Special Operations Executive

Discussion in 'SOE & OSS' started by Jedburgh22, Oct 24, 2010.

  1. Michael156

    Michael156 Junior Member

    Now THAT is an unique account of operations that I have never heard of before. Thanks for the exceptional insight. Might there be any further references or information on these actions and strategic intent? Would you have any further details on C3, logistics or final disposition and outcome of assets used?

    Thanks again for the knowledge,
    Michael.
     
  2. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Michael send me a PM with your address and I'll send you a copy of the full file
     
  3. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    PS like the OSS F/S on your logo
     
  4. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    At a rough guess the British would have lost touch with a lot of assets after the fall of France, Norway and Holland, with Britain on the back foot post-Dunkirk resources were mainly stockpiled in UK for the expected invasion and after SOE was formed it was a case of melding the MI(R) and Section D organisations with their parents in the form of SIS and the War Office clashing over changes to plans and priorities.
     
  5. Michael156

    Michael156 Junior Member

    Yes Sir, that makes sense. But what a coup it would have been to have possibly maintained those assets and that capability to some extent, or develop it into something other. Would have given new meaning to 'pinprick' harassment...Churchill would have enjoyed that.

    M.
     
  6. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    ==================================================
    Was this Britain's bravest spy family? - THE HEROIC EXPLOITS OF THREE SIBLINGS BEHIND ENEMY LINES ARE TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
    --------------------------------------------------
    Sunday Times, The (London, England)-October 30, 2011
    Author: James Gillespie

    FOR more than 65 years the extraordinary courage of one family during the second world war has lain hidden in the dusty files of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

    Only now, after the death of Eileen Nearne in September last year revealed her secret life as a British agent, are the full details of her remarkable family emerging.

    At one time during the war, three of the four members of the younger generation of the Nearne family were working for SOE as undercover agents in Nazi-occupied France.

    All four siblings were born in Britain to an English father and Spanish mother, but spent much of their childhood in France and spoke the language fluently. They could have sat out the war in the relative safety of the family home in Nice, in Vichy France. Instead, they felt it their duty to fight.

    A new book, The Heroines of SOE, by Beryl Escott, reveals how the two Nearne sisters, Jacqueline and Eileen - who were not supposed to talk to each other about their secret work - were part of the tiny group of women in the SOE, the real-life Charlotte Grays, who played such a crucial part in the allied victory.

    Eileen, who died at her home in Torbay at the age of 89, was parachuted into France, where she helped arm resistance units until she was seized by the Gestapo. Despite being tortured she told her captors nothing of the British network of agents in France.

    Sent to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, she escaped in the dying days of the war and made it as far as Leipzig before meeting the advancing American forces.

    What was not revealed at the time of her death was the extent to which her whole family played such a brave role during the war. "Eileen's story rather overshadowed the other members," says Escott.

    Jacqueline, five years older than Eileen, had preceded her to France as an SOE agent, and she in turn had been preceded by her older brother, Francis. Of the four siblings only Frederick did not join the SOE, opting for the RAF in 1939.

    In 1942 the sisters left Nice and followed their brothers to London where they joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Both were passed on to SOE because of their ability to speak French. Jacqueline, 26, was one of the first women to be trained as an agent for F [France] section, but insisted Eileen, 21, be trained only as a home-based wireless operator, saying she was too young to go to France.

    Their brother, Francis, 28, was already working for SOE near Grenoble, helping to organise the local resistance and meeting airlifts of incoming agents and supplies.

    In January 1943, Jacqueline parachuted into France "blind" (without a reception party) behind enemy lines. Small, dark and pretty, she blended into the community near her safe house in Clermont-Ferrand and set about building up contacts with the resistance.

    She worked as a courier, carrying messages and equipment, and finding suitable landing grounds for air drops. She helped with sabotage attacks on aluminium, rubber and munitions factories.

    In late 1943 she visited a Paris riddled with informers, where she noticed the German attitude towards the French hardening. Her sister would be among the next agents to be sent to the French capital.

    By the time Eileen arrived in March 1944 it was a lethal place for a British agent, packed with German officers nervously expecting an allied invasion.

