I’ve spent much of the Easter weekend looking through the Henri Déricourt files in the National Archives (released in 2004), and engaging in correspondence with four separate historians of SOE. We are all of the same mind: recent attempts to raise the flag for conspiracy above the trenches of the Secret War fall once again, not merely on lack of evidence but on increasingly levels of absurdity. The lengths some writers go to advance their arguments in favour of increasingly bizarre notions of events in the field being directly manipulated by shadowy men with nefarious motives in the Broadway Building in London, all led (no doubt) by the evil genius Claude Dansey, should in fact set publisher’s and reviewer’s alarm bells ringing. The slightest supposition is derived from the shortest of scribbled notes in a file (where there is absolutely no other evidence), all of which is taken to mean that the truth still remains hidden somewhere, jealously guarded by the evil gatekeepers of Britain’s secrets in the vaults of the Secret Intelligence Service.
But, as Tom Phillips and John Elledge observe in their hilarious book on conspiracy theories, much of what people try to pass off as hidden or secret history is simply boll*ocks.
As many readers will know, I’ve come across this before when writing about the resistance in France. For some reason, particularly because much of SOE history remains murky, people want to find the secret state at work, almost as though there was a puppeteer at work, especially where it looks as though men and women have been sacrificed for ‘the Greater Good’ (such as D Day deception plans). The piece which follows is a slightly edited annex to my 2014 book on the famous 1944 Mosquito raid by the Second Tactical Air Force on Amiens Gaol - the Jail Busters - which I thought readers might enjoy.
In a BBC Panorama documentary shown on 19 April 1982 Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the long-retired former head of F Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was challenged by the interviewer, Michael Cockerell, as to whether SOE was behind the famous jail-breaking attack by RAF Mosquito fighter-bombers on Amiens Prison at noon on 18 February 1944. The interview had been prompted by the recent publication of Jack Fishman’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down and his publication of a letter dated 2 March 1944, addressed to Air Vice Marshal H. E. P. Wigglesworth, Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO) of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) and written by Group Captain L. G. S. Payne, MC, AFC RAF, a member of the Directorate of Intelligence in the Air Ministry. It began:
“I have been asked by ‘C’ to express his gratitude and the gratitude of his officers for the attack carried out on Amiens prison on 18th February, and also their sympathy for the relatives and comrades of the air-crews who were unfortunately lost.”
‘C’ was Major General Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more commonly known as MI6. A startled Colonel Buckmaster denied any involvement by F Section. As well he might. The interviewer had made the common mistake, when considering the direction of underground activities in France during the war, of failing to grasp the difference between two of the French-focused elements of SOE, F and RF Sections, and also of confusing SOE’s work alongside the French underground with that of MI6. It was and remains an easy error to make, if that indeed was what had happened. It seems more likely that the interviewer knew the distinction very well, but by his line of questioning was attempting to catch Buckmaster out.
The programme’s agenda was somehow to prove that a secret lay behind the raid, a secret that the British establishment had attempted and was still attempting to hide through its supposed refusal to release documents hidden in the archives of MI6. In an article written for The Listener on 29 April 1982 Cockerell lamented that the ‘secrets of war are still as secure after 40 years’. The programme did not stop to consider the possibility that there was nothing else to say about the raid, either because there were no remaining British archives to scour, or because the truth was already in the public domain. But that would have meant that the BBC had nothing to report, and that would have made dull television.
The evidence shows beyond doubt that the raid had in fact been authorised by the Air Ministry and undertaken by the RAF at the behest of MI6, on behalf of one of the latter’s many secret intelligence networks (réseaux) that were operating at the time against the occupying German forces in France, and not by SOE. At least one Resistance network, and possibly more, sent repeated messages to London urging action. The evidence also suggests that MI6 were encouraged to consider the raid by their colleagues in the Free French BCRA, with whom they worked closely throughout the war.
The revelation in 1982 about the involvement of the Secret Intelligence Service did not in fact reveal anything new to experts in the subject, although it was the first time that MI6’s involvement had been directly referenced in an official document about the raid. MI6’s involvement could, nevertheless, have been easily deduced from material in what was then the British Public Records Office (now the National Archives at Kew) and freely available in the Hôtel de Soubise, the home of the French National Archives in Paris. In addition, there was any amount of published material relating to MI6’s wartime operations available, including the autobiographies in French and English of a number of important Resistance leaders going back to the 1950s (such as those of Georges-André Groussard, Gilbert Renault, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade and Paul Paillole), as well as three separate legal depositions by two of the Resistance leaders responsible, the brothers Pierre and Dominique Ponchardier, dated September 1944, 26 October 1946 and 13 January 1953. While the opening up of any remaining MI6 records – if any still exist – would be a boon for historians of this period, it is fair to say that both archival and published material in France going back to 1944, written by the men who conceived and initiated the raid, helps compensate for (although not replace) the lack of official records in Britain, and enables the construction of an accurate picture of the respective roles in the Amiens affair of the French Resistance, the Free French Secret Services (and those of Vichy), and of MI6.[1]
The fact that the BBC interviewer in 1982 had not comprehended the role of MI6 in the affair (except perhaps in an underhand way) is testament to the success of the organisation in remaining in the shadows. In the meantime it was the exploits of SOE that loomed large in the public imagination and received most of the attention for underground operations in occupied Europe. Without the oxygen of publicity, the extent of MI6’s intelligence-gathering activities (in contrast to the noisy setting off of ‘bangs’ by SOE), and any implications of this activity in terms of military operations – except insofar as this information had been released as part of wider deception operations, such as Operation Fortitude South, for example – has been quietly forgotten as the years have passed.
