The Lifeline - The Shetland Bus in WW2

I’ve always been interested in untold stories of WW2, especially stories from overlooked outposts, such Shetland (The Lifeline). Although The Shetland Isles are a long way from the mainland it would be a mistake to think that the islanders of Shetland were little involved in the war effort against Germany. As one of the furthest flung points of the UK, Shetland was in an ideal position to act as a staging post between the mainland and Nazi-occupied Norway.

The idea of the Shetland Bus originated when a marine base was being established in late 1940 at Lerwick, and caught the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who realised that the base could be used as a staging post for arms and information in the fight against the Germans.

David Howarth’s excellent non-fiction book The Shetland Bus describes how small fishing boats acted as go-betweens for the Norwegian Resistance, supplying arms, personnel, and intelligence in their fight against their fascist invaders, and this was my starting point for the novel, which draws on various true-life incidents. This clandestine route across the sea was in operation between Scotland and German-occupied Norway from 1941 until the surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, and it grew from being just fourteen fishing boats to a much bigger operation once the US got involved in the war.

 

To reconstruct these journeys across the North Sea for The Lifeline, I drew on memoirs and real accounts from men who made the crossing. The Shetland Bus Memorial is located at Scalloway in Shetland, and the local museum has a permanent exhibition relating to the activities of the Shetland Bus and information about those who manned it.

Although the boats pretended to be regular Norwegian fishing boats, they were ingeniously equipped with machine guns and ammunition hidden in boxes of fish, or oil barrels, as the men often had to defend themselves from enemy fire. Once the Nazis discovered this route was being used to support Resistance activities, they patrolled the coasts regularly with boats and reconnaissance planes, which would strafe the boats if they were spotted beyond Norwegian waters. If the men on board were captured by enemy patrols, they were tortured then executed.

Leif Larson is the most famous of all the Shetland Bus crew and the most highly decorated Naval Officer of the war. Known in Norway as ‘Shetland’s Larsen,’ he escaped from Norway in February 1941 in a fishing boat and trained with the military unit called the Linge Company. During WW2 he made over 50 trips to Norway including one trip where on the way back his boat was attacked by the Luftwaffe and six of his crew were hit. The surviving two men made it to the Alesund area and were picked up by a ship that took them back to Shetland. 

Arguably worse than the threat of Nazi attack, was the other enemy – the winter weather. Sorties had to take place in winter when enemy patrols were less likely to spot them. The mountainous seas and wintry conditions of fog, ice and storms made the journeys perilous. My fictional narrative features Jørgen Nystrøm, a Norwegian wireless operator who retrains to crew on The Shetland Bus. 

My other main character is a female teacher, Astrid Dahl. Her story centres on the Norwegian Teachers’ Strike. When the Nazis try to force the teachers to join their Fascist teachers union, Astrid refuses and persuades others to join her in defying them. This rebellion leads her into danger, and eventually forces her to try to escape Norway, via her only lifeline – The Shetland Bus. The stories of the two main characters coincide, and I hope provide both an insight into Norway in the war, and a satisfying story.

 

One of the pleasures for me as a writer was to be able to describe the wind-blown Shetland Islands and the majestic mountains and fjords of Norway, so I do hope some of you will take the journey with me!

 

Listen to a BBC podcast about the Shetland Bus. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028vd4

THE LIFELINE mybook.to/LIFELINE

Website www.deborahswift.com

Twitter @swiftstory Bluesky @authordeborahswift

Pics: Wikipedia, Pexels, my own.

The Fake Gestapo Cell in London in WW2

by Deborah Swift

During WW2 the government did its best to suppress the British Union of Fascists (BUF), but MI5’s effort to prevent fascist activities was hampered by the government’s advisory committee on internment. This advisory committee consisted of members who were influential in society, friends of aristocrats and the upper classes. They were there to make decisions about who should be removed from society as a threat to the war effort. But members of the BUF had friends on the committee who frequently recommended the release of their upper-class colleagues despite their fascist sympathies.

