Helen Fry
‘Mission France’: A Conversation on the SOE Agents Behind Enemy Lines in France in WWII
Dr Helen Fry and Kate Vigurs - ‘Mission France’: A Conversation on the SOE Agents Behind Enemy Lines in France in WWII
- [Host] Okay, hello and welcome to everyone. Today we are joined by Helen and her guest, Kate Vigurs. Dr. Kate Vigurs is a professional freelance historian, her debut book, “Mission France” has received critical acclaim, described as a tale of triumph and tragedy, of romance, but also ruin. A fitting epitaph to their courage and humanity. And as an important addition to the story of the female agents of SOEs F Section, the book was shortlisted for the Poly Corrigan Prize and the SAHR First Book Prize in 2022. Kate and Helen, I will hand over to you.
Thank you very much. Thank you for joining me for our In Conversation Kate, it’s great to have you. We’re going to be discussing your fabulous book, which has taken years and years of research. You can see it behind me here, “Mission France”. It’s about 39 female agents that were sent behind enemy lines into France. F Section was the French Section of SOE, of course there were men and women were sent behind enemy lines. But Kate has written about all 39 of the women, many of them who haven’t had any real publicity or attraction before about their lives and their sacrifice. And of course, as we know, it’s a very difficult story. We have those images of so many of the agents that didn’t make it back were subject to horrific torture. And I thought perhaps we would start at that point, at the difficult point, so that we can move to perhaps a more redemptive understanding of their sacrifice. So before we get into their specific lives, can you give us a sense of how many of the 39 agents, we are only talking about those that were sent into France, just so that our listeners are aware. Those 39 female agents, how many survived and what, in broad view, what happened to those who didn’t?
So as you said, 39 women were sent into France by Special Operations Executive F Section. So one of the sections that was working in France. Now they were given a survival rate of 50/50 and they went in with that understanding. They were also told that as a wireless operator, one of the roles, they would have a life expectancy of six weeks. Some of them fared better, but unfortunately some of them didn’t. And out of the 39 women, 13 of them didn’t come home. One of them I’m hoping to talk about in a little bit more detail later, passed away. Purely coincidentally, she developed an illness, but the rest of them were arrested as a result of their resistance activities. And they were sent to Gestapo headquarters, typically in Paris at 84 Avenue Foch, where they were interrogated, some of them were tortured. Most of them were kept at a place called Fresnes Prison, on the outskirts of Paris. And then they were moved out, and the story kind of splits up at that point ‘cause some of them went to Karlsruhe Prison. And from there they were deported to various camps, and some of them went straight to the camps. So we have some of the agents, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, Cecily Lefort, who end up at Ravensbruck, also Yvonne Rudellat, but she’s not executed at Ravensbruck like the rest of them are. She’s sent to Bergen-Belsen. She survives deliberation at Belson, but she doesn’t last much longer. She passes away. And her story is truly remarkable anyway, because she’d survived a head wound, gunshot wound to the head, while trying to get away from the Gestapo. So the fact she survived as long as she did is incredible.
Some of them were sent to Dachau, where they were executed by gunshots. And I think the bit that I certainly found hardest to write was the women who went to Natzweiler, which is in the Alsace region, which was France. And they were executed by lethal injection, using phenol. That said, we’re not convinced there was enough phenol used. And it’s more likely that they died in the crematoria ovens than with the injections. So yeah, it’s a pretty traumatic story and very, very depressing. But with that in mind, you know, 26 of them do come home. We do have camp survivors who come back and are able to stand trial and sort of bring the perpetrators to some justice. I won’t say it’s enough, but to some justice.
And when you’re doing this, you’re writing the book, you’re carrying out the research, I know 'cause we’ve chatted before, we’re friends behind the scenes. How did you cope with that trauma? Because when you are working on declassified files on perhaps memoirs, some of it particularly, I’ve worked on some of the war crimes trials, some of the testimonies are incredibly graphic and harrowing. Now, you actually had a survival mechanism, didn’t you, when you were writing that very difficult chapter towards the end. Tell us about how you survived as a historian dealing with what is harrowing material.
So I wrote, like we’re doing in the talk, I wrote those last chapters first because I wanted, rather like we’re doing now, to be able to sort of celebrate their lives and to enjoy the process. And I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy this particular part of the book. I hired a little cottage in the countryside, so I went for walks every day with my lovely dog and sort of enjoyed my time in the fresh air. But I did struggle and I can’t lie because, I’m sure you find it as well, the more you write about people, the more they come off the page and become real people to you and they’re like your friends. And certainly when I was writing about the four at Natzweiler, there’s a very detailed description of their arrival at the camp from some eyewitnesses. And it was getting very, very late at night. And I thought, I’m going to have to stop. I’ve got to try and get some sleep. And I thought, but if I can just hang on, maybe I can rescue them, maybe I can stop this happening. I know it’s ridiculous, but yeah, it did affect me. So, the same coping mechanism I have now. I just watch utter rubbish on television or will read, you know, a bit of a cheesy novel just to try and switch off from it because they, it’s such harrowing stuff and you’re dealing with individuals, like I say, that you’re becoming very accustomed to being in their company, even though they’re long gone.
