Beaulieu by Cyril Cunningham

Author:Cyril Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783032174
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter VII

THE STUDENTS

The popular idea of a spy is somebody similar to Kim Philby, a civilian who may or may not be a native of the country in which he resides, posing as a respectable citizen while collecting and transmitting classified information to a foreign power. This classic notion is in fact far more descriptive of the type of people operated by our Secret Intelligence Service than the men and women who worked for SOE, whose primary purpose was subversion and disruption. Inevitably, in order to do this SOE needed a great deal of information for targeting and sabotaging installations and key industrial plants working for the Germans in the occupied countries. Some of this came from their own resources but much of it came from other Intelligence sources including air reconnaissance and the Secret Intelligence Service. Nevertheless, the Country Sections needed huge amounts of information about local regulations, documentation and living conditions in the occupied countries in order to operate at all. In practice, therefore, the SOE agents were compelled to collect intelligence for operational reasons, but it was not their primary function.

Anybody who has read some of the 400 books that have been written about SOE operations, or have read some of the personal accounts of their experiences by numerous former agents, might be forgiven if they became confused as to whether the typical SOE agent was a ‘civilian’ like the well-known agents of the French Section or whether they were more like the SAS men of the present day. Certainly the focus of public attention has been upon the French Section’s civilian ‘star’ agents like Peter Churchill, John Farmer, Francis Cammaerts, Ben Cowburn and Robert Heslop. Even greater publicity has been given to the Section’s fifty-five women agents, among them Odette Hallowes, Pearl Witherington, Nancy Fiocca and Christine Granville, all of whom survived, and to the eleven brave women who were caught by the Germans and perished after terrible suffering in Nazi concentration camps, women like Violette Szabo, Yvonne Rudellat and Noor Inayat Khan.

Very few people will have heard of the ‘star’ agents of the other Country Sections, such as Knut Haukeld, Joachim Ronneberg, or Jens Paulsson of the Norwegian Section, or of Jan Piwnik and many other very brave Poles; or of the Dutchmen Lieutenant Jan Ubbink and Sergeant Pieter Dourlein who suffered almost as much at the hands of the British, who thought they were double agents after they escaped from the Gestapo, as they did under the Germans. And there were others, too numerous to mention, who served with distinction in the Czech, Belgian and Danish resistance movements. There is a tendency to overlook the large number of British officers and men who fought with partisans in France, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia and other Balkan countries and never tried to disguise their true identities or their British nationality. There were also some who lost their lives operating in neutral countries in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and elsewhere.

At a very modest estimate there

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