One of the problems with operating in any kind of information vacuum is the temptation it poses for otherwise well-intentioned people to fill gaps in the historical record with ill-evidenced notions of their own. The story of the Amiens Prison raid in recent years has been no exception. The ‘revelation’ in 1982 of MI6’s involvement prompted a flurry of speculation, in film and books, that questioned the ‘real’ reason for the attack and suggested some nefarious purpose by MI6, some of which has subsequently found itself in print, and of course in more recent times on the Internet. It has led some at worst to suspect some form of cover-up and at best to describe the affair, as do M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley in MI9, Escape and Evasion 1939–1945, as ‘mysterious’.
In one sense Foot and Langley’s description is apt. There is not, for example, a clear and unequivocal official record laying out the rationale for the raid, only a rather jumbled piece concocted by the RAF’s Director of Public Relations in October 1944, many months after the event. But on the other hand there is no mystery at all, merely secrecy. The French networks and operations deep in the heart of enemy territory run by Britain’s SIS, in conjunction with the Free French secret service, were not in the habit of advertising their activities, some of which involved the most spectacular coups (the discovery of the V1 rocket programme, for instance) ever secured in the history of espionage, and achieved in the face of severe personal danger for many scores of dedicated French patriots and directly employed British agents of MI6 and RF Section. The truth is that at stake in February 1944 were the lives of a number of French men and women, and possibly those of other nationalities as well, who had been instrumental in opening a priceless window into France that enabled London to have sight – if perhaps through a glass darkly – of secret German plans for the bombardment of Britain, and to whom a debt of honour was owed.
Unfortunately the gaps in the official record have not always been seen for what they represent – the necessary product of operational secrecy – and have led, bizarrely, to claims that the raid was a cover by MI6 for other purposes. This distortion is a common theme in intelligence studies – an occupational hazard, as it has been described to me by one insider. One account of the raid, which has received more prominence than it deserves, even claims that the official RAF version is ‘sheer lies’, that the Resistance did not ask for the raid, that the operation had nothing to do with releasing résistants and was instead part of the Allies’ complex strategic deception plan designed to mask the true target of the forthcoming invasion of France. It even suggests – preposterously – that there is no evidence to support a genuine Resistance dimension to the raid, despite the overwhelming and publicly available evidence to the contrary.
There has been some surprising support given to these ideas. Professor M. R. D. Foot had initially accepted that the purpose of the raid, as he explained in Resistance in 1976, was ‘to try to rescue some resistance leaders . . .’ Prompted by the BBC in 1982, however, he apparently changed his mind, and suggested that the raid was in fact designed to support the deception plans that lay at the heart of Operation Fortitude South. This idea was subsequently taken up and elaborated by others. Was what has become known to the world as Operation Jericho a gigantic hoax dreamt up by the schemers in the SIS at Broadway House in St James’s, a cruel fabrication that resulted in the loss of many innocent French lives, as well as those of four gallant airmen shot down during the mission?
No. The truth of the events of 18 February 1944 remains grounded firmly in the freely available historical record, and this book is a careful exposition of this evidence. The account of the raid does not need to be gilded by conspiracy to make it any more remarkable than it was in reality. At the same time as the BBC documentary was being aired in Britain, Television New Zealand also commissioned a documentary from Limelight Productions entitled Dead on Target, which interviewed three of the surviving résistants who were inside the prison when the first of the New Zealand Mosquitoes thundered overhead, as well as a number of résistants on the outside. All three – Maurice Genest (Henri), André Pache and Raymond Bonpas – were active in networks at the time of their arrest that were all feeding intelligence to MI6. The New Zealand documentary (presented by Ian Johnstone) frankly made a far better fist of it than the BBC, by refusing to be swayed by the temptation to present flimsy though headline-grabbing suppositions from half-complete archives. The truth is not hard to find, if only one knows where to look, and is not side-tracked by fantasy on the way.
[1] The truth is that no MI6 files on the raid remain. Duncan Stewart, latterly the SOE adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, confirmed as much in a letter to Sebastian Cox, head of the MOD’s Air Historical Branch, on 3 August 1999.
It's a truth that conspiacy theories are always more prevalent in an information vacuum and that all plans go out of the window on contact with the enemy also as far as i'm aware at no point in 2WW was bombing accuracy that pinpoint. Altogether another win for the "cock up" theory of history.
A good few years ago I wrote and presented a documentary for Channel 5 on the Amiens raid. From what I could find in the TNA and elsewhere I was in no doubt that the aim was to allow resistance detainees to escape before they might be executed.