Das Reich (7 page)

French Section has been the subject of some misunderstanding since the war. General Gubbins and the operational chief of the Western Europe department, Robin Brook, exercised rather more
control of operations in France, and Colonel Buckmaster perhaps a little less, than has generally been recognized. F played the central role in sending officers to France to assess the capabilities of Resistance groups and to arrange arms deliveries to them. By June 1944 there were some forty French Section networks each operating with at least one British-trained agent. But throughout most of France, British officers did not control the Resistance or lead it into action. It was not their business to use a gun, except in self-defence. Their vital function was to act as a catalyst for Resistance, to make it possible for Frenchmen to translate their own will into action. They sought to teach, to encourage, and to convey the hopes and wishes of London. Most lacked the temperament or training to act as military commanders in the field, a function that former French regular soldiers undertook in most areas.

The operations of the Das Reich Division involved five of French Section’s networks in southern and central France, and it will become apparent that in almost all their areas, as throughout the rest of France, the impetus for Resistance came from within. To the end, local commanders jealously guarded their right to command their own men. Some surrendered it latterly to De Gaulle’s French nominees. Very occasionally, they accepted the direction of an Englishman of outstanding personal force, such as George Starr. But throughout the war, the most important function of the British staff in Baker Street was to search out, train and dispatch men and women of exceptional character, capable of moving others by sheer force of personality. In the early years of F Section, they were obliged to select agents who were capable of living a cover story, of acting as something close to the traditional image of the spy. By late 1943 and early 1944, as the paramilitary role of the Resistance developed, agents who could scarcely speak more than schoolboy French were being dispatched to the wilder rural regions. From beginning to end, the agents who failed were almost all those who lacked the inner strength, the lack of need to confide in others while themselves encouraging
confidences, that was essential to their curious calling. Yet it is striking to notice that there was absolutely no common denominator between the men and women of SOE beyond their courage. There was no
genus
agent as there was a
genus
Guards officer, bomber pilot, even
résistant
. Each was entirely an individual, often whimsical and elusive.

Once these agents had gone to France, Baker Street could seldom give them useful tactical instructions about what to attack or where to go. The staff knew too little about conditions on the spot. Signals traffic was generally restricted to brief practical messages about the number of men an agent believed could be mobilized in a given area, and about rendezvous for the dropping of arms, explosives and money – the last always an essential lubricant in making local Resistance groups susceptible to reason. F section knew a great deal about the conditions of life in France – ration cards, train times, German repressive measures – but very little about the detailed military situation. While SIS, through Ultra, was reading many German troop deployments and readiness states, virtually no military intelligence was passed on to French Section. Resistance was regarded as a strategic weapon. Baker Street was seldom brought into Allied planning debates, and Gubbins never achieved the place that he sought on the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

A perceptive SOE officer who served with distinction in France remarked that ‘there was no atmosphere of brilliance in Baker Street – just shrewd, sensible people working very hard indeed’. Beyond Buckmaster, the most familiar figures were Gerry Morel, the Operations Officer – thought by some to be a trifle lightweight for his role; ‘BP’ – Bourne-Paterson, a professional accountant who handled finance; Selwyn Jepson, a successful novelist who fulfilled the critical role of recruiting officer; and Vera Atkins, wryly pseudonymized by George Millar in his excellent book about his SOE experiences,
Maquis
, as ‘the intelligent gentlewoman’. Coolly handsome, very tough, shrewd, quick, Miss Atkins (for she held no rank until she became a WAAF squadron-leader in August 1944
and seldom wore a uniform) was regarded by many people as the critical force in French Section. In Baker Street’s years of almost chronic crisis, Vera was the woman never seen to lose her head.

Her father had been in the timber business. She was largely educated in France, and travelled widely in Europe before the war, learning to take shorthand in three languages. In 1940 she was living at home with her mother and working in Civil Defence when the superb British facility for word-of-mouth recruiting sought her out for French Section. She came to Baker Street as a secretary on a month’s trial, and ended the war with an absolute grasp of every aspect of F’s affairs. It was Vera who kept the signal log and card index that were almost the only written records. Much of the Section work seemed to be done at night, and again and again she, Buckmaster or Morel would find themselves catching two or three hours’ sleep on a camp bed in the office before waking to read the latest signals brought by dispatch rider from the huge radio stations at Crendon and Poundon on the Oxfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. In a very English way, although they worked in conditions of such intimacy, they saw little of each other outside the office. Vera’s mother was allowed to know nothing of the reasons for her endlessly absent lifestyle. One morning when she came home from Tempsford at breakfast time, Mrs Atkins said with a sigh: ‘Well, I hope at the end of all this he makes an honest woman of you, dear.’ A Frenchman who was trained in England by F Section was among those who much admired Vera. He nerved himself to make a pass, but in the end could not go through with it – he was too frightened of her.

At the beginning of 1944, French Section faced a crisis: hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were now believed to be ready to join an uprising when the Allies landed, but there were arms for only a tiny fraction of them. It required an average of twenty-five RAF bomber sorties to drop arms for 1,000
résistants
. Each night, the RAF was dispatching enough bombers on a single raid to Germany
to arm 30,000
résistants
, but the Air Staff and Sir Arthur Harris resolutely refused to divert more than twenty-three Halifaxes to the needs of SOE throughout north-western Europe. The Chiefs of Staff showed little interest in the problem: they regarded General De Gaulle and the Resistance as a potential political liability, rather than an actual military asset. During the February moon period, against 1,500 tons of arms landed in Yugoslavia, France received only 700 tons. In desperation, the Free French and SOE for once made common cause in turning to the Prime Minister.