And it kind of, unless it can inhabit you in that way, I think that’s what makes the writing come alive on the page. I love your book. It’s, you know, it is written with passion and that really comes across, but it’s quite a skill. But it is because you’ve cared about the women that you’re writing about. And not many people probably know. By the way, I will say at this point, we are going to take some questions at the end, so if you have questions, get them ready, or start putting them in the chat as we’re having our In Conversation. But it was 1942, wasn’t it, that the first two female agents, Borrel and Baissac, were sent into France. Can you give me an idea of why was it so late that women were sent behind enemy lines, and what was the decision to send these first two women into France?
Isn’t that a good question? Why did it take them so long to realise that women could do the same as the men? You know, I think that’s a question through history. So SOE was set up in the wake of the fall of France and actually the rest of Europe in July of 1940. Obviously the fall of France had happened a couple of months before, but they were very aware that France was going to be very strategically important in the invasion whenever that came. And so, sorry, that’s a little ping on my laptop there. So they decided that they were going to recruit men to start off with through the Old Boys network. And it became more and more apparent as the war went on that men of certain age, of military age, moving around the countryside was more difficult because they were starting to have a census and to round men up for the forced labour programme. And basically men were rounded up and sent to labour camps to work on behalf of the German war effort. Those who didn’t want to do this, you didn’t really have an option, let’s be honest. Some of them just disappeared off into the mountains and the hills and they became the Maquis, the resistors.
But it was increasingly difficult for men to move around occupied territory and that’s why they thought they would use women, because women were never rounded up in the same way for forced labour. So yeah, it’s April 1942, and as I’m sure you’ve done in the past, you latch onto this thing, you’re like, I have to find the document that proves how this happened, and there isn’t one. The best we can do is that the SOE recruiting officer, a man called Selwyn Jepson, had the idea he wanted to recruit women, but it was outside the rules of the Geneva Convention to send women into basically a war zone and to arm them, you couldn’t arm them. But he realised that the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, I think I’m correct with that, were pulling the lanyard that pulled the trigger on the anti-aircraft guns during the Blitz. And he said, well they’re already bearing arms, so what’s the difference? And in a conversation with Winston Churchill, Churchill kind of tacitly agreed that using women would be a good idea. So they started to recruit them, and your first two go into the field in September '42, Andree Borrel and Lise de Baissac go in by parachute and make history. You’ve got a couple who go in before, but they’re the first two to parachute and that’s what makes them sort of so special.
And in terms of the training then, would they have had the same training as the men? Can you give us a sense of, a little bit of a sense of the kind of training that the SOE agents underwent, but also did the women have exactly the same training?
They pretty much did. I’m just going to, because you’re probably sick of looking at me, I’m going to just pull up my slideshow and just show you some of the training they undertook. So this, the training changed as the war went on, but in a nutshell, you did preliminary training, which was really to weed out people who weren’t suitable. And it happened at these two locations, Wanborough Manor and Winterfold Manor. Here they would learn things like morse code, they would do physical training, basic firearms, that kind of stuff. But really it was to check whether or not they were suitable. And if they weren’t, they would be weeded out at this point. This joke might not work with our audience tonight, but there was a joke that SOE actually stood for Stately 'Omes of England. 'Cause they’re all in these beautiful requisitioned manor houses. So that’s preliminary. The next training is up in Scotland. It’s called paramilitary training, although this isn’t the parachute training, but this is where they learn to live off the land. They learn to do hand-to-hand fighting called silent killing. They learn how to use various weapons. Silent killing is like a type of martial art. They learn really the tough side of resistance. I tried to hike around Loch Morar last year and I gave up. They were made of tough stuff, these agents, to undertake this training in Scotland. And women and men were treated the same.
Yeah. Can I ask you that point, so the women would also, as well as the men, be given training into, well basically how to silently kill. Is that correct?
It is. It is correct. I interviewed Pearl Witherington about 20 years ago now, and she told me that it wasn’t how hard you hit them, but where you hit them, and size didn’t matter. A woman could quite easily take down a man as long as they were trained in the right way. And Nancy Wake loved this part of the training. She really enjoyed sort of, she was quite little, but she enjoyed throwing men around and pounding them to the floor. And she said she worked as hard at that as she could, against the day she might have to use it for real. One of the instructors actually said, you know, when they’re crawling through the mucky ground of Scotland, they’re all bods in battle dress. Everybody is treated exactly the same. Likewise the next part of the training. So this is silent killing and unarmed combat here. So they were taught how to do all of this. Parachute training didn’t matter if you were male or female, you could claim a fear of heights, Noor Inayat Khan didn’t do this because she was frightened of heights, but mostly you had to learn to parachute jump because that was your main way of getting into occupied territory. And men and women, again, treated exactly the same. Beaulieu, I’ve spelled that wrong for a start, I’ve now discovered this is the only building at Beaulieu that wasn’t used by SOE, but there were hundreds of houses all dotted around the landscape where SOE agents were housed and trained. And this was the finishing school. And here they would have to speak the language, live their cover story. They’d have mock interrogations, they’d go out on exercises, Beaulieu’s a fascinating place in the New Forest, and you can literally close off the entire village. You can stop the general population seeing it or getting in. So, and again, very much men and women treated the same, even through the mock interrogation, they would, you know, they would have to get on with it. So that was the finishing school. So yeah, they definitely had all of the same training. So I’ll just stop sharing and come back.