 

Pic: Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists (British Library)  

Determined to stop this, MI5 set about forming a fake Gestapo cell. It was led by Eric Roberts, an unassuming-looking bank clerk who worked for the Westminster Bank. Roberts was a former fascist sympathiser, but he had changed allegiance and now became an undercover agent in the BUF.


Roberts was supplied with a fake Gestapo identify card and then assumed the alias of ‘Jack King’, supposedly a German agent who’d been recruited in Britain in early 1939 to compile information on those who would be ‘loyal to the Fatherland’ in the event of Nazi domination.

 

Pic Jack King's Nazi identity Card (National Archive)


Over the next three years, ‘Jack King’ put together a network of hundreds of Nazi supporters. His aim was to channel all the information given to him back to MI5 whilst pretending that this intelligence was being fed back to the Gestapo in Berlin. Jack King maintained his nerve and was able to successfully defuse many of the plans made by Hitler’s supporters in Britain.






Central to the BUF network were two ardent fascists, Marita Perigoe and Hans Kohout, who also feature in The Silk Code. Marita Perigoe had a grudge against the British because her husband Bernard, a committed fascist, had been imprisoned by the internment committee. Marita made herself King’s second-in-command, and unbeknownst to her, MI5 housed her in a specially bugged flat in central London so they could track her conversations and contacts.

In my novel 'The Silk Code' all these characters make an appearance. Spies like Marita provided ‘Jack King’ with maps showing the location of Britain’s petrol and aviation stocks, top secret research on new types of engines for fighter planes, and reports on experimental tanks. Some recruits spied in their home towns for information on possible targets for German bombers, or for sites of military bases and civil defence.

Some were even happy to gloat over the death and injuries caused by air raids, incorrectly putting their success down to intelligence they had provided, when in fact none of the information ever got to Germany.

When Oswald Moseley was released from prison he tried to revive his plans for a fascist Britain, but this failed. So in 1949 Marita Perigoe left England and headed for Australia where she had several further marriages and became a costume designer for theatre.

Marita Perigoe died in 1984, never learning that she had been fooled by ‘Jack King’ in WW2.

Read more about it on the BBC website

Read about Marita in The Telegraph 

 

‘The Silk Code had me absolutely hooked… A great storyline full of bravery, trust, love, survival, betrayal and determination.’ NetGalley reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Based on the true story of ‘Englandspiel’, one woman must race against the clock to uncover a traitor, even if it means losing the man she loves.

Universal Link https://mybook.to/SilkCode

Decoders of the WW2 Special Operations Executive

by Deborah Swift

After the fall of France and Belgium, a new organisation was formed – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to strengthen subversion and sabotage in occupied territory and behind enemy lines.

To disrupt the enemy, agents sent abroad were charged with destroying railways, utilities such as telephone exchanges, bridges and factories, and then also to organise resistance cells of volunteers from within. Churchill’s famous instruction to Hugh Dalton, the then head of the SOE was to 'set Europe ablaze!'

The SOE headquarters, to train and recruit enemy agents, was in Baker Street in London, and the SOE began to recruit men and women to fill their ranks. One of the roles they needed to fill was that of decoders, women who would try to unscramble the ‘indecipherables’ – messages from agents abroad who had mangled their coding either through fear, pressure or simply forgetfulness.

These women had some skill in puzzle-solving, for example crosswords, but little else in the way of experience. Often they were daughters of someone else in the service, or of a friend or neighbour, as was all top secret and done by word of mouth. In my novel Nancy arrives there because her brother is already working for the SOE.

Women were recruited from all walks of life, the main criteria being that they had the language of the place they would be operating in, and were calm under pressure. The trainers tested them mercilessly, even going so far as to subject the women to enemy-like interrogations and they were rigorously vetted both during recruitment and during training.

 

Leo Marks in his book ‘Between Silk and Cyanide’ details all the methods that were tried to make the codes easier for agents to use. These included the use of poem codes (the agent and his decoder would learn a poem as their crib sheet) to printing on silk with disposable single-use grids of numbers.