Churchill did not disappoint them. He had already been influenced by impressive pleas from leading Frenchmen, among them Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. At a meeting on 27 February attended by Selborne, Sinclair the Air Minister, and representatives of Gubbins and De Gaulle, Churchill over-rode the airmen, and decreed that supply-dropping to France should become the second priority of Bomber Command, whenever aircraft could be spared from the Battle of Berlin. In the last quarter of 1943, the RAF had dropped 139 tons of arms into France. In the first quarter of 1944, this rose to 938 tons. In the second quarter, with American help, it reached 2,689 tons. Just over half of all these weapons went to F Section circuits, the remainder to those liaising with RF.

But the Allied invasion planners at SHAEF were less than delighted by the Prime Minister’s intervention. ‘We cannot hope to equip all the Resistance bodies to the extent we wish to,’ said a SHAEF memorandum of 28 February. For the purposes of the invasion, all Allied Resistance and behind-the-lines commando operations were being coordinated by Special Forces headquarters, a specially created body answerable to Eisenhower, despite protests from Koenig. Throughout the winter of 1943 and the spring of 1944, the representatives of SFHQ debated plans for the participation of Resistance in Overlord. But to their increasing dismay, they found that the planners at SHAEF took little interest in the hopes and ambitions of guerillas and saboteurs. ‘It is unfortunate that Resistance only gets “support by results”,’ wrote SHAEF’s G-3 Operations Department in answer to a protest from SFHQ ‘and
never ahead of results. The fact remains that owing to the nature of its indefinite contribution, Resistance has to prove itself before getting the support necessary . . .’

After the initial Allied landing in Normandy, the decisive problem was to prevent the Germans from building up their counter-attack against the beach-head more rapidly than the Allies could move reinforcements across the Channel to strengthen it. If the Germans could move unimpeded, predicted the Joint Planning Staff, by D+60 they could have a theoretical fifty-six divisions (with a strength equivalent to thirty-seven Allied units) deployed against thirty-six Allied divisions in France. SHAEF Intelligence staffs had created a mass of detailed projections of German troop movements in the first days after the Allied landings:

Through Ultra, they were reading almost every German monthly equipment state. They knew, for instance, that ‘2 Sugar Sugar Panzer Div’, as the decrypters incongruously recorded the Das Reich, was short of 257 trucks, had only two of a complement of seventeen tracked artillery tractors, and was 2,001 rifles and 546 machine pistols short of complement. But SHAEF consistently overestimated both the speed at which the German units in the West would be ordered to Normandy, and the pace at which they would move once they had been set in motion.

They had to. It was their business to plan for a ‘worst case’ situation. After much argument among the airmen and heart-searching by the Prime Minister about the cost in civilian life, it was agreed that Allied bombers should carry out an intensive
bombardment of seventy-two critical railway junctions in France during the months before D-Day. To conceal the location of the landings, the attacks would be spread throughout the north and centre of the country. Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander, rejected proposals for concentrating the attack on rail bridges, on the ground that these were too difficult to hit. The bombers would go for major rail centres, on the basis that even those which missed their aiming point would probably damage other rail installations.

The Free French, appalled by the prospective casualties, considered the possibility that the rail system could be immobilized by a general strike of SNCF workers from D-Day. But the idea was rejected not only because of the difficulty of carrying it out, but because it was essential to maintain some communication with the great cities of France in order to feed their populations: ‘It was unthinkable to compel 400,000 people to take to the
maquis
. . . and the total strangulation of the network would cause a famine.’ Contrary to the accounts of some Resistance historians, it was never intended that the entire rail network of France should come to a halt after D-Day.

But the other obvious course, keenly advocated by SOE, of attacking the railways by sabotage at minimal risk to civilian life, was politely brushed aside by the planners. ‘The weight of air effort necessary to produce results comparable to those achieved by the SOE/SO option would certainly be very considerable,’ wrote Kingston McLoughry, Air Commodore Plans and Operations at Allied Air Forces HQ on 10 February. He went on:

General Morgan added a note to the same file: ‘I agree with you entirely that we must continue to do as we have in the past, and treat any dividend we may get out of SOE as a windfall . . .’

Through all the debates that continued until the eve of D-Day about the role of the French Resistance, this was the unchanging view of the Allied planners. The Resistance should be encouraged to create whatever havoc it could for the Germans, but no part of the Overlord plan should be made dependent on Resistance success. This attitude must have been reinforced by a modest experiment carried out in southern France in December 1943. Local Resistance groups were allotted fifty rail targets, to be attacked on receipt of an ‘Action Message’ from London, of the kind that would be transmitted across all France on D-Day. The message was duly sent. A few weeks later a full report reached London. Of the fifty targets specified, fourteen had been attacked, together with a further twelve chosen on local initiative by
résistants
. SHAEF was not greatly impressed. One of the officers who served in SHAEF’s G-3 division in 1944, liaising with SOE and SFHQ remarked: