The Women who Worked for SOE

By Hilary Green

In my last blog (Click here) I wrote about the work of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the First World War. When the conflict was over the FANY did not disband, although there was some difficulty in keeping membership buoyant in the inter-war years. Nevertheless, a loyal core continued to train, although now the emphasis was not so much on nursing as on transport. It was clear that there was no longer any need for mounted nurses, the function for which they had been founded in 1907, but their ability to drive and maintain motor vehicles had been crucial during the 1914-18 period. So now they concentrated on this aspect of the training and shortly before the outbreak of World War II it was suggested that they should come under the aegis of the ATS as the Women's Motor Transport Company. And it was in this capacity that many of them did sterling work driving ambulances and chauffeuring high ranking officers during the war. (It was into this corps that Princess Elizabeth, now our Queen, was recruited in order to 'do her bit'.)

Princess Elizabeth in the ATS - Public domain Image

Some long-standing FANYs, however, refused to be subsumed into the ATS. Their independence from other authorities had always been a matter of pride and they insisted on maintaining it, becoming known as the 'Free FANY.' It was this independence that made them ideally suited to working with SOE.

When the Special Operations Executive was first set up at the behest of Winston Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze' by dropping secret agents behind enemy lines, its existence was so secret that not even the army high command was allowed to know about it. So when a need arose for help on 'the home front' with such activities as radio communications and coding and decoding messages to and from agents in the field it was impossible for them to turn to the ATS or any other recognised women's service. Fortunately Colin Gubbins, who was in charge of operations, knew that a neighbour of his, a Mrs Phyllis Bingham, belonged to the FANY and he turned to her for help. So was born 'Bingham's Unit', a branch of the FANY whose function was known only to a few.

Member of ATS - Public Domain image

In order to fulfil their new tasks it was imperative to recruit extra personnel. What was required were young women with experience of wireless telegraphy, perhaps those who had worked for the Post Office, or who had a mathematical background or an aptitude for crossword puzzles. These last, it was felt, would have the right kind of brains for dealing with codes and cyphers. Girls with the right attributes found themselves being referred to a vicarage in Wilton Place, in London, where they encountered the redoubtable Marion Gamwell. (Marion and her sister Hope were long-standing members of the FANY, having volunteered in the First World War, when they provided, from their own funds, a mobile bathhouse in a converted lorry where troops could bathe and get their clothes washed.) Other young women who applied to the Women's War Work Bureau in Oxford Street were sent to Bingham's office in Baker Street. None of them knew what they were being recruited for, but if they were considered suitable after an induction course at Overthorpe Manor, they were then asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. Not even their parents knew what they were doing. They were told that their daughters were being trained as drivers.

Potential radio operators were sent to Fawley Court, near Henley, for four months’ intensive training. If they passed they then went to SOE's communications centre at Grendon Underwood, one of the many country houses taken over for the duration of the war. Conditions were grim. They lived in Nissen huts in the grounds and were often cold and hungry. They worked six hour 'skeds' or schedules in shifts round the clock and each girl was allotted her own agent (or Joe as they were fondly called). In this way, she would get to know his 'fist' – his unique touch on the Morse key – so that she could detect if someone else was impersonating him. Messages were in code and sent in groups of five letters which did not make words, so if one letter was missed it was impossible to guess what it should have been, and they were often sent in haste and in poor atmospheric conditions. It was intensive and demanding work.

Fawley Court via Wiki commons - click here for attribution

Once the message had been received it was handed over to the coding section to be rendered into plain English. Codes were based on poems. Each agent was asked to memorise two or three lines of verse and each message was based on one or two words from those lines, the letters of which were then transposed by using a cypher on a silk sheet which could be folded very small and concealed. The process is described by Leo Marks, a brilliant young man who was SOE's Head of Coding in his book 'Between Silk and Cyanide'. (Those who have read or seen '84 Charing Cross Road' will be interested to learn that Leo was the son of the man who owned the eponymous bookshop.) Many agents maintained that they were unable to remember even short pieces of poetry, so Leo suggested that the girls at Grendon might make up verses that would be easier for them to learn. Some of the results were scatological in the extreme -but presumably all the more memorable for that!