So in terms of some of those, we obviously won’t have time today to discuss each of those 39 agents, who each of them do have very special stories. And it can be read in your book, “Mission France”. There are a couple, I think, are there not, that we want to kind of hone in on today? And that’s the couple of Jewish agents, which actually until your book, I didn’t know about to be honest. So can you tell us, maybe you have photographs of them, who were these Jewish SOE agents that were sent into France? Give us a little sense of, well, who they were and what they did.
In terms of the women. This is Denise Bloch. Now, Denise Bloch was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded. And she was very, very fortunate and she managed to avoid the roundup of the Rafle du Vel’ d'Hiv, which is in July of ‘42 in Paris, which was basically the French collaborators, they almost did it without any Nazi instructions or help, rounded up every single Jewish occupant within Paris and sent them to the Velodrome, the cycling track, the winter cycling track in Paris. If anyone’s ever seen the film “Sarah’s Key”, there’s really harrowing scenes within the film of this roundup. So as I say, they managed to escape that as a family, but they understood the very severe danger that they were in by being Jewish. So they actually changed their surname as a family from Bloch to Barrault, and they just sort of continued their life as best they could, and they moved away out of Paris as well. Now Denise met a man called Aron, who was a Jewish Citroen engineer. I’m just consulting notes to make sure I get the story absolutely right. And he was involved in the ventriloquist circuit. Now if you’re not familiar with SOE, what they did was they divided France into basically a patchwork quilt with lots of different circuits. And each circuit was independent, but it would work with circuits around it if needs be. And each circuit would have a circuit leader, a wireless operator, and a courier. But they would also work alongside local resistance. And this is how Aron was involved. And they worked in the Orleans and Blois areas, so in the Loire Valley. But life became dangerous for Denise and she had to escape across the Pyrenees.
And I guess if people want to know more about that, there’s plenty in your book on MI9 to explain all about the escape lines and people coming out, you know, across the Pyrenees on the escape lines to get to safety as much as possible. So she managed that, she got to London and she was recruited into Special Operations Executive. It would’ve been her knowledge of France that would’ve been attractive, her French, and also the fact she’d already resisted, they would’ve been very attracted by that track record that she had. So she joined SOE and she went back into occupied France. Now she was doing her job, she was very successful, she had good training reports. And to cut a very long story short, I can’t give too much away, otherwise you won’t buy the book. but she had dinner with a man called Benoist, who was famous because he was a Bugatti driver before the war. And Benoist was her circuit leader. He received a message during that dinner that his mother had been taken ill and that he needed to go and see her. Now we don’t know if this was a trick from the Gestapo or whether it was genuine, but what he said to the rest of his group were wait 24 hours and if I’m not back, split up, get away from each other and get away from here. She was a wireless operator, so she did her sked, which is her message back home to England the next day, this is the 18th of June. And there was no sign of Benoist, but they didn’t do what he had said. And they all got together again that night and had dinner in a villa, where apparently they were preparing fresh eggs. I can’t remember where I got that information, but I must have been convinced enough to put it in the book. So they were due to have fresh eggs for dinner.
And just as they were sitting down, it was 20 past eight in the evening, cars screamed up to the villa, out got the Gestapos, came into the house screaming and arrested everybody. And one of the things they asked was where is Lien? And Lien was the codename for her wireless traffic. So they obviously knew who she was. She stepped forwards, put her hands out to be handcuffed and went off with them. She was taken to the Avenue Foch in Paris. She lived in Fresnes, or was incarcerated in Fresnes, I should say. She was then taken on a transport, and it’s quite a famous story this, because of the film “Carve Her Name With Pride”, but she was taken on a transport to Saarbrucken, which was a transit camp. And the train was bombed by the allies on the way. And the men who were also in the train were crying out for water. Now, she was handcuffed to a lady called Violette Szabo, and the two of them crawled up the carriage together, taking water to the men rather than trying to escape. They decided that they were going to help these men. And it’s in lots and lots of records, this amazing act of bravery. Unfortunately, she was then taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was put on several work details and eventually she was executed in the winter of 1945, along with Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. So just an incredible story anyway, but to take that double risk, and I say this in the book, to take that double risk of being Jewish and being in the resistance is just incredible, I think, to have that bravery to say, actually I know that I’m in danger anyway, but I’m going to do this regardless.
And do you, 'cause you actually interviewed surviving agents, well Pearl Witherington you’ve mentioned. Did they actually think that they were doing anything brave? What kind of sense did you get? Because generally more veterans I’ve found don’t think that they’ve done anything particularly heroic. I mean we’ve lost the vast majority of them, haven’t we? Most have passed away now, but they aren’t particularly brave in their own eyes. They were just doing what they had to do, and you think, well, hang on a minute, they survived 11 months on the front line doing this or that, as a tank driver, whatever it is they’re doing. But you’re agents behind enemy lines, this is another whole different level, isn’t it, of courage and heroism. So how did they view themselves?