    Sending regular broadcasts by radio from a safe house, Eileen was captured by the Gestapo the day before she was due to move to a new location. She was taken to Gestapo headquarters at the rue des Saussaies, where she told her interrogators that she had been sending commercial messages for a businessman.

    Despite the Gestapo's equivalent of "waterboarding", where her head was held under water until she nearly drowned, her story did not vary. She was sent to Frèsnes prison and then Ravensbruck, 55 miles north of Berlin.

    By the time she escaped, Jacqueline and Francis were safely back in Britain. Eileen returned home ill and suffered a severe emotional breakdown. She was nursed by Jacqueline, who died in 1982. After the war Francis returned to Grenoble, where he died in 1965.

    Odile Nearne, 56, the daughter of Frederick, the son who joined the RAF, said: "I have a remarkable family. I'm extremely proud of them - they were wonderful people.

    "They were living in France at the time of the German invasion but felt it was their duty to serve. When Eileen died, everyone said she was alone and forgotten, but that wasn't true. We were very close. I loved her dearly."

    The Heroines of the SOE by Beryl Escott is published by The History Press
    Eileen, left, and Jacqueline, right, helped organise undercover operationsEdition: 01Section: NewsPage: 14
    Record Number: 53217772(c) Times Newspapers Limited 2011
     
  7. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Secrets of brave family who spied for Britain
    Monday, October 31, 2011Western Morning NewsFollow
    The brave exploits of a remarkable family of British spies will be highlighted in a new book.

    Eileen Nearne's role in working with the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France was well documented when she died, after quietly living out her days in Torquay.


    Eileen Nearne
    Now, for the first time, the risky work of her brother and sister will also be revealed, as a new publication tells the story of three heroic siblings.

    Mrs Nearne died at the age of 89 in September last year. It emerged that she was parachuted into France as part of the Special Operations Executive, and was captured three times, tortured and sent to concentration camps, but escaped each time, and maintained her silence on the British network of agents in France.

    Now, author Beryl Escott's new book, The Heroines of SOE, will also focus on the role of her two siblings, Jacqueline and Francis, who were also selected for the SOE because of their fluent French.

    All the siblings could have lived out the war peacefully in the family home in Nice, but instead they felt it was their duty to fight.

    Jacqueline was parachuted into enemy-occupied France in 1943. The small, dark, pretty 26-year-old (pictured, right) blended into the community from her safe house in Clermont-Ferrand and began building up contacts with the Resistance.

    Francis, who was 28, worked for SOE near Grenoble, helping to organise local resistance and meeting airlifts of supplies.

    At the time, Jacqueline insisted that Eileen, then 21, be trained only as a British-based wireless operator, saying she was too young to go to France.

    But, the following year, Eileen did visit Paris while working as a courier, carrying messages and equipment. Her work involved sabotage attacks on aluminium, rubber and munitions factories.

    Jacqueline was already posted in the French capital, and both sisters risked their lives carrying out their duty as German officers nervously awaited allied invasion.

    Eileen was captured by the Gestapo, and questioned over sending radio broadcasts from a safe house. She insisted she was working for a businessman, despite being held under water until she almost drowned. She was sent to two prison camps, and by the time she escaped, her siblings were back in Britain. Jacqueline, who died in 1982, nursed Eileen through a severe mental breakdown following her return home.

    After the war Francis returned to Grenoble, and died there in 1965.

    Odile Nearne, 56, is the daughter of Frederick, the fourth sibling who joined the RAF. She said: "I have a remarkable family. I'm extremely proud of them. They were wonderful people.

    "When Eileen died, everyone said she was alone and forgotten, but that wasn't true. We were very close. I loved her dearly."
     
  8. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    The Morrisburg Leader - Home

    Roy Wardle shares memories from WWII

    News - November 9, 2011 Edition




    Roy Wardle is pictured here holding the map he was given before para-jumping into enemy territory during World War Two. The map is made of silk and was meant to be sewn into the inside of the pants for safety.