Leo Marks at the opening of the Violette Szabo Museum
Image via Wiki Commons - click here for attribution

Because the messages were sent under very dangerous and difficult conditions they often arrived garbled, making the decoding almost impossible. Marks describes how, on his first visit to Grendon, he told the girls the story of a young Belgian radio operator who was caught while transmitting by the Nazis and suffered terrible tortures in an effort to make him reveal his associates. He pointed out that the longer an operator was at his set, the greater the chances that the enemy detector vans would be able to pinpoint his location. It was vital, therefore, that no operator should be asked to send a message twice. After that, it became a point of honour among the decoders that, no matter how garbled, every message was decoded – even if they had to sit up all night to solve it.

Radio communications was not the only area where the FANYs gave invaluable help. Agents in training or those waiting to be sent into the field, were housed in more great mansions taken over by SOE. In fact, there was a standing joke among them that the letters stood not for Special Operations Executive but for Stately 'Omes of England. While there, they had to be looked after, fed and above all entertained to keep their minds off the dangers ahead of them. Here the more traditional FANY personnel were ideally suited. Many of them had come from backgrounds where social life was at the hub of their existence, but this did not mean they were not prepared to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work. But at the end of a long day cooking and cleaning they would change into evening dress and after dinner the carpet would be rolled back and they and the agents would dance till midnight to the music of a gramophone.

It was not long, of course, before some of them developed the urge to become agents themselves. Once SOE became convinced that women could play a useful role they began to train with the men, and many of them who were not already members of the FANY were enrolled into their ranks to give a cover to their real purpose. One such was Violette Zsabo, whose exploits form the basis for the film Carve Her Name With Pride.

[This is an Editor's Choice archive post which was originally published on EHFA on 6 December 2018]
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One aspect of this change in the role of the FANY that particularly interested Hilary was the social implications. When they were founded the FANY was unashamedly elitist. It was a Yeomanry, an organisation for the daughters of the land-owning classes. To a great extent it had preserved that ethos up to the beginning of World War II. Many of the young women had been 'debs', had been presented at court and 'done the season'; some even had titles. But the expansion of the work had required the influx of a large number of girls from very different backgrounds. The heroine of  'We'll Meet Again' is a working class girl recruited into Bingham's Unit who becomes a coder for SOE, ultimately finding herself parachuting into enemy-occupied Italy.
The heroine of Never Say Goodbye is  Frankie's best friend, a girl from the opposite social background, who volunteers to be dropped into France as an agent.

Connect with Hilary: www.hilarygreen.co.uk

RMS Lancastria

by Kate Dunn

I've always been terrified of boats.  One of my earliest memories goes all the way back to when I was two or three – still young enough to be having major tantrums – standing on the banks of the River Thames at Windsor throwing a hissy fit because I thought joining my family on a pleasure cruise would mean certain death.  It's a fear I have to this day, to a certain extent: the sight of a giant prow looming above me still brings me out in a cold sweat.

RMS Lancastria (center) at Funchal, Madeira, c. 1930.

Perhaps this fear brings with it a certain morbid fascination, but certainly when I was busy researching the fallout from the evacuation of Dunkirk for a project that I was then working on, mention of a ship called the RMS Lancastria caught my eye.  She had been a Cunard liner before the war, ferrying well-heeled holidaymakers to the Bahamas and in her day must have been the last word in luxury.  After war broke out she was requisitioned and following the Allies' disastrous campaign in Northern France in the early phase of the conflict she was pressed into service as a troop ship to recover the stragglers who failed to make it as far as the coast for what the government euphemistically described as "re-embarkation".  Several thousand of these men were instructed to retreat westwards towards Brittany and eventually ended up at St Nazaire, where the Lancastria and her sister ship the Oronsay were waiting to bring them home as part of Operation Aerial.