So the first agent I met was Yvonne Baseden. Now she survived Ravensbruck. She came out on the Swedish white vans right before the liberation. She had terrible tuberculosis. So she survived the camps, and she sort of disappeared after the war. I think a lot of them were fighting really for the right just to continue their pre-war lives. So she went and got married, she moved to Africa and by the time I finally met her, she just moved back to London having recently been widowed. And I was lucky enough to be introduced to her, and the first thing she said was, well, why do you want to interview me? And I said, but you’ve had the most amazing wartime career. You were a wireless operator, which is the most dangerous job of them all, and not least, you know, surviving Ravensbruck. And she said, but do we have to talk about the war? Or you know, could we talk about, you know, I’ve got loads of lovely grandchildren. I said, much as I would love to Yvonne, this was for my PhD actually, I said, I really do need to ask you about your wartime experiences. But she was so self effacing about the whole thing. And I also interviewed Pearl Witherington, later Cornioley, in Paris, not in Paris, sorry, we met in the Loire Valley. And one thing she said to me was, I couldn’t help everybody and I was just a teeny-weeny dot in all of this. This woman led over 3,000 men into D-Day. Very few of them ended up being killed because she was just so well able to protect them and to lead them properly. And she just said, you know, I only only did what I had to do type thing.
And many of them, those are the only two I met face-to-face, but many of them, when you read their autobiographies or their papers, they’re just doing a job. There’s, you know, most of them don’t even know what they’re getting into, to be honest. I don’t think a lot of them realised just how dangerous it was going to be because how could you know, it was a brand new thing. It was a new type of warfare. Look how war had evolved from the great war. They just didn’t know. But yeah, they’re also self effacing. Not one of them goes in for grandiose ideas or for fame and fortune. Not one of them had that motive.
And of course the woman who sends them in, we’ve both written about actually, from different angles, is Vera Atkins, who herself was Jewish. Her family is, some of our listeners will know from my work on Thomas Kendrick, the spymaster, that her family worked for him actually from South Africa days through the 1920s and '30s. And then Vera in the Second World War, of course she features in your book, because she eventually becomes deputy head, doesn’t she, of F Section, I read somewhere. So she’s actually sending and preparing these women, well she sends men in as well, doesn’t she, behind enemy lines. Did you get a sense of Vera’s character? Tell us a little bit about Vera. Vera Atkins.
Oh, Vera’s formidable and I so wish I’d met her. You only have to listen to her audio archive, which is available online, and you get a real sense, you can hear her dragging away on her cigarette as well. You get a real sense of this formidable woman who you just, I wouldn’t want to cross her, but a very compassionate and caring woman at the same time. An example of this is with the agent, Noor Inayat Khan, who was the Indian lady who was recruited to be a wireless operator in Paris, and Noor had a difficult time training, we can’t deny it, and her reports were negative, but also two trainee agents wrote a letter to Vera and said, we don’t think she’s the type to be sent. And so Vera went to sit with Noor to talk through the letter with her and she said, you don’t have to go, we’re not forcing you to go. She said, but the worst thing you can do is go and then let us down, we’re giving you the opportunity to not do it. And I just imagine that meeting was so full of compassion and care. Obviously Vera was trying to protect all the other agents already out there, but she would’ve been very aware how upset Noor would’ve been by all of this. In fact, I’ve seen two plays in the last year who deal with the relationship between Vera and Noor. And it’s a very interesting sort of concept, but I’ve also heard stories like when she met Yvonne Baseden after the war at the train station at Paddington and she said, come on, we’ll get you a cup of tea and everything will be fine. You know, little realising this woman had just escaped from a concentration camp and what that meant, none of us, nobody knew what that meant at the time. So yeah, she was definitely a force to be reckoned with and to get that high up in the organisation as a woman, she must have had something about her. Very, very skilled, very organised. And I would argue probably did a better job of running F Section than the actual leader of F Section did.
Yeah, I would totally agree with you on that. Yeah. And of course she actually helped, well she prepared the agents and saw them off, didn’t she? In that moment. 'Cause if we think about that time when agents were being sent and were not coming back and there’s this whole debate, and historians I think are split or it’s not really very clear why, because the agents were being betrayed, because they weren’t coming back, why we still sent more agents in. And that was tricky for Vera Atkins, wasn’t it, knowing that this could be the last goodbye to those female agents.
Yeah, definitely. It must have been so, so difficult. You know, she would accompany them if she could to the airfield where they were going to take off from. She would check what they were wearing, make sure they didn’t have anything particularly British about them. You know, she would take photographs of loved ones from the agents and keep them safe. She would write their wills with them. So she was very, very conscious that she might not see them again. And that must have weighed so heavily on her mind, whether or not, you know, there were a few instances of the Germans capturing wireless sets, for example, and pretending that they were the agents and sending messages back. Whether or not she was worried about that in any way, I’m not sure. But it must have been desperately difficult to form relationships with these people and to sort of be the last one to see them off. And then of course, I don’t know if you’re coming to this after the war, what she did as well.
Yes. I’m going to come to that now actually. 'Cause I think that’s a really important, unique perspective, but probably something which people don’t realise is that you mentioned it just before we get onto this, that she helped them to prepare their will, so the agents had to think about their, you know, personal effects if you like, if they didn’t come back from action. I think that’s something we don’t think about necessarily.
No. And one of the other things, she encouraged them to write letters that could be posted at intervals. So they would tell their family that they were off doing, one of them said they were going to be an ambulance driver in Scotland, for example. And she would encourage them to write letters that she could then get posted at intervals. So the family just thought they were in contact, and obviously they weren’t. And when the agents were captured, she had to kind of explain really what had happened and that actually they’d been deceiving them the whole time. But it was a nicer way of doing it, I think, in some ways.
