Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass Read Online Free PDF

who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, and complete political reliability. Some of these qualities are to be found in some military officers and, if such men are available, they should undoubtedly be used. But the organisation should, in my view, be entirely independent of the War Office machine. 1
    As indeed it was, except for borrowing of training personnel for instruction in unarmed combat, wireless transmissions and use of weapons – and for use of RAF aircraft to drop supplies and land and recover agents from the field. SOE was tasked, in the prime minister’s words, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. His private nickname for it was ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. Within certain limits, it did set parts of Europe ablaze, at the cost of burning also many innocent people, including citizens in the occupied countries who thought they were working with London to liberate their homelands, but were in fact being used as pawns, sacrificed in games of which they were unaware.
    Section F of SOE, with responsibility for espionage and sabotage in France, was headed from September 1941 by Maurice Buckmaster, an Old Etonian who had been employed pre-war as a manager for the Ford Motor Company in France. His permanent staff numbered no more than seven, based in a flat in Orchard Court, off Portman Square in London’s West End. Buckmaster’s chief assistant was Nicholas Bodington, a pre-war Paris correspondent for the Daily Express , thought to have moonlighted there for British Intelligence. During that time, he met an extrovert French air force pilot named Henri Déricourt, who made friends wherever he flew, including in Nazi Germany. In charge of welfare and ‘prepping’ agents for their missions was an astonishingly cool and competent civilian, Ms Vera Atkins, who hid her exotic Romanian-Jewish origins under her very English manners. Recruitment and supervision of training was the responsibility of Major Selwyn Jepson, who used the alias ‘Mr Potter’ when interviewing prospective agents in English and French, of which his knowledge was so good that he could tell in what region of France they had picked up the language.
    All this had to be done without the prospective agents knowing for what or by whom they were being interviewed. As one of them afterwards recalled:
I met [Jepson] in a bare office at the Northumberland Hotel and we talked together in French for three-quarters of an hour. He didn’t say anything at all about the actual set-up and at the end he said, ‘All right, I think we’ve got a job for you. You start your training on 1 August.’ And that was it. I still had no idea what I was actually signing up for. 2
    The training course was so tough that a failure rate of twelve out of a course of fifteen recruits was not unusual. It included field craft such as recognising when one was being followed and techniques of losing a tail, and the use not only of British weapons but also of American and enemy small arms, which had to be stripped down and reassembled in the dark by feel alone. Target shooting was made more difficult by taking place at the end of an exhausting obstacle course. The course ended with parachute training at Ringway airport near Manchester.
    In 1942 Buckmaster decided to set up a totally new network to be run by Francis Anthony Suttill, a 33-year-old lawyer qualified in both Britain and France. He may have been a good lawyer but, like Delestraint and Moulin, lacked the paranoia necessary for clandestine work in an occupied country. Déricourt afterwards summed up Suttill as ‘more suited to be an officer in a gung-ho cavalry regiment than for clandestine warfare’. In retrospect, that may have been a powerful reason for selecting Suttill.
    He christened the new network PROSPER, after a fifth-century theologian named Prosper of Aquitaine. On 24 September 1942