Bravery, Jealousy, Failure

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 5

Bravery, Jealousy, Failure

(By T. S. MONKS In the "Sydney Morning Herald’’) •THE cloak-and-x dagger army of British secret agents in war-time France has in the 20 years yielded a glut of highly-coloured books and films—and a mountain of controversy. How much of it all really happened and was worth while?

For a long time many people have wondered what an official historian would make of it, how many red and angry faces would result from a cool look at the records.

Amazingly, an official history now appears. There are some red faces. There is some anger. Yet so much really did happen. There was much unimaginable bravery and heroism as well as failure and weakness and muddle. And the basic verdict stands out clear. “No single division of any army exerted a tenth of the Special Operation Executive's influence on the course of the war,” writes the historian, M. R. D. Foot, in this strangest of volumes to be published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office—“S.O.E. in France," History of the Second World War, U.K.

The virtues and vices of individual agents are

examined dispassionately. They were a very mixed bag these men and women who parachuted in France, or landed from a submarine or fishing boat. Pimps, Princesses There were “pimps and princesses,” says Mr Foot. There were journalists, artists, salesmen, youths barely out of university. There were elegant young ladies, so many of whom were to meet a terrble fate. There is the horrifying record of the young Indian princess, Noor Inayat Khan, kneeling in the blood-stained sand of Dachau holding hands with Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damarment, as they were shot by the German S.S. There is the telling of how one of the best of these secret agents, Brian Stonehouse, came back from concentration camp and, having chops cooked for him, rushed into the street crying: “I can’t stand the smell of burning flesh.” Some heroes are debunked. Others are confirmed. Like the man who was known as agent “Guy” (Gustave Bieler), who bad such a gift of leadership that years after his death Frenchmen would still poirrdto the chair on which he tSbd to sit Injured severely In his

spine by his parachute drop, he never sought medical attention. He limped for the rest of his life. Even the S.S. respected him. They mounted a guard of honour to escort him to his death in 1944. So much tragedy came out of all the adventure. What happened to many agents was never known, and will never be known now. And so much controversy. The Foreign Office never really liked the Special Operations Executive. The Intelligence Service proper was jealous of it The orthodox Services often questioned its value. The

Free French in London were often so suspicious that they would barely co-operate. Not The Form Lord Portal,, the war-time Chief of Air Staff, once held up a parachute drop by the S.O.E. with this argument: “1 think 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.” Yet Mr Foot examined, and tables carfully, a formidable list of industrial sabotage in France uhieved by the S.O.E. The toUt’ 1 quantity of explosives useo was about 30001 b, considerably less than the

load of one light bomber in 1944. He points out how 19 Lancasters were used to blow in the mouth of a railway tunnel near Saumur. The risk ran by 135 highly-trained air crew in those planes, says Mr Foot, could have been left to a single WA.A.F. flying officer, who was running a resistance group close by. The verdict in this history is that, despite muddle at the S.O.E. headquarters in London, despite all the mistakes, the rivalries, the resistance groups that were set up in France made possible all over France a guerrilla attack on the Germans which shortened the war by six months. Not For Bond

It is not James Bond-like material. This was for real with too often tragic and horrifying ends to the lives of the heroes. But there is no lack of excitement or of plots and counter-plots, or ambushes or machine-gun battles. There are tales of bow Germans seized and controlled crucial radio links, how agents were sent in unknowingly to immediate capture and certain death. Storms are arising already about the book and its judgments of men and events from some of these who survived or who controlled those events. The argunjfent about the S.O.E. will neverwnd, not even with an “official history.”