200

Line upon Line: Evasions in Europe 1943–45

Staff

To make clear what follows, various boundaries and responsibilities they affected MI 9 and MIS-X must first be set out. During Crockatt’s visit to America early in 1943 he discussed with Strong, Catesby Jones and Johnston the problem of where each department had best concentrate its energies. Both sides agreed that it would be a sensible division of labour if each took the lead in some areas, and acted consciously as second rather than as leader in others. On his return to London Crockatt talked this over with Davidson, the director of military intelligence, and with his concurrence proposed by cipher telegram on 23 March the following ‘spheres for all purposes (A) War Office europe africa asia mainland and sumatra (B) War Dept. america japan australia and all other Islands East of Sumatra.’

Washington did not reply immediately, but on 26 May Simonds, in the course of his highly successful American sortie, was able to telegraph ‘have complete approval from General Strong for “spheres of influence”.’ On 1 June Strong and Davidson finally agreed that the British sphere was to contain Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India and Burma; the American, North and South America, the Pacific and China. Whether Crockatt took in at this stage that by agreeing to this revised version, he had sawn off the branch on which Leslie Ride was sitting to perform his extraordinary work in south China is not clear. Ride was so far away, and communications with him were so scanty, that it is probable that Crockatt knew 201not what he did, and simply bowed to the Americans’ insistence that China must be in their sphere: an insistence motivated by domestic politics, rather than by any knowledge of Ride’s achievement or even of his existence.

Dudley Clarke was also concerned in the problem of spheres of interest. While Crockatt was in America, on 17 February 1943 – well before the worldwide argument was settled, and even before the fate of North Africa was quite sealed – Clarke proposed to him that A Force, including N section, should work over the whole of Eisenhower’s command as well as the entire Middle East. Crockatt gave a rather grudging consent; indeed he had already eleven days earlier sent to Jones via Johnston an organigram to explain the layout:

Tac[tical] HQ “A”

Force Tunisia

 

1 United States National Archives, research group 332, MIS-X box 6, Crockatt file, 6 February 1943

 

For a time even this extended empire was not too much for Dudley Clarke’s phenomenal capacities to control nor for the untiring Maskelyne to tour. They had a particularly valuable American to help them at the AFHQ end, Major Philip V. Holder. He had fought through the 1914–18 war, first in a Canadian infantry battalion and then in the RAF, and had served in south Russia in 1919. Mobilised into the USAAF, he had spent the late summer of 1942 at Holt’s elbow in London, and Crockatt thought highly of him: so highly that he drafted 202 a letter to Strong for Davidson to sign on 29 October that year. The letter pointed out that Clarke was very anxious to get his organisation onto an inter-Allied basis and requested that Holder, who was particularly suitable for this suggested assignment, be posted to join A Force. The posting was made, to the great benefit of the alliance and of aircrew serving in the Mediterranean; his imperturbable presence was totally reassuring.

Many months of effort finally convinced even Dudley Clarke that he had extended himself too far, and on 20 August 1944 he handed over the central Mediterranean organisation, by now called IS 9(CMF), to Commander Rodd, RN. Rodd was no more easy to rattle than was Holder, who was still at his elbow, and the handing over made no difference to the support that MI 9 and MIS-X were able to give to those who needed their help.

Simonds’ responsibilities, henceforward named IS 9(ME), were confined to the Balkans, the Aegean and anything that might crop up elsewhere in the Middle East; and for reasons of nearness and convenience Yugoslavia and Albania were taken away from him, and handed over to IS 9(CMF). AFHQ at Caserta, near Naples, was generally thought to be a better main headquarters from which to supervise them than Cairo; in fact IS 9(CMF) kept most of its operational headquarters in and near Bari, by the heel of Italy, conveniently close to the main airfields available for clandestine work.

On Hitler’s map of Europe Yugoslavia had vanished, partitioned among and into several states, but the Allies continued to treat and write of it as a continuing entity. Its ministers in London, Moscow and Washington were promoted ambassador, and its exiled young king did his best to continue to reign. Allied historians can here safely follow Allied wartime practice.

It is now time to review IS 9’s work in more detail; it will be taken section by section, starting at the eastern end.203

IS 9(ME)

Tony Simonds’ excursion into the heel of Italy with Simcol gave him an interlude in a long spell of intricate and intensely difficult work. From Cairo, with a forward base under Wolfson’s eye in Istanbul, he had been trying since the autumn of 1941 to build reliable escape lines to run south-eastward out of central Europe. He got sympathy and encouragement from his opposite numbers in the secret service and in SOE, the subversive organisation (known in Cairo as MO4, to add to the acronymic confusion of general headquarters), but – wireless links apart – they could provide him with no actual help outside Yugoslavia and Greece. Such agents as they had in the Danube basin had other fish to fry.

However, Simonds’s work with Wingate in Palestine before the war now bore unexpected fruit. He had kept in touch with several friends he had made among the Zionist leaders, when he had been operating with their special night squads in the late 1930s.1 They had now become senior men in their movement, and he drove a bargain with them. They would provide him with contacts, operators, safe houses in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and all over the Balkans, on the understanding that they could bring out a Jew along the channels thus set up for every Ally they rescued. The risks the Jews ran were even heavier than the risks normally run by helpers in escape lines, for the Nazi regime had never made any secret of its anti-Semitism, and extra severe penalties ending in an extra nasty death awaited anybody who added to the grave offence in Nazi eyes of helping an evader or escaper the unbearable affront of being a Jew. The Jewish Agency was nevertheless prepared to make the offer, which was cleared through Dudley Clarke with Whitehall and at once approved.

204The idea was splendid, but the results did not live up to it. There were some scintillating additions to the world’s gallery of secretly heroic figures, but no enormous number of escapers and evaders were handled by them. Moreover in Eastern Europe, in Slav territories in particular, the Nazi security forces acted with a dispatch, ferocity, and an efficiency quite unknown in north-western Europe, and still not fully appreciated there or in America.

One example, long celebrated in Israel but little known outside it, may help to make this clear, that of the young poet Hannah Szenes. Her name comes at the head of a list of twenty-five agents, all by their names Jewish (unless we should except a pair only codenamed Dickens and Jones), sent in by Simonds between June 1943 and August 1944 to organise new channels down which evaders could move home. All the women had been recruited into the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force before they left, and all the men into the Buffs or the Pioneer Corps. She was dropped into Yugoslavia on 14 June 1943, as ‘Minnie’ of operation ‘Chicken I’. ‘Micky’, who followed her five days later, was Sergeant Nussbacher of the Buffs. They both reached Budapest, and made touch with the Jewish colony there. For excellent reasons, these Jews were in a considerable state of turmoil, and there were too many informers lodged among them. One of these promptly delated her, as a newcomer and therefore a suspect, to the police. Nussbacher also was soon arrested. Accident once put them in adjacent cells, and she was able to tap out a good deal of information for him before she was taken away for further interrogation, torture, and death.2

The fact that Nussbacher knew her well and was on the same mission eluded their captors, and he managed to pass himself off as an ‘ordinary’ Jew. As such he was first sent to a labour camp near Vienna, and then bundled into a railway cattle truck 205with several score others and sent on his way to an extermination camp. That particular truck arrived empty; Nussbacher had not been trained by Maskelyne for nothing. He had still got an escape file secreted about his clothing. With it he cut a panel out of his truck after dark and bolted, as did everybody else. He returned to Budapest shortly before Christmas 1944, dug up the transmitter he had buried on arrival, passed on the news he had from Hannah Szenes and much else, and provided for a few weeks the only means of communication between those people in Budapest who wanted Hungary to change sides and the Allies.

Communications at that time and place, long before teleprinters had spread far in the Levant, were often exceedingly tricky. Simonds had an agent called ‘Interval’ in Sofia, who could send morse on an SOE set to Istanbul. His messages then had to pass through four further signals junctions, Ankara, Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem, before they reached Cairo: a system that might have been calculated to maximise clerical error and the chances of garbling. No wonder that Simonds did not want to know when the earliest stages of Eichmann’s astonishing offer to swap Jews in quantity, at the rate of 100,000 Jews for 1,000 lorries and some soap and coffee, first reached the Allies through an N section channel.3 The proposal was immediately passed over to the diplomatic and strategic authorities whose task it was to reject it. No one – or no one but an anti-Semite or a secret policeman, so often the same thing – could fail to be appalled by the impending fate of Hungary’s Jews, over a quarter of a million of whom were shortly to be exterminated. But none of Russia’s allies could dream of supplying lorries to the Germans, expressly for use on the eastern front against the now usually victorious Red Army.

Sergeant Nussbacher’s fate provided a small but significant instance of how much gratitude the Russians felt for this refusal 206to work against their interests. When they drew near Budapest he hid; survived their capture and sack of the city in the second week of February 1945; and reported to one of their headquarters as a friendly Allied agent, who wanted to know what he could do to help. He was at once arrested, severely tortured in an attempt to extract some British codes from him, and sent to a penal camp in Russia.

Months afterwards, a ragged wraith presented himself to the MI 9 repatriation mission in Odessa, and identified himself as Sergeant Nussbacher of the Buffs; having escaped the clutches of the SS, he had brought off the still more difficult feat of an escape from the NKVD. The award of a Distinguished Conduct Medal did not overrate his devotion to freedom.

There will be more to say about Hungary in the following chapter, on escapes; but the ‘Chicken’ mission – some chickens, as Churchill might have put it – needed mention here, because their task was to have been the setting up of an evasion line.

Simonds had early appreciated the possibility of getting ratlines, as N section called evasion lines – Crockatt detested the comparison with rats – working out of Silesia into Slovakia, which would of course aid escapers as well as evaders; it was not till the late summer of 1944 that his ‘Amsterdam’ mission was able to get into the field. Sergeant Grünhut and Martha Martinovic (‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’) composed it. Grünhut may have got in by parachute in August. She certainly arrived by one of the war’s odder semi-clandestine operations, a landing by two B-17 Flying Fortresses at Tri Duby, a small grass airfield between Banska Bystrica and Zvolen in central Slovakia on 18 September. Forty-one P-51 Mustang fighters were in attendance as escort, and flew to and fro for the twenty-five minutes the big aircraft were on the ground.