St Nazaire: the HMT Lancastria Memorial on the left 

Most of the general public are familiar with the sinking of the Titanic in which fifteen hundred and seventeen men and women were drowned, and some have heard of the Lusitania which sank with the loss of eleven hundred and ninety two souls, but until recently few people have known about the fate of the Lancastria. She and the Oronsay were too large to enter the port at St Nazaire and remained moored out in the estuary while a couple of destroyers ferried the waiting troops out to them.  It is not known how many thankful passengers finally boarded the Lancastria in this way, but estimates put the number at above six thousand.

Overcrowding was certainly a problem on a ship built to hold thirteen hundred, but the captain was faced with a far greater one: there were rumours of U boats circling out at sea and he made the fateful decision to wait for an escort before he set sail.  They came under attack while they were waiting and a bomb was dropped on the Oronsay, knocking out her bridge.  The nervous refugees on her sister ship must have thanked their lucky stars that they were on board the Lancastria.  Shortly after this six German aircraft came flying out of the sun.  Most of them dropped their payload on the docks, but one of them had his sights set on the Lancastria, which was struck by four bombs, started listing badly and sank within twenty minutes.

Nobody knows how many people died on that sunny afternoon on the 17th of June 1940 but lower estimates put the number at around four thousand – more than double the number of casualties on the better known Titanic.

Lancastria sinking off Saint-Nazaire, France, 17 June 1940.

Why do relatively few people know about what was the worst maritime disaster in British history?  If it doesn't have the national resonance that the Titanic and the Lusitania share, it is because the sinking took place the very same day that Marshal Petain signed an armistice with Hitler, such a catastrophic set back in the war that Churchill felt the British public and should be spared further bad news and slapped a D notice on the Lancastria, which meant that anybody mentioning it would be prosecuted.  A terrible pall of silence descended and the stories of the men who drowned and those who survived remained untold.

Gradually, as the decades passed, details did slip out.  There are some firsthand accounts held by the Imperial War Museum which take your breath away: the lines on a lifeboat containing women and children jammed and had to be cut, sending the craft plummeting vertically into the sea; the cork life jackets which were issued were so rigid that men jumping from the sinking vessel had their necks broken as they hit the water and the life rafts thrown from the ship dealt knockout blows to those  below.  The boat's fuel tanks were ruptured so people were thrashing about in a thick slick of oil and as they struggled the German planes banked round and started firing on them.  Witnesses spoke of seeing hundreds of tiny dead fish floating around them as a result of this.

A typical cork jacket from 1887

As early as 1955 the Lancastria Survivors Association was set up to support and commemorate those who had come through this horrendous ordeal and an organisation called the HMT Lancastria Association still exists today.  Author Jonathan Fenby has also written a comprehensive account of the tragedy, "The Sinking of the Lancastria".  In 2015 after a campaign run by the military and a number of celebrities including actress Joanna Lumley and best-selling author Louis de Bernieres, the government did finally recognize the disaster when George Osborne, standing in for the prime minister, referred to it in parliament, but mention the Lancastria to the man or woman in the street today and they will probably shrug and say they've never heard of it.

Perhaps because of my morbid fear of boats, but actually, I think it was more from a sense of injustice, I became deeply interested in this mighty ship.  The soldiers who were rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk were treated as heroes and given campaign medals, but the fate of the those who went down with the Lancastria was never acknowledged in that way.  So I did the only thing I could: I picked up my pen and started to write…

[all above images are in the Public Domain and sourced from Wikipedia.com]

Kate Dunn comes from a long line of writers and actors: her grandfather, Hugh Williams, was a celebrated actor and playwright and her uncles are the actor Simon Williams and the poet Hugo Williams. Kate has performed in repertory and in the West End and appeared in television productions including My Brother Jonathon and The Bill. The publication of her first novel Rebecca's Children was followed by Always and Always, the Wartime Letters of Hugh and Margaret Williams, and in October 1998 Exit Through the Fireplace - The Great Days of Rep and the sequel to this, Do Not Adjust Your Set – The Early Days of Live Television, in 2003. Kate now broadcasts on Radios Two, Three and Four and is a regular contributor to Front Row. She teaches creative writing at Bristol University.

