow got to hear of his arrival and of his personality, and managed to meet him. Each took instantly to the other, and was ready to trust him; even though Garrow could spot at once that O’Leary was not born an English speaker, and did not use the language in an accent that bore out his French Canadian cover. His name in fact was, and is, Albert-Marie Guérisse, and his nationality Belgian. He had served as a doctor with a Belgian cavalry regiment, during their eighteen days’ campaign in May 1940; had got away to England; had not cared for what he saw of his compatriots’ early efforts at setting up a government in exile; and had taken up with the crew of the Rhin, a formerly French Q ship of which the name was changed to Fidelity. In the shadow of the tremendous personality of the Rhiris captain, Peri, who changed his own name to Langlais, Guérisse secured a British naval commission as a lieutenant-commander. At first he told no one but Langlais that he was a doctor, for he did not relish the prospect of spending the rest of the war tending wounded. He preferred adventure; thanks to that squall, he found it. By midsummer, MI 9 and P15 knew that Garrow wanted to employ Pat O’Leary.73
74P15, after checking O’Leary’s real identity in the files, mentioned it to Dansey, who at once blew up, and threatened the direst penalties for anyone who mentioned the name Guérisse again during the war. He took an even dimmer view than Guérisse did of all the colonies of exiles in London; probably he thought nobody perfectly secure but himself and the King of England. However, he was prepared to let Garrow recruit the Belgian, and from Garrow’s and Guérisse’s work together, great results followed.
When in October 1941 Garrow was at last arrested by the French police, and interned at Mauzac in the Dordogne, Gurisse took over command of the line they had set up. It was known thence forward officially as PAO, after the cover initials of its head. His own friends in it called him Pat, and it is as ‘Pat’ that the line is generally remembered today. All told, about six hundred people moved to safety down it in a year under his charge: airmen, soldiers, and volunteers for the free French and Belgian forces.
Its great strength came from the fact that the people, who formed its guiding core all knew, liked and trusted each other. They understood each other quickly, without long explanations; they were all well aware of the risks they ran, individually and in common. The enormous advantages of this inner cohesion were offset by a countervailing, catastrophic snag: one of them was no good. His companions, being the sort of straightforward people that they were, did not take this in till he had handed fifty helpers over to the Gestapo.
London was not able to do much for the line in Garrow’s 75day, because communications were so weak; this in turn was because the value of evasion had not yet been appreciated, either in the upper reaches of the Air Ministry or anywhere else in the services’ high command. SIS and SOE, like everybody else, were busy trying to fit themselves out for war in circumstances nobody had foreseen, and took care to keep any French-speakers capable of operating a secret wireless set to themselves. (Up to March 1942, SOE’s wireless affairs were handled for it by SIS, a further cause of friction between the two bodies.)
Darling sent money in to Garrow when he could. Through the elephantine personality of Nubar Gulbenkian (‘Carnation’, so called because he wore one out foxhunting), who had been recruited into secret service while out with the Old Berkeley Hunt and was too rich to attract suspicion, a garage was secured at Perpignan where Michel Pareyre (‘Parker’) could collect parties before they set out to tackle the nearby Pyrenees. Pareyre was to be paid £40 an officer and £20 a man, figures previously cleared with the Treasury. Gulbenkian’s valet managed to drop an iron on Brauchitsch’s exquisitely polished toecap at Vichy, but otherwise his mission attracted no adverse notice. Pareyre, on the other hand, found himself so closely watched by the local gendarmerie and by the Vichy milice that he could do little himself. Garrow nevertheless, with encouragement from him, opened up some useful friendships with the local smugglers. Smugglers, and other guides, quite regularly took parties of people round or over the mountains, in either direction. Darling, badly as he had got on with the ambassador in Madrid, got on hardly better with (Sir) Harold Farquhar, the British consul in Barcelona, but the consulate was at first more effective than the embassy in fugitives’ interests. It may be suspected indeed that Farquhar spent a good deal of his own money on these people, before the embassy’s policy altered and it began to help.
Any fugitives who could not claim to be subjects of the British Crown might easily be deflected, as many British 76subjects also were, into one or other of the Franco regime’s concentration camps. The huge one at Miranda de Ebro, forty miles south of Bilbao, was perhaps the worst. Thence they could only be extracted after prolonged negotiations, in Madrid and on the spot, by some embassy or legation attaché.
One of the attachés at the British embassy, (Sir) Michael Creswell – codenamed. ‘Monday’ – proved himself a tower of strength. He undertook a great deal of the delicate and difficult work of ferrying British escapers and evaders round Spain. Sometimes, when the lines and Barcelona had provided a large enough party, he could put together a whole coach-load of ostensible students, and send them down to Gibraltar. More often he or his colleague Henry Hankey – son of the former secretary to the Cabinet – had to use their own motor cars, and people whose journeys needed specially to be kept from prying eyes had to learn to travel in the boot, at least for the frontier crossing into Gibraltar. Sir Samuel Hoare, the ambassador in Madrid, was prepared to drop his initial hostility and look the other way.
Obviously what Guérisse needed was a clandestine wireless operator, so that he could communicate promptly with London or Gibraltar or both; none was to be had. Langley eventually found a Frenchman called Ferière, who struggled through the indispensable course of training during the winter of 1941–2.