Half a dozen Russian staff officers, previously put in by the Soviet air force, were in attendance on the airfield, and showed keen interest in every detail of the B-17s; for ‘Amsterdam’ opened up, accidentally, at the crisis of the Slovak national rising, which 207had broken out on 29 August, when it looked as if the Red Army was about to storm southward through the Dukla pass in the Carpathians and the Germans attempted to occupy the whole of their satellite state. The two aircraft, on one of which Martha Martinovic travelled, brought in four and a half tons of military stores and an OSS mission, and flew out to Bari a delighted party of twelve Americans and three British airmen, and a Czech.4 Those sixteen men cannot have gathered at Tri Duby by accident. One pair were guided in by Russian officers they met with the partisans. Grünhut may have collected some of them beforehand. His wireless set soon fell into German hands and so did Miss Martinovic’s – with two OSS companions to whom she had lent it; and they lost most of their money. They sent out nevertheless by air on 7 October another large party of twenty-eight Americans – evaders and escapers, again mixed – and a couple of New Zealand privates who had found their own way to central Slovakia from Silesia. But the Russians were still stuck on the northern side of the Dukla pass, and the German grip on the Slovak rising was tightening.

208‘Amsterdam’, reinforced by two more Jewish sergeants called Berdichev and Reisz (the ‘Anticlimax’ mission) who had marched in from the Yugoslav-Hungarian border – in itself a feat – threw in their lot with John Sehmer’s SOE mission called ‘Windproof’. They all hid in the Tatra ranges east-north-east of Banska Bystrica, on the northern side of the Hron valley, and hung on. The OSS mission joined up with them; so did a party of nineteen American and two British evaders, who were to have been flown out to the Russians, a plan that came to nothing. (No evaders’ names survive.) This was too large a group to stay together as winter drew in, and the Germans held all the towns and large villages; they split into smaller parties. ‘Had to remain with P[arti]s[a]ns in very bad conditions,’ Berdichev complained on Guy Fawkes’ day, ‘living in improvised huts in woods where weather is worst possible.’ He needed sleeping bags, whisky, and anti-louse powder. ‘Where is rest of A Force party? No contact with them.’ Sehmer and Berdichev tried to rescue Viest and Golian, the captured Czechoslovak senior officers who had commanded the rising, when the puppet government put them on trial in Bratislava, but both were shot.

Eventually, on 26 December, Sehmer and seventeen British and American companions were surprised in the early morning by the Germans and taken prisoner. Sehmer met his death in Mauthausen, and Reisz Grünhut and Berdichev were no more fortunate, though Martha Martinovic survived. As R. S. Taylor, on MI 9’s staff at Bari, put it, long before their fate could even be guessed at ‘When the whole story can be told it will undoubtedly be an epic of endurance in the face of extreme difficulties’, but the epic has yet to be written.

Relations with partisans

An incessant difficulty for N section, for its agents forward in the field, and for evaders or escapers who wanted to cross partisan territory lay in the attitude towards all of them of the partisan’s leaders. No fine distinctions were made, outside Great Britain 209and the USA, between intelligence and other secret services. Any Communist suspected any member of the officer class automatically, and the suspicion became intense if the officer belonged to any sort of secret organisation, for it was axiomatic in the Communist world that all such organisations outside it were necessarily devoted to the overthrow of Communism. Months, years of explanation that MI 9’s and MIS-X’s agents were only seeking to hasten the overthrow of Axis imperialism did nothing as a rule but create deeper suspicion, mixed with some admiration for the elaboration of the cover story that was surely being spun.

It was not merely a matter of getting leave to operate in partisan territory, though that could be difficult enough. For instance, leave for the ‘Amsterdam’ party to pass through Yugoslavia on their way via Hungary to Slovakia, sought on 21 June 1944, was not granted till 19 July; the matter had to be referred to Tito personally. (In fact as will have been noted these two agents went direct by air.) He can be forgiven for taking his time over it, for he had much else of more importance on his mind. Similar delays were common. Various approaches to the Soviet authorities, through the military attachés in Kuybyshev, for leave to operate MI 9 or MIS-X agents with partisan forces in western Russia met a peremptory refusal. On the other hand, as early as 17 May 1944 the Soviet general staff had put out a message ‘warning all Russian troops on fronts where Brit[ish] or American aviators may bale out or crash land that they must be prepared for Allied aviators and help them.’

A worse difficulty was met at a less exalted level. It was simply inconceivable to most partisans that young healthy unwounded men who shared their dislike of Nazism and Fascism, whom fate had cast into their neighbourhood, should want to leave it instead of staying to fight. They were amazed to discover that military airmen had had no infantry training, and were devoid of those elementary skills of tactics and field craft that are ingrained in Balkan children. When what they had at first supposed to be heaven-sent reinforcements turned out to be useless mouths to 210feed, and a security liability as well, they could not be relied on to remain friendly. We know of no definitely established cases of airmen intent on an evasion that were quietly disposed of by partisans to whom they can have been nothing but a nuisance; but it is only too probable that such a fate did befall some.

There are several cases on record of airmen who bailed out over Polish, Bulgar, Ukrainian or Russian-occupied territory who were roughly handled, fired on from the ground while still descending by parachute, robbed, beaten up, and kicked when they were down, before they had had any chance to establish their nationality or their good will. To help them clear themselves quickly, MIS-X and M19 distributed a great many ‘blood chits’: printed cards, bearing prominently Stars and Stripes or a Union Jack or both, with a short clear statement that there would be a reward for treating the bearer well. These were first devised in Arabic for use in the western desert, and were then recast, and translated into several languages of south-east Europe and of south-east Asia. Aircrew often forgot to take them, or had them fall out of their pockets while parachuting. Devising new formulae for them was a staff officers’ game; their value could hardly be great among populations not much used to reading, and not in the least interested in foreign flags.

On the other hand, not all country folk were suspicious of strangers. Bread and salt were brought out by the nearest Montenegrin cottager for at least one party of arriving SOE agents; accompanied by a dash of slivovits, as they had turned up by parachute in the middle of a battle. And there were quite a lot of country-bred aircrew who were capable of becoming adepts at mountain warfare. A few of these had the foresight to bring machine guns and ammunition along with them, if they crash-landed instead of parachuting. These weapons might make a formidable difference to the local tactical balance, and would in any case be rapturously received by partisan bands, sure to include a village blacksmith who could improvise gun-mountings. Jules Dominique’s band of freebooters in Luxembourg, which 211specialised in attacking German police, had a heavy machine gun from a crashed American aircraft as its main armament. Lieutenant Charles F. Kingsman whose Liberator was shot down over northern Italy on 25 April 1944, injured himself when he landed by parachute, and lay up for months with an Italian family. While hiding, he held secret classes’ for visiting partisans in the use and care of the .50 machine gun, several of which they had been able to secure from crashed aircraft and provided a mass of tactical intelligence for the brigadier of the 7th Indian Infantry Brigade when a Gurkha unit overran the house he was in on 25 September. There were a great many other cases of aircrew who ought according to all their training to have pressed on with the business of rejoining their units, but who preferred – or were pressured into – fighting for a while with more or less irregular bands as infantry.

Few airmen, American or British, knew much about the political complications of the areas over which they had to operate. An entire Flying Fortress crew shot down on 24 May 1944, when trailing behind their formation on the way back from a raid on Vienna, found themselves over Zagreb (Agram), the capital of Croatia. ‘The navigator had had a very good briefing on the safe areas in Yugoslavia the morning of the mission. None of them had ever heard of the Ustachi’, the Croat terrorists in the centre of whose stamping ground they were, and they were exceptionally lucky to run straight into an OSS mission and thus get flown out fast. The crew of another B-17 which crash-landed about forty miles further east, on 16 July 1944, had had very little briefing on escape; the only advice they could recall was to ‘contact the partisans’. This they did to such effect that they were flown back to Italy only four days later.

For by this time OSS’s Strategic Balkan Service5 had got several missions lodged in Yugoslavia, some with Mihailovic’s 212Chetniks and some with Tito’s partisans, and the United States air forces produced a Balkan Air Terminal Service (yes, BATS) which Operated mainly with C-47 Dakotas, to as many as thirty-six improvised landing strips. As Mihailovic’s standing with the Allies worsened, the number of these strips in his territory declined, but even after all military aid to him by the British and Americans, and all propaganda aid to him by his original trumpeters the Russians, had been withdrawn he continued to order his men to succour Allied evaders and escapers – most of them evading aircrew – whenever he could.

Aircrew, like politicians, were of several minds about the Chetniks. We could instance 2/Lieut. William H. Vean, who had to bail out north of Sarajevo on 28 August 1944 owing to engine trouble on his way back from an attack on Budapest. (There is a study waiting to be written, or at least to be published, about the proportion of aircraft lost over enemy territory through faults that developed in flight, rather than through enemy action.) He reported that ‘the Chetniks in the regions where he travelled with the Partisans, are actively aiding the enemy against the Partisans.’ Three survivors from an aircraft damaged in odd circumstances during the raid on Ploesti on 28 July 1944 – the aircraft in front of them blew up when a bomb from another one hit it – found themselves in the hands of a not very friendly body of Chetniks, who moved them round for weeks from one safe house to another while they made no attempt to evacuate them. They ‘seemed to be allied directly with the Germans’, who supplied them. The three airmen ‘strayed away from the Chetnik camp on 15 September and ran into some Partisans who took charge and started them off for evacuation next day.’ On the other hand, Lloyd C. Hargrave, an Idaho farmer shot down on a ground strafing task a few miles south of Belgrade on 3 September 1944, was feasted by the Chetniks, even had his shoes shined, and was offered a commission in their air force; but he met a United States mission – what sort of mission, his report is too discreet to specify – and was back 213at duty a fortnight after he had been shot down. And a crew from the 830th Bombardment Squadron, who bailed out on 22nd August 1944 in the course of a flight against Vienna, remarked that the Chetniks who looked after them ‘fought the Germans’.

Others again were enthusiastic in their support for the Chetniks’ local opponents, Tito’s partisans; none more so than Staff Sergeant Edward C. Legro of 414th Bombardment Squadron. He had to parachute on 24 March 1944 when his B-17 collided with another in cloud about sixty miles south of Zagreb. When he got back to base, late in the summer, ‘he would like to shout from the house tops the kindness and co-operation from Partisans, and the fine job they are doing.’

He must have spent some months in the mountains on the Croat-Serb border before he made touch with an American mission. OSS seems to have taken on directly the business of aircrew rescue in Yugoslavia, which was certainly one of those parts of Europe where Hitler’s writ did not run everywhere and where extensive mountain areas could be found in which evaders were more or less safe. Numerous special parties, American-manned, were put into Yugoslavia to work near BATS airstrips, collect evaders, and pass them promptly back to duty. Equally numerous arguments and misunderstandings followed, with Chetniks and Partisans alike; neither body could comprehend why people with a call on aircraft, and constant wireless touch with the Allied high command, staying in their midst, were yet unavailable as a source of ammunition, heavy weapons, medicines, food and clothes. Of the last three items each party tried to keep a small stock for the benefit of wounded, famished or tattered evaders, a stock that was in constant danger of being pilfered or requisitioned by their Yugoslav hosts who felt – intelligibly enough – that after three years or so on the run they had earned the right to any good things that were going.

