#ww2

SOE: Special Operations Executive 1940–46 by M R D Foot

I’m currently in the middle of a long overdue deep dive into the SOE rabbit hole. This has been a long time coming, since I have always loved the espionage genre in fiction, and my favourite book Declare imagines a future for SOE beyond the official 1946 cut-off date.

Prior to this, I’d say my focus on espionage centred around the Cold War, and I’ve never nurtured much interest in the live-fire version in WW2. I suppose I considered it messier, wetter, less cerebral.

M R D Foot is, I think, the official historian of SOE, and published a number of books about it and related matters prior to his death in 2012. Just like Pippa Latour, he has a very interesting back story and was himself in the SAS and parachuted into France after D-Day.

If I was a television comedy writer, I’d be using the rich material of multiple secret organisations operating at the same time in occupied France. You’ve got your SIS, your SOE, your SAS, which is before you get to the different branches within SOE: according to this book there were no less than six different groups within SOE operating in France around D-Day. Officially, there was F section, but then also RF section, and then a group of Polish exiles, and “Jedburghs”, and so on. Confusing, chaotic, and clashing.

Because they did all kind of hate each other. De Gaulle’s official Free French RF Section was operating independently of the British-run F section. In September 1944, De Gaulle went on a tour of France telling the Brits to get the hell out of his country.

As for SIS, the rivalry and conflicting priorities were stark. SIS wanted to operate in complete secrecy, keeping things quiet and gathering intelligence. SOE wanted to do a bit of that, but at the same time made a lot of noise, blowing stuff up, sabotaging vehicles, train lines, and factories, undermining the enemy’s morale and ensuring that they had to deploy troops in out of the way places on guard duty.

At the end of the book, Foot asks the key question: how effective was it? Because it operated in secrecy, the impact of SOE was very little known until long after the war. But there are lots of indications here. The clever sabotage of a Peugeot factory near Montbeliard, which was making military equipment. The disabling of train carriages used for tank transport down near Toulouse, which delayed Nazi reinforcements following D-Day by over a fortnight. The gathering of intelligence about enemy positions and movements, blowing up bridges, repeatedly damaging the same targets, all of it seems to have been useful.

On the other hand, there are tales of incompetence and stupidity that boggle the mind. These are the kind of details that Tim Powers picked up on for Declare. A key example is the playback of agents who had been captured, along with their radio sets. There were measures in place for this: pass phrases designed to verify that a message was genuine. But SOE back in London ignored, over and over again, the fact of missing or incorrect code phrases, and carried on regardless. The whole of the Netherlands operation seems to have been blown, and quite a lot of the French. One agent even sent the code groups CAU and GHT but London failed to recognise it!

The fog of war, etc.

Agents could come unstuck for the most trivial of reasons. Asking for butter with a croissant. Looking the wrong way when crossing the road. Meeting up with another agent and speaking English in public. It was almost as if some of them wanted to get caught. The number of people who parachuted in and got caught almost immediately was really quite remarkable.

Anyway, for my purposes, I’m mainly interested in what went on in France, but this book covers the whole gamut of global operations, from what was then called Abyssinia to the Far East. If I’d known this was the case, I might have bought his other book: SOE in France, but no matter. I have another book on the go that covers that.

When I was a kid, my grandad gave me a book called something like Greatest Secrets of World War 2. I don’t remember the exact title. Given that this was probably published some time in the 1960s, I don’t think that many of the actual secrets of WW2 were in that book, but I suppose it sparked an interest. As it happens, my grandad worked at Bletchley Park during the war (I’ve no idea in what capacity), but like a lot of these people, he never talked about it.

#bookReview #Books #espionage #history #SOE #WW2

On this day, December 7th, I remember my Uncle Bob who was a member of the Hawai'ian Teritorial Guard in their WW1 surplus Tin Hat helmets and rifles in the 1930s and 40s. They were mustered as first responders to save sailors and marines from the burning waters of Pearl and transport to Tripler immediately at the attack.

His sister, my mother, watched the horrific attack from Manoa where she worked as a live-in nanny as she attended secretarial school in town. Her employers told her to rush home to the North Shore. She said the explosions and fires were shocking and scary. When she got home, they learned Bob was at Pearl with the Guard but had no contact.

Meanwhile, at Pearl, after hours of diving into the burning waters and transporting the wounded, by about 6pm, Uncle Bob and his fellow Guard troops who were Americans of Japanese ancestry found themselves under arrest at bayonet-point as spies, under the orders of a white Mainland General. They were held for days by US troops with guns trained on them until local officials intervened and they were released.

Bob rejoined his Guard unit reformed as the 100th Battalion, then volunteered to fight in Europe as part of the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated US military unit in US military history for its size. They knew they were going to be used as racist cannon fodder, and they fought valiantly despite it. Because, for guys like my Uncle Bob (and three other Uncles and my cousin Buster) they were fighting for their home, Hawai'i, and for democracy. In one battle, a short company of 110 was left with only 8 standing. Bob was wounded multiple times, and received Bronze Stars and commendations which we did not know about until after he died and was given a military funeral with 21 gun salute.

The fight for democracy is a relentless and continuing fight. This is why I fly the American flag, to honor those who willingly sacrificed, with full knowledge of their beloved, complicated, and imperfect America. Uncle Bob was a devout Buddhist, and war and killing were antithetical to his personal religious beliefs, and this was his greatest sacrifice, one that left him in absolute quiet moral agony till he died in 2008, at Tripler. He was the sweetest, kindnest, gentlest, soft-spoken quiet man. RIP.

#JapaneseAmerican #WW2 #pearlharbor #442RCT #december7th #USHistory #hawaii