    MORRISBURG —

    “As I reached the door there was more machine gunning. At that moment a man left the house opposite running. I saw the bullets strike him across the shoulder, chest and abdomen. He pitched to one side and lay still. There were more explosions and firing, then suddenly everything was very quiet.”

    Roy Wardle, a World War Two Veteran, shared his amazing story with the Leader on October 31st at the Hartford Retirement Centre in Morrisburg. The above excerpt was taken from Wardle’s own personal writing on an event during the war titled, “Stuka Attack - Bosnia 1944.”

    Wardle joined the Bedforshire and Hertfordshire Regiment on March 13, 1941, when he was just 17 years old. He and a friend, Percy, both had to fib, saying they were 18 in order to join the infantry in England.

    Wardle transferred to the Royal Corps of Signals on February 10, 1942, which is when he and Percy parted ways, taking different paths. Wardle decided to train for a radio dispatcher position. This he did in Yorkshire for about eight months. As a matter of interest, radio dispatchers were paid extra.

    Following his training, he went into the 56th Welsh Division and was approached to voluntarily join the parachute division.

    “I thought that could be interesting,” said Wardle.

    At an information session, Wardle was required to sign a secrecy agreement. This position required working with an officer. The pair would be dropped by parachute into German occupied territory where they were to join with the partisans.

    Twelve men attended the information session, but only two agreed to volunteer for the new position. Wardle was one of them.

    Eventually, Wardle joined recruits who were making their way to Cairo, Egypt, before heading to Palestine.

    Following a radio course in Egypt, he went for paratraining, which would include five training jumps, four in daylight and one in the dark. On one of his jumps he revealed: “I landed not exactly as I should have. I went backward and banged my head. I was out for one to two minutes.”

    Then it came time for the night jump: “I was a bit dubious about night jumps because there would be fires on the ground. What if I came down on one?”

    As it turned out, however, “it was a lovely moonlit night. I floated down, nowhere near the fires.”

    After training, Wardle returned to Cairo and then on to Benghazi in North Africa. “That’s where you went on operations.”

    From Benghazi, men were flown to Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia, or Bulgaria. Wardle was flown to Brindisi, Italy.

    He was told that “it won’t be normal army, you’ll be looked after” because he was now part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). “We were treated like lords,” he said.

    Wardle joined SOE on July 1943, eventually serving with Force-133 (Balkans) and Force-136 (Burma).

    The SOE was formed by Winston Churchill for the purpose of encouraging and facilitating espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance behind enemy lines.

    Wardle was assigned to Yugoslavia. He was to be teamed with Basil Irwin, an officer. They would be stationed in Brindisi, Italy until they could be flown and dropped into Yugoslavia.

    “We were unlucky,” he said. “We had to fly over there five times because they couldn’t see the fires or there were too many clouds. We couldn’t drop.”

    “Eventually, we went on the night of April 3rd, 1944. That was the night we dropped into Yugoslavia. We were 25 miles from Germans in Tuzla. I landed in an apple tree.”

    Wardle and Irwin “had a Serb” who acted as their interpreter. “The three of us were together all the time. We moved everywhere on foot. We had to get our own food and we relied on the people for food.” At one point, “we went three days without food because we couldn’t find anything.”

    “We kept on the move most of the time. The Germans knew we were there so they were looking for us.”

    “Hitler had ordered if any of us were caught, we were to be shot no matter what. People who were captured; there were awful things that happened to them.”

    “We did a lot of walking. We got ambushed a couple of times. We were dive bombed.”

    Wardle explained the purpose of his team: “The officer would be involved with the partisan people. He’d make the messages, all in code. I would transmit them with my radio over to Italy.”

    “Messages were about all different things and about materials needed by the partisans like grenades, guns, and plastic explosives.”

    They were in Yugoslavia for three months trying to get “up near the Danube oil barges.”

    “We were trying to get up there, but we couldn’t. So, a plane flew in to pick us up and drop us where they wanted us to go. They had to make sure the Germans weren’t around.”

    This, he said, “was hard to do. The Germans were out on patrols.”

    He was “dropped back in nearer to the Danube.” Luckily, this time he and Irwin only had to go in once for the jump as the weather and fires were cooperating. He flew in a “DC3 with just two engines and a hole in the floor.”