Lynn Farish, a cheerful and companionable American major known as ‘Slim’, was attached to Fitzroy Maclean’s mission to 214Tito, as liaison both with OSS for the Strategic Balkan Service’s work and with the American air force for aircrew rescue. In October 1943, at the ruined village of Glamoc on the eastern side of the Dinaric Alps, south of Zagreb and west of Belgrade, he sustained morale by bathing daily in the open air, still wearing his flat air force cap. There was a BATS airstrip close by, from which he hoped to fly out any evaders he could collect. It was the unhappy scene of the young partisan hero Lola Ribar’s death in a German air raid a few weeks afterwards; and Farish himself was killed later still on an air operation into Greece.

Albania

From these tragedies, which still depress the dead men’s surviving friends, let us move to a more comical incident which illustrates the extent to which command of the air and inter-secret-service co-operation could develop.

A baker’s dozen of nurses, young second lieutenants in the United States 507th Medical Air Evacuation Unit, who had only been overseas for a few weeks, set off on the cloudy afternoon of 1 November 1943 on a routine flight from Catania in Sicily to collect patients from Bari. Their Dakota got lost in the cloud, and the fuel ran low. The pilot landed at the first airfield he found, but took off again at once when one of his crew pointed out they had just taxied past some aircraft bearing German markings. He soon crash-landed in pastureland; they found they were in Albania.

‘Right away’, one of the girls wrote later, ‘we began wondering who had Albania and trying to think where it was on the map.’ The crew burned the aircraft, and the party of twenty-five Americans – four crew, thirteen nurses, and eight stretcher-bearers – set off with a self-appointed local guide to hike into the mountains. After two nights in peasant cottages, where they all acquired body-lice, they reached the fortified town of Berat, which was large enough for the whole party to hide in, here and there. Conditions in it were normal, there was plenty to eat, 215the bars were open; but as women in Albania never in those days wore trousers, as the nurses all did, half the party had to stay hidden.

An Allied mission – from SOE, not MI 9 – was soon in touch with them, sent out word of their plight, and shepherded them on a further set of mountain marches, a day or two, sometimes only an hour or two ahead of the Germans. On 29 December they were all huddled together in ditches at the side of a disused airfield at Argyrokastron, some forty miles south of Berat, when a Wellington and two Dakotas, escorted by thirty-six Lightning fighters, flew over to pick them up. The Wellington was to land first, to provide ground covering fire from its power turrets for the unarmed Dakotas. By an unhappy chance, a German armoured unit had chosen that moment to halt on the road on the opposite side of the airfield from the wanderers, so the Wellington was not given the signal to land. It ‘gave the entire party the biggest thrill of their life’. ‘If I live to be 100 years old’, one of the nurses wrote later, ‘I shall never forget nor be able to express my feelings when I saw that swarm of planes sent out by the 15th Air Force just to rescue us.’ ‘The girls cried and the boys all had lumps in their throats’. An SOE subaltern, Gavin Duffy of Leeds, saw most of them safely onto a motor gunboat near Valona on the night of 8/9 January, and the party stepped ashore at Bari next morning in high spirits.

Three girls had got left behind in Berat. At the moment when the party had to leave, the messenger did not reach the comparatively remote house in which they were staying, with the brother of a girl who had spent some years in the middle west, in time for them to catch the rest of the group. A couple of Germans called, were satisfied that they were nurses, and let them be.

By February they had got tired of staying indoors and made themselves skirts out of old blankets. After endless delays Captain Smith, an OSS agent, secured them German and Albanian passes and drove them safely through a mass of controls. A final twelve hours’ march through the mountains 216brought them to a secret Strategic Balkan Service base on the coast, where they were picked up by an Italian torpedo boat with its original crew under a British naval officer; they too reached Bari safely on 23 March.

Balkans in general

One name, still more than Slim Farish’s, deserves to be attached to the business of getting downed airmen back from the Balkans: that of Colonel George Kraigher, the commander of the Air Crew Rescue Unit of 15th Air Force. BATS may be regarded as primarily an airfield construction unit, of which the main task once its airstrips had been built was to supply whatever irregular or paramilitary forces lay in its area, and to reinforce or withdraw them as Allied policy from time to time dictated. The job of an ACRU, smaller and more closely defined, was to bring back evading or escaping American aircrew who had reached the strips, or could be found at others such as Banska Bystrica, but as this Slovak example showed just now, Kraigher’s ACRU was not going to stand on ceremony and refuse to take off British aircrew also, or Commonwealth escapers, if they presented themselves at a happy moment.

Kraigher’s own indifferent opinion of the national armies of liberation with which he had to deal is set out in a paper he wrote at the end of the European war about irregular forces, which the interested inquirer will find at the Simpson Historical Research Center at Maxwell base; it is beside our present purpose. More to the point is a single exchange, illustrative of the colonel’s character and method, between him and a young air force historian:

Q, ‘Is your work cleared through MAAF?’

A. ‘I report to MAAF. I do the thing first and then tell them.’

A general summary prepared by MAAF in the autumn of 1944 showed that by 20 October 3,870 army air force aircrew had evasions in europe 1943–45 217already been recovered – nearly a third of them ex-prisoners from Romania. The summary defined an ACRU team – a senior officer, a doctor, ‘a radio operator with portable equipment’, and an OSS officer: this explains the American Strategic Balkan Service’s interest in MIS-X’s work. Teams were not of course always available just when they were needed; improvisation, at which so many British and Americans excel, could then take over. Lieutenant T. K. Oliver found himself and all nine of his crew stranded in central Yugoslavia (presumably in the summer of 1944: maddeningly, the same summary gives no date), met and made friends with one of Mihailovic’s wireless operators, improvised a code to headquarters 15th Air Force, and had his party grow from ten to 225 airmen, not all of them American, before the air force could collect them.

The problem of whom to bring out was endemic in such organisations. It long exercised Crockatt’s, Johnston’s and Dudley Clarke’s minds, and was a perpetual source of trouble to Simonds. Clarke ordered him on 13 June 1943 to ‘Organize operations only in respect of British, Americans, Greeks, and Poles.’ Both knew that ‘British’ was here shorthand for subjects of the British Crown, and included Canadians, Indians, South Africans and so on. In addition, he could accept at his discretion ‘isolated individuals, French, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, Czech, Yugoslav, Chinese or Russian’ who joined parties of the accepted nationalities. The order went on: ‘Refuse to handle any personnel NOT in either category as being outside our charter even given most liberal interpretation.’

Just a year later, on 15 June 1944, writing to Simonds to remind him that he was not to go behind his superior’s back direct to the War Office, Dudley Clarke added: ‘If you are asked to do anything which is outside your existing instructions your proper answer is that you will refer the matter to me for a ruling.’ Simonds must take care not to get involved with ‘waifs and strays’ but to stick to Imperial and American passengers. ‘Johnny Bevan is arriving here in a couple of days’ time and 218 I have asked him to come briefed with Norman Crockatt’s views on these problems.’ Meanwhile, Greek and Poles may be carried on sufferance as special cases; the rest, not. The particular waifs and strays Clarke had in mind may be guessed from his next remark: ‘there is no justification for ‘N’ section handling Hungarian diplomats or Abwehr deserters.’

Greece

In the two months of December 1943 and January 1944 Simonds’ parties brought out of the Aegean area as many as 714 people, 121 British, thirty-nine American, 425 Greek, thirteen Cypriot, seventy-five from the Dodecanese and forty-one Jews. Besides, they evacuated ‘large numbers of Imp[erial] service personnel’ from Leros, where a British battalion had gone ashore in September and had been roundly defeated – for lack of local air support – a few weeks later.

Simonds made a great deal of play with codes, and the files of these operations are full of references to jackals, frogs, toads, scum, lice, birds, bugs and fleas; luckily he jotted down what they all meant – various secret services and nationalities – and the jotting survives. A parallel series of more wholesome codes covered places. Hungary was Ohio, Romania Skye, Bulgaria Essex and Turkey Kelso. A journey by film from Looe to York would necessarily pass Bude, but might leave Eton away to port – that is, a caïque travelling from the Peloponnese to Çeşme had to go through the Aegean islands, but would not necessarily call at Athens. Through this light coding haze, some remarkable activities in the Aegean and in the Ionian islands emerge.

A combined effort was made to rescue the garrisons of Cos, Leros and Samos after these islands’ recapture by the Germans. The British naval and military attachés in Ankara took charge of it; Wolfson, Rees and Simonds all threw themselves whole-heartedly into the effort; and MI 9’s fleet of caïques played a predominant part in the result. As the senior (naval) intelligence officer in Istanbul put it in a telegram on 14 December, 219‘please bear in mind large part played by MI 9 organisation in general work getting back mideast evacuees wounded and shipwrecked from all services. These number several hundred but discrimination?6 as between channels handled is? impossible.’ After a momentary initial flurry, there were some weeks of model interservice co-operation. No one stood on ceremony and everyone got on with the job.

The old alliance between MI 9 and the Long Range Desert Group was reforged in the Dodecanese, this time with a reversal of mini: it was MI 9 that commanded the transport, the LRDG that provided the passengers. Several LRDG patrols had been on Cos and Leros, and their seniors were particularly anxious to get the survivors back: MI 9 was delighted to be able to help. One day, preferably while witnesses are still alive to tell tales, there is a fascinating book to be written about this minor and dispersed Dunkirk, and one of its main sources will be the Cairo file simply called ‘Operations. Islands.’ It is full of such telling details as the mention that Midshipman Rankin of HMS Belvoir and Private add-on of the medical corps ‘arrived on their own’ near Çeşme; that the report of this crossed a terse message from Simonds, ‘please take immediate action’ to recover nine other ranks in mufti on the north-west corner of Leros; that an Australian pilot was rescued from Cos by a Greek in a craft ‘made out of a trough lying on the beach and pieces of wood,’ which took eighteen hours to cover the few miles to Turkey; that among the many caïque captains, ‘Milton’ was at once the most daring and the most successful.

‘Milton’, a Greek whose identity remains hidden behind his codename, made ‘countless passages through enemy waters, entering enemy ports, without ever losing a “passenger” or a member of his crew.’ Before the war was over, he had an honorary 220 civil OBE to put beside his DSO; though characteristically he remarked to a friend that he would rather have had a thousand pounds.

In the course of 1944 the number of caïques in MI 9’s pay grew to thirty-two, with a main repair base in Cyprus, and the speed of their reactions improved also. The swiftest rescue perhaps came in July 1944; not by caïque. Warrant Officer Sykes and Flight-Sergeant Foxley of 603 Squadron RAF crashed between Mykonos and Delos in a Beaufighter on the 23 July. Their ditching drill went well, and they rowed in their dinghy to Delos, as the smaller and therefore presumably the safer island. An MI 9 agent who had seen the crash took care of them and sent a message to Çeşme; a high speed launch picked them up thirty-two hours after they ditched.