Yeah, I suppose we have to imagine that SOE was top secret. The relatives were in on it if the agents didn’t come back. But yes, it was still very, very top secret. And even now as Kate and I are finding through our research, some of the files that are only just being declassified and there are other personal files for each of the agents, which are still coming out. So it’s been a long haul, hasn’t it? Let’s go back to what to Vera then at the end of the war, because it was very unusual, not exceptional, but unusual for women to be interrogators. And what Vera does is quite extraordinary. She vows doesn’t she, to track down the fate of every single agent that she sent into action and hasn’t come back. So give us a sense of what she did. This is when she leaves London and she’s basically working with all male, isn’t it? Teams of investigators and judges for the war crimes trial. So give us a sense of what she achieves.
So she wants to track down the missing agents, 118 F Section agents go missing in action, and that’s literally all they know. Some of them, they’ve got an inkling of where they went. Cecily Lefort, for example, was able to write and say where she was. But most of them had just disappeared into the Nacht und Nebel, which is the Night and Fog, a directive that Hitler gave for anyone in the resistance would simply disappear, they’d have no records. So they know 118 of them are missing. SOE, as soon as the war ended, knew it was over, they weren’t going to continue as an organisation. So they started to wind down. But she said, no, no, no. What did she say, “missing, presumed dead, is not good enough.” And she said, I’m going to go out to Germany, France, wherever it is, and I’m going to trace every single one of these agents. I’m going to find out what happened to them. And she joined the Judge Advocates team, went out into Germany and she started to track down what had happened to the men and women. I think we talk about the women quite a lot at this point. But she did trace all the men as well. And she interviewed guards from Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Natzweiler. And she compiles these eyewitness accounts of what happened. Now for some of the women, they’re easier to trace because the women killed at Natzweiler, that’s a male camp, there were no women at Natzweiler. And so the internee’s remember the four women arriving, there’s a painting of them actually done by a guy called Brian Stonehouse, and a very clear description. And she’s able to work out from the descriptions that he gives her who they are. And likewise the women at Dachau, there is some confusion as it goes along because the description of Noor Inayat Khan also matches that of an agent called Sonia Olschanezky, who although never trained in England, we count her among the 39 of SOE because she was executed alongside SOE agents for her role with the organisation.
So Vera is going around and she’s interrogating SS guards, camp commandants, she even gets involved in the Auschwitz trial, although none of the agents ended up there. She’s such a good interrogator. And you know, a lot of the Germans say she was quite terrifying and she got a lot of information out of them. And with all that information she pieces it together. And out of 118 missing agents, she finds 117. There’s one that she didn’t trace, and she thinks that he absconded with the money he parachuted in with and disappeared to the south of France. But he’s the only one that she couldn’t find, the rest of them, she traced, she was able to inform the families in quite some detail what had happened to their relatives. And then she guarded the families, she looked after them during the war trials. She tried to keep the names out of the newspapers, but she forewarned them that there was going to be some harrowing times ahead as the guards and so on were tried.
Must have been very difficult for those surviving agents after the war, how do you really, did you get a sense, I mean the two that you interviewed, how they could go back to normal life?
I think it was incredibly difficult to go back to normal life, not least because you’ve been trained to kill with your bare hands. You have been trained to look over your shoulder at every opportunity, to question the motives of anybody that you are in conversation with. And I think to come down from that, and there was no debrief, there was no, you know, when people leave the army today, they kind of have a course on how to be a civilian. They didn’t get any of that. One agent in particular, a lady called Eileen Nearne had been at Ravensbruck, and she’d escaped off the death march and she never recovered. She had a mental breakdown. She spent the rest of her life in a wig and in dark glasses. And I don’t think she ever fully recovered. But I guess this is a wider problem at this point because anybody coming out of the camps must have had a hell of an awful time sort of re-assimilating into into normal life. I was listening to a podcast only today actually, where a lady said, none of us talked about the war, because we’d all been in the war, and nobody was interested in everybody else’s experiences because they had their own to kind of process. Pearl said she heard a car backfire, she was out with her daughter, and she heard a car backfire, and she threw both of them on the floor and kind of protected them because she thought it was a gunshot. And she said if she ever saw a black Citroen, she would just freeze and couldn’t cope with it. And another lady, whose name I forget, was mugged and all her silent killing just came back into her head and this poor bloke was like battered down to the floor and you know, couldn’t quite believe that a 70 year old lady could take him out like that. But I do think it stayed with them for a long time. But things were put in place. There’s a special forces club where SOE agents treated as their second home. And I imagine that was very cathartic for some of them. To be able to go there together, nobody from the outside world knew about it, where it was, what it was, and they could maybe share their experiences there. But other than that it was terribly difficult to go back to normal life.
So what would you say, while we’re just coming to our last two or three questions, we’re going to open up for questions from the audience shortly. What would you say was your most important discovery or the aspect of the research that affected you? Yeah, what was the most surprising or important discovery that you made? Because when we start on this research journey for what we do, you think you’ve got a kind of scope for the book, you have your chapters, but there is always a surprise, isn’t there? What would that be for you Kate?