The Line Between Us draws on firsthand reports of the Lancastria tragedy to craft a story framed by a gripping evocation of a major disaster that remains relatively unknown even to this day. 

Reflections on the Battle of Britain

by Dr. Helena P. Schrader

There are few events in British history that are as dramatic or as inspiring as the Battle of Britain. Indeed, Winston Churchill suggested in his famous speech that the Battle of Britain was the British Empire's "finest hour."

From the point of view of a historian, the Battle of Britain was significant because it brought Hitler’s aggression to a halt for the first time after he came to power in Germany in 1933. Admittedly, Hitler considered his failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940 an annoyance rather than a major strategic set-back; his real objective was the Soviet Union, and to this day most Germans have never even heard of the Battle of Britain! Yet for Britain, the United States, and occupied Europe, the significance of the Battle of Britain can hardly be over-stated.

If the RAF had been defeated in 1940, the Luftwaffe would have been able to continue indiscriminate day-light bombing almost indefinitely and paved the way for a German invasion of Britain. Although many doubt this would have been successful, there is no certainty that it would have been repulsed either. The Royal Navy had been seriously weakened by the losses during the evacuation at Dunkirk and was over-stretched trying to protect the Atlantic lifeline. Furthermore, the Royal Army was had been mauled in France and the British Expeditionary Force had abandoned all its heavy equipment in France. In consequence, the British ground forces lacked tanks and artillery for fighting the heavily mechanized Wehrmacht. Churchill was not only being rhetorical when he spoke about fighting a guerrilla war against the invaders!

But the invasion did not take place because the Royal Air Force, or more specifically Fighter Command, prevented the Luftwaffe from establishing air superiority over England. Without air superiority, the Wehrmacht was not prepared to invade. So Hitler (more interested in invading the Soviet Union anyway) first postponed and then cancelled the invasion of Britain altogether.

This was more than a military victory. The Battle of Britain was a critical diplomatic and psychological victory as well. The psychological impact of defeating the apparently invincible Luftwaffe was enormous at the time. The RAF had proved that the Luftwaffe could be beaten, and by inference that the Wehrmacht could be beaten. This fact alone encouraged resistance and kept hope alive all across occupied Europe.

Even more important, as a result of British tenacity and defiance in the Battle of Britain, the United States, which at the start of the Battle had written Britain off as a military and political power, revised its opinion of British strength. Because of the Battle of Britain, the U.S.A. shifted its policy from ‘neutrality’ to ‘non-belligerent’ assistance. With American help, Britain was able to keep fighting until Hitler over-extended himself in the Soviet Union. This in turn made it possible to forge the wartime coalition of Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which would eventually, defeat Hitler’s Germany.

Yet, any such purely objective assessment of the Battle of Britain does not explain the appeal of the Battle of Britain to people today. There were, after all, many other decisive battles in WWII from Stalingrad to Midway. The appeal of the Battle of Britain is less military and diplomatic than emotional.

The Battle of Britain was a drama that has captured the imagination – and hearts – of all subsequent generations because of just how much hung in the balance and of just how little stood between Britain and a Nazi invasion. The Wehrmacht had just defeated the French in six weeks! The British Expeditionary Force had been rescued by the skin of their teeth in a dramatic, improvised evacuation – but only at the cost of abandoning all its equipment on the beaches of France. Thus, in the Summer of 1940, it seemed like only RAF Fighter Command stood between Britain and invasion, between freedom and subjugation.