A few weeks later, the extent to which MI 9 had become a dominant force in the Aegean got a startling if minor illustration in the Dodecanese, of which the outline – unfortunately, only the outline – is known. Two Gestapo agents visited one of the islands in search of an MI 9 agent whom they believed to be there. His information service was better than theirs; he arrested them.

By the spring of 1945, while German garrisons still held on to the Dodecanese after their comrades had withdrawn from mainland Greece; MI 9 had an agent on each of the twelve islands on whom a caïque called fortnightly as regularly as a remote country bus service. Deserters from Rhodes could be bought for a few shillings a head. London in this case approved.

Minor naval and evasion operations were not confined to the Aegean. In March 1944, for example, HM submarine Sibyl launched operation ‘Clerk’. Captain E. J. A. Lunn and Sergeant Gilmore of the Special Boat Section rowed ashore in Loortha bay on the south coast of Cephallonia, opposite the north-west corner of the Peloponnese, on the night of 23/24 March 1944. A heavy swell swamped their folboat, a collapsible canoe, as they tried to re-launch it; they broke it up at the water’s edge, 221moved inland gave a German sentry a bad fright, buried their wireless set and took to the hills. A French-speaking woman put them in touch with a dentist with an English wife; hence they made touch with the left-wing resistance movement, ELAS, and were ‘cordially received … Many vague and optimistic promises’ ill concealed a marked reluctance to run any risk at all, but Lunn and Gilmore got away to the neighbouring island, Odysseus’ Ithaca, where the German garrison only numbered eight; thence an SOE caïque rescued them. Another SBS pair, Captain Kennard and Sergeant Preece, reconnoitred Ortholitha bay on the western side of Cephallonia, from Sibyl, by folboat and on foot on the night of 25/26 March, and reported it ‘an excellent bay for landing agents.’ Dudley Clarke described the operation as ‘a thorough success’; whether anyone for MI 9 was in fact later landed on Cephallonia remains unclear.

An American aircraft had to make a crash landing on a rice field in southern Corfu on 18 November 1943. The ten survivors hid nearby, mainly in Lefkimme village, for over six weeks, spending one night with an unexpected character, ‘an EAM clergyman’ – evidently, an Orthodox priest of left-wing tendencies. The local EAM, the political wing of ELAS, were in touch with their opposite numbers the Albanian partisans across the subsequently ill-fitted Corfu channel that still keeps Britain and Albania apart. The new were ferried across that narrow strip of sea on 3 January 1944, and hid in Epirus for ten weeks more; a ship rescued them eventually on 15 March.

T/Sergeant D. M. Bennett of the 342nd Bombardment Squadron, whose aircraft broke up in the air on 11 January 1944, had nearly two months’ wanderings in the Peloponnese, passing through lateral villages, one of which – Garditsa – was half burned down by the Germans a few hours after he and his guides had left. The burning was no doubt done, as Voltaire said Admiral Byng was shot, pour encourager les autres. Bennett was brought out by a caïque from near Nestor’s palace at Pylos on 3 April. One of the people on the spot who was handling this 222sort of task in detail, the future Professor P. M. Fraser, had to point out to Simonds who was raising security difficulties from Cairo that once there was to be an operation the whole village knew the fact in minutes: the vital security precaution therefore was not to set an operation up – which took anything up to twelve hours, assembling mules, donkeys, food, blankets and so on – except in cases when the Germans were at least twenty-four hours’ march away. It was easy to forget in the bustle of Cairo (outside the sacred afternoon siesta), or the motorised hum of London or Washington, that in the remoter parts of eastern Europe much of the war still moved at a walking pace.

Yet simultaneously with the friendly feeling shown to the British SBS on Cephallonia, and to an individual American airman in the hills near Olympia, Simonds was having to complain at the hostility shown by ELAS and its political master, EAM, towards evasion operations. All movement in the Peloponnese, he told Clarke on 29 March, was blocked by EAM order, and the same organisation had brought to a temporary standstill his ratlines across Euboea, the long island to the north of Athens. (He did not hear of Sergeant Bennett till later.) Once EAM seized a caïque; but soon returned it.

As may be imagined, fearsome political complications attended the task that was set MI 9 by a request that originated with the Greek government in exile. The ‘special charter’ mentioned in Appendix 1 has not yet surfaced, but the end result has: ‘2,089 Greeks (service personnel, Government officials etc.) rescued.’ A glimpse or two appears in the files about how this was done. In late August 1944 for instance there was a special MI 9 mission in Athens under ‘an outstandingly brave Greek volunteer’ who had recently escaped, and then gone back in again at his cabinet’s request. This was operation ‘Cooking’, run single-handed by an agent called Kryonis (‘John’), ‘a most self-reliant and responsible person’ in his case officer’s view; he took into Athens with him fifty-four gold sovereigns, fifty million drachmae, and a memorised list of thirty names of 223men to bring away. Two of these, forming a subsidiary task, were the son and nephew of the Greek Minister of Marine. He reappeared at Çeşme on 6 September with thirteen but of his thirty targets, plus fourteen others, ‘mostly compromised MI 6 personnel from Tinos’. ‘Others named on list did not wish to come out’. MI 6’s local office remarked bluntly that ‘We have no record of individuals working for us in Tinos’, so it looks as if even ‘John’ could be imposed on. Still, Simonds telegraphed at once ‘Heartiest congratulations to john and all concerned. The highest in the land have been informed and are delighted.’

As one of EAM’s objects was to controvert at every opportunity the exiled king, George II, whom presumably Simonds meant by ‘The highest in the land’ – he could hardly have meant either Farouk or his own commander-in-chief – some of EAM’s hostility to N section has a perceptible basis. Simonds was naturally well aware already of the intense politicisation of every aspect of Greek resistance, as indeed of most of Greek life. Already in May 1944, before ‘Cooking’ had been set up, the Greek navy in search of fully-trained Greek-speaking crews had had to drive a bargain with EAM: two Greek naval officers were allowed to go to Greece to hunt up such men, and bring them out through MI 9 channels, on condition that each carried a written guarantee from his commander-in-chief ‘that neither officer will indulge in politics.’ Such a document was a highly perilous thing to have on one’s person during a clandestine mission; conceivably that was why EAM insisted on it, to endanger their opponents, though they may simply have been careless of the ground rules of urban underground warfare.

Still grosser carelessness could be displayed by EAM’s opponents. The work in Athens in April 1944 of an N section agent known only by the Buchanite codename of ‘Greenmantle’ was obstructed by a ghastly series of confusions and intrigues. He was sent into Greece to make touch with several politicians, including the subsequently well-known Papandreou, and to get them all to a conference in the Lebanon in May. Some were under 224threat of assassination by nominal colleagues. Others indicated that they would not mind leaving Greece, provided they did so in circumstances that would make horrible trouble for rivals left behind. A Greek diplomat, outside the Nazi orbit, telegraphed the name of One of the people ‘Greenmantle’ was to collect, as that of someone about to leave Greece, to his colleague at Berne; and telegraphed it in clear. No wonder the agent went off the air suddenly, half way through a message, on 25 April: and vanished entirely. By June, a fresh agent from Cairo called Kodros had replaced him, but the wranglings went on.

What proportion of N section’s effort this large Greek undertaking consumed is not easy to judge. A rough guess, on the brute statistics in Appendix 1, would suggest about two-fifths: 2,089 Greeks brought out in the eastern Mediterranean, as against 2,811 Imperial and American service people. Yet who can measure the nervous strain of attending to ‘Anticlimax’s’ plea for whisky and delousing powder against that of trying to pacify an enraged Greek diplomat, or a furious SAS major? All the historian can note is that the requirements of the Greek government in exile laid a noticeable burden on the staff and the field agents of N section, which was gallantly and uncomplainingly borne.

IS 9 (CMF): Italy

Over the wild and at first wholly unfamiliar country of central and northern Italy, Austria and Yugoslavia – the main working field of the Fifteenth US Air Force – navigators were encouraged as part of their escape and evasion training to check their position constantly, and to keep their crews informed about it, so that any sudden emergency would find everybody with a rough knowledge at least of his whereabouts. Numerous evasions endorsed the soundness of this advice.

For example T/Sergeant Frank J. Knoble of the 429th Bombardment Squadron, shot down on 11 March 1944, after bombing Padua, was received on the ground by partisans, one 225of whom, ‘nick sinkich, former Chicago gangster, accompanied party all the way and made all the arrangements.’ S/Sergeant Paul B. Miller, of the 348th Bombardment Squadron, bailed out over north Italy when his aircraft’s engines failed on 24 July 1944, hurt his ankle when he landed, was looked after by peasant family, walked south when he was better, and fell in with a partisan unit commanded by a British major. He fought with them for some weeks, and then decided he had better go back to the sort of fighting he was trained to do. He had a puzzling time picking his way through the fighting line on 19 October because he stumbled on a Brazilian unit; Brazil had taken up active participation at the front after he had been shot down. He ‘had thought they were Jerries but couldn’t figure it out because they seemed to be going in the wrong direction’: a Brazilian division fought with distinction in the Allied armies in Italy from September 1944.

One of MI 9’s field escape sections, whose members might have known better, also had a brush with some Brazilians who ‘spoke in guttural accents’ and thus attracted suspicion, in September 1944. By that time Italy was well covered with a network of agents dense enough to collect shot-down aircrew without too much trouble, and to connect them up with one or other of the frequent journeys south-eastward – usually by sea – that the service arranged for the many thousand escapers who were still at large in northern Italy.

Air operations became more complex in the last winter of the war. A few weeks before the end, one of MI 9’s ‘Vermouth’ parties in north Italy under a South African sergeant called Fick got the local partisans to prepare a small landing strip. A Fieseler Storch captured from the Luftwaffe, flown by an Italian pilot, landed on this strip and lifted off a few minutes later a wounded Rhodesian pilot, collected by ‘Vermouth’ from the wreck of his aircraft; British and American fighters providing overhead cover meanwhile. By this time the average daily loss in men in the Mediterranean air forces was ten, reckoned as two 226dead, two captured, and six evading: a tribute to the effectiveness of MI 9’s and MIS-X’s training. As was to be expected from any staff under Crockatt’s command, IS 9(CMF) as well as IS 9(MEF) was anxious to set up lines for escapers and evaders who were on their way out of the enemy heartland, but from Italy this was quite as tricky as from Egypt. Geography and tactics alike put the north-eastern frontier out of the question: high barren mountains, the few valleys swarming with SS. A way round was imperative: it would have to run through Slovenia and Carinthia.

