Hitler's Sectret War: The Nazi Espionage Campaign Against the Allies by Charles Whiting

Author:Charles Whiting [Whiting, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookzat Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six – The Abwehr Strikes Back

‘It is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable feats in the history of espionage.’

Admiral Canaris, 1943.

At one o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 10 March, 1943, a four-engined RAF Halifax bomber was slowly approaching the Dutch provincial town of Apeldoorn. On board there were, in addition to the crew, three Dutchmen. All were spies, volunteers, exiles from their homeland for nearly three years. Now they were going back to fight the Germans. Only one of them, a 25-year-old former Dutch naval petty officer, Pieter Dourlein, would survive the battle to come.

The pilot spotted what he had been looking for for the last ten minutes – a fleck of winking red light. It was the signal beacon lit by the Dutch underground. They had almost reached the DZ. The three Dutch SOE, recruited a few months before in the UK by a British Major Anthony Blunt, who looked at the world with a haughty stare as if he had just discovered an unpleasant smell underneath his long nose, tensed at the door.

Now the green light inside the door started to wink on and off. It was time to go. They went out one after another like clockwork, as they had been taught to do. Their instructors had told them the reception party didn’t want to spend half the night looking for them. The ‘stick’ had to be very tight. For a novice Dourlein didn’t make a bad landing – in the branches of a tree. He dropped to the ground and in a flash had his pistol out.

The drone of the Halifax’s engines died away as the bomber turned and headed westwards back to its base and an early morning breakfast of eggs and bacon. Now there was total silence. Dourlein must have felt he was the last man left alive in the world. He grasped his pistol more tightly as he heard heavy boots swishing through the damp grass. There was someone coming. If it was the Moppen, the Germans, he swore they wouldn’t take him alive. A figure came into view. Someone called his cover name softly. ‘Paul? Paul, is it you?’ It was the reception committee after all.

He stepped out of the trees to find two men waiting for him, followed a moment later by a third. As Dourlein recorded after the war, ‘Their welcome was hearty and their manner jovial. We shook hands and they told me they were taking me straight to the leader of the reception committee.’

A little while later they found the other two agents. Dourlein spotted plenty of lamp signals in the distance, presumably from the Dutch underground. He thought, ‘These people are being very lavish with their lights,’ then dismissed what he regarded as his new friends’ carelessness.

After half an hour they had a break and were each given an English cigarette, apparently a great luxury in Holland. They also had a nip from the new arrivals’ whisky flasks. It was now four in the morning and they were given the signal to move on.

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