On 5 January 1942 Darling moved his base from Lisbon to Gibraltar, where he stayed till late in 1943, nominally as a civil liaison officer – a deliberately meaningless phrase: the civil population had already been evacuated. He ran a one-man interrogation office which was invaluable for the work of MI 9. He took every newcomer from the Continent through every move of his escape or evasion, and having a retentive and orderly memory built up in his own head a complete picture of the means of moving about north-western Europe. This enabled him to spot at once anybody who was trying to feed himself onto an MI 9 line while in fact working for an Axis agency: a valuable safeguard.77
He had already in the autumn of 1941 begun to have doubts about one of the ‘Pat’ line’s most ardent helpers in the north of France: an evader from the BEF who called himself Captain Harold Cole, and was known as ‘Paul’ in his underground work. A glance at the army list showed Darling that there was no officer in it of that rank and name, and he alerted London. An inquiry at Scotland Yard threw up Harold Cole as the name of a con-man and housebreaker, a petty criminal quite well known to the police; and a Sergeant Harold Cole had absconded from the BEF in the spring of 1940, with his sergeants’ mess funds. Langley flew out to Gibraltar in March 1942 with Ferière, by now at the end of his wireless training; Guérisse came out down his own line, ending the journey in the boot of ‘Monday’s’ car, for a conference with Langley and Darling.
They persuaded Guérisse that Cole would not do; as he had already begun to suspect himself. He had summoned Cole to Marseilles in the previous autumn, charged him with spending the line’s money on loose-living, and knocked him down; Cole got away, and went back to Lille. There, it was later discovered, he had been arrested by the Abwehr in early December 1941, and changed sides. On 8 December, the morning after Pearl Harbour, he helped two Germans at Abbeville disguised as RAF evaders to arrest the Abbé Carpentier, a devoted priest who had been using his private printing press to keep the line supplied with bogus identity cards and passes to cross the demarcation border. Long afterwards, it emerged that the Abwehr office in Brussels were using Cole extensively, under several aliases – Delobel, Joseph Deram, Richard Godfrey – to penetrate Garrow’s line.
Guérisse was persuaded at Gibraltar that Cole must now be shot on sight, and that all addresses known to the evident traitor were to be changed. As it turned out, Cole was arrested by the Vichy French police in May 1942, and given a heavy sentence; this put him out of the way, but not for long.
Ferière went back into France with Guérisse, but proved a broken reed: his only desire was to rejoin his own wife.78
Langley sent in instead, by Lysander, Jean Nitelet, a Belgian airman who had lost an eye in action; but Nitelet was arrested a few weeks later by the French while clearing up after a small parachute drop of stores. It was not till October 1942 that the ‘Pat’ line at last got a full-time wireless operator: the young Australian Tom Groome, who from his French-born mother had learned excellent French. It says much for Guérisse’s ingenuity, and for the silent courage and devotion of his helpers, that several large seaborne operations were laid on during 1942, using a British-owned armed trawler, the Tarana, to evacuate several score evaders and a few escapers as well. Two parties left from a deserted villa near the solitary hotel, the little Hotel du Tennis, at Canet-plage; their comfort not increased by the blocking-up of both the villa’s lavatories during a wait prolonged over several days.
Guérisse was never the sort of man to let formal obstacles stand in his way, and one thing he did appalled Darling, who did not dare report it to the irascible Dansey. As imprudently as improperly, Guérisse used as an extempore courier a Swede called Gosta Wedeborg, master of the Red Cross ship Vega which plied between Gibraltar and Marseilles. Wedeborg was perfectly safe, but the use of a Red Cross channel to assist MI 9’s business in any way went clean against Crockatt’s orders as well as international law, as Darling took prompt pains to make clear.
Several of the helpers in the ‘Pat’ line had distinguished careers in F section of SOE later in the war: notably Nancy Wake, terror of the Germans in the Auvergne; Tony Brooks, who ran a small and highly efficient railway sabotage circuit that did much to bring rail traffic in southern France to a standstill in the summer of 1944; and Andrée Borrel, the silent heroine of the big SOE ‘Prosper’ circuit’s disaster in Paris in 1943. She died in German hands, as did Madeleine Damerment, who was dropped straight to a Gestapo reception. None of these four could have been assured long life if they had stayed in the 79escaping business, for all work in that was dangerous as well; yet Langley did sometimes reproach himself that he had not tried harder to keep some at least of these young, promising and already distinguished people, before Buckmaster’s able recruiter Jepson snapped them up for SOE.
At the same time as the ‘Pat’ line grew, flourished, and fell into difficulties, another line originated in Belgium, spread across France into Spain, and had comparable successes and failures; but in quite different ways.
One day in August 1941 four strangers, three men and a girl, called at the British consulate in Bilbao. The girl, who spoke for them all, though the frailest of the four, turned out to be their leader. One was a private soldier called Colin Cupar, an evader from St Valéry who spoke not a word of French; the other two were Belgian officers who wanted to join the Allies. The consul happened to be away that day. The vice-consul, Arthur Dean, was not wholly inexperienced: it had been his task to shepherd the Duke and Duchess of Windsor out of France fourteen months before. A few words apart with Cupar convinced him that he at least was genuine: who on earth were the others? The girl was invited to talk while Cupar and the officers waited in the next room.