Yet RAF Fighter Command was tiny! Even including the foreign pilots flying with the RAF, there were only roughly 1,200 trained fighter pilots in Britain at this time. (Numbers varied due to training, casualties and recruiting.) These men were a highly trained elite that could not be readily replaced. Pilots were not mere “cannon fodder.” They were specialists that took years to train. In the summer of 1940, they stood against apparently overwhelming odds. Churchill – as so often – captured the sentiment of his countrymen when he claimed that “never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

This image of a small “band of brothers” standing up to a massive and invincible foe in a defensive battle for their homeland was reminiscent of other heroic battles – Henry V at Agincourt, Edward the Black Prince at Poitiers, Leonidas and his 300 at Thermopylae. Such battles, pitting a few defenders against a hoard of enemy, have always appealed to students of history and readers of historical fiction like almost nothing else.

Furthermore, it must be remembered that pilots were very, very young (averaging 22 years in age), and they were they were fighting with beautiful, fragile machines that still awed most of their contemporaries. Furthermore, the casualties were devastating. In the short, four month span of the Battle, Fighter Command lost roughly 40% of its pilots. That means that each pilot had only a slightly better than 50% chance of surviving the Battle. Furthermore, the effective casualty rate of killed and wounded was closer to 70%. This situation was aggravated by the fact that, as a rule, the more experienced pilots had a 5-6 times greater chance of surviving than did the replacement pilots coming into the front line with very little flying and no combat experience. The most critical period for a replacement pilot was his first fortnight in a front-line squadron. Many pilots did not survive four hours.

This meant that a smallish core of experienced pilots watched waves of replacements arriving and then being shot-down in a short space of time, until sheer exhaustion wore down even the most experienced pilots. By the end of the Battle, Squadron Leaders, Flight Lieutenants and Section Leaders were increasingly getting shot down as a result of mistakes, inattention, and ‘sloppy flying’ that resulted simply from fatigue.

These are the “human interest” stories that so fascinate us today – the inexperienced teenagers with less than 20 hours on combat aircraft being thrown into the bloody fray, and their experienced commanders, the “killers” who had to shoot down enough German aircraft to convince Goering and Hitler that the Battle could not be won , while at the same time leading, encouraging and advising their young colleagues so they could live to fight another day.

How did they do it?

Obviously one factor was sheer motivation. British pilots were fighting over their homes – and their historical and national heritage – acutely aware of being the last line of defense in a war against a widely abhorred enemy. But this alone would hardly have given them victory. The Poles and Danes and French etc. had also been fighting for their homes and country against the same aggressor.

Technology and organization were other critical factors and these have been analyzed and discussed in great detail in many good history books. I will only mention here radar, without which Britain would certainly have lost the Battle of Britain, and the system of ground control over dispersed fighter squadrons, which was equally important to Britain’s victory in 1940. The Spitfire deserves at least an honorable mention since it was such a magnificent fighter, even if honesty compels me to note that in the Battle of Britain more squadrons were equipped with and more German aircrafts shot down by Hurricanes.

But I would like to draw attention to one aspect of the Battle that I believe has often been overlooked in favor of the above explanations for success. This was the very strong “team spirit” that predominated in the RAF – in sharp contrast to the Luftwaffe at this time. The Luftwaffe enabled and encouraged individual fighter pilots to become “aces.” If a German pilot was an “ace,” he was not only lionized by the press and praised by his peers and superiors -- all the way to Hitler himself, but he was given a wingman and then an entire “Schwarm” to protect him so he could concentrate on killing. This way, German aces accumulated huge scores, sometimes over 100 attributed “kills,” while the highest scoring ace of the RAF, “Johnnie” Johnson, had only 38 recorded “kills.”