In Carinthia, on the disputed borderland between the Third Reich and Croatia/Yugoslavia, there was for a time an SOE mission called ‘Clowder’, which Simonds described as ‘working very well with us being most useful’ in June 1944. But ‘Clowder’ was not immortal. Its leader, Hesketh Pritchard, was killed in action (long afterwards, the local Communists annexed his achievements as their own), and the main concern of (Sir) Peter Wilkinson who took over from him was to extricate what remained of the mission safely: which he accomplished. The fact that ‘Clowder’ was operated and controlled from London, not from either Cairo or Caserta or Bari, provided yet another staff hurdle; by now Simonds, Rodd and Wilkinson were all consummate hurdlers, and no one tripped over it.

This only left Slovenia, and here a special variant on the partisans’ frequent general obstructiveness produced a block. As one anonymous officer in Special Forces – whether in OSS or SOE is unclear – put it early in 1945, it was a case of ‘the utter hopelessness of ever getting into austria overland from slovenia without Partisan assistance. This has been consistently refused, not so much by direct methods as by deliberate obstruction and procrastination.’ To safeguard the Communists’ fellow travellers from ‘infiltrating propaganda and ideas not in sympathy with their own’, the partisan leadership barred all travellers out, particularly those from an American or British secret service: a preview of the policy that led eventually to the 227walling in of East Berlin, lest those inside should wish to flee the Communist paradise. A mission called ‘Cuckold’ operated for MI 9 in Slovenia for most of the autumn of 1944, till silenced by a big German attack on 23 December, but was not able to do much to help evaders.

Scandinavia

On the opposite, northern flank of the grand Anglo-American assault on north-west Europe, operation ‘Overlord’, there was not a great deal that MI 9 either could do, or needed to do, to assist evasion. In Norway, ground was paramount: the terrain was too severe and communications were too sparse for potential evaders to get any counsel but one – move eastwards into Sweden if you can. A few could, and after a brief grilling from the Swedish police took their chance of a ride back to Scotland in the bomb bay of a Mosquito. More were caught, and became prisoners.

In Denmark both ground and tactics were entirely different, Flat farming country with excellent communications provide plenty of opportunities both for evasion lines and for enemy counter-action. Danish resistance organised itself much more slowly than did, say, Polish or Greek; with slight Communist assistance, and not a great deal of help from the West either. MI 6 seems to have left the bulk of the running in Denmark to be made by SOE, and MI 9 followed MI 6’s example. The Danes in any case, an independent-minded lot, preferred to run things their own way. Hardly any MI9 or MIS-X files on Danish work have yet surfaced, and there was probably not much that either of these services needed to do beyond briefing aircrew on how to behave if forced down over Denmark.

Jørgen Haestrup, the principal authority on Danish resistance history, states baldly that as late as the summer of 1943 ‘Regular escape routes were not yet established’; but from that autumn they developed. He cites the case of a Canadian pilot called Donald Smith, the only survivor of a crew of eight returning 228from a raid on Stettin, who kept going across Zealand for a day and a night on his escape pack ration, slept in a stable, met a friendly farmer who gave him a little food and money – by a too frequent mistake, he had the wrong purse, full of French francs – and bumped by chance into some Danish resisters who took him across the Sound to Sweden in a rubber boat stolen from the Germans. By the end of 1943 there was a quite frequent secret boat service across the Sound from Frederikshavn, near the northern tip of Jutland.

Haestrup quotes another example, late but telling. The American Major McFarlane bailed out over Lolland, the large island midway between Copenhagen and Lübeck, on 12 March 1945 – flak had damaged his aircraft over Swinemünde. The moment he landed he was given a raincoat and a hat, and hidden in a wood, by a boy who fobbed off a German search party. He spent several nights in various private houses; watched the fire Embry’s Mosquitoes had started in the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen on 21 March; was smuggled on board a dredger at Tuborg, and hidden with several companions in the ship’s bottom; and was received by the British consul at Helsingborg in Sweden two days later.

As Haestrup remarks, ‘Every study of the “headquarters activity” is justified and necessary. But it is never adequate, McFarlane’s path may well seem unplanned, but behind it there is an organisation, constantly arranging, hooking link to link. When McFarlane reached Sweden and made his report, he was not initiated into the mysteries of the organisation, but he must have felt its existence throughout … The Resistance is not formed primarily according to directions and orders from above, but has grown up organically from the constant activity in its depths.’

France, Belgium and Holland

Something similar happened in Holland, Belgium and France in the second half of the war, but with a multiplicity of 229organisations at work instead of a single body. As was shown above, the ‘Pat’ lines faded out after Guérisse’s arrest; only the indomitable François Dissart and the equally unbreakable, but more somnolent Mifouf were left to take up again the private struggle to get people away under the noses of their Gestapo neighbours on which they had been engaged before ever they met Guérisse or Groome. ‘Comet’ survived a large number of betrayals and counter-attacks and continued to send airmen across the Pyrenees, almost at Andrée de Jongh’s rate, even after her arrest, even after her father’s execution. Madame de Greef, who kept careful accounts, kept also a nominal roll of every passenger. The last one to leave, Flight-Sergeant Emeny of the RAF, was booked out into Spain on 4 June 1944. Thereafter the line, most sensibly, gave up passing people through to Spain, but its members were still on the alert to shelter any evaders or escapers who came their way.

By early 1943 indeed this had become a normal attitude over wide areas of Western Europe. Evaders from casualties in the RAF’s night raids over Germany who could get outside the Reich readily found help, and the great day raids by the USAAF over German-occupied territories were often followed with passionate interest by crowds of spectators on the ground, who stood by to help at the fall of a parachute. The raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942 had given a lot of amateur helpers some early practice, yet it soon became clear that it had only been a raid; it was not the start of liberation. The German surrender at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, a world-shaking event too big to hide, clearly marked something more substantial. Though the Wehrmacht was still unbeaten it no longer looked unbeatable, and millions of occupied civilians took heart.

A fortnight later, on 16 February, Lieutenant T. P. Mayo of the American 422nd Bombardment Squadron was shot down on his way back from a raid on St Nazaire; several Frenchwomen came up to him as he landed, some of them already carrying plain clothes for him. On 17 May a crew from 230 338th Bombardment Squadron had to bail out near Lorient; ‘An excited crowd of Frenchmen came running across the fields to us and took our equipment’; food and clothing were both ready to start them off on their southward journey. By 29 May, when Lieutenant T. M. Peterson and T/Sergeant J. M. Scott bailed out over western France, each was met and given plain clothes; a woman in Scott’s impromptu reception committee had had the forethought to bring a shovel, so that any compromising kit could at once be buried, and they were soon back in England.

When on 24 August 1943 S/Sergeant Claude Sharpless was shot down near Toulouse, a crowd of at least thirty French surrounded him. ‘A man had brought civilian clothes with him. In four minutes I looked like any one of the Frenchmen and my [flying] suit and flying equipment had disappeared.’

Most of this help was purely spontaneous; people rushed out to look after the airmen who were fighting their war for them, out of sheer enthusiasm and humanity mixed. By this time they all knew what occupation was like, and what penalties attached to helping fugitives; the penalties only deterred the timid. Some of the help, far from being provided off the cuff, had been foreseen from afar; an ideal instance is provided by T/Sergeant Samuel E. Potrin of 331st Bombardment Squadron. His aircraft was shot down in a raid on Le Bourget airfield near Paris on France’s national day, 14 July 1943. His parachute opened; he ‘landed in a wheatfield and was rolling up my chute when a Frenchman rode up on a bicycle’ – and this Frenchman, already, was his MI 9 contact. ‘From here my journey was arranged’, that familiar phrase inserted for security’s sake to preserve the helpers’ anonymity in so many thousands of reports, here came very early on, and he was back at his English base in a matter of weeks.

MI 9’s lines were perhaps the most efficient, but they had no monopoly. There were many small private lines, some of them already lost to history; others traceable only through such references as Donald Darling could give them from memory. We might instance the Balfe line, run as he recalled in the 231neighbourhood of Amiens by ‘a former Irish guardsman, his French wife and their two teenage sons … The father was a no-nonsense man of notable physique, as were his two sons, who looked so Irish they might have been born on the “Ould Sod”, except for the fact that they were also very French.’ In that area, they could find plenty of friends among the Britons and half-Britons who tended the colossal graveyards of the previous world war; in a shed in one of which at least evaders were frequently hidden.

A bigger affair was the Dutch-Paris line, run entirely off his own hut by John Weidner, a Dutch Seventh-day Adventist who had all the splendid stubborn righteousness of that creed. He passed people, Jew and Gentile, from the Netherlands into Switzerland, or on to Spain. Through Dr Visser’t Hooft, then in Geneva as the secretary of the World Council of Churches, he had some powerful connections in the free world. An interest was necessarily taken in him in London both by the Dutch government in exile and by the secret services. It was his line that picked up Dourlein and Ubbink, the two victims of SOE’s notorious ‘North Pole’ disaster in Holland who escaped, that guided them into Switzerland, and that later saw them through from Switzerland into Spain. The line saved over a thousand Jews, but at the cost of some 150 arrested members of it, forty of whom – Weidner’s sister Gabrielle included – did not survive. Its head was eventually brought over to England by an air pickup operation, which must have had Dansey’s sanction.

Another, smaller Dutch line with which the Dutch-Paris group worked for a time was run by a huge young man called Christiaan Lindemans (‘King Kong’). Darling suspected that the worst troubles of Dutch-Paris might have stemmed from ‘King Kong’, and claimed to have warned London against him in March 1944. Herbert Ford, Weidner’s post-war friend and neighbour in California, working on evidence unavailable to Darling, concludes rather that a girl courier broke down under torture by the Gestapo in Paris.232

The sketch on the following page, based on the working layout of the ‘Burgundy’ line in the spring of 1944 (of which more in a moment), shows how the tentacles of this sort of network reached out into a large number of villages, and covered a surprisingly dense proportion of the soil of occupied Europe. ‘Comet’ worked in much the same kind of way, in areas away to the north-east of those shown on this sketch.7 It will be noticed that by this time the Balfes have become incorporated in a larger network. Can this have been one of the reasons why the Home Office found it impossible to grant them British citizenship when the war was over?

MI 9 had had its own troubles with ‘North Pole’. Neave obtained Dansey’s grudging leave to start up an organisation in Holland, and sent in to run it a Dutch air hostess called Beatrix (Trix) Terwindt, who had already proved her self-assurance and capacity for keeping her head by escaping from Holland through Belgium, France and Switzerland to London. Greindl (‘Nemo’) of the ‘Comet’ line in Brussels ‘was anxious to have a link on which lie could rely for a system of guides from The Hague and Amsterdam.’ Trix Terwindt (‘Felix’) seemed cut out for the task.