The average lifespan of an agent sent abroad by the SOE was a mere six weeks, which means many were caught and killed earlier. In Holland the messages were broken very efficiently by the Germans, and after the first few Dutch agents were captured, it made it easier for German Intelligence to transmit as if they were the agent, getting the key to the code through torture and intimidation. The people at Baker Street were unaware they were decoding messages from the enemy who had infiltrated the resistance.

The agents that were still free were always looking over their shoulder. The slightest mistake, such as transmitting too often, would lead them to be discovered. This fact meant that decoding was a high pressure job. The women in Baker Street were working against the clock to crack the message – and the longer it took, the more likely the agent would send it again and that would put them at risk. Just to hop on the air waves was dangerous, when the German detector vehicles were scouring the area for illegal signals.

In my novel, Nancy goes on to work as an agent, to be the one sending rather than just receiving the radio messages. They were few restrictions on what agents could do, and outside the SOE the organisation became known as the ‘Ministry for Ungentlemanly Conduct’. This was because the SOE was responsible for high profile missions rather than the secretive low profile favoured by the Secret Intelligence Service, usually known as MI6.

For Nancy’s journey I researched the various countryside properties that were requisitioned by the SOE. Remote locations were used, such as the remote Arisaig in the Highlands of Scotland, so that the agents could develop skills in how to kill with their bare hands; the preparing of disguise, how to sabotage a train; and even how to break in and out of buildings by picking the lock with wire. Other country Houses that were used in SOE training included Winterfold House, Cranleigh, and Fulshaw Hall, Cheshire. The latter was the place where agents did parachute training. Several agents were injured during this training which included jumping out of a barrage balloon over a Manchester airfield.

If an agent survived weaponry training and passed the parachute test, they were ready to go behind enemy lines. The agents were assisted on their missions with some James Bond type equipment supplied by ex-film property makers working in an old hotel called The Thatched Barn – special clothing, cases to conceal radio and camera equipment, explosive devices. They also supplied false documents for the agents’ cover stories.

Sir Stewart Menzies head of the Secret Intelligence Service denigrated the SOE as 'amateur, dangerous, and bogus' and eventually the RAF, sick of losing planes to drop agents into Holland, simply refused to lend out their aircraft for these clandestine drops. They would rather drop bombs than agents. Nevertheless, the SOE produced many brave men and women whose actions were courageous, intelligent and awe-inspiring. I hope Nancy Callaghan, my main character helps you experience what life was like for those women who joined.

Read more about Female Spies of the SOE https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Female-Spies-Of-SOE/

See also Seven Stories from SOE agents https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/seven-stories-from-special-operations-executive

Find me at www.deborahswift.com  or on Twitter @swiftstory

Miss Graham's Cold War Cook Book by Celia Rees

It was a very long time coming but it is here at last! Yesterday was publication day! I must confess to thinking that the day would never come. The book was in my mind when I joined the History Girls in June 2011.  I had always written Children's and Young Adult fiction but I knew that this book would be an adult novel. This would be a departure for me and and a challenge and I welcomed the chance to join a group of fellow writers who wrote historical fiction for all ages, including adults. I could not have asked for a more supportive group. Over the years, I've always been able to rely on a sympathetic ear through the book's vicissitudes and I have to thank History Girls, past and present, for their help, encouragement, and their generosity in reading and commenting on the finished book. 

I could have stopped writing at any point, not even started, turned back to YA, the writing world I know, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Neither could I change it, introduce some young characters, turn it in to a YA title. I knew it had to be an adult book. It had been brewing away in my mind for years. 

It began with the chance find of an old cookery book among my mother's effects. 

The book was a mystery in itself. I'd never seen it before. When, I opened it, I found clippings and cuttings from newspapers and magazines, some dating back to the war, and handwritten recipes - I recognised my mother's, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's writing. As far as I knew, these were the only written connection between these three women. I had found no letters. I put the book aside. I knew there was something I wanted to write about there but I had no idea what it might be. 

