Das Reich (6 page)
The general instruction to all the men of the AS and those
maquis
under the influence of De Gaulle or of British officers – around two-thirds of all
résistants –
was that they should fight the Germans only when they were compelled to do so. There was a limited programme of sabotage of vital industrial targets. But between 1942 and June 1944 most Resistance groups fought gun battles only when themselves attacked, or when a minor action seemed essential to maintain morale and stave off boredom.
The remaining one-third of
résistants
, the communists of the
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
who scorned De Gaulle or any authority
other than their own, pursued an entirely different policy. They were committed to an internal liberation of France by her own people – and of course to their own political glory in the process. From late 1942 onwards, they sought to damage the Germans wherever and whenever they could be attacked, at whatever cost in reprisals, and whatever the strategic futility of their actions. They captured or stole arms from Vichy, the Germans and non-communist Resistance groups with equal energy. The attacks on the Das Reich Division’s area around Montauban in the spring of 1944 were almost entirely the work of FTP groups. They despised the
Armée Secrète
’s policy of
attentisme, immobilisme
. ‘The French know that a citadel is never so readily taken as from within,’ wrote their leader, Charles Tillon, ‘and that none has ever successfully resisted attack from without and within. This is why they are so astonished to be so poorly encouraged and assisted to play a decisive role . . .’
Many FTP
maquis
achieved a terrible reputation in their regions as little better than bandits, murdering alleged collaborators with a ruthlessness that earned as much enmity from respectable Frenchmen as the reprisals of the Das Reich and the Gestapo. But there were also many non-communists who admired the energy with which the FTP inflicted violence on the Germans. ‘If there is no violence, how is France to know that there is a Resistance?’ ran their argument. It possessed considerable force. The momentum that Resistance had attained by June 1944 owed more than its survivors may care to accept to the actions of the FTP – and to the hatred of the Germans which reprisals had inspired among workers and peasants who would otherwise have remained indifferent neutrals.
But London’s policy was still single-mindedly directed towards D-Day. The success of Resistance, in the eyes of the Allied governments and the chiefs of staff, would be determined by the scale of difficulty that it then caused to the Germans – above all, the delay it could impose on the movement to Normandy of reinforcements.
Among these, outside northern France the 2nd SS Panzer Division was the most formidable formation.
For the French Section of Special Operations Executive 6 June was the beginning of the end of four years of extraordinary labour. There was a rush to dispatch the last batch of agents to the field. A quarter of all the arms parachuted into France since 1941 were dropped in the single month of May 1944. For months, an acrimonious struggle for control of SOE operations in France had been approaching a crisis. It had been agreed that the Free French, in the person of General Koenig, should take command of French Section from the British once the Allies had landed. But to their bitter resentment neither Koenig nor De Gaulle himself was to be allowed more than a few hours’ notice of the invasion. The private view at the top of SOE was that the vital work of French Section would be finished after D-Day. Once Resistance became an open rather than a secret army the alleged insecurity of the Free French could do no harm. Within ‘F’, however, there was persistent bitterness about the new command structure. Vera Atkins flatly refused to leave Baker Street for the move to Koenig’s headquarters in Bryanston Square, and indeed she never did so. This last unseemly wrangle somehow sullied their four years of passionate, dedicated struggle towards the great moment of the Allied return to France.
They held no celebration in the austere rooms at Norgeby House in Baker Street. They were too busy. Signals traffic and demands for supplies continued to pour into the office. In any event, throughout the war they had neither celebrated their secret triumphs, nor wept for their secret tragedies: ‘There was no place for emotional scenes. It would have seemed to cheapen what we were doing,’ said one of them. For four years they had worked to build an underground circulation system in France, to provide the lifeblood of arms, explosives and communications for the Resistance. Now, the body was coming to life. From D-Day onwards,
French Section could do little to steer the battle – it could only report and support it.