No channel was available for sending her except SOE’s Dutch section, which landed her on the night of 13/14 February 1943 – well before Dourlein’s and Ubbink’s escape – slap into the arms of the German secret police. Her level-headedness did not desert her. Fortunately for her, she knew little about SOE, so she could make few damaging admissions; in fact she hardly said anything, and her enemies did not discover that she was working on a quite separate task for a different service. She survived over two years’ concentration camps and is alive today. As she put it in a letter to Neave after the war, ‘I was an amateur but in war risks have to be taken. I played a game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo with the only difference that I was caged and the cat was free.’

233

234In June of 1943 Neave did what SOE might well have done: dropped an agent into Holland blind – that is, with no reception committee. This was Dick Kragt (‘Frans Hals’), a British subject with a Dutch father, who was dropped not far from Deventer. As it turned out, he was dropped in a smart suburban area instead of the open country, and most of his kit – including his transmitter – was handed straight over to the Germans by the Dutch collaborator into whose garden it fell. However, he retained money, wit and initiative enough to keep himself out of enemy hands, made courier contact with ‘Comet’, got a wireless operator in the end, and did sterling work in the autumn of 1944.

One area remained to be opened up if possible: north-western France. Two efforts to develop Brittany with the help of Free French naval officers failed. A third one was attempted; In the spring of 1943. 138 Squadron, one of the two special duty squadrons that operated from Tempsford just off the Great North Road out of London never had so much trouble finding anyone else’s dropping areas. At the tenth attempt, it succeeded. Two agents were dropped: Vladimir Bouryschkine (‘Val Williams’), who had had earlier experience as a helper in the ‘Pat’ line; and Ray Labrosse, a French Canadian who had escaped across France after Dieppe. Bouryschkine was a White Russian, born in Moscow in 1913, brought up in America, energetic and impulsive.

They were dropped close to Paris – industrial haze turned out to have been the trouble that obscured the spot. Bouryschkine found nearly a hundred evaders hanging about in Brittany, thirty-nine of them in the chateau of Comtesse Betty de Mauduit, who was American. His attempts to shift them by sea failed, because Labrosse’s wireless had not survived the drop. He tried to take a party out by train southwards; they were all arrested on 4 June at Pau, between Toulouse and Bayonne. He was imprisoned at Rennes. With the help of a fellow-Russian who was a prisons labourer he escaped, breaking his leg in the process, and turned 235up in Paris, where he met Labrosse, who had meanwhile returned to England and come out again to France.

Labrosse’s journey to England had been arranged by Georges Broussine (‘Burgundy’), the most successful of a group of Free French officers who operated in north-western France in 1943–4 under the joint auspices of Colonel ‘Passy’ of the BCRA and of Room 900, the usual cover for P15. Broussine managed to send out a few parties from the south Breton coast by boat; it was on one of these which was shipwrecked that the heroic Pierre Brossolette was trying to travel when arrested on 3 February 1944. When Broussine could not send people by boat he sent them, as he sent Labrosse, across Spain. He could not save the Comtesse de Mauduit from being sent to a German concentration camp (whence she returned alive), but managed to remain out of German hands himself – just as well, as he was a Jew – and his group brought out a total of 225 men, many of them along a route through Andorra.

Bouryschkine was promptly returned to London by Labrosse’s new commander, Lucien Dumais, who had also escaped from Dieppe. Dansey suspected Bouryschkine’s story of how he had got out of Rennes prison, and had him locked up for a while as a suspected double agent, a fate visited also by SOE on the ‘North Pole’ escapers Dourlein and Ubbink. All three were released after the Normandy landings had proved successful.

By that time Dumais and Labrosse had at last got a fully-fledged sea escape line working out of Brittany into Cornwall, called ‘Bhelbume’. Dumais’ own account of this enterprise, fuller and more detailed than Neave’s, is particularly well worth reading, and illustrates exactly the difficulty that Crockatt and the rest of MI 9’s staff feared. They were afraid that people of Dumais’ superbly combatant aggressiveness would make too much trouble for the enemy, once the invasion had started, and so endanger their passengers. It is true that ‘Shelburne’ took a great many risks, but they were nicely calculated, and the line not only survived but flourished in secret. This was due partly to 236its leaders’ own capacities, partly to the heroism of their many French assistants of both sexes at the collecting points in Paris and Rennes and near the obscure yet adequate Breton beach at Plouha where the bulk of the passengers were embarked. The bravery of the motor gunboat crews of the Royal Navy who ran the risks of collecting them, not often noticed in escape literature also deserves remark. All told, ‘Shelburne’ claimed 307 succeesses, no mean score for less than a year’s work.

A different sort of bravery, of a more old-fashioned kind than Dumais’ commando-style ferocity, was displayed by a senior officer in the RAF, with unexpected consequences. (Sir) Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman came from what in the Habsburg monarchy used to be called a Kaderfamilie – that is, he belonged to the old officer class. He had won a Distinguished Flying Cross in France in 1918 at the age of nineteen. He had made his life in the service, and like any other good officer he believed he should never give an order he was not prepared to carry out himself.

Service accident promoted him in February 1944 to the rank of air commodore and to the command of a highly secret air formation, of which it was the task to fly over German radar defences in north-west Europe, measure wavelengths, pinpoint stations, and so provide data for the radar countermeasures which formed an important part of the invasion plan. Ivelaw-Chapman was uneasy at sending younger men out on so dangerous and delicate a task, and thought he ought to go on one operation at least. He did, in mid-May, and the aircraft carrying him was shot down over Britanny.

Another aircraft in the same squadron counted the parachutes and reported that everyone’s had opened. This report slumbered in a group captain’s in-tray at the Air Ministry over the weekend; Whitehall then leapt into activity. Langley was informed by Desmond Morton, the Prime Minister’s private secretary for secret matters, that Ivelaw-Chapman was to be recovered coute que coil, or if he could not be recovered he was to be eliminated. This was because the unhappy air commodore 237knew a great deal about the time, place, scale and method of the imminent invasion, and had overlooked the rule that no one half as fully informed as himself was to venture anywhere near enemy territory, until it had begun.

Broussine recovered him within forty-eight hours; reported the fact, to Langley’s and everybody else’s intense relief; and held him in a safe house, pending a sure chance of returning him to England. The safe house was not safe enough; Ivelaw-Chapman fell into German hands in mid-June. By then his special knowledge had ceased to be especially secret. He had the common sense to pass himself off as an evading squadron-leader from bomber command and saw the war out in a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

Two other air force evaders are worth a mention, whom Langley has long quoted as examples of the shortest and the longest evasions of which he knows. The story of the shortest was that of a young fighter pilot in the RAF. One Saturday in the summer of 1943 he got engaged to a stunning girl at a dance at the Savoy, and promised to meet her there again in a week’s time for a party to celebrate. On the following Monday he was shot down in a dawn sweep over northern France. It was his first parachute drop; he did not manage it neatly, and landed on the roof of the greenhouse of a chateau. The gardener, who was a secret resister, hid him in a potting shed, and was trying to clear away the parachute and the mess when his master, a count, unexpectedly strolled by. The count insisted on being introduced to the pilot, whom he entertained for two nights in the chateau. In the middle of the second night the pilot was suddenly woken up, taken out of doors, and bundled into a Lysander in the park: the count also was a secret resister, and kept a safe house for SOE. The pilot kept his date at the Savoy, and later married the girl; though SOE insisted he spend six months cooling his heels in the Scottish Highlands, lest he talk too much.

The longer evasion can be more briefly told. A squadron leader shot down over France in 1941 got as far as Paris, went to a 238race meeting, won some money, and settled down to win more. He was twice visited by emissaries from MI 9 and consistently maintained that a journey farther than Longchamps would be dangerous for anyone as senior as himself. By the summer of 1944 – he had a good eye – he had a racehorse of his own, as well as a charming companion, and MI 9’s second emissary found him ensconced in a flat near the Bois de Boulogne. After the liberation of Paris he consented to return to duty. To Crockatt’s great annoyance, no charge under King’s regulations could be drawn up against him that was certain to stick at a court martial, and he got off scot free.

Help for ‘Overlord’

Much thought was devoted by Crockatt, Holt and their staffs to the best way in which the escape services could help in ‘Overlord’, the impending invasion of north-west Europe, commonly called the Second Front. (Why on earth that phrase was never applied to the campaign in the central Mediterranean, that knocked Italy out of the Axis in September 1943, is an odd question in history and propaganda, asked but not answered here.) IS 9(CMF)’s experiences gave some indications of the sort of problems that would arise, and the sort of forces that would be required. Plenty of transport, massive communications, and warm and close relations with special forces of all kinds as well as the air force authorities, seemed to be the main things needed. The Americans were content to leave the lead with the British; as Catesby Jones put it in a minute to Strong of 30 August 1943, ‘The British have a functioning underground in France. It is efficient enough to chart the progress of all evaders. I believe it unlikely that we could set up as successful an organisation.’

Who was to take command? In September 1943 Langley had handed P15 over to Neave, and taken de Bruyne’s place at Beaconsfield in charge of MI 9b. Crockatt soon let him know that he had been chosen as joint commander of a new unit, 239Intelligence School 9 (Western European Area), or IS 9(WEA). He was to be promoted lieutenant-colonel and to share the command with Lieutenant-Colonel Richard R. Nelson, an insurance magnate from Kansas City, Missouri. Fortunately, he and Dick Nelson got on very well together, and had not the slightest trouble working in double harness.

A War Office file survives to explain the British content of this body, formed at Camp 20 – notionally on 14 January 1944 – and stationed at Fulmer Hall near by from 1 May. It was to have fourteen British officers and twenty-six other ranks, a vehicle for each officer, ‘one box, stationery, field, large,’ ‘1 pr, handcuffs,’ two felling axes, a normal quantity of small arms and small stores, and three no. 22 wireless sets. The Americans matched the British, rank for rank and jeep for jeep.

What was IS 9(WEA) for? Langley and Nelson went to Crockat and Holt to ask; and the brigadier, with his usual gift of clarity and desire to make his intentions crystal clear to his subordinates, explained. Langley does not claim after thirty-four years to repeat Crockatt’s statement word for word, but it was so clear and concise that no further directive was ever necessary. It went like this:

‘The ill-conceived “stand fast” order in Italy resulted in a fiasco which did much harm to the concepts of escaping. The situation is unlikely to be repeated in enemy occupied Western Europe or Germany, but none the less Colonel Holt and I are determined that MI 9 and MIS-X shall have representatives in close touch with the commanders of the fighting forces. IS 9 (WEA) will be attached to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and will therefore be ultimately responsible to General Eisenhower. You will maintain close contact with all departments in his headquarters of which the actions might affect escapers, evaders or POWs in Germany. These contacts will be extended to cover Army Groups, Corps, Divisions, etc. You will therefore be in a position to keep 240Colonel Holt and myself informed as to what is happening or likely to happen in the field and to transmit our requests and views to the relevant commanders.