Years later, I was with my daughter in the Espionage Gallery of the Imperial War Museum. I read on a wall panel that after the war, the British Zone in Northern Germany had been a hotbed of spying. One of us said, 'Perhaps Aunty Nancy was a spy!'. We both laughed. My Headmistress maiden Aunt a spy? How ridiculous was that? But then again, it was perfectly possible... 

She'd been in Germany directly after the war, working as an Education Officer for the Control Commission, the civilian branch of the occupying forces,  tasked with bringing some kind of order to the post war chaos. She'd been stationed in Lübeck, practically on the border with the Russian Zone. She had spent the war at home, teaching in Coventry and looking after my grandmother. Then, as soon as the war was over and much to the consternation of the family, she'd upped sticks and gone to Germany. She didn't come back until the mid 1950s. I remembered her coming back bringing presents for everyone, Benson & Hedges cigarettes for my mother, a carved bear for my brother and a stuffed monkey for me. I remembered other things about her. She'd led a bit of a hidden life. She was a fluent German speaker and had had a relationship with a German boy before the war. She'd also spent a lot of time 'jaunting about Europe' according to my mother, accompanying her her cousin who was rumoured to have been involved in something 'hush hush' during the war.      

My Aunty Nancy

 

I had been her executor, one of the reasons I knew there had been no letters. I'd kept some things that related to her time in Germany. She had sent photographs of ruined cities and sunken ships in bombed harbours; a shocking addition to the family album. I found more in a German chocolate box. 

I'd also kept her passports, so I knew when she had entered and left Germany.

 

Among the photographs were holiday snaps of Bavarian villages, ox carts, two women walking along a street festooned with swastikas and a photograph of a young man in a cricket sweater. Could that be her friend Karl? 

I knew enough about life to create the skeleton of a story. If she had been a spy, then who would she have been working for and why? What would she be finding out? If she was going to be sending messages via recipes, to whom would she be sending? I needed to know more about post war Germany and what was going on there. As for the coded messages and the recipes, it would make sense for the exchange to be between women. 

The more I found out, the more possible it became. There were, indeed, women involved in post war work in Germany. Vera Atkins, ex SOE, working with War Crimes, trying to find her missing agents.

Vera Atkins

Krystyna Skarbek

I already knew about the women who had worked for SOE during the war. I had read ex History Girl Clare Mulley's excellent biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, The Spy Who Loved. Suddenly a real plot was forming, new characters arriving and Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook was born. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Follow me on Twitter @CeliaRees

Instagram @celiarees1

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Plotting the Second World War, by Clare Mulley

Earlier this month I was delighted to speak at a commemorative day at Tempsford, in Bedfordshire, being held in recognition of the RAF Special Duties Squadrons that delivered SOE's special agents behind enemy lines from the village’s top-secret airfield during the Second World War.

Memorial Plaque in Tempsford village church
(courtesy of Martyn Cox, www.secret-WW@.net)

Among the guests was Doreen Jeanette Galvin, nee Grey, a former member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, better known as the WAAF. Doreen served as an Intelligence Officer at RAF Tempsford during the war. She now lives in Canada, and this was her first visit back to her wartime base. Finding a squashy sofa in the memorial hall, Doreen told me how moving it was to return to this tiny village, attend the service of remembrance, and see the beautiful memorial to both the female special agents who were dropped behind enemy lines, and the Special Duties pilots who flew them there.

What I was not expecting was for Doreen to tell me how she had plotted the Second World War. Not in an evil god-of-destruction way you understand, but as a WAAF processing data about aircraft movement provided by radar stations and observation posts, and plotting the changing positions of Allied and enemy planes on a map.