    “I went through and reached the ground. I heard some automatic gunfire when I came down. I heard people calling. I saw light coming through the trees. Someone called out Bob.”

    Although his name isn’t actually Bob, this is what people called him, so he knew then that “these must be friends.”

    “They took me back to the fires where there were three escaped POWs (prisoner of war).” These men were from a jail in Belgrade. The jail had been bombed, which took out an entire wall and allowed the men to escape.”

    They shared “a flask of rum and cigarettes,” which as Wardle pointed out, “were issued to us.”

    “A few nights later there were Yugoslavian officers coming in behind us. The plane landed and the escaped POWs went out. That was 1944.”

    “We never did get to the Danube. Too many Germans in Fruska Gora. We stayed in there for 10 months anyway. Basil figured we had walked 1,500 miles. We walked most nights and sometimes during the day.”

    In the 10 months he was there, Wardle said he only took his clothes off twice.

    “We eventually left and went back to Italy,” he said. Here they were asking for volunteers for the far east who would be put on islands in the Pacific to report on Japanese shipping.

    Wardle volunteered. He was eventually “shipped out, heading for Bombay, India.” He traveled to Delhi and on to Meerut and, finally, “I went to the other side of India to Calcutta.”

    “As far as climate, that’s the worst place on the planet. I never want to go there again.”

    “We worked out of the signal office. We had quite a bit of time off.” A favourite place was “the Lighthouse” with “the longest bar I’ve ever seen in my life, 40 feet long at least. There was a cinema in there as well. And, downstairs, a posh restaurant for nice meals.”

    “They got fed up with us doing nothing. No more than we did.”

    The SOE, Wardle continued, employed women, who were called FANNYS. They deciphered code, drove vans or did whatever tasks necessary.

    “There were 24 of them in a big room in front of a radio, receiving messages. I was a signal office superintendent in charge of the room. That was just one thing in Calcutta.”

    Then, “they put us in a boat, the worst I’d ever been on, more like a garbage boat. There were six or seven of us going across to Burma.”

    “We got to Rangoon,” the headquarters in Burma for SOE Force-136. “We stayed in houses where people had just left their homes, right on the side of Victoria Lake. It was a nice spot.”

    “From there I was sent to Pegu with an officer. We were involved with Japanese prisoners and the place where they were interrogated. We used to take them up there.”

    Then it was back to headquarters and, “from there we went another 50 miles north to Tongoo, where we lived in a railway station.”

    “There was an airstrip near there where we went to work. From there, planes went out and dropped supplies in Burma.”

    Then one day, “the Royal Air Force said ‘you’re going back to Rangoon’.”

    “I’d been there a few days when I got called into the office. They said, ‘we need somebody who can drive. We have a job for you to go with Major Maddox up to North of Burma. He’ll leave you up there until the commanding officer comes up.’”

    “Major Maddox was from Winnipeg. He’d been out with the Americans fighting the Japanese. He could speak fluent Japanese and Burmese.”

    “We had a jeep and a trailer. We had a Burmese teen with us to help us. His job was riding with me.”

    “When I was a little kid, about six, I used to listen to the ‘The Road to Mandalay.’ I never thought I’d get to see it.”

    To reach their destination, they had to make several stops, cross a river, travel with their jeeps via a flat boat, and drive across roads that were basically giant ruts. Once there, the Major “put me in a house and he went back to Rangoon.”

    When the new major and colonel arrived, the group left for Rangoon, which is when Wardle “found out what was in the jeeps. Bags of them - thousands and thousands and thousands of rupees.”

    They traveled “all the way through the Shan States.” The rupees went to pay “all the people who had been helping to fight the Japanese. That’s what this trip was all about. I didn’t learn that until the way back.”

    On the way back, they traveled down roads with “hair pin curves” around cliffs with thousand foot drops. The drops were barred only by posts spaced about 10 feet apart.

    Wardle quickly discovered that he had no brakes. To make matters worse, he had a moment of panic when the wheel wouldn’t turn. “I hit the post and the thing stopped. I backed up.”