‘You will be responsible, in conjunction with P15 and the organisations in France, Belgium and Holland, for the continual tion of escape and evasion until the war in the west is over. You will set up reception and interrogation centres for all escapers and evaders and arrange for the dissemination of all intelligence information and the onward transmission of the men to the United Kingdom.

‘No one knows when or how the POW camps in Germany will (216) be liberated and the participation of IS 9(WEA) will depend on initiation at the time. You will receive orders and instructions III due course.

‘Finally, a word of warning. Commanders of regular units, for the most part, dislike and mistrust private armies and frankly they have my sympathy. You will ensure that under no circumstances does IS 9(WEA) ever become classed as another “Popski’s” Private Army. Should I learn that IS 9 is being so regarded and treated, your command will be immediately terminated. Any Questions?’

Langley had only one. ‘What exactly will be the relationship between the Americans and ourselves within the unit?’

Crockatt explained: ‘You will be completely integrated and will live and work as one unit regardless of nationality. In the absence of Dick [Nelson] you will have the right to award punishment to American officers and other ranks and vice versa. In the event of a difference of opinion which you cannot settle yourselves the matter will be referred to Colonel Holt and myself. However, I don’t expect this situation to arise.’ Nor did it; the integration was an entire success. It was not quite unique – one signals section at SHAEF was as completely integrated, and on Eisenhower’s as on Alexander’s staff there was plenty of warm Anglo-American co-operation – but the blend was certainly of interest.241

The main weaknesses of IS 9(WEA) were three. One was its small size. ‘Small is efficient’ was always Crockatt’s motto, as has been said before, but a group only eighty strong in all ranks combined might be overwhelmed by a sudden flood of work, as indeed happened in the spring of 1945. However, in the winter of 1943–4 eighty men were all that could be spared. The second difficulty followed from the first: not all the people posted to the unit were up to their job. None of the Americans had had any experience of clandestine work and few had been shot over, but they were intelligent and quick to learn. With the British element the case was different. MI 9 produced some excellent officers but of those that came in from outside at least one was suffering from battle fatigue, and others were under the illusion – which was difficult to dispel – that IS 9(WEA) was a private army, with all the privileges and loose discipline associated as they thought with such unofficial units. Some of the other ranks were excellent. Two had served prison sentences and few had clean sheets in their army records. Britain was of course by this time scraping the manpower barrel, with the best long since consumed.

The third and worst trouble was that of inadequate communications. Half a dozen twenty-two sets of short range and uncertain performance hardly sufficed to keep jeep patrols in touch with the nearest army headquarters. For long range discussions, particularly for contact with Beaconsfield or with P15, IS 9(WEA) was dependent on the hospitality of the signals staffs of various formations on the Continent: not a satisfactory arrangement. Langley has grateful memories of the help and courtesy extended to him by the MI 6 signals unit that was working, under a suitable cover, at 21st Army Group’s advance headquarters, but so ad hoc an arrangement should not have been the best that could be done.

Within the unit, friction between the British, the Americans, and the occasional attached French, Belgian or Dutch advisers – whose cover was that they were interpreters – was minimal; 242 hardly any serious tiffs are remembered. The worst was when the British other ranks, who had voted to a man to draw American rations instead of British, got bored after a few weeks and demanded to change back.

Ian Garrow was the unit’s original operations officer, but was incapacitated by a bad accident just before D-Day. Major P. S. McCallum from MI 9 replaced him till Neave could finish handing over P15 to Darling; Crockatt, seeing how busy IS 9(WEA) was going to be, let both Neave and McCallum serve with it. The two adjutants, the British ‘Johnny’ Johnson from the Eighth Army and the American Fred Blakeman, who like Holt had fought with the American expeditionary force in 1918, were both experts at calming down the high command when some enthusiast in one or other of the operational teams seemed indiscreet. Blakeman was well over the age limit the Americans sought to impose on their staffs, but Holt persuaded Eisenhower that the adjutant’s presence was an operational necessity.

Four officers in IS 9(WEA) served in the House of Commons after the war, three of them – Airey Neave, Hugh Fraser and Maurice Macmillan – with distinction; the fourth, Peter Baker, had a less happy career. He was convicted of fraud, was sent to prison, and died soon after his release.

Three other officers brought individuality to the unit. One was Captain Peter Murray of the 4/7 Royal Dragoon Guards, who behind the impeccable cover concealed the real identity of Prince Pierre Murat, a direct descendant of the greatest of Napoleon’s cavalry commanders by the emperor’s sister, Caroline Bonaparte; and his mother was a descendant of the equally famous Marshal Ney. As he was perfectly bilingual, he had picked up some odd anecdotes about the British and American view of the French. He was one of the unit’s chief interpreters. Another was Rolfe Elwes, who had been wounded and captured while commanding a platoon of the Coldstream Guards in 1918, and thus knew at first hand what a prisoner of war’s life was like.243

The third officer, ‘Johnny’ Evans, was attached to IS 9(WEA) as air liaison officer, but was not to any noticeable extent under its control. He had a motor caravan, and came and went as and when had chose. Liaison back to the Air Ministry, sideways to the Second Tactical Air Force (2nd TAF), and forwards to its squadrons and to any RAF escapers or evaders he could find, was his task; founded on the theory that no soldier could be expected to understand the technicalities of current air warfare. Langley and Nelson could never find him when they wanted him, and had no idea how he spent his time, but at least his presence in Normandy and Belgium ensured that IS 9(WEA) never had any difficulties with the Air Ministry at all. A fairly full file of his activities during ‘Overlord’ in fact shows that he spent most of his time lecturing to the Second Tactical Air Force, and exchanged numerous notes with Langley about likely safe or safeish areas for airmen to lie up and wait for the battle to catch up with them.

This was the general advice given to evaders in the first few weeks of the Normandy battle. Early on, Langley thought that passage through the fighting line there would be easy for men used to risk and danger. He based this view on some early SAS forays near Caen; but it was soon seen to be a mistake. IS 9(WEA) found itself in everybody’s way in a crowded beachhead, and was able for the moment to do little good. Some of the more restive of the ‘retrievers’, as the operational parties were known, had to be sent back to England for the time being.

The efficiency of the schemes that had already been put to work, and that Langley and Nelson were about to operate, can be judged from a single telling statistic. During ‘Overlord’ it was reckoned that an airman shot down unwounded over German-occupied territory had an even chance of evading successfully, instead of becoming a prisoner of war. The odds remained tilted against people shot down over Germany, indeed as the weight of the air war rested more and more heavily on the Germans aircrew were more likely to be lynched than ever; but 244west of the Third Reich, and in Denmark and Luxembourg as well, the efforts of MI 9 and MIS-X had brought the betting down to evens.

Flying Officer H. Furniss-Roe of 66 Squadron, RAF, had crash-landed near Evreux in Normandy on 22 August 1943, and was back in England via Spain by November. When on 25 January 1944 he force-landed his Spitfire in France again, 300 yards from a German anti-aircraft battery, he had the high spirits to send a last message before he unstrapped himself from his cockpit – ‘back in two months’; nipped into a passing peasant’s cart; met an MI 9 helper within twenty-four hours, and was back on British soil on 10 April, only three weeks late. This can be dismissed as a piece of exuberance, ordinary fighter command high morale; but quite a number of journeys as prompt as Furniss-Roe’s were to be provided with the help of the escape services during the following summer.

When at the end of July 1944 the Americans broke through on the right flank as planned, and a phase of more open warfare began, IS 9(WEA) showed its worth; it became clear also how effective its preliminary planning had been. Crockatt and Holt had taken a lot of care over a suggestion, first put up by Neave that was code-named ‘Marathon’. This was a scheme to concentrate evaders in areas likely to be out of the way both of the Germans and of the eventual Allied advance, in woodland camps: there was to be one near Rennes in eastern Britanny; one near Châteaudun west of Orléans, and one in the Ardennes astride the Franco-Belgian border. Everyone concerned in MI 9 and MIS-X was sure that by setting up these camps they would improve the evaders’ chances of safety. Still more important, they would lessen the risk to the families of helpers who would otherwise have to shelter them, probably in large and police-filled cities such as Brussels and Paris. It was foreseen that retreating Germans might have ragged nerves; Oradour-sur-Glane provided tragic evidence that this foresight was correct. Crockatt was haunted by the spectre of a general massacre of 245Allied troops or airmen caught at large in occupied territory, and resolved to prevent one if he could.

Several Belgian agents of high quality, notably Baron Jean de Blommaert (‘Rutland’), had been sent forward by parachute as far back as the autumn of 1943 to ensure ‘Marathon’s’ success. They had the usual difficulties with the Germans. Conrad Lafleur, another Dieppe escaper and one of their wireless operators, was caught in the act of transmission at Reims, but shot his way out of the ambuscade and was rescued by ‘Comet’. De Blommaert had the traitor Desoubrie on his back for a time; escaped by ‘Comet’ also in March 1944; and parachuted back into France in April to set up ‘Sherwood’, the camp near Châteaudun. Thirty men were I here by D-Day, and over a hundred by the end of July, almost all Of them airmen; sustained partly by parachute drops of food and Mores, partly by what could be bought locally. In the end, 152 were rescued by Neave himself and the American Captain Coletta, under guard of a big SAS patrol, by a bus convoy from Le Mans in mid-August.

Neave entered Paris on 25 August, on the heels of Leclerc’s leading troops. One of the first people he met there was Donald Caskie of the Seamen’s Mission at Marseilles, ‘thin and pale after years in the hands of the Gestapo,’ but alive.

‘Comet’ had not approved of ‘Marathon’. Neave searched the Ardennes in early September for his expected camp; it was not there. Instead, he found a fair number of evaders living it up in Brussels; where the resident IS 9(WEA) field section set up house in what its newsletter tactfully described as ‘two hotels of a type not met with in the U.K.’ – that is, former brothels. Elwes, its commander, was too good a Roman Catholic to sleep sound in a madam’s bed, and soon moved his unit out to the famous monastery at Montaigu near Louvain.

During the war of rapid movement in late August and the first half of September 1944, many evaders were overrun in odd places, besides de Blommaert’s and other organised parties, and many of them got lifts back to England or even to America 246from friendly transport pilots, without passing through any of the solicitously prepared IS 9 interrogation teams. On the other hand, all IS 9 (WEA) staff found themselves bombarded with requests, denunciations, counter-denunciations, information, misinformation, and disinformation; for everybody in France and Belgium who met them leapt wrongly and immediately to the conclusion that they were a sub-unit of the all-powerful Intelligence Service. Their unit sign – three witches on a broomstick, in distant tribute to E. H. Jones’s Road to En-Dor – did little to counteract the myth.

