British thought otherwise. If it was true that the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg victories in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France had been delivered through military might, they had been aided and abetted by fifth columnists in the defeated countries. These were the agents of sabotage, propaganda and subversion who had bombed civilians in Vienna, faked the attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz that had given Hitler the pretext for invading Poland in September 1939, and spread defeatism in France on the eve of her Fall. Commonplace today, at theoutbreak of war these tactics were something of a novelty. It was true that in the wake of Anschluss, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 had created a special unit for just such a purpose. Section D was based in Caxton Street in the medieval lanes around Westminster Abbey. It had dreamed up some wonderful schemes. They included sabotaging Swedish iron ore exports to the Reich, blowing up the oilfields in Romania and – best of all – blocking the blue Danube. None had come to fruition.
The Fall of France focused minds wonderfully. On 16 July 1940, the same day that Hitler signed Directive No. 16 ordering the invasion of Britain, a midnight meeting was held by Churchill in Downing Street. A plan was agreed to foment sabotage, subversion and resistance throughout Europe. Hugh Dalton, the blustering and belligerent Minister of Economic Warfare, was to be the political chief of the top-secret agency. It was to be called Special Operations Executive or SOE. Churchill’s parting shot to Dalton as he left Number 10 through a haze of cigar smoke has passed into legend: ‘Now set Europe ablaze.’
This was indicative of the high hopes that Churchill himself, Dalton and many others entertained at the time. The Executive was classed with strategic bombing and the naval blockade as amongst the country’s most powerful weapons, its role to foment popular uprisings in Europe of which a new expeditionary army would merely be a guarantor. 1
In practice, nurturing resistance proved far more difficult than envisaged. In due course there grew sufficient will to resist in the occupied countries of Europe. It was rarely to be found in 1940. The populations of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Poland were shocked, cowed, subdued and generally submissive to their new masters – be they Nazis, Italians or puppet governments. The Alps themselves, remote though they might be, at first seemed little different. As to what Churchill dubbed the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, SOE had to begin at the beginning. In 1940 this was not necessarily a very good place to start. Lord Selborne, a Tory grandee who replaced Dalton in 1942, recalled, ‘Underground warfare was an unknown art inEngland in 1940; there were no text-books for newcomers, no old hands to initiate them into the experiences of the last war … lessons had to be learned in the hard school of practice.’ 2 There was also the problem of MI6. Section D had been folded into SOE at its inception, and the intelligence service saw the new organisation as an upstart. This was understandable given that the two agencies’ interests were perpetually at odds. Clandestine activities were undercover: silent, secret and inconspicuous. Sabotage and subversion were the polar opposites. A bomb here, a derailed train there, an assassination ‘pour encourager les autres’. Visibility was all.
At once this conflict arose in the Alps.
As Switzerland’s General Henri Guisan regularly made clear, the republic’s very existence hinged on the Alpine railway tunnels that welded Italy and Germany into the Axis. When the British discovered that a third of Mussolini’s coal requirement was trucked from the Ruhr and Saar coalfields through the St Gotthard and Simplon, they became an obvious object of interest to SOE. An operation was drawn up to destroy the marshalling yards, sabotage the bridges and block the railway
The Fall of France focused minds wonderfully. On 16 July 1940, the same day that Hitler signed Directive No. 16 ordering the invasion of Britain, a midnight meeting was held by Churchill in Downing Street. A plan was agreed to foment sabotage, subversion and resistance throughout Europe. Hugh Dalton, the blustering and belligerent Minister of Economic Warfare, was to be the political chief of the top-secret agency. It was to be called Special Operations Executive or SOE. Churchill’s parting shot to Dalton as he left Number 10 through a haze of cigar smoke has passed into legend: ‘Now set Europe ablaze.’
This was indicative of the high hopes that Churchill himself, Dalton and many others entertained at the time. The Executive was classed with strategic bombing and the naval blockade as amongst the country’s most powerful weapons, its role to foment popular uprisings in Europe of which a new expeditionary army would merely be a guarantor. 1
In practice, nurturing resistance proved far more difficult than envisaged. In due course there grew sufficient will to resist in the occupied countries of Europe. It was rarely to be found in 1940. The populations of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Poland were shocked, cowed, subdued and generally submissive to their new masters – be they Nazis, Italians or puppet governments. The Alps themselves, remote though they might be, at first seemed little different. As to what Churchill dubbed the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, SOE had to begin at the beginning. In 1940 this was not necessarily a very good place to start. Lord Selborne, a Tory grandee who replaced Dalton in 1942, recalled, ‘Underground warfare was an unknown art inEngland in 1940; there were no text-books for newcomers, no old hands to initiate them into the experiences of the last war … lessons had to be learned in the hard school of practice.’ 2 There was also the problem of MI6. Section D had been folded into SOE at its inception, and the intelligence service saw the new organisation as an upstart. This was understandable given that the two agencies’ interests were perpetually at odds. Clandestine activities were undercover: silent, secret and inconspicuous. Sabotage and subversion were the polar opposites. A bomb here, a derailed train there, an assassination ‘pour encourager les autres’. Visibility was all.
At once this conflict arose in the Alps.
As Switzerland’s General Henri Guisan regularly made clear, the republic’s very existence hinged on the Alpine railway tunnels that welded Italy and Germany into the Axis. When the British discovered that a third of Mussolini’s coal requirement was trucked from the Ruhr and Saar coalfields through the St Gotthard and Simplon, they became an obvious object of interest to SOE. An operation was drawn up to destroy the marshalling yards, sabotage the bridges and block the railway
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