    Surprisingly, he continued down the mountain where he met the colonel and the major. “If you want that jeep to go back to Rangoon, you’re going to drive it yourself,” he told them.

    They eventually made it back to Rangoon, just in time for Christmas, 1945.

    Following this, “I’d been transferred to Burma command. Once that happened, I was out of the SOE.”

    “In the end, that’s where I came home from in 1946.” Wardle explained that people were dispatched from the war in stages. It wasn’t a case of “the war is over today, go home.”

    Wardle was discharged from duty on December 6, 1946.

    Wardle made it home to England safely. There he met and married Winnifred, the sister of a soldier he’d met in 1944.

    In 1953, Wardle and his wife came to Canada. “We were married for 50 years. She died 15 years ago.”
     
  9. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Rose Robertson
    Rose Robertson, who has died aged 94, was an SOE agent in Nazi-occupied France and later founded Britain’s first advice and support service for families with gay children.

    Rose Robertson with her parents and her pet poodle, Puffy
    6:00PM GMT 11 Nov 20111 Comment
    She was born Rose Laimbeer on October 28 1916 and grew up in working-class Deptford, south London, in the 1920s. Her father, Arthur, a merchant seaman, was absent for much of her childhood and her mother, also Rose , treated her with an inexplicable lifelong disdain, which may have accounted for her later sympathy with outsiders and the downcast.
    After leaving school, she took a series of secretarial jobs, but her unremarkable existence changed dramatically during the war when she was recruited into SOE and later parachuted into Nazi-occupied France. Sworn to lifelong secrecy, she underwent tough counter-interrogation training. For the rest of her life she was very reluctant to speak about her secret work. On the rare occasions when she did, it was with self-effacing modesty, though it was clear that her memories caused her considerable distress.
    According to the limited information gleaned by friends and family members, she acted as a courier, working with members of the French Resistance, including two young gay anti-Nazi fighters. She was horrified to hear their stories of family prejudice and rejection. On one occasion she was stopped by German troops who were fooled by her forged papers and failed to find the miniature pistol she had hidden in her tied-up hair. Rose’s network was eventually betrayed. She got away; others faced the firing squads.
    Corroboration of her wartime role is impossible. Many SOE records were lost or destroyed, and as a consequence she and many other heroic agents remained unsung and undecorated. Many years later, however, she acted as an informal adviser to the producers of the film Charlotte Gray (2001), about a female SOE agent in France. Watching the film bought back painful memories of lost comrades and caused her to suffer a temporary breakdown.
    After the war Rose Laimbeer returned to secretarial work and later helped manage Miller’s industrial clothing factory near London Bridge. She married George Robertson, a retired music hall artiste, in 1954, devoting the next decade to her job and bringing up their two sons.
    In 1965 she took in two young male lodgers. On eventually learning that they were gay and had suffered because of their parents’ homophobic attitudes, Rose Robertson set up Parents Enquiry. This was the first organisation in Britain — and possibly the world — dedicated to advising and supporting parents and their lesbian, gay and bisexual children. She ran it almost single-handedly, without payment, from her home in south-east London until the 1990s.
    Rose Robertson typically received 100 phone calls and letters a week — from distressed gay teenagers, many of whom had harmed themselves because of the prejudice they faced, and from parents who were variously distressed, or felt guilty, ashamed and hostile towards their homosexual children. Often she mediated between parents and children, usually with success. A middle-aged, thoroughly heterosexual housewife, she was a reassuring figure.
    Rose Robertson opened up her house to gay teenagers who had been thrown out of their homes by their parents, providing them with sleeping bags so that they could stay in her living room.
    She also rescued from the sex industry homeless gay youths who had turned to prostitution to support themselves. Amsterdam was a magnet for gay runaways in the 1970s. She made many trips there to bring back teenagers and later persuaded many of their parents to accept them back into the family home.
    Occasionally she was verbally abused and physically attacked by irate parents. Usually, she won them round. She was also targeted by homophobes and Right-wing extremists, enduring arson attacks on her home, excrement through the letterbox, abusive phone calls and hate mail.
    From the mid-1970s onwards, these attacks eased off. Meanwhile, official reluctance to support gay youths gave way to growing respect for her work. A rising number of referrals came from the police and social services. Authorities which had been wary of supporting gay teenagers, some of whom remained classed as criminals until the age of consent was equalised in 2001, were impressed by her family-oriented approach to reconciling gay children with their parents.
    Rose Robertson won endorsements from Marjorie Proops and Claire Rayner, the leading agony aunts of the era. She was a frequent speaker at universities, churches and medical seminars, and was a regular on television and radio throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
    Although Parents Enquiry ceased to operate in the 1990s, Rose Robertson’s pioneering work continues today through the services provided by Friends and Families of Lesbians And Gays (FFLAG) and Parents, Friends (& Family) of Lesbians And Gays (PFLAG).
    Rose Robertson’s husband died in 1984, and she is survived by her two sons.
    Rose Robertson, born October 28 1916, died August 10 2011
    Rose Robertson - Telegraph
     