Me with Doreen Galvin at Tempsford, May 2015
(courtesy of Mary J Miles)

Doreen joined the WAAF in March 1941. Her family’s association with the British Air Force went back to the First World War, but it was not until the late autumn of 1940 that she decided to volunteer. The trigger was watching the Battle of Britain at close quarters from her south coast garden, which was on a steep hillside looking down to the sea. At one point the planes flew so low that she felt they might knock the television aerial off the roof of her house, and she threw herself into a ditch in the garden. When she looked up there were black crosses on each wing of a German fighter above her, which was followed by a Spitfire which shot it down into the sea. She knew then that she had to volunteer.

Doreen in uniform
(courtesy of Doreen Galvin & Martyn Cox, www.secret-ww2.net)

Doreen’s first position as a plotter was in Liverpool, receiving aircraft information and translating it into representative counters moved across a large map. On her third evening she found herself plotting the course of an enemy plane. Soon more followed; it was the start of the Liverpool blitz. Nothing could have better brought home to her the vital importance of her work, and how essential it was to be accurate.

Doreen's long and often exhausting career eventually led her to a Commission interview with ‘a very frightening Squadron Leader’ and, as the result of her courage to refuse the more regular roles she was encouraged to take in admin, or codes and ciphers, either of which she felt would ‘drive me crazy’, she was accepted for Intelligence.

Doreen in the WAAF
(courtesy of Doreen Galvin & Martyn Cox, www.secret-ww2.net)

Doreen was then trained as a Photographic Interpretation officer at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. Here she worked with Constance Babington Smith, known to all as ‘Babs’, who was ‘charming, not gushing, but she knew what she was doing’, as well as Sarah Churchill, the red-haired daughter of the PM, among others. Their role was to examine photographs and identify tell-tale troop movements, the build up of fleets and tanks, the creation of fuel and ammunition dumps, the construction and development of weaponry and key sites for military production and other bombing targets. Once, when particularly sensitive photographs and maps had to be examined, Sarah Churchill was segregated in the bathroom, with a 3-ply plank across the huge claw-foot bathtub on which to spread the pictures. She did not know it at the time, but she was working on images of North Africa. ‘We always used to say,’ Doreen told me with a laugh, ‘that for us, North Africa started in the bathroom’. 

Among a wealth of other material, including pictures of her family's former house in the Channel Islands (garden doing well, she noted), Doreen’s photographs provided early images of the German Messerschmitt 162 and 163 rocket planes. She also worked on photos of a series of ramps in northern France, all facing London. ‘It was obvious something was going to be shot off them’, Doreen said, but they couldn’t see what. Nearly two years later she was spending the night with a friend in Bromley when the first V1s to reach London ‘flew over the roof like an express train’. Wearing a hard hat on the early morning journey into work the next day she suddenly realized that these new flying bombs must be what she had been looking for at Medmenham. 

Doreen during the Second World War

(courtesy of Doreen Galvin)

After a year in Aerial Reconnaissance, Doreen moved to Bomber Command, with an office next to the famous ops room. From there she became an Operations Officer at RAF Feltwell, in Norfolk. At times it was almost unbearable work. One morning twelve planes left to bomb a hydroelectric station, and just one damaged aircraft returned late that afternoon. It was ten days before Doreen learned that she was in no way to blame for the high losses through any inaccuracies in her work - the planes had simply had the misfortune of coinciding with a Luftwaffe squadron.

Finally Doreen was sent to RAF Tempsford to work as an Intelligence Officer, without yet knowing the operational nature of the secret little airfield. On arrival she was surprised to see the odd variety of aircraft of all vintages and sizes that operated from the airfield, including a number of old-fashioned Lysanders, affectionately called ‘Lizzies’, which she thought must have come from the previous war. The intelligence office seemed ‘very dull’, the maps ‘uninspiring’, and Tempsford struck Doreen altogether as ‘a mediocre station, full of left-overs, in a forgotten backwater’.

