Forgotten Voices of the Secret War by Roderick Bailey

Author:Roderick Bailey [Roderick Bailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407022369
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

HOLLAND

Patricia Stewart-Bam

FANY staff, Air Liaison Section, SOE HQ, London

Holland went so terribly wrong. They had the right sort of flashing and the right signal from the field, because it had been taken from the agents under duress, and the supplies were dropped. I was never aware of any of the Holland business until much later on when it was generally known in the Air Liaison Section that the agents that were giving the messages were under suspicion and that everything must be very, very carefully watched, double-watched. At that time they didn't know it was all being done under duress. It was a very successful counter-operation by the Germans.

Lieutenant Stanley Eadie

Signals officer, SOE HQ, London

I went into the signal office. Something had come up about the Dutch Section and Mac said, 'I've tried seeing the person in charge. You can try if you like. It would be good if you did.' Neither I nor Mac liked what was happening in the messages that were coming in. They didn't have their security code done properly. The security code was a quirk in the message: it might be that the twelfth or thirteenth letters were interposed; it wouldn't look bad at all on paper but that was our means of knowing that the agent was all right. Well, with the Dutch section we were seeing that some of these security checks were not there.

The Germans knew that we were having security checks so instead of having one security check, which we started out with, we had two, the idea being that if an agent was picked up and being tortured, he could reveal his first security check but not the second one. So if a message came in with no security checks, it might be all right as the agent hadn't bothered putting them in; and if it came in with both security checks, then that was all right; but if it came in with one security check only, that should have been alarm bells. But the major in charge of the Dutch section refused to accept it. He thought there was no problem at all and they'd just forgotten to do it. This was his attitude and we couldn't get anywhere with him. We couldn't prove anything, everything appeared all right from the messages except that some of the security checks were not there, and this major just pooh-poohed it. There was nothing we could do. We had no proof. We just had this gut feeling that there was something wrong.

Robin Brook

Director, Western Europe Section, SOE HQ, London

Once the thing had been thoroughly penetrated at the centre, the Germans were able to pick up incoming Dutchmen. And those Dutchmen, when they found that other Dutchmen were already working for the Germans or they were told that they were, etc, sooner or later gave in, not necessarily to torture, but to pressure; but torture if necessary. And against this combination, very few could, or did, hold out.

Then finally, on our side, we

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