  10. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    This seems an odd one it is a name I have not come across in any of the operational files or the extant literature, there is no P/F for her, again odd as therewould normally be a mention on an Agents Nominal role.
     
  11. Colin MacGregor Stevens

    Colin MacGregor Stevens Junior Member

    I have a list of the Canadian SOE agents (1945 CLOAK AND DAGGER REPORT) and I had the good fortune to meet some of them, including a former Twelve Force agent (who was my next door neighbour!), as well as a couple of Canadian MI-9 agents.
     
  12. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Was looking at the P/F of SOE Agent and later POW Sqn Ldr HM Falconer who also used documents in the name of Mallory. He was one of the resident agents on Gibralter and was later taken POW in Tunisa - his SOE Symbol was GB 007 - I wonder if Ian Fleming lifted it! If so JB was in the RAF!
     
  13. PsyWar.Org

    PsyWar.Org Archive monkey

    Was looking at the P/F of SOE Agent and later POW Sqn Ldr HM Falconer who also used documents in the name of Mallory. He was one of the resident agents on Gibralter and was later taken POW in Tunisa - his SOE Symbol was GB 007 - I wonder if Ian Fleming lifted it! If so JB was in the RAF!


    Interesting, do you know if Falconer had any involvement in the Goldeneye Plan for Gib?

    Although, Fleming's friend Sefton Delmer suggests another influence for the "00":

    ...Ian readily admitted that he had borrowed some of his own tastes and habits for James Bond. For these were tastes and habits he knew and could therefore describe most convincingly. He gave Bond his own elastic-sided naval pull-on boots which he went on wearing after he had returned to civilian life as Foreign manager to the Kemsley Group of newspapers. He gave Bond his own specially blended Turkish cigarettes with the double gold band, the brand of whisky he drank himself, the same three and half minute eggs. (Just after the war Ian asked me to supply him with eggs from my farm. They had to be brown eggs laid by a special breed of hens Marans!)

    The prefix 00 as the code identification of a special grade of British secret agent licensed to kill he chose because in the early months of the war 00 was the prefix number for top secret cipher signals and the 00 had appealed to his sense of the mysterious and dramatic. James Bond he turned into a champion golfer and a skilled card-player because he himself was both. And he staged that lurid golf match with Goldfinger at a club whose captain he was to have become had he lived a few more months. Boodles, his London club where I had often dined with him, appears in the James Bond novel as Blades. He even includes his friends in his stories under their true names. In one he mentions me. I forget which. [Diamonds are Forever]



    Lee
     
  14. cockybundoo

    cockybundoo Junior Member

    Sorry to have to come in at a late date and bring up something that was mentioned a while ago, but whilst I was trying to find out what P.T.C in a SOE personnel file meant, I happened to come across this thread.
    I know that this is when a selective candidate for SOE had an interview or started some sort of vetting process, but I have been unable to find what actually P.T.C stands for. The only educated guess that I have come up with is ‘Paramilitary Training Checks’.
    I was just wondering if PsyWar.org, who obviously knows his stuff, has remembered what P.T.C stands for or does anyone else know what it stands for?