Arnhem

More mythmaking lay immediately ahead. As Eisenhower’s armies began to run out of petrol, the vast airborne operation called ‘Market Garden’ sought to break through the German right flank by seizing a series of river and canal crossings at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem.

Four days before ‘Market Garden’ was launched, a Dutch agent who had made touch with an IS 9 team in Antwerp was sent back into Holland near Eindhoven, at his own request, ‘to collect evaders he was sure would be hiding with his resistance friends in that area,’ The man ‘was a boastful extrovert whom I disliked,’ Langley wrote long afterwards, but he had been given full security clearance by 21st Army Group. Colonel Pinto, the security chief at Dutch advance headquarters, sent a word of warning to Langley, but added that he had no proof; it never crossed Langley’s mind that 21st Army Group had not been warned also. As soon as Eindhoven was liberated the man – Christiaan Lindemans, the notorious ‘King Kong’ – was denounced as a traitor, broke down quickly under interrogation, and later committed suicide.

Newspaper rumour had it that ‘King Kong’ betrayed ‘Market Garden’; but as Colonel Boeree long ago pointed out, the dates really do not fit. General Brereton, the operation’s commander, did not make even an outline plan till the evening of 10 September, 247by which time two SS armoured divisions were already in process of re-forming in and near Arnhem. The essential details of the drop on Arnhem were not fixed till after ‘King Kong’ had crossed the lines. General Student, who is supposed to have inferred the attack on Arnhem from remarks made to him by Lindemans about an impending attack on Eindhoven and beyond, flatly denies it; never met Lindemans; and adds, ‘The truth is, nobody in the German command knew anything about the attack until it happened.’ This does not stop speculation that Lindemans was really a good Dutch patriot who was unlucky; but the weight of available evidence tells the other way.

Once the attack had happened, and had gloriously failed – First Airborne Division, expected to hold out for two days, held out for eight – several hundred evaders from it were left hiding in what was left of Arnhem, in the villages to the west of it, and in Ede, the next town of any size in the same direction. The most resolute and the badly wounded of them came out at once – Captain Eric Mackay, for example, the engineer commander at the fatal bridge, who had taken his escape training to heart. With three companions, he escaped on the way into Germany; they stole a boat, and paddled clandestinely down the Rhine to Nijmegen. But many more remained.

Dick Kragt, ‘Fabian’ of the Belgian SAS, and an MI 9 operator called ‘Ham’ provided some chances of contact with these men. Much more directly, there was a private telephone circuit, still open and untapped by the enemy, between the power station at Nijmegen which was in Allied hands and the power station at Ede, which was in occupied territory but manned by sound Dutchmen. Neave, having clandestine antennae, spotted this link, which Dutch resisters were already using. In the teeth of stick-in-the-mud staff opposition outside MI 9, he determined to make use of it.

South-west of Ede, opposite the town of Tiel, Dutchmen started slipping across the river at dead of night, sometimes bringing an evader or two with them. Neave has given a powerful 248account of how he mounted operation ‘Windmill’, to put an agent called ‘Harrier’ and an American parachutist into Tiel who would get these evasions onto a more settled basis. Langley approved the operation, from Brussels, on the written order that ‘Harrier’ and his companion remained in uniform and did not leave their safe house in daylight. They crossed the river on the night of 10/11 October, and went to stay with the Ebbens family in Tiel, an address provided by Kragt. A leading Dutch official, Dr J. H. van Roijen – later Netherlands ambassador in London – crossed by the same skiff in the opposite direction, bearing important news for his government about the state of the starving Dutch.

‘Harrier’, a jumpy young Englishman who fancied himself as a secret agent but had had no relevant training, disobeyed his orders, and was seen by day in a street in Tiel in plain clothes, recognised as a stranger by a Dutch quisling, and shopped to the Gestapo. He managed to establish a false identity as an evading airborne officer who had lost touch with his unit, was sent to an Oflag, and survived the war (he is now dead; there is no point in giving his name). But his American companion vanished altogether; and both his Ebbens hosts were shot. There was great and just indignation about this case in Holland, then and later. Evans, by a gross breach of security, told ‘Harrier’s’ parents what had happened to their son, and Crockatt was only able with extreme difficulty to avert questions in the House of Commons.

‘Pegasus’, the unit’s other operation across a river – over the Rhine at Randwijk, some six miles south of Ede and eight west of Arnhem – made a better start. A company of Royal Canadian Engineers at Nijmegen had some assault boats, with which they had already rescued many First Airborne Division survivors at the close of the main Arnhem battle. After ‘Harrier’s’ arrest on 17/18 October, the Germans stepped up river bank patrols and searches, but telephone messages from Ede still indicated that there were not too many Germans about. A party of as many 249as 138 evaders were ferried across on the night of 22/23 October, headed by (Sir) Gerald Lathbury, one of the Arnhem brigadiers. Neave and Fraser acted as beachmasters on the southern bank. Neave was astounded to welcome two Dutch naval officers who had been in Colditz with him, who had seized this opportunity to complete their escape. He also recognised ‘The Voice’, that had been reading lists of casualties to him for weeks over the telephone from Ede; it belonged to Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose ‘calm and ingenuity’ Neave praised for their impact on ‘Pegasus I’; it had been Tatham-Warter’s company that reached the critical bridge, object of the divisional drop. The beachmasters on the north bank had been Colonel Dobie, a parachute battalion commander who had already made a daring solo evasion, and a young Canadian officer called Leo Heaps who volunteered for the task, and was at once taken on the strength of IS 9(WEA).

The operation was of great value, both for establishing what had happened in the actual battle of Arnhem, and for discovering a mass of targets and other valuable fragments of intelligence. It was also clear that Hugh Maguire, the divisional IO who had remained behind, had still got several score men with him, for whom a rescue would need to be mounted.

While ‘Pegasus F was a great success,’ ‘Pegasus II’ was a shambles. It was mounted a month later, on 23/24 November, a few miles closer to Arnhem. Storm boats were used; an artillery bombardment again covered the boat engines’ noise; 40mm Bofors firing tracer again gave some clues to the crossing point. Only seven men were rescued; the rest fell into an ambush, and were scattered, recaptured or killed. (Maguire was recaptured.)

The blame for this can reasonably be laid on the London journalist interviewed some of the evaders on Pegasus I, under the pretence that he was an officer of IS 9, and still more on the censor who passed his piece for publication. The Germans can hardly have failed to read it and to profit by it. Crockatt was fully aware when he approved the plan for ‘Pegasus II’ that the 250odds were very heavy against its success, but no further risks for the Dutch families who sheltered the evaders were acceptable.

Neave went back to London to begin work for the Dutch wards bureau, but Fraser remained on the spot, still in touch with Dutch resistance – rather slowly, because Kragt and ‘Fabian’ both communicated through London (‘Ham’ had fallen into enemy hands). He was able to raise some S-phones, extra secure radiotelephones, from SOE, and this improved working conditions for him a lot; they were quite as useful for passing intelligence as for arranging evasions. A quiet, steady, secure traffic by canoes through the marshes of the Biesbos, farther down stream, was developed through the winter. One of its most distinguished passengers, then Brigadier Hackett, has written an unusually vivid book about what it was like to be wounded at Arnhem, to hobble out of a prison hospital, to spend months in a devout private house in Ede which backed onto a Feldgendarmerie billet, and then to be brought out suddenly into the company of old friends, and away by canoe.

When he and Warrack, the divisional medical officer – also the author of a notable book – emerged, the IS 9(WEA) group at First Canadian Army noted: ‘never an interrogation had given us so much pleasure.’

All through the last winter and spring occasional evasions went on across Holland and Denmark, Germany and northern Italy; Evans went on lecturing; Maskelyne went on lecturing; Germans went on fighting, to the very bitter end. Liberated Frenchmen, Belgians, Brabanters found life much more pleasant without the Gestapo but were still woefully short of food and fuel, and found their lives quite often disrupted by denunciations, by Hitler’s revenge weapons, or by the December panic of the Ardennes offensive. This chapter need not end on quite so dour a note; let us turn for a moment to farce.

A British heavy bomber crew got into difficulties during a night raid on Germany. All their direction-finding equipment, including their wireless and their main compass, was shot away, 251and their altimeter damaged. They ran into thick cloud. Their engines and petrol tanks were intact; steering by guess and by God, they waited for daylight. In the mirk of dawn, as petrol ran low, they caught sight of some level pasture, and landed. A peasant walked by, remembering their escape lecturer’s advice to make friends with labouring people in occupied countries, they sent the most proletarian member of the crew across to talk to him. ‘Where are we, mate? Oo somm noo?’ ‘Olland,’ the peasant grunted, and walked on. The crew ran back to their aircraft, set it on fire, broke out their Dutch escape purses, and were trying to plot a course on one of their escape maps when a man in dark blue uniform bicycled up and asked them, in perfect English, if they needed an ambulance? They turned out to have landed in south-east Lincolnshire, in fact in Parts of Holland. The Air Ministry was furious; Crockatt was vastly entertained.

1Conversations with Simonds, 1977–8. Much of the next seven paragraphs is gratefully derived from the same source.

2WO 208/3418, letter 66, 4 March 1945, reported her shot in Budapest on 6 November 1944.

3See Weissberg, Advocate for the Dead, for the details; and Eichmann’s sensational trial in Israel in 1961.

4WO 208/3377, ‘Amsterdam’ report by Colonel G. Kraigher to commander, Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAFF), 18 September 1944; information from H. M. Threfall, who like Kraigher took part in the operation. A few of the Americans are identifiable: 2/Lieut. Gerald K. Rothermel and S/Sgt. Robert J. Fleharty of the 736^th Bombardment Squadron, shot down over Slovakia on 7 July, who had escaped in a party of thirty from a prison near Bratislava on 2 September and marched eastwards; 2/Lieut. Walter Leach and S/Sgt. Delos Miller, 759^th Squadron, shot down 130 miles away on 22 August, and guided by locals; and Corporal P. C. P. Reinhart, 429^th Squadron, who had bailed out only four days earlier, on 13 September, and walked. (Simpsons Historical Research Center file 670–614–1, Fifteenth Air Force escapers and evaders. Reports in this large file are kept by the date on which their subject returned to Allied territory; there is also a names index.)

5Distinguish sharply of course from the British Special Boat Section which shared the same acronym, SBS (cp. pp. 92–3, 200–1)

6[Readers of this sort of deciphered message in the original will recall the cipher clerks’ routine of putting ‘?’ after a word that had to be conjectured in a slightly corrupt text.]

7Information gratefully received from M. Leslie Atkinson.