She was thoroughly forthcoming. She explained that she was a Brussels schoolmaster’s daughter named Andrée de Jongh, aged twenty-five, a commercial artist by profession but with some training as a nurse, brought up to revere the memory of Edith Cavell. (She was of course unaware of Nurse Cavell’s secret parallel career as an intelligence agent.) She had, with some Belgian friends’ help, organised a chain of safe houses between Brussels and the western Pyrenees, every detail of which she was ready to give; might she come back another time with some more British evaders? It would be, she indicated, safer for the people who were currently housing them to be relieved of the honour of doing so; and perhaps such young 80men as Cupar could be of some help in the war? Was there, Dean asked, anything she wanted? Well, she replied, it would save her from some embarrassment if she might have Cupar’s fare, which she had had to borrow from a relative.
Would she care to wait? She waited for nearly a fortnight, hiding up in a small hotel, while the wires hummed with cipher traffic between Bilbao, Madrid and London. Dansey denounced her as an obvious plant. Bilbao, with patience and skill, replied that in the judgement of those who had met her, she was a girl of radiant integrity, as well as something of a beauty, and physically hard as nails – otherwise she could never have managed the mountain crossings, and it was established she had not been smuggled in by the geographically easy way, by Irun or Fuenterrabia from Hendaye. To Bilbao’s assurances that she was straight Dansey gave in the end a grumbling assent; letting women run anything was against all his principles, though at this moment he was dealing with another exceptionally capable woman, who was head of an intelligence network in France.
So began a saga of secret warfare that has few parallels, alike for the courage of those concerned and for their skill in surmounting barriers, both physical and police. At first called ‘Postman’, the line was soon named ‘Comet’. Its tale has been told repeatedly; we only need here to inquire what London could do to help.
London’s front man was Creswell (‘Monday’), who was captivated by Andrée de Jongh’s intense and forceful personality the moment he met her. Her advance post on the French side of the border, manned by Madame Elvire de Greef (‘Tante Go’) at Anglet near Biarritz, usually had warning of when she was going to come south, and passed a code message on to Creswell; he then drove up to Bilbao, or San Sebastian, and took with him anything he thought Andrée might need. Money he was able to supply for her in plenty; most other things she did her best to refuse. She ran the line with her friends and contemporaries – it was very much a young people’s affair, though her father, to 81whom she had said nothing, divined what must be going on and insisted on helping her, a course eventually fatal to himself. They were all absolutely insistent on keeping the running of the line entirely, finance apart, in their own hands; and long refused to accept a wireless operator, because they felt that to have one would insidiously lead them somehow under London’s control. Only very slowly was ‘Monday’ able to convince Mademoiselle de Jongh that he and London were not trying to control anybody except the Nazis; they only wanted to get on with the war.
On one point he did soon manage to convince her, through his ability to descry the strength of her anti-Nazi feelings. He explained to her how severe the Allied shortage of trained aircrew was, and what an enormous advantage it would be to the RAF and to the other Allied air forces to get back shot-down airmen who happened not to have fallen into captivity. So thoroughly did Andrée (‘Dédée’) de Jongh and her friends appreciate this point that they came to specialise in evading aircrew, as soon as they had worked off a backlog of evaders from Dunkirk whose whereabouts they happened to know. Their promptest effort was to return all seven of the crew of an RAF heavy bomber, shot down near the Dutch-Belgian frontier late in 1942, to Gibraltar in a week. Only a run of lucky accidents gave them the chance to handle that party quite so fast, but the incident naturally enough did both the line and its London sponsors a great deal of good.
Gestapo pressure on it was constant, and led to numerous arrests, but most of the people arrested kept silent; and the essential figures – Andrée de Jongh herself, her father, ‘Tante Go’ near Biarritz, and Florentino Goicoechea the Basque mountain guide – kept out of the Gestapo’s way. Andrée’s father had the good luck to be out when the Germans called at his flat in February 1942 and arrested his other daughter, who subsequently died of what she had undergone at German hands. He fled to Paris, where he and Andrée lived in a succession of flats, paid for by MI 9’s money. At the Brussels end, the line was 82run thereafter by Baron Jean Greindl (‘Nemo’), whose ostensible task was to run a small Red Cross organisation that relied on Swedish funds to assist refugees. He was able to improve and extend the de Jonghs’ range of sure acquaintances, so that before long every place in Belgium of any size had somebody reliable in it, who could collect evaders for the line. In July to October, 1942, the line brought out fifty-four people, most of them aircrew; this was about its average rate of traffic, except in midwinter.
Gradually, as evader after evader returned safely to Allied territory, it became clear in London that there was a large – indeed a growing – body of potential helpers on the Continent. Readiness to help increased as Axis occupation dragged on, and the occupied came to understand in practical detail what Nazism was like. Helpers were never to be found universally; there were always people who were too timid or too uninterested or too fond of leaving things exactly as they were. Yet every day the Germans stayed in Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, a few more hearts turned against them; till even those who had at first welcomed them – mieux Hitler que Staline – wanted them to go.
MI 9 saw first that this body of helpers existed, and Crockatt made it his business to spread the word. MI 6 became convinced rather more slowly, for most of its senior staff shared George V’s distrust of foreigners; and MI 6 in any case was geared to the distribution of single items of highly secret information, rather than to the dissemination of so broad and vague a concept. It was perhaps a weakness in the British organisation of the war that few if any general politico-military surveys of the state of opinion in Europe were – so far as is known – prepared officially, and made available outside Foreign Office and PWE circles.