A Lysander at Tempsford during the war,
with officers from Special Duties squadron 161
(courtesy of Hugh Verity & Martyn Cox www.secret-ww2.net)

Only after she was taken through a security door did Doreen see a map covering the entire wall opposite. ‘On it were hundreds of brightly coloured pins, each holding down a small label with a number and a code name typed on it.’ These represented the dropping and landing sites for Britain’s special agents and supplies across Europe. Her role was to ensure the pilots were fully briefed on the sites, and their routes, using aerial photographs and other intelligence. Doreen stared at the map in amazement, thinking, ‘If only the Germans could set eyes on this wall map, they could surely eliminate the entire Underground Movement in Europe in a week!’ 

Tempsford brought its own tragedies, although nothing quite on that scale, but also many lighter moments among friends who became very close. Here the WAAF Officers’ Mess was so close to the vicarage and the old stone church that one morning, after an RAF dance the night before, the vicar’s wife accused Doreen's friend of getting their chickens drunk. The hens had come wandering in unnoticed and drunk from the dregs of the slop bucket behind the bar. 

Doreen at the Special Duties memorial plaque in Tempsford Church
(courtesy of Martyn Cox, www.secret-WW@.net)

Reverend Margaret Marshall with Doreen Galvin
at Tempsford's memorial to the SOE women and Special Duties pilots
(courtesy of Clive Bassett)

Last Sunday, after the morning of talks, Doreen visited Tempsford’s old stone church again, this time for a service of remembrance conducted by the Reverend Margaret Marshall (how times have changed), before laying wreaths at the memorial opposite. For Doreen it had been a moving experience to return to the village where she had spent so much of her war, and to see that neither the special agents, nor the brave pilots who flew them behind enemy lines, have been forgotten. Not only are there beautiful memorials in the church and on the village green, but there are often events here which welcome everyone from family members who come to remember, to school children who may be hearing for the first time about the history of the village, the airfield, and the many brave people who once passed through.

Aerial photograph of RAF Tempsford during the war
(courtesy of The Bob Body Collection & Martyn Cox, www.secretWW2.net)

I am delighted that Doreen has written and self-published her memoirs, From Arts to Intelligence, available from Amazon in kindle and EPUB formats, and paperback. 

I should also mention that the very good Temspford commemorative event this May was organised by educational charity Secret WW2 for which, many thanks.

Copyright Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com 

Setting Europe Ablaze, by Y S Lee

In December, I introduced you to my historical boyfriend, Freddy Spencer Chapman. Since then, my research has led me to the more general history of SOE, the Special Operations Executive that operated parallel to – and sometimes in conflict with – established military intelligence during the Second World War.

Chances are, you’ve heard bits and pieces about SOE’s exploits in both fact and fiction. Historian M R D Foot says it was “formed in a tearing hurry during the summer crisis of 1940, at Churchill’s direct prompting” and dismantled in 1946. Churchill’s actual directive was for SOE to “set Europe ablaze”. Now, looking back, what reader or writer could resist such an invitation? Even better, because the organization no longer exists, its six years of secrets can be fully explored without endangering lives. Finally, there’s the romance of it all: clandestine recruitment of a diverse and international group of volunteers who didn’t know what they’d be doing, but were willing to perform “duties of a hazardous nature”.

SOE’s work is at the centre of recent novels like Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name: Verity, William Boyd’s Restless, and many others. I’ve recently been reading some non-fiction sources in an absolute fever of excitement. Currently, I have SOE and the Resistance: As told in the Times Obituaries (ed. Michael Tillotson, 2011) and Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations in the Second World War (ed. Roderick Bailey, 2008). Today, I want to share a few highlights in hopes of enticing you to join me.

Einar Skinnarland (Norwegian, 1918-2002)

image via snipview

Skinnarland was an engineer at a hydroelectric plant in German-occupied Norway that was scheduled to produce heavy water for the Nazi plutonium project. In May 1940, Skinnarland took a one-month leave from his job at the plant, joined a group of young Norwegians who hijacked a coastal steamer, and sailed it to Aberdeen to offer their services to the Allies. He brought with him detailed information about the plant’s security systems and volunteered to return for a sabotage operation. After “very basic” parachute training, the RAF dropped Skinnarland back into the Norwegian mountains, in good time for his return to work after a “holiday”! Skinnarland and his associate, Knut Haukelid, spent several months training resisters in the mountains and their group succeeded in sinking Germany’s stocks of heavy water in Lake Tinnsjo in February 1944 – a major contribution to the end of Hitler’s hopes for an atomic bomb.