    Also discussed, was D/CCO. As PsyWar.org has already stated, D/CCO was the SOE appointment symbol for Maj David Alexander Wyatt (RE). It has also been mentioned that Maj Wyatt was also the SOE Liaison officer.
    Maj Wyatt was part of the Liaison Section of SOE, which in turn was an arm of the ‘Directorate of Intelligence’ under the command of Air Commander Boyle. Various sections of the military were assigned liaison officers and because they were under the Directorate (in this case ‘of Intelligence), the SOE appointment symbol for the Army was D/ARMY, the Navy D/NAVY, the RAF D/AIR etc.

    Maj Wyatt was the Liaison officer for Combined Operations and was initially assigned to ACO (Advisor Combined Operations) which subsequently became CCO, which stands for Commodore Combined Operations. The organisational chart from the summer on 1941 shows the ‘A’ from AOC being crossed out and ‘C’ being written beside it.
    These changes reflect the ranks held by Lord Louis Mountbatten, who eventually became the Chief of Combined Operations.

    Lord Mountbatten was the Advisor of Combined ops and took over the position of Commodore in Oct 1941. Mountbatten’s new directive which was issued on 16th Oct 1941 stated that his responsibilities were defined under four heads;
    Under the general direction of the Chiefs of Staff you will:-
    a) Act as technical adviser on all aspects of, and at all stages in, the planning and training for combined operations.
    b) Be responsible for co-ordinating the general training policy for combined operations for the three services. You will command the Combined Training Centres and Schools of Instruction.
    c) Study tactical and technical developments in all forms of combined operations varying from small raids to a full-scale invasion of the Continent.
    d) Direct and press forward research and development in all forms of technical equipment and special craft peculiar to combined operations.

    The important bit here is ‘d) Direct and press forward research and development in all forms of technical equipment and special craft peculiar to combined operations’. A lot of the special equipment used by Combined Operation’s, was being designed and produced by the SOE.
    SOE had initially stated that it could handle small raids with less than thirty men. In early 1942 Mountbatten discussed this with the head of SOE at the time, Hugh Dalton and they agreed that they should co-operate rather than squabble. From this time on, there was a close working relationship between the two.

    When Maj Wyatt was appointed the liaison and become D/ACO then D/CCO, it appears that he went to Station XII at Aston House. Station XII was involved in the research, development and production of ‘devices’.
    Whilst there, he was involved in the ‘Wreath Mine’ that was devised to blow up the two big caissons that operated St-Nazaire dock. Maj Wyatt made up the charges for blowing the lock gates, dockyard bridges, impeller pumps in the pump house, motors in the powerhouses, guns and the caissons.

    How Maj Wyatt came to be at Dieppe where he got killed, I don’t know.

    At least by April 1943, the appointment of D/CCO seems to have disappeared and the liaising seems to have gone to COHQ (Combined Ops HQ) direct.
    By this time there were more formal meetings going on between the SOE and CCO, especially under the ‘Small Boats Sub-Committee’. Development of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, or ‘Motorised Submersible Canoe’ as it was officially known as, was being heavily concentrated on. This was a special submersible craft that was going to be used by both SOE and CCO, especially by the Royal Marines from the RMBPD (Royal Marine Boom Patrol Detachment) under the leadership of Maj ‘Blondie’ Hasler (Operation Frankton – Cockleshell Heroes).

    Sorry for the longwinded story, but the short of it is that Arthur Howard Titchener was probably attached to a section at Aston House under the guidance of Maj Wyatt, that assisted with the development, research, production of items, such as waterproof torches, that were specifically designed for use by CCO.

    Hope I haven’t bored everyone to tears, but I’ve gleaned so much information from sites such as this, I just wanted to give something back.

    Mike
     
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  15. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    PTC is Put through the Cards (MI5 Record Cards)
     
  16. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Nairobi Star (Nairobi)
    Kenya: For a Rumour to Be Successful It Must Be Easy to Remember

    Mwangi G19 November 2011


    Rumours, everyone has heard at least one that they probably believed. I remember as a teenager there was even a pop song that suggested that rumours were started by "jealous people."

    Growing up in Kenya there were always political rumours swirling about and later in my life as a journalist one had to be careful of rumours and rumour mongers.