For me, it was this agent Cecily Lefort. I didn’t expect to kind of want to sit in a pub with her and chat to her the way I did. I just felt such an affinity for her, partially because we are of a similar age, in terms of when she was sent into the field. And I just liked her character. Unfortunately for Cecily, she was arrested, she was hiding in a coal cellar, and she had a piece of paper in her pocket. Nobody knows what that paper said, but it seems to be very important. And she was unfortunately sent on that big convoy that left Paris to Ravensbruck, a very famous convoy train that of deportees. And there were opera singers, and Genevieve de Gaulle was on it and Red Cross Nurses, and Cecily was on it. And I think the bit of the story that gets me, she pushed a letter through the slats of the cattle truck just saying to her husband, and it said, leaving for Germany, C. And her husband wrote to Vera Atkins actually, and said, sorry, when she got to Ravensbruck, she sent a letter and that fascinated me. I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know you could communicate, which clearly shows she wasn’t Nacht und Nebel, I don’t think they suspected her of SOE activity. Anyway, she opened this line of communication with her husband and he asked what Ravensbruck was and they said, oh, don’t worry about it, it’s nothing. But he wrote to her and asked her for a divorce, and he said, you endangered my life by undertaking resistance activity. I want a divorce. And she just did the most amazing thing, she found a camp doctor, she rewrote her will and she wrote him out of her will in the middle of a concentration camp. And I just think that’s the most extraordinary nous, and I just feel like, go girl, good on you. Unfortunately she didn’t survive the camp.
She was gassed, but I just felt such an affinity with her. The other thing, which is actually about Vera Atkins, and I couldn’t put it in the book 'cause I could never find the reference, but one of the agents decided that now was the time to get pregnant. I want a baby and I want one now. You know, right in the middle of the Second World War in occupied France, she got pregnant. And when word got back to SOE, apparently Vera knitted some little booties and put them out in the next parachute drop. And these little booties arrived for the baby. But I can’t remember where I read it, but I just thought that was extraordinary. And that’s what I love about this subject, it’s the human stories. These are people. And my favourite quote is, “they were ordinary people doing extraordinary things”. And I think that’s what grips me so much still, I’m still so enthusiastic about my subject because of that.
And during the research, of course, we both visit places that are relevant to the research, which you’ve done, haven’t you? Give us a sense of why that’s important and the kind of things, the places you visited. Did you visit Ravensbruck? Did you visit the camps during your research?
I did visit the camps. Yeah, I did. I’m just trying to find my share screen again. So yeah, I visited Ravensbruck, which is just here.
And at what point in the research? How did you feel about it?
I did Ravensbruck for my PhD actually. Because I was writing about two agents who’d been there. So this is, I visited Ravensbruck, I always take flowers. And I visited, I don’t know if I’ve got the photos of it. I visited Dachau. Is that Dachau? No, that’s Paris. So we stood outside the Avenue Foch in Paris. My partner and I, working out Noor Inayat Khan’s escape route, for example. The bottom here, we visited Drancy, this was while researching the book. The house at the top is Noor Inayat Khan’s house when she lived in Paris. We also went to Dachau fairly recently, and found ourselves kind of trying to work out where it all happened, where the cells were, where they were executed. Same at Natzweiler. I went to Natzweiler, I had a copy of another book in my hand called “Flames in the Field”. And I went with a friend and we just retraced their footsteps. But you know, I’ve also been to happier places, to places where they trained, for example, been to Beaulieu and places like that. And I find it important because I like to, history for me is very much bringing it off the page. It’s been a privilege to write a book and to be doing another one. But I’m very much a believer in standing where they stood, seeing what they saw the best you can, of course. And just trying to understand it that little bit better. So I’m very much for research trips and getting around as much as possible. And I think for me, going to the camps was a kind of catharsis for me, to see where it had happened and to understand a little bit more, I guess, by actually being on the site.
So I’m going to open up for questions One final question from me before I check in the chat box, and keep the questions coming. We do have questions in the chat box. Were there any areas that eluded you during your research, areas where you feel you would like to have known more? Or do you feel you’ve pretty much managed to get a fairly complete history?
I’m very happy with the results, but there is always more. I was flicking through it today and thinking I wish I’d been able to find out more about, for example, Muriel Byck, she’s the one I didn’t come onto, but one who died of meningitis. I wish I could have filled her story more because there’s only two or three pages. So even though I’ve tried to give a balanced view, sometimes it’s not possible because the files don’t exist to back it up, or it’s very difficult to find people who can help you. And when you’re writing about 39, you can’t reach out to everybody, because you just don’t have the capacity to do that. So for some of them, yeah, I really, I wish I could have said more or got more out of the archives, to tell their stories and to bring them back to life in a way. But that said, I’m pretty happy with it. Yeah, there’s always going to be stuff that eludes you. You’re trying to put that one bit of the jigsaw in and it just won’t fit. You’re trying to come to a conclusion that doesn’t quite work. So at the moment I’m revisiting the history of the Prosper circuit, the one in Paris, which was blown in June of '43. And although there’s a whole chapter on it in the book, I think there’s actually a whole book in it to be honest, about the traitors and what happened, and why it happened and everything around it.
That’s the difficult part in this whole story. But also other networks behind enemy lines, the betrayal, just horrifying.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: I’ve had a peak at the questions that have come in. We’ve got some fabulous questions, Kate. Could you just very briefly, very, very briefly talk again about the Jewish agents? Not in total, but we’ve had a question. I think I noticed that some people logged in a little bit later after we’d started, and may have missed this. So could you just give us a very, very brief sort of paragraph if you like, outline of the Jewish agents. How many were, and just give us a little sense 'cause we have had it one of those questions in the chat.