image via wikipedia

Jos Gemmeke (Dutch, 1922-2010)
As a teenaged girl in the occupied Netherlands, Gemmeke volunteered to distribute copies of a resistance newspaper. The penalty for being caught with even a single copy on one’s person was death, and Gemmeke ran this risk daily for more than four years. She also couriered messages for the Dutch resistance, on bicycle, hiding the microfilms in her shoulder pads. On one journey, while attempting to cross the River Waal, a German soldier informed her that the bridge was closed. As she tried to persuade him to let her cross, Allied aircraft strafed the bridge. The German soldiers dived for cover and Gemmeke was free to cycle across, working her way through the front lines, and delivering the microfilms to newly liberated Brussels.

Pearl Witherington (English, 1914-2008)

image via wikipedia

When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Witherington, who was born to English parents and raised in France, was forced to make her own way to England, from Spain to Portugal and then through Gibraltar. Once she found SOE, her instructors were impressed, if patronizing: “This student, although a woman, has got leader’s qualities. Cool, resourceful, and extremely determined. Very capable, completely brave.” Witherington parachuted back into occupied France to work a courier between different SOE “circuits”. When the Gestapo arrested the head of her circuit, Witherington was given control of the northern half of the circuit. She armed French Resisters, gave them weapons training, and ambushed German convoys of military vehicles. After the war, she settled in the area where she’d led her circuit.


Ibrahim bin Ismail (Malayan, 1922-2010)

image via wikipedia

After the debacle that was the British “defense” of the Malayan peninsula in 1941-42, SOE turned its attention to recruiting local resistance to the occupying Japanese army. The Malayan Communist Party was staunchly anti-Japanese, but their politics made the British nervous. In Ibrahim, SOE found a perfect recruit: an existing officer in the Indian Army willing to infiltrate his homeland. After two failed attempts at a coastal landing, Ibrahim’s party successfully reached the shore in kayaks, only to be welcomed by Japanese soldiers. Under interrogation, Ibrahim persuaded the Japanese that he would prefer to work with them. As evidence, he offered to radio a message to SOE headquarters. In the message, Ibrahim gave the wrong answer to his safety check question, thus alerting headquarters that he was in Japanese hands. For the remaining ten months of the war, SOE used Ibrahim to feed the Japanese false information.

Noor Inayat Khan (Indian/American, 1914-1944)

The daughter of an Indian father and an American mother, Khan declared to SOE that while she loathed the Nazis and wanted to defeat them, her first loyalty was to India. Her recruiting officer noted that hers was the sole case in which “a loyalty was not directly British”. As Khan was fluent in French and already working as a WAAF wireless operator, SOE trained her only briefly. Six weeks after Khan’s arrival in France, hundreds of other resistance workers in her circuit were arrested. As the only radio operator still free in Paris, Khan continued to work, limiting message transmission to 20 minutes per location, and moving constantly in order to evade detection. She was betrayed to the Germans by a double agent within SOE. During her month-long interrogation, she lied consistently, gave up no secrets, and twice attempted escape. After her third effort to escape, Khan was transferred to Germany as a Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) prisoner – that is, to disappear without a trace. There, although kept shackled and in solitary confinement for ten months, she was able to communicate her name and London address to another inmate. She was executed and her body burned in 1944, and was still officially classed as “missing” in 1946.

These are just five of the astounding volunteers of the Special Operations Executive. I've deliberately chosen individuals from diverse places, to show the breadth of SOE's remit: Churchill may have thought primarily of Europe, but SOE operated the world over (with the exceptions of Russia and Japan). Three of the five here are women because women were particularly active in SOE, especially in its French Section. But there are hundreds of others whose stories keep me up late at night and change the way I think of the Second World War. I hope the same is true for you, too.