    Last weekend in South Africa there was a rumour about a particular brand of bread that spread so quickly and fast. The national broadcaster even picked it up and had to tell the public it was not a true story.

    According to the news, the baker, Tiger Brands, had been forced to dismiss claims that its bread had been poisoned. SABC, the public broadcaster reported that there had been online messages warning consumers not to buy a particular brand of bread, Albany, because it has been poisoned to make white people sick. The bread firm dismissed the message as mere speculation.

    At first we laughed and were quick to say it was one of those "only in South Africa" stories. There is still so much distrust between the races that a rumour like that could very easily fly.

    Then my mind shot back in time to about 1985 or 1986 in Kenya when there was a political rumour circulating that milk from the school milk programme in Nyeri district had been laced with family planning drugs. At the time, then vice president Mwai Kibaki who was fighting political battles with people who wanted President Moi to replace him.



    According to news reports at the time "When the pupils from schools in Nyeri district lined up for their customary free milk one day, some of the children balked. They said the milk was laced with contraceptives."

    Eventually it emerged that someone had spread a false story. The truth was that school milk was provided free by a government that was bent on reducing Kenya's soaring birth-rate. The rumour was that the milk had been doctored to make primary school children infertile.

    Eventually, President Moi ordered the arrest of "rumourmongers" and if memory serves me right, a Catholic priest and a teenage student were jailed on charges of rumour mongering.



    The story of the South African rumour got me thinking about how rumours spread from person to person and why some rumours spread like wildfire, while others never seem to make it out of a small circle of interconnected people? Reading up on the phenomenon I came across Dan Zarrella, who describes himself as a social media scientist.

    According Zarrella, "In 1940, the British military formed an organisation as a part of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, called the 'Underground Propaganda Committee' or UPC whose mission was to create and disseminate rumours as defensive weapons against the expected Nazi invasion of the English mainland."

    Zarrella writes "During World War II the Americans, under the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually became the CIA, began cultivating their own rumour-weapon technologies with the help of the UPC and scientist Robert Knapp, who also wrote about rumours in an academic context."


    In the end, Knapp's work was adapted by the OSS in 1943 to create a sort of manual for rumour engineers during the war. Zarrella writes that this document was de-classified in 2004. According to Zarrella, to be successful a rumour must be easy to remember. It must also follow a stereotyped plot.

    The South African poisoned bread rumour met the above criteria. It was easy and the stereotype of one race want to cause harm to the other made sense to those who think along such lines.

    The bread rumour also met two further criteria in that it touched on the momentary interests and circumstances of the target group and it managed to exploit the emotions and sentiments of the group.

    So for instance, if like in South Africa a group is known to have a pre-disposition to mistrusting a certain other group, like Blacks and Whites, rumours about the evils of either race are easy to spread. Knapp's manual says that successful rumours justify or articulate an emotion widely held by the target population.

    allAfrica.com: Kenya: For a Rumour to Be Successful It Must Be Easy to Remember
     
  17. cockybundoo

    cockybundoo Junior Member

    Hi Steven

    Thanks for the info on P.T.C, that's great and is very much appreciated.

    regards

    Mike
     
  18. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Read in a Dutch file about a pigeon ring code

    No rings all OK
    One ring some problems
    Two Rings the S**t has hit the fan.

    The agents deployed with a pigeon with acetate springy plastic rings on its leg so it was easy to unclip them - the rings were rather like the plastic on a comb ring binder.
     
  19. BjornSoby

    BjornSoby Member

    Capt. Irving-Bell.
    Major Vivian Robert Johnston took, according to his report HS6/838, over the command of Mission Indelible Cotulla III from Capt. Irving-Bell in March 1945. Irvin-Bell was captured in February 1945. I can't find any information about Capt. Irving-Bell. Can anybody help me?
    Best regards
    Bjorn
     
  20. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    The is no surviving SOE P/F for Captain Colin Gordon Irving-Bell of the Norfolk Regiment, all the info I have in my database if that he was taken POW by the Germans at Fort Gova in Italy on 27th February 1945.
     

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