The next body after MI 9 to take in the unexpectedly wide range of available help was the Air Ministry. Aircrew training, pilot training especially, was one of the air force’s principal 83headaches, and any relief for it, however slight, was welcome. The rapid rate of technical change of the 1940s meant in any case that aircrew were in constant need of training and retraining in the more and more complicated skills of their craft; aircrew returned from an escape, or better still from a prompt evasion, could be fed with little trouble onto existing courses, before going back onto operations, and at least would not need retraining in the basic skills of airmanship.
Moreover, it gave a splendid lift to the morale of operational squadrons if people who had gone missing in action reappeared a few weeks later. In such a case, an ounce of practice was worth a pound of principle: people could see for themselves that the escape-and-evasion lectures were worth attention, because they produced visible results.
Yet, tremendously encouraging though it was to squadrons to get their lost friends back after all, there was one obvious catch: security. Anybody reappearing in an RAF or USAF mess after a brief recent spell in occupied territory was bound to be deluged with questions: what was it like, where did he go, what did he do, whom did he meet; above all, how did he get away? Few of these were questions that could be answered with any safety to the helpers working on the Continent, whom it was MI 9’s task to protect, and successful evaders or escapers were universally ordered to clam up and say nothing. The timid at least among these helpers deserve sympathy: the risks involved were not light. Anybody found helping evaders could hope for a concentration camp at best, both for him or herself and for everyone else living in the same house, irrespective of sex or age; while all the evader had to do was to produce his service identity discs, thus ensuring his own transfer to a prisoner of war camp. Evaders were often threatened with worse, but like all European threats to non-Soviet prisoners of war these threats were empty. It is worth noting that the same offence of harbouring an enemy national on the run, if committed in England at the time, carried a maximum penalty if proved in court of 84two years’ imprisonment plus a £500 fine. British and American staffs were painfully aware of the dangers of reprisal that hung over potential helpers, and did nothing willingly to make them worse. Crockatt guided them as usual to take a robust and practical view.
Experience soon showed that there were plenty of anti-Nazis and anti-Fascists all over Axis-occupied Europe – a phrase that excludes the Axis powers’ home territories – who were anxious, who demanded even as a right, to be allowed to court these dangers.
For them, this was a way of atoning for the ease with which their homelands had been overrun; and the right was one the British four were ready enough to grant. They did not grant it in any spirit of readiness to fight to the last foreigner. Great pains were taken to ensure that all successful evaders and escapers were properly warned about the indispensability of keeping their mouths shut on their helpers’ identity, location, even existence; and the same point was stressed repeatedly in all training lectures on escape and evasion.
Unfortunately, as every sergeant knows, orders given are not always orders carried out. There were a few tragedies of helpers betrayed: some unavoidable, because re-arrested airmen were put under Gestapo pressures they were quite unable to bear; others not. As Rawlinson once put it in wartime talk with Langley, ‘loquacity will always triumph over security’. One case in particular has stuck in Langley’s memory, and needs record. An early RAF evader got ample and friendly help from a farmer and his wife near Amiens. Strictly against the orders he was given at his interrogation on return to England, he passed on their name and address to his closest friend; who wrote them down on a slip of paper, tucked it in the back of his wallet, and forgot about it. More than a year later, the friend was shot down over the western desert, and the Germans found the slip of paper, still in his wallet. The farmer and his wife were arrested, confronted with it, and shot. A French gendarme who took 85part in the arrest and had seen the slip of paper passed word out through an evasion line. Crockatt after long deliberation decided not to press for a court martial, but the story – with all the names and places left out – was a powerful one for use in lectures.
The security problem arose in a particularly sharp form when it came to briefing participants in the raids mounted by combined operations headquarters into enemy-occupied Europe. On the whole MI 9’s policy remained fixed: all help short of addresses, but nothing that would run the least risk of compromising any helper. Commandos, parachutists, landing craft crews were given careful training in how to evade, as well as in how to resist interrogation if they had the misfortune to be captured, but were not told of particular people or places they could approach.
While ‘Biting’, the successful parachute raid on the Bruneval radar station on the night of 27/28 February 1942, was being prepared, MI 9 got ready a lot of addresses of people in north Normandy, who were known to have given reliable help to evaders in the summer of 1940, and passed it under top secret cover to the planning staff at COHQ; one of whom, in all good faith, passed one of the addresses on to Wing Commander Pickard, who was to pilot the leading aircraft. Pickard memorised it; and mentioned the fact some two years later to Langley, whose best man he was, at Langley’s wedding. It is an interesting illustration of how easily security can be breached. This address turned out to be of no use to Pickard, who was shot down and killed on the still mysterious operation ‘Jericho’ on Amiens prison in March 1944.