A - Of course. Yeah. So there’s Denise Bloch who worked within the resistance and escaped across the Pyrenees, was recruited into SOE and unfortunately just seemed to get caught up in a trap and was betrayed by the sounds of it. She was a wireless operator. She was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Paris, imprisoned at Fresnes. And eventually was executed at Ravensbruck concentration camp alongside Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo. Another lady is Muriel Byck, she was a wireless operator as well. She had some quite important jobs, with which was to establish what they call post boxes. So where you can leave a message safely, and it can be picked up.
Q - And she was Jewish, yes?
A - Yes, she was Jewish as well. Muriel Byck, yeah. She lived on her nerves. And actually one historian thinks she died of fright, but she became very, very poorly. Now the worst thing to do as a resistor is to go to hospital, because you know, they’re watching you the whole time. And especially if you’re delirious as she was, she had a fever. She might say anything. So her circuit leader went with her and sat with her the entire time. It turned out she had meningitis. And she died. She died in his arms. They tried desperately to save her. They were going to operate, but she passed away. And this is the really sad part of her story. They couldn’t bury her under her own name. So they buried her in a zinc coffin so that she could be exhumed and moved after the war. But she was buried under a false name, which is just so tragic that they couldn’t recognise who she was. The other lady who was involved with SOE who was Jewish was Sonia Olschanezky. She was a Russian ballet dancer. And although she wasn’t an agent in the true sense, in that she didn’t come back to Britain to train, she was heavily involved with SOE, and a little bit like Denise’s story managing to avoid the Rafle du Vel’ d'Hiv. Sonia didn’t, she was actually in Drancy, she was in the transit camp, and her mother managed to get a letter written saying she’s too valuable as a worker to deport her. And it worked. They got her out of Drancy and she worked in the resistance. Now it’s difficult to know exactly what happened, but she ended up with the women at Natzweiler, I’m sorry, I was just trying to remember which camp because it was a confusion between her and Noor. So yeah, I mean there are, and as I said earlier, the risk these people took, you know, it’s bad enough being an SOE agent, being a Jewish SOE agent, and of course there were male agents as well. I don’t know an awful lot about them. There were some great websites out there with some fantastic information on them.
Q - Okay, so we’ll get any more details on the Jewish Agents of SOE in France, Please do read Kate’s book. So we’ve had another question, in Sarah Helm’s book about Vera Atkins, she describes the F Section, especially Buckmaster, couldn’t accept that the networks were blown and this was a catastrophe for the agents. Do you want to comment on that?
A - Yeah, I was only speaking about this this morning with someone else. I mean Buckmaster has come under a lot of flack for his mismanagement of F Section. And his inability to accept that agents had been captured, certainly shines through in my case, because I write about the women, the main story is Noor Inayat Khan, and her wireless set was captured and what they call played back by the Gestapo, and she was omitting her check, she omitted her true check, which should have shown them that she was captured. And they’re like, ah, do you know what, it’s Noor, she’s a bit flighty anyway, so let’s not worry too much. So yes, I do think, I quote him in the book, he actually said after the war, “I didn’t do anything that cost anyone their lives.” And I sort of sucked my teeth and thought, oh you did, you did. But it was a new type of warfare, it was a completely new organisation, and I think mistakes were going to happen. But unfortunately the kind of mistakes that happen in this line of work cost people their lives.
Q - And has yet, and I don’t know whether there ever will be, there’s yet to be a biography of Buckmaster, hasn’t there?
A - Yes, there have. Yeah. I’ve saw his diaries. His son met me and wafted his diaries at me. But they were very much, at two o'clock I have lunch and at three o'clock I’m meeting the Prime Minister type thing. He’s got his autobiographies, but you must treat them with a pinch of salt. They’re really quite, they’re awful.
Q - So someone has asked, did they have to speak French? But what about the backgrounds from what they recruited? I’m not sure actually we have time to talk about the background. So I would advise Shelly, who’s very brilliantly sent that question in, Shelly I think you’d really enjoy the book. ‘Cause I think this is going to answer this in more detail. So I’ll just ask you that one question. Did the agents have to speak French?
A - Yeah. You had to speak French fluently and like a native, men and women. For some reason they were a bit more lax with the men, 'cause some of the women arrived and went, oh, I can’t believe that, just stop talking. Just one of them said, could you just pretend you are dumb? It would make life so much easier if you let me do the talking. So they had to speak French fluently, and if they spoke it with an accent, so for example they were French Canadian, they needed a cover story to account for that. But yeah, absolutely.
Q - And something, when you were talking about the training earlier, can you give us a sense of how long the training took? I mean, are we talking about two or three weeks? Are we talking about a couple of months? Just give us an idea.
A - In an ideal world, and what’s ideal in times of war? But in an ideal world it should have been between six to nine months. Some of them only had six weeks training. Some of them had much longer because they were struggling with it. But yeah, ideally it was six to nine months.
So we’ve had a question about SOE, and to answer, it stands for the Special Operations Executive. So the lady who asked that question, that’s the shorthand for Special Operations Executive is what SOE is.
And it’s the European equivalent of the OSS really, the Office of Strategic Services.
Q - We’ve had a question about the aircraft, and of course we’ve got Lysander, great, on your cover, but it wasn’t only Lysander was it, what aircraft were used to drop agents and to pick them up, could you just give us a brief sense of that?