Special Operations Executive had been created in the depths of Britain’s strategic impotence in 1940 ‘to set Europe ablaze’, in Churchill’s memorable phrase. Ironically enough, it was that man of peace Neville Chamberlain who was responsible for drawing up its original charter for ‘. . . a new organization . . . to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’. To understand SOE, and to judge what the French Resistance did and did not achieve in 1944, it is essential to remember that throughout its history the organization was dogged by controversy and scepticism in London. The Chiefs of Staff disliked and distrusted it. Beyond their instinctive distaste for irregular warfare, they considered it – like all ‘private armies’ – a drain of resources from the main battlefields, above all a waste of precious aircraft. In 1942–3, much of the material parachuted to Resistance movements in Europe was from captured Italian stocks, simply because these were all that the War Office would release. Sten guns were unsuitable for guerilla operations in open country, because they were short-range weapons wasteful of ammunition in unskilled hands. But they were dropped into France in vast numbers because they were cheap and plentiful.
In February 1941, the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, one of the principal architects of area bombing, attempted to insist that one of the first SOE parties sent into France should be dropped in uniform: ‘I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated . . .’ Portal never lost his scepticism about SOE, even when he was confronted with such achievements as the halting of tank production at the Peugeot factory in 1943, one of the great sabotage coups of the war. ‘I am not at all clear,’ he wrote acidly on 27 February 1944, ‘how far the promises and claims of SOE have been fulfilled or substantiated. I have in mind as a typical instance the Peugeot factory at Montbéliard. There
must be many others. I believe SOE claims to have put this plant out of action by the sabotage of a single individual . . . I should gravely doubt its being true.’
MI6, the professional Secret Intelligence Service, had obvious cause to dislike its amateur rival because SOE’s campaign to make conspicuous trouble for the Germans made the work of SIS agents, who were seeking to gather intelligence as unobtrusively as possible, substantially more difficult. There was also jealousy. All the evidence now available suggests that SIS achieved little through its agents in Occupied Europe in World War II, and certainly less than SOE. The prestige of SIS in 1945 stemmed almost entirely from the work of the Ultra decrypters at Bletchley Park, whom that skilful courtier Sir Stewart Menzies, head of SIS, had contrived to keep within his own empire. ‘C’, as Menzies was known, together with his deputy Sir Claude Dansey, met the chiefs of SOE regularly throughout the war. But SIS was never better than a suspicious neutral in the Whitehall struggle for resources and support.
The fiercest battle of all, of course, was that fought by General De Gaulle, who claimed the right to control all agents and Resistance operations on French soil. To his bitter resentment, he was merely permitted to drop his own arms and agents through SOE’s RF Section, created specifically to maintain control over Free French activities and communications. RF worked parallel to but with somewhat fewer resources than the British-run F Section. F’s officers maintained regular contact with the Free French through meetings with ‘Colonel Passy’, the austere young Captain André Dewavrin who commanded De Gaulle’s
Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action militaire
– the BCRA – from Duke Street, behind Selfridge’s department store. Although the British found little to like about Dewavrin, they respected his brains and did much informal business without friction. ‘But any time that Passy came to Baker Street in uniform, we knew that we were in for trouble,’ according to an SOE officer. When Passy spoke as the voice of De Gaulle, it was seldom without bitterness. It is a measure of the
General’s attitude that after the Liberation, on several occasions when he met a French Section officer in France he sought to have him immediately ejected from the country. It is a measure of British regular army feeling towards SOE that, after the war, General Sir Colin Gubbins – the Highland soldier who directed the organization with distinction from September 1943 – found his career permanently blighted by his association with the ‘irregulars’ and died a disappointed man.
But SOE also had powerful friends, above all the Prime Minister. Churchill seldom informed himself about the details of SOE operations in Europe, but his spirit was deeply moved by the ideal of Resistance. His support for Gubbins was strengthened by a number of meetings at Downing Street with British agents who had worked in France, above all Wing-Commander Yeo-Thomas of RF Section. When Lord Selborne became Minister of Economic Warfare in February 1942, with responsibility for SOE, he used his personal friendship with Churchill to some effect, especially in the struggle with Sir Arthur Harris and Bomber Command for supply-dropping aircraft. SOE’s senior officers never felt much warmth for Major Desmond Morton, the former Secret Service officer who served as Churchill’s personal aide and mediated when necessary between ‘C’ and Gubbins. But one of the chiefs of SOE always believed that Morton made a decisive personal contribution in persuading Churchill that it was essential to support De Gaulle as the unchallenged leader of Free France. Had that decision not been taken, the course of events in France both before and after D-Day would have been even more complex and possibly disastrous.