Dansey, who had an even lower opinion than Crockatt of the security-mindedness of junior officers and of other ranks, closed a long debate on preparations for ‘Biting’ by laying down that no addresses were to be given out to the force, on the grounds that the raid would certainly alarm the neighbourhood, and that the chance of a successful evasion from the beach 86was too small to justify the risk. The precedent, once set, was normally followed. A few distinguished evasions after raids did take place, but they were due to the evaders’ own enterprise and initiative, sparked off by their MI 9 training. Corporal Wheeler of 2 Commando sent back a valuable military report on the St Nazaire raid through the military attaché in Madrid, and added that ‘the propaganda value of the raid was enormous.’ Three other men deserve mention, French Canadians from Dieppe who were picked up by the ‘Pat’ line after making their own flying starts: Dumais, Labrosse and Vanier. All went back to Europe later and did outstanding work for escapers and evaders.
For a single party, a special exception was made: ‘Blondie’ Hasler’s marine commandos, the ‘Cockleshell heroes’ of operation ‘Frankton’. Particular care was taken to provide them with advice, including cover stories. They were launched in five two-man canoes from a submarine off the mouth of the Gironde, early in December 1942. Two canoes got as far as Bordeaux harbour, where they attached some limpet mines to several large ships. Hasler himself and his companion Corporal Sparks were the only two to get away after the attack. They made – as ordered – for the small town of Ruffec, north of Angouleme, which lay on the demarcation line between the two halves of France. (The line was kept in being, as an obstacle to movement, although for a month past both halves of France had been in German occupation.) There they managed – by good fortune as much as anything else – to make contact with the ‘Marie-Claire’ line.
‘Marie-Claire’, born Mary Lindell in Surrey in 1895, impeccably English in upbringing and manner, had lived for many years in France, and as the Comtesse de Milleville had a position in Parisian society; in 1942 she had three children in their teens. As a nurse in the previous world war she had been decorated for gallantry under fire, and the late summer of 1940 had found her hard at work in Red Cross uniform – with her English medal ribbons worn in front of her French and Russian ones, 87so that no one in the least skilled in medal reading could doubt her nationality. She smuggled British officer-evaders over the demarcation line towards Caskie V mission at Marseilles. Tact was never her longest suit; courage she possessed abundantly. She went straight to the German commander in Paris, General von Stiilpnagel, with a tale of babies that needed to be reunited with their parents on the Riviera. Stiilpnagel introduced her to Count von Bismarck, a great-grandson of the founder of the Second Reich, who gave her permits for herself, a baby, a nurse, and a mechanic; and plenty of petrol coupons. The rest was, comparatively, easy.
She fell foul eventually of the Paris Gestapo; not before she had transported several officers to safety, and inspired scores of French people of many callings to stiffen their own nerves against the occupation. After a spell in Fresnes prison she came out through Spain in the disguise of an elderly governess, and met Farquhar in Barcelona. He equipped her with a note that got her promptly into touch with P15 when she reached London in July 1942.
P15’s staff had by now doubled: it consisted of both Langley and Airey Neave, who had been posted to it as ‘Saturday’ on making the home run from Colditz. They interviewed in a flat above Overton’s restaurant, at the bottom of St James’s Street, where they had a series of wrangles with the Countess, a lady used to having her own way. She pronounced herself unable to work with Tom Groome, the only wireless operator they could offer her; they were unable to train in time the substitute she suggested. They had trouble enough convincing Dansey that she could be allowed to go back to France at all, for anybody who had once been in the hands of the Gestapo was automatically suspect.
In the end, she went back without a wireless operator, and was landed near Limoges from a Lysander in the small hours of Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1942. She rapidly picked up the threads of her organisation, of which a demarcation line crossing 88point near Ruffec was a prominent feature. But security and the lack of an operator alike prevented her from knowing of ‘Frankton’, the Bordeaux raid, in advance; and the lack of an operator kept London from knowing that at the moment ‘Frankton’ took place she was in hospital with five broken ribs after a bad road accident. Her elder son Maurice, who was nineteen, took Hasler and Sparks in charge, and hid them in a safe house at Lyons; whence in the end they returned in safety. She met them there at the end of the year; characteristically, her first action was to hand Hasler her nail-scissors and order him to remove his magnificent blond moustache.
MI 9 and P15 drew the same lesson: wireless contact with any line was all but indispensable.
So far this account has dealt primarily with north-western Europe, but Crockatt never forgot that MI 9’s range of responsibilities was worldwide.
For the first nine months of the war, the Near East – confusingly called the Middle East by the British military authorities, who placed a large headquarters in Cairo – was no more than a staging area and training ground. The Italians had reached a peak if preparedness in 1935–6, and were not yet ready for another war; they hung back from their Axis obligation till they saw the French crippled in the battles of May – June 1940. Greed then overcame judgement, and on 10 June Italy hastened to join the winning side. The French held them off locally, but had to cede them occupation rights in Corsica and in a few border departments of south-east France. From their colony of Libya, their army marched with some flourish of propaganda trumpets sixty miles across the desert into Egypt, and then sat down in the sand.
The British commander in Cairo, Sir Archibald (later Earl) Wavell, one of the most intelligent soldiers the British army has ever bred, realised that at that moment the British had little to live on but their wits, and determined to use his wits to the 89full. He sent for Colonel Dudley Clarke, who had served under him in Palestine before the war, and was currently engaged in Great Britain in organising another of Holland’s inventions, the earliest commandos; they had been given a trial run in Norway under Gubbins. Wavell put Clarke, whose code name was ‘Galveston’, in charge of a body with a perfectly neutral and unobtrusive name: A Force. A Force’s task was to manufacture strength out of weakness: to organise by every available means the deception of the enemy high command.