A - So to drop, if you’re parachuting, it could be a Whitley Bomber for example, or a Halifax, but to get them out you had to have an aircraft that could land. That’s where the Lysander comes into its own. You can only get two or three people in the Lysander, but the joy of it is it can land in a very, very short space and it can take off on a tiny, it doesn’t need much to get it up in the air. So that’s why the Lysander was so important. But no, to parachute them in Halifax and Whitley’s were the main aircraft, but basically it was whatever was available that you could jump out of. Because the RAF, they did have special duty squadrons, but obviously they had other things that they needed to be getting on with as well. So anything you could jump out of, basically.
Q - We’ve had a question. Did France or England ever honour any of the women?
A - Yes, both of them did. So for England, the highest decoration you could get as a woman was the George Cross. And three agents received the George Cross. Nancy Wake got the George Medal, which is the next one down. And then you’ve got lots of mentions in dispatches, OBEs, MBEs. Pearl, who I’ve mentioned several times, was given what’s called the civil MBE, which is for somebody who’s done a desk job the whole of the war. And she sent it back with a note that said, “I have done nothing civil.” And eventually they changed it to a military one. I think it’s brilliant.
That’s fabulous. I love that story.
And yeah, the French eventually recognised them. We just don’t have time to get into how de Gaulle treated them after the war. But those that he overran, he gave 24 hours to get out. He said this was, you know, this is our war, we liberated ourselves. But eventually they got the Legion d'honneur, or the Croix de Guerre as well. So nearly all of them received something. I think, oh I don’t know if I do list them in the book actually, because it got a bit thorny and difficult. But there are lists out there of the various decorations they received.
Q - So we had Kathy who said she’s got an artist friend who was in Ravensbruck. Would you be interested in seeing copies of her paintings and drawings of her experience?
A - Oh gosh. Yes, absolutely. I’ve got one of the Violette Lecoq pictures in the book. Oh gosh, yes, absolutely.
Q - So contact you via your website? So if they Google you, Kate, yes, is that the best?
A - Yeah, I wonder if I’ve got it. I don’t know if I’ve got it. Just google my name and you’ll get my website. Yes.
Or maybe Kathy could email Lockdown, and Lockdown can pass on the e-mail to Kate.
That would be amazing. I could put my email in the chat, can’t I?
[Helen] Yes.
I’ll do that.
Q - We’ve got time for just two more questions, I think. There’s so many fabulous questions here. How much did the descendants know about what their relatives, their mother, their aunt or whatever had done, 'cause presumably you have been in touch with relatives of the families of these women. How much did they know?
A - They didn’t know anything. So they had to sign the Official Secrets Act and they had to basically promise that they weren’t going to tell anybody what they were doing. So a lot of them were either in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or they were in an organisation called the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which provided them a cover, so when they were training they could say, I’m off to, I don’t know, I keep saying drive ambulances, it’s the one that springs to mind, so they had a cover. So basically their families did not know, and for some of them they didn’t, you know, they didn’t find out until after the war. Yolande Beekman had just got married, she was thought to be pregnant when she went out and her family had no idea that she’d done it or that she was even vaguely interested in doing anything like this. They were shocked and unfortunately she didn’t come home. She was executed. So for them, can you imagine the shock when you think that they’ve just been away, I don’t know, you know, doing, I don’t want to say a mundane job, but certainly not fighting behind enemy lines. It must have been a real shock to them. So no, a lot of their families literally had no idea.
Q - It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Can we just kind of finish our session, 'cause we could go on for so much longer, but I think a lot of the questions that have come in, we’ve got so many of them, will be answered in your book. So I really encourage people to go out and get the book. It’s also as an audio, it’s as an e-book, support independent book shops, however you prefer, buy online. It really is deeply important to remember these stories. Kate, as we finish now, can you kind of give us a sense for you as a historian, what can we learn about the bravery of the women and why are their stories so important for us today? Why does it matter that we remember them?
A - I think for me it’s important because of the sacrifice that they were prepared to make and the decisions that they had to make. I’ve spoken to a lot of schools recently, now the youngest agents going in were 19 years old, and I’ve spoken to 17, 18 year olds and said, you know, your biggest decision is where to go to university or what to wear to the pub tonight. These people were deciding whether or not to jump out of aircraft, and what was going to happen to them when they did. And I just find their stories so inspirational. And I think, in this particular generation, heroism is a much bandied about an overused word. I always use an example of my niece. She was asked to write about someone who inspired her and she chose a YouTube influencer. And I just said, but auntie Kate’s book is full of inspirational women, and we need to remember it’s not just a sacrifice they made, it’s also that they were human and they were making these incredible decisions to go out there and to try and change the world. They wanted to fight fascism, they wanted to fight Nazism, they wanted to protect people. And some of them said, one of them said, how can I live if I don’t try and save the future of my children? I need to do something. And for some of them they felt this was literally the only way that they could do it. Of course, for some of us listening now, it might seem like a fool’s errand, but it was incredibly important for them at the time to try and make an impact in the best way that they could.
Kate, thank you so much for your honesty. That’s what I’d love for you as a historian to be so honest so that we can gain a sort of understanding and a depth to our conversation today. Huge, huge thanks and I look forward to chatting with you when your book comes out. Your next book in just over a years time.
Well likewise with yours. Very excited.
So do tune in for our next In Conversation and our next lectures. There’s plenty coming up. But to Kate today, thank you so, so much. Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me.