This article first appeared in the author’s local parish magazine Focus (June 2023 edition)
In the early part of the Second World War, the British army did not (to put it charitably) fare terribly well in its head–to–head confrontations with the German army.
That concentrated Churchill’s resolve to wage war, where possible, by using intelligence (in both senses of the word). The gathering of military, economic and political intelligence - spying - was very much to his taste and, indeed, very much in the British tradition. The country had been sending spies abroad for at least 500 years. By 1940, this had become the job of MI6. The information that their spies uncovered came back through the gleaming antennae of the Whaddon Web. From there it was fed into Bletchley Park; where it was added to other intelligence, much of it gleaned from cracking enemy codes. Then the resulting information was passed on – as I’ve described in my last excerpt – to Churchill and generals in the field.
Given the size of the landmass controlled by its enemy – most of Europe - Whaddon Hall had set up several transmitting and receiving sites for talking to their spies in the field. Each station dealt with a different area of occupied Europe The English sites were at Middle Weald (with aerials at Calverton, operated by American engineers) and Nash. These were round-the clock, three shift stations. Weald had eight radio operators on each shift, Nash had five. From this, it is obvious that they had quite a few customers.
MI6 only employed the best; highly talented Morse Code operators who worked at exceptional speed and accuracy. They had to. As soon as a broadcast began in occupied Europe, German monitors knew of it and began tracking it. Tracker vans raced to the broadcasting source, quickly homing in on it until they found the radio. Then they would break in and kill – or preferably capture – the man or woman sending the message. Then, for them, hell would begin; usually ending in death.
Operators (trained in England) were advised never to broadcast from the same place twice; to do so greatly increased their danger. But moving from place to place was in itself dangerous; for spot searches were routine in occupied Europe. While the sets (made in Little Horwood) were as small as MI6 could make them, they were still bulky. The lifespan of the average resistance radio operator was in months; so if the operators at Nash and Middle Weald (or the northern site in Scotland) asked for repeats, they were quite likely to be signing the death warrants of their friends behind enemy lines.
MI6’s main problem, at first, was that they had too few spies, especially in France. After the sudden defeat of France and her surrender in 1940, few there thought that resistance was possible. As Britain’s fortunes changed, the resistance movements would grow to tens of thousands; but let me describe one of the very first – a lady by the name of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. I will call her Marie from now on.
When the German armies broke the Allied armies in France in 1940 (leading to the evacuation from Dunkirk), most of the population of Paris fled before them. Marie was one of them; caught in the endless columns which trekked south, sometimes machine-gunned from the sky.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
After the French surrender, the Germans placed northern France and all of the French Atlantic coast under their own direct military control. Partly this was to protect that coast from British landings. Also – and more importantly at this stage – the French Atlantic coast was where the Nazis would build their submarine (u-boat) bases. From these, Germany would wage war at sea against the Royal Navy and British convoys. The rest of France was not occupied, but allowed a limited independence under a collaborationist government. This ‘free’ area was controlled from the town of Vichy and was therefore known as Vichy France.
Vichy was where Marie headed – there to join her boss, whose code name was ‘Navarre’. Their objective was to spy on the French collaborationist government in Vichy and, if possible, raise the remaining French armies against the German invaders. To do so, the two formed the very first French resistance group – Alliance. Bear in mind that they formed Alliance in the first days after the French defeat – when the chances of beating the Nazis were very slim indeed; and the dangers of trying to do so were almost suicidal. The Nazis and Vichy worked hand-in-glove from the start to crush any resistance to the ‘New Order’.
After her boss (‘Navarre’), was captured in Rheims cathedral by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp, Marie became the leader of Alliance – the most important French spy network of them all. I have little space to tell her inspirational story here; if you want to know more about this extraordinary heroine, I advise you to read my book, The Intelligence Zone.
Marie considered that the ‘real war’ started for her when she got her first radio – from Whaddon. She and her group – like all the other spy groups – were supplied from England by MI6 and trained by them too. They were provisioned by light aircraft from RAF airfields in Northamptonshire and Suffolk.
‘Navarre’ Georges Loustaunau-Lacau after liberation from a concentration camp. Aged 33
These night-time flights were extraordinary operations, carried out by crack RAF pilots, who flew their small aircraft on moonlit nights across occupied Europe to improvised landing places, where they were guided in by torches (hopefully not German torches). They delivered arms, money, radios, cigarettes, food and radio operators; and they took agents out for training (at the great sabotage schools in Hertfordshire and Scotland) and debriefing. Many pilots lost their lives.
The Westland Lysander
These operations, arranged from Whaddon, were often announced – in code of course - by the BBC. One of the code names used for an Alliance supply landing was ‘Nash’. It was named, of course, after the radio room which was used to communicate with Marie’s (and many other) resistance groups.
The information supplied by Alliance was of the highest order. From Marie’s network, for example, came much of the information about the V1 and V2 launching sites used in the rocket attacks against London; the world’s first ballistic war.
During the war, Marie was given by MI6 a ‘licence to kill’ (which she used). Alliance lost many operators, but Marie herself survived. She lived on her nerves; and it was only those thin, jangly, spiking nerves - her reactions, her intelligence - that kept her alive at all. This is drama of the highest order and unparalleled courage. Marie was one of France’s greatest daughters. She stands almost in a class of her own. Her power came from an iron-hard, unbreakable decency; and a courage that would rather face almost certain torture and death than submit to evil. She was truly the flower of France.
Later in the war, Marie–Madeleine would be flown to England as a break from the mentally crippling work of running Alliance. The average time that an agent lasted was 6 months – when she was flown out she had been running Alliance for three and a half years. By this time she was chain-smoking sixty cigarettes a day. She was feted by SIS in London, being chauffeured in one of Pop Gambier–Parry’s sleek limousines. Marie, ever observant, commented on the:
‘…long black Packards, driven by the slim blonde nymphs of the British secret services, moulded into their fetching uniforms.’
She was taken to Whaddon by Lord Sandhurst, who was in charge of SIS’s agent radio operations. From there, she was taken to the Nash radio room – the other end of the communications from her agents. She described the transmitting room as:
‘A tower of Babel where messages in many languages were taken by men and women operators who then passed them to the War Office. Lord Sandhurst appeared to me to be a chap one would have imagined more used to pig–sticking than managing secret transmissions …my illusions about the English were confounded.’
Here I wish to break some of my own secret news! In my exalted role as footpath monitor for the parish of Great Horwood, I can add something that has never before being noted, to my knowledge. The Nash transmission hut was not in Nash at all – but in Great Horwood – opposite College Wood. It’s on private land and not accessible; but it’s still there. This place, where Marie Fourcade, The Flower of France, spoke for the first time face-to-face to those British friends who had done so much for the liberation of her country, still exists. It is, as many another part of the Whaddon Web, unremarked these days. There are no blue plaques, no drums or trumpets, another site which should be celebrated is forgotten.
In my next article, I will talk about how Gambier Parry’s merry men set up more sites – for black propaganda and, the most desperate of all, for the heroes with short predicted lifespans who were tasked to stay behind if the Germans had managed to invade.
©Alan Biggins June 2023
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