It was also, as a cover for its still more secret work on deception, to undertake the training of fighting men in evasion and escape, and to organise any help they were likely to need. Harrison was sent out from England in August 1940 to set up N section of A Force, as that body’s escape side was known. Unhappily neither the climate nor the staff manners of Cairo suited him, and he felt at a loss between the pomposities of GHQ on one side and the facade of irregularity put up by the humorous – but deadly efficient – Dudley Clarke on the other. A Force’s head office – according to David Mure, who was in a position to know – was in a disreputable house ‘in the Kasr-el-Nil near Groppi’s. At the time, this building was used as a brothel. Galveston, a man of exquisite courtesy, was reluctant to inconvenience the ladies and permitted them to continue their activities in those parts of the house which he did not actually require for his.’
Cairo organised one operation that did not do well. An agent was sent into Vichy France, with no co-ordination of what he was doing with London, or with Darling’s advanced post in Lisbon. The agent, the subsequently celebrated A. D. Wintle, was no more tactful than Mme de Milleville; had indeed boisterous habits, not suited to the French circles in which he sought to move; and lacked her quiet, steely capacity for getting her own way. He went to Marseilles, where his task was to set up a line that would run by sea to Beirut in one or other of the Vichy ships that still plied the Mediterranean; but he was soon 90in Toulon jail, whence he escaped over the border into Spain. Farquhar got him sent through to London; where Dansey made sure he also saw the inside of a British jail, to teach him better manners. (He had already had a short spell in the Tower, for being rude to an air commodore. For most of the rest of the war he was in SOE.) He can serve as an example of the eccentrics, the social oddities who got attracted to irregular and clandestine units. Crockatt tried to employ as few of them as he could. But we must go back to Cairo.
MI 9’s – that is, N section’s – survival, and even success, in the maelstrom of Cairene secret service politics derived partly from the body’s manifest usefulness, partly from its small size compared to its rivals, and partly from some fortunate postings. Its head there, from 21 September 1941 to the end of the war, was a regular soldier with a flair for intelligence work, Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. Simonds. Before the war he had worked in Palestine with Wingate under the watchful eye of Wavell; he and Wingate worked together again, also under Wavell, on a quasi-clandestine expedition into Ethiopia early in 1941. He was then called on to form SOE’s Greek country section; and was summoned thence by Dudley Clarke to take charge of escapes and evasions.
The fact that Tony Simonds had been in SOE helped MI 9 in several ways. His having left it endeared him to MI 6, and to PWE. His having been in it gave him invaluable insights, even beyond what he had picked up from Wingate and the Jewish special night squads, into methods of irregular activity; and provided him with an understanding of the SOE system, and some acquaintances among the more permanent of SOE’s often transitory staff. On several occasions this led to close and valuable co-operation in the field between SOE and MI 9. He recorded himself that MI 6 had been even more valuable to his work, particularly in providing wireless sets and channels. 91
92Cairo was in many ways a miniature version of London; and just as SOE had to duplicate several of SIS’s facilities, which in a more perfect world might have been shared between them, MI 9’s and MI 6’s offices in Cairo included separate forgery squads, 6’s very small, 9’s consisting of a single man. Professional pride made it hard for them even to acknowledge each other’s existence, but at a real pinch they could be made to work together by their seniors.
At first there was only a hairline cleavage between N section and the rest of A Force; and though the gap widened with time, N section had many reasons to be grateful to Dudley Clarke, who did a great deal of the heaviest initial work himself.
It was he for example who took the initiative for creating a magnificent set of evasion lines across the Aegean, which Simonds inherited from Victor Jones and Ogilvie-Grant, the original heads of Clarke’s Greek N section detachment. The key to these lines lay on the west coast of Turkey, and was turned by two naval officers who had become consuls: Commander Wolfson in Istanbul (Constantinople) and Lieutenant-Commander Noel Rees in Izmir (Smyrna). Wolfson had both Jewish and Russian ancestry, and he was resolutely anti-German. Rees, whose mother was Greek, came from one of those Anglo-Levantine families that dominated so much of Near Eastern trade; he was proud to remember that when Nelson’s fleet had called at Smyrna, the Rees of the day had victualled it at his own expense. Noel Rees had been vice-consul in Chios, and knew the Dodecanese well. He continued the family’s traditional largesse in the public interest by paying out of his own pocket for the initial arrangements he made, through friends in the local fishermen’s communities. He built up a clandestine naval base near Çeşme, opposite Chios on the peninsula west of Izmir. From it N section’s caïques could operate, as well as odder craft on odder duties. He even persuaded the local Turks to declare the peninsula a prohibited area, thus preserving the base from too much risk of German counter-attack.
These arrangements carried a distinct flavour of old-fashioned secret service work; as is only suitable in such a context, 93there is nothing left on paper about method, and precious little about personalities. What can be found, though, are some notes about results; which are striking.
As early as 5 May 1941, Major P. A. Cohen was in charge of a party of 120 Australian evaders from Greece by caïque; he landed them that day in Crete. They could hardly know that they had stepped out of the frying-pan into the fire: by the end of May, Crete too had become the scene of a British defeat. Five thousand troops were left behind there. Wavell gave them discretion to surrender. Many did; many others were picked up; and nearly a thousand managed to evade instead. Most of these evaders were brought away in the late summer and autumn of 1941; a trickle went on for the next three years, as one Cretan village after another ceased to be a safe refuge.