Yet the RAF with its ethos of acting as a team inflicted losses on the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain at a rate of almost 2 to 1. Furthermore – and far more important -- morale did not break. Given the losses and the sheer physical demands placed upon RAF pilots at the time, it was their ability not only to keep flying but to keep drinking and laughing that awed their countrymen, their leaders and their enemies – when they found out.

Furthermore, it was not the pilots alone who won the Battle of Britain. The RAF had worked hard to ensure that its pilots were supported by some of the best trained ground crews in the world. With an ‘apprentice’ program, the RAF had attracted technically minded young men early and provided them with extensive training throughout the inter-war years. In fact, because of a unique program that enabled exceptional “other ranks” to qualify for flying training, many pilots flying in the Battle of Britain had come up from the ranks, starting as mechanics themselves. This made the pilots appreciate their ground crews more than pilots did in other air forces of the time.

Perhaps most important, however, was that at this stage of the war, individual crews looked after individual aircraft and so specific pilots. The ground crews identified strongly with their unit – and ‘their’ pilots. After the bombing of the airfields started in mid-August, the ground crews were themselves under attack, suffering casualties and working under deplorable conditions – often without hot food, dry beds, adequate sleep and no leave. The ground crews never failed their squadrons. Aircraft were turned around – rearmed, re-fuelled, tires, oxygen, airframe etc. checked – in just minutes.

Last but not least, I would like to note that the RAF from the very start had an exceptionally positive attitude toward women. The RAF actively encouraged the establishment of a Women’s Auxiliary, which by the end of the war served alongside the RAF in virtually all non-combat functions. Even before the start of the war, however, the vital and highly technical jobs of radar operator and operations room plotter, as well as various jobs associated with these activities, were identified as trades especially suited to women. The C-in-C of Fighter Commander, ACM Dowding, personally insisted that the talented women who did these jobs move up into supervisory positions – and be commissioned accordingly. During Battle of Britain over 17,000 WAAF served with the RAF, nearly 4,500 of them with Fighter Command. A number of WAAF were killed and injured and six airwomen were awarded the Military Medal during the Battle. The presence of so many young women is another factor that contributes to its modern appeal.

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My novel on the Battle of Britain, Chasing the Wind (Kindle edition: Where Eagles Never Flew), pays tribute to the entire spectrum of participants, male and female, from mechanics and controllers to WAAFs as well as to the pilots. I based my account on the very meticulous records now available from both the UK and Germany to ensure that the raids, casualties, and claims each day are correct. Yet the most important research was reading the memoirs of dozens of participants and corresponding with others to try to get the atmosphere “right.” My greatest moment as a historical novelist came when I received a hand-written letter from a man I had only read about up until then: RAF Battle of Britain “ace” Bob Doe. Wing Commander Doe wrote to tell me I had “got it smack on the way it was for us fighter pilots,” and said that Chasing the Wind was “the best book” he had ever read about the Battle of Britain. It doesn’t get any better than that for a historical novelist!

Here’s a video teaser about the novel. Click here! (Note the Kindle Edition was published under the title Where Eagles Never Flew.)For reviews click Reviews.



Helena Page Schrader is a career diplomat, who earned a PhD in History from the University of Hamburg with a ground-breaking dissertation about the mastermind behind the coup attempt against Hitler in July 1944. She has published non-fiction works on the German Resistance, women in aviation in WWII, and the Berlin Airlift. Her novels on the German Resistance (Hitler’s Demons, the Battle of Britain (Chasing the Wind, Kindle Edition: Where Eagles Never Flew), and Ancient Greece have won praise and awards. (View a video teaser on her Leonidas Trilogy.) She is currently working on a ten Tales of Chivalry, novels set in the 13^th and 14^th century against the backdrop of the crusades. (View a video teaser on her Tales of Chivalry series.) The first novel in this series, A Widow’s Crusade, was released April 9, 2013 and can be purchased on amazon.com. You can find out more about Helena and her books at her website: http://www.helenapschrader.com.