By June 1944, SOE had grown into an organization of almost 14,000 people, running a chain of agent schools in England and Scotland, dropping arms by sea and air almost nightly across Europe. Its formal title had also changed, to become SOE/SO. It was now officially a joint Anglo-American organization – the SO stood for Special Operations, an arm of General Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services. An American officer had been placed
alongside each of the senior British executives as part colleague, part understudy. To the Americans’ chagrin, the British had largely excluded their men from an operational role in France until after D-Day. But they shared in the fierce debate about the role of Resistance that preceded the invasion, and which began with the establishment of a formal SOE/SO Planning Group on 30 August 1943.
Until the last weeks before the landings on 6 June, Yugoslavia was overwhelmingly the most important theatre of operations for SOE, where it was effectively sponsoring a full-scale war. More than twice as many weapons were being delivered to Yugoslavia as to France, chiefly because it was possible to land cargoes from the sea. But all over Europe, SOE’s agents were becoming legends in the closed world of secret operations: Harry Rée, who organized the destruction of the Peugeot tank plant; Michael Lis, who pursued a charmed life through Hungary and Poland; Paddy Leigh-Fermor, who kidnapped the German general commanding in Crete; Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard, who sent a last message from his doomed position in the mountains of Yugoslavia: ‘Give all my love to all at White’s. This is no place for a gentleman . . .’
Those with the best prospect of survival on SOE operations were the most ruthless and untrusting. But however strongly their instructors discouraged it, there was also a romantic, buccaneering streak about the organization that brought into its ranks many men and women who would never have become professional spies for SIS. Although reared as a regular gunner, General Gubbins himself had always been suspected of unorthodox tastes. He wrote an important pamphlet on guerilla warfare in the 1930s, and commanded the Independent Companies in Norway in 1940, winning a DSO. But he incurred the lasting enmity of the Brigade of Guards in Scandinavia by sacking one of its battalion commanders on the battlefield. Animosity from some of the most senior soldiers in Whitehall dogged him for the rest of the war. ‘Gubbins had all the outward affectations of a regular Highland officer,’ said Selwyn Jepson, French Section’s recruiting
officer who later became his friend, ‘but underneath it all, there was great sensitivity.’
After Yugoslavia, France was always Gubbins’s overwhelming preoccupation, ‘. . . because the Allies were obviously going to have to land somewhere there in the end’, in the words of Colonel Dick Barry, his chief of staff. From October 1941 until 1945 the French Section of SOE was commanded by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, with a staff of some thirty men and women in Baker Street, supported by hundreds of training instructors, signals and supply personnel at ‘the stations’ all over England and Scotland. Like most of SOE, Buckmaster was not a professional soldier – indeed his only military experience had been gained as a cadet in the Eton Officers’ Training Corps, on an Intelligence course in 1940, and as a liaison officer with the Free French on the Dakar expedition. Before the war, he had been a senior executive of Ford in France, and one of his staff said, not without respect, that ‘he brought the optimism of a sales director into Baker Street’. His enthusiasm and energy made a great contribution to French Section’s success, although the reverse of these qualities as a certain lack of scepticism: ‘He believed that all his geese were swans,’ according to a senior SOE officer, Buckmaster’s deep respect and feeling for the agents whom he sent into France were shared by all his staff. They never achieved a battlefield commander’s resigned detachment about losses. When mistakes were made, it was almost always because French Section had been too ready to believe that too much was being achieved in the field. Their greatest difficulty throughout the war was accurately to assess the achievements and potential of networks in the field when there were no troops to inspect, no battlefields upon which to measure yards won or lost. Colonel Barry said: ‘One would hear that such-and-such a network was very efficient, but it was all hearsay. One never saw the bloody thing.’