Rees set up a caïque route through the Northern Sporades, via Skiathos, Skopelos and Skyros; there was also a hidden advance caïque base farther south, at Antiparos, supplied by submarine. Before the routes were properly at work, a party of thirty-one Anzacs bought themselves a boat in Skyros, and sailed through to Port Said, where they arrived on 25 May. A wry Cairene air force joke put it that any aircrew known to be at large in Greece for as long as a month ought to be posted absent without leave.
Scanty extempore and incomplete records made in Cairo suggested the rough figures for evaders, some of whom might for a short time have been prisoners, and might therefore technically be categorised as escapers, shown in the below table.1
Two submarines, Thrasher and Torbay, once brought nearly two hundred people away from Crete between them in a single voyage each in the midsummer of 1941. Their sister ship, Triumph, was lost in January 1942 at Antiparos, where the Italians caught a party of twenty-two evaders in the charge of an MI 9 guide called G. D. Atkinson who was recaptured with 94them. He had himself escaped from Greece, by caïque from Athens to Alexandria, in the previous year. He showed the usual readiness of those fighting men who had just got away from enemy territory to go back into imminent danger. N section favoured this, and used as many escapers as it could to take part in forays into Axis-held areas; for the fact of being an earlier escaper from an enemy prison camp could provide a cast-iron cover to account for one’s presence at large in enemy territory. It was only necessary to have devoted time and thought to a watertight explanation of where one had been and what one had been doing since the escape.
| Evaders in Eastern Mediterranean 1941 | ||||
| Month | Greece | Crete | ||
| May | 302 | — | ||
| June | 24 | 195 | ||
| July | 6 | 79 | ||
| August | 59 | 129 | ||
| September | 35 | 11 | ||
| October | ? | ? | ||
| November | 20 | 107 | ||
| December | — | 14 | ||
| Minimum totals: | 446 | 535 | ||
| Minimum grand total: | 981 | |||
Greece is one of the countries for which a full account of the clandestine war remains to be written, in spite of the admirable summaries from the SOE and the political sides that some participants have already prepared. When it appears, some of the brightest pages in it will deal with these early caïque operations, as they threaded their way through the sun-drenched Aegean islands under a hostile sky.
Now and again beauty, danger and courage were outmatched by farce. One mainland and two inland incidents may 95confirm this. Flying Officer Marting, shot down over Derna on 30 October 1942, got promptly away from the captors who had flown him to Athens, walked boldly up to each Greek he met, and asked ‘Say, d’you work for A Force?’ The thirteenth one did, and he reached Cairo via Smyrna in December. A muddle between a censor and a war correspondent let out the news, in a BBC broadcast, that as many as 400 evaders had assembled on Melos; they were whisked away to prison in Italian fast craft before N section’s more leisurely caïques could arrive to collect them.
An Australian private, seeking the south coast of Crete during an evasion that had started well – he was already in plain clothes, of a ramshackle sort – found that he had to cross a main road under constant German watch. He had no time to wait for dark. The only hope of cover seemed to be as a shepherd. He came upon a dozen sheep in the charge of a shaggy biped bundle of rags, before whose face he crackled his only inducement, a white five pound note. The bundle at first said nothing, but repeatedly lifted his head sharply, in the Greek sign for ‘No’. When an hour’s attempts to chaffer had produced no more result, the bundle remarked in broad Glasgow Scotch ‘Gae and find yer own bluidy sheep. I’ve spent half a day getting this damn lot.’
These Greek adventures necessarily took up much of the time and attention of N section’s Cairo staff, some of whom managed to participate in them directly. Ogilvie-Grant for instance parachuted into the Peloponnese, on the night that Simonds joined A Force, to try to organise a large group of evaders, believed to be over 700 strong, who had assembled in the Taiyetos range west of Sparta. He was soon taken prisoner, and so were most of those he was trying to rescue.
N section needed to look westward into the desert, as well as northward across the sea.
Climate and terrain, as usual, dominated what could be 96done and what had to be left undone. Most of the doctrines of desert survival that it was the section’s duty to preach ought to have been fixed belief already in properly trained units, in which battalion, company and platoon commanders who were up to their job would already have made it their business to discover the essentials. Among these the will to evade came first; then water, with which to keep alive; then a compass, to know which way to go, and stout boots, to make the stony ways walkable. Though a great deal of the desert is sand, a great deal more is sharp rock, not readily passable by barefoot Europeans. But care of his men’s feet was all but instinctive in an infantry officer, and was hardly a point on which an N section lecturer needed to dwell.
Clayton Hutton’s silk maps were available, for what maps were worth in those wide open spaces; travelling in the African desert was in every way remote from travel in Europe, but it was conceivable, even in small parties on foot, even alone. N section’s lecturers did their best to persuade people to try it, if the sudden twists and quirks of manoeuvre in open warfare left them cut off from their friends. Those unsure of themselves could head north, till they met the one coast road, though on that it was more than likely that they would find themselves made prisoners of war; or even press on to the coast itself, on the remote off-chance that they might be able to signal to some naval craft on the right side. The more adventurous course was to head south, then east for a good while, then north again, and hope to make contact with Allied forces.
One lecturer deserves special notice, both for who he was and for what he did: Jasper Maskelyne, of the famous conjuring family whose sleight of hand had delighted thousands of people in the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s. He did important work in camouflage and deception in Britain in the summer crises of 1940, had some dealings with Clayton Hutton, could not get on with that still more wayward genius, and at Wavell’s request went to try his hand at battle magic in Egypt, the home 97of so much magic more ancient than his own. Simonds found him in the summer of 1942, apparently in charge of an engineer dump on the Suez Canal – his cover was admirably dense – and annexed as much of his time as he could. Maskelyne was a highly skilled as well as an entertaining lecturer, and during the next two and a half years he instructed over 200,000 men – most of them aircrew, British and American – in the arts of escape and evasion. He travelled 135,000 miles, through a dozen Mediterranean countries, to do so, and earned congratulatory letters from General Twining, Commander-in-Chief, Fifteenth USAAF downwards; besides exciting the interest, even the enthusiasm, of the audiences he addressed. He turned his inventive mind also to the problem of parachute packaging, and devised an entirely satisfactory method of dropping W/T equipment safely. All this activity, secret as it was, provided admirable cover for what Maskelyne regarded as his really important work: the erection and removal of dummy ships, tanks, lorries and aircraft to suit the current ingenuities of Clarke’s Thirty Committee.
In one way evading was simpler in North Africa than in Europe or Asia; there was hardly any local population about whom the evader needed to worry. Thirty years of Italian colonial occupation had sickened most Libyan Arabs of the occupiers, and for an evader who had the good luck to run into an Arab encampment his troubles were probably over – if he had the manners to keep away from the women. In Bill Kennedy Shaw’s words, ‘it was the Arabs’ hatred of the Italians far more than their love of the unknown British that put them so whole-heartedly on our side.’
Advance A Force, as N section was known in the desert, was able to go farther, with the help of some distinguished desert navigators who operated, in uniform, on the fringe of the Allied forces in north-east Africa. Bagnold and Prendergast, the unit’s two successive commanders, and Kennedy Shaw, its intelligence officer, made the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) a body of unusual hardihood and capacity. All three 98had explored the desert in some detail before the war, as had the Belgian Vladimir Peniakoff (‘Popski’) who worked with them for a time before establishing his own private army (PPA) late in 1942. The best of their patrol crews were New Zealanders; Rhodesians, yeomanry and guardsmen provided most of the rest. Their numbers were always small – the two forces together hardly mustered 400 strong – but their influence on the war was disproportionately large.
Their toughness is attested enough by their Sergeant Moore’s march – 210 miles, over sand, in ten days, wounded in the foot, with no food and little water, after his truck had been burned out by joint air and ground attack – or by another party who made a similar march, after a similar disaster, and emerged with a look in their eyes that Shaw remembered from a photograph of Cherry-Garrard when he got back from ‘The worst journey in the world’.
Shaw’s book provides a good example of the sort of thing they could do to help evaders:
One day in August [1941] an Arab brought word to Siwa that a wounded British pilot was hiding near Bir Bidihi, a desert well a hundred miles inside enemy territory. A patrol went off to bring him in, but at the place described there was no sign of any pilot. After searching for a time they found the mouth of a rock-cut cistern, dry after the long summer. As a last chance they shouted down this and to their surprise out scrambled an Arab, very frightened and denying all knowledge of British pilots. The patrol’s hopes fell again, when suddenly from the cistern mouth appeared a bald, pink head followed by the smiling face of the missing airman. ‘Why did you say he wasn’t here?’ demanded the patrol. ‘Oh,’ said the Arab, ‘only yesterday he was telling me that the English soldiers never had beards, so I thought you must be Germans.’
Peniakoff had tales to tell of returned evaders also; some of them were waifs, such as the driver attached to the 7th Armoured 99Division who neither knew nor cared whether the sun rose in the east or the west. Once it was clear in Cairo that LRDG was a reliable travel agent, a few advance A Force parties were carried out into the desert by it as well, with the double object of looking after evaders, and of setting up dumps of stores and water at which escapers – if later there were any – could refresh and equip themselves for a long eastward walk. Peter Grandguillot was in charge of one of these parties in the early summer of 1942, and is credited with a remark to Peniakoff that sums up crudely the fighting soldiers’ view of the staff: ‘“Ce sont des cons” – referring to our masters in Cairo – “mon vieux Popski, mats nous allons être plus malins qu’eux.”’ He assembled an adequate network of friendly Arabs all along the Gebel Akhdar, who did useful work collecting shot-down pilots and occasional army evaders; including the odd survivor from SAS or LRDG raids that had not gone quite smoothly. All were in the end returned back to the Delta, via Kufra or Siwa oasis, in LRDG trucks. One of A Force’s more far-flung representatives, discovered a shade dishevelled in some dunes near Tripoli by an advancing Eighth Army armoured car subaltern, when asked what on earth he was doing there, replied with quiet dignity, ‘I live here’.
Yet the last word on this system must be left with Shaw: ‘A good many men in the Eighth Army must owe their lives to L.R.D.G., but for every lost man found by us how many are still in the desert, now only a skeleton with a few rags of clothing round it and an empty water-bottle beside and, maybe, with its teeth fastened in the dry stem of some desert shrub?’100101
1WO 208/3253, appx D, 6; E, 4.