VE Day and the unsung heroines who risked their lives to defeat Nazism
Women were banned from serving on the front line but gender, social background and ethnic differences were no bar to becoming a spy. Yet the remarkable contribution of these fearless women is often underplayed because they don't fit the popular narrative of victory, reports Mick O’Hare
It’s not going to be the Bank Holiday VE Day celebration most of us expected or wanted. Flags and bunting will be minimal, there’ll be no sitting in the pub garden until late and no heading outside to watch fly-pasts of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Covid-19 has seen to all that. But 75 years since the Second World War ended with the fall of Berlin perhaps the changed circumstances offer us a chance to examine the conflict from a different perspective, to look beyond armies and airforces, beyond the combatants, battles and military hardware, at some of the more subtle reasons behind the victory.
In that era Britain prohibited women from engaging the enemy in the front line, but they were to play major roles elsewhere. As men were conscripted, women began to fill non-combat positions in society and the armed forces: working in munitions factories, driving ambulances, decoding enemy messages, becoming air-raid wardens, ferrying fighter aircraft… the new occupations were endless, and emancipating.
And one role would be vital. Spying. What became eminently clear was that if all spies were male that would give the enemy a head start in exposing them: they could simply disregard half the population. Not only that, in many circumstances women would be able to operate more effectively behind enemy lines, taking up assignments where a man would stand out. Men in occupied countries were expected to be working but women could move around more freely. And when you needed fluent speakers of the enemy’s languages it would be remiss, if not plain stupid, to exclude half your potential recruits.
Britain set up its Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940 to undertake intelligence gathering, subversion and sabotage, and to assist resistance movements in Europe’s occupied nations, and for the first time women were encouraged to apply.
Some have achieved greater fame than others, Violet Szabo and Odette Sansom among those, but while many would come through traditional routes of recruitment with more obvious British societal and educational backgrounds, a small number of the cohort was drawn from rather more unexpected sources and communities. And while it would be unfair to say that subsequently some of these were seemingly airbrushed out of the story because they didn’t always fit the popular narrative of victory, it’s probably true to say that for many years their contribution remained underplayed.
Obviously intellect, disposition and – most vitally – aptitude strongly influenced the selection of those being considered for service behind enemy lines, and being able to speak fluent German, French or Dutch was a prerequisite. But variety of background and upbringing also played a key role. Socio-economic and ethnic differences were, for once, considered no bar. In many cases they were deemed a bonus. One recruit was a Moscow-born Indian Muslim, another the daughter of a Polish count and another a woman born to a French family in British-controlled Mauritius. Their work was clearly fraught with peril. If they were captured interment, torture and most likely execution followed, yet all were willing to risk their lives to defeat Nazism.
In a quiet, shaded corner of Gordon Square in Bloomsbury is a statue of Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, at the place where she used to sit and read in summer. It is inscribed with the last word she spoke in French “Liberté”. Her life ended in the Dachau concentration camp with a German bullet in her head. She had endured 10 months of torture at the hands of the Gestapo and had revealed nothing.
Noor certainly did not fit the obvious stereotype of a British spy. She was born in Moscow on New Year’s Day 1914 to Indian Muslim royalty. Her father Inayat Khan was a descendent of the rulers of the Kingdom of Mysore, her mother was from New Mexico. Before she turned one her family had moved to London and thence to Paris where her father died and she began caring for her siblings while studying at the Sorbonne and the Conservatoire de Paris, and earning a living as a poet and writer. But when the Second World War broke out her family fled first to Bordeaux and then to England.
Noor had been brought up by her father, the founder of the Sufi Order in the west, with its tradition of pacifism but she understood that the evils of Nazism were something that had to be countered. And although as an Indian she had strong reservations too about British imperialism and believed in independence for her nation of heritage, she saw the rise of Hitler as a threat to all cultures and all races. “She felt it more of a crime to stand back,” says her biographer Shrabani Basu and so Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force as a trainee wireless operator.
Her consummate French soon brought her to the attention of the SOE – wireless skills and fluency obviously offering the perfect background for her to work behind enemy lines. At first there were concerns her personality might be unsuitable for field work. Noor was described as “too feminine” and sometimes seemed timid. She also failed one especially important test during training. She added milk to cups before the tea, something that would have marked her out as having a British background, such was the meticulous training required of recruits.
But eventually she was passed for field duties and was assigned to F-Section, responsible for operations in France. It troubled her greatly that her family – including her widowed mother – couldn’t know, both because she hated deception and because she was worried about them should she not return. Her head of F-Section, Vera Atkins, offered her the opportunity to back out but she refused.
She left for Paris in July 1943, under the codename Madeleine, the first female radio operator to be sent, but unfortunately just as a network of French Resistance cells was being broken up by the Gestapo. She spent her first four months there evading the German occupiers, moving from safe house to safe house, and keeping up a constant stream of communications in Morse code while constantly changing her appearance and alias. As her fellow radio operatives were captured she ended up doing the work of six yet her codemaster in London declared her transmissions “flawless, with all security checks intact”.
The plan was that she would return to England for further briefings, indeed she was ordered to return by the SOE but insisted on staying because her skills were at a premium following the break-up of the local resistance cells. She hid in attics and stables, attaching her aerial to washing lines to improve the signal, while lugging her suitcase-sized transmitter around the city. But in October she was betrayed to the Germans, possibly by the sister of one of her resistance contacts.
Refusing to cooperate with her interrogators she was sent first to Pforzheim prison in Germany and thence to Dachau where, after being beaten to a pulp for 24 hours, she met her terrible demise, aged 30, on 13 December 1944. Although her notebooks had been discovered, she had told the Germans nothing. Her defiance astounded them.
She was posthumously awarded the George Cross – Britain’s highest civilian award for bravery – in 1949, only the third woman in the SOE to receive it after Szabo and Sansom. She also received the French Croix de Guerre and has since, belatedly, received wider recognition, recently making the news as one of the potential people to feature on the redesigned £50 note, and appearing on a Royal Mail stamp celebrating “Remarkable Lives” in 2014. Outside her former house in Paris every Bastille Day a military band plays in her honour.Her statue is close to her house in Bloomsbury, which will later this year receive an English Heritage blue plaque, the first woman of Indian origin to receive the honour. “Freedom” was the last word she spoke, not hers tragically but ultimately that of Britain, Europe and, indeed, India.
Unlike Noor, Krystyna Skarbek survived the war, but she was every bit as courageous in the field and her abilities and success are credited with convincing the SOE to recruit more women. And Skarbek had an equally exotic background. Born in 1908, her father was a Polish count and she lived a luxurious lifestyle until the financial crash of the 1920s and the economic depression that followed. Her father died in 1930 and she had to support her widowed mother, working in a car dealership and coming runner-up in the Miss Poland beauty contest. It was this confident, prepossessing appeal coupled with what was described as a captivating personality which she would use to great effect in her career in espionage, later variously described as “Britain’s most glamorous spy” and “Churchill’s favourite spy”.
Everything changed for Skarbek when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and she and her husband – eccentric writer Jerzy Gizycki – fled to England (she was half Jewish so there was an additional imperative) and she offered her services to British Intelligence, which was at first worried that she was “too flamboyant to work undercover”. Nonetheless, by December she was described in files as a “flaming Polish patriot, expert skier, and great adventuress” and “absolutely fearless”.
Thereafter her wartime exploits read like an improbable teen novel. Adopting the name Christine Granville she used her fluent Polish and French to great effect. One of her first missions was to ski into occupied Poland across the Carpathian Mountains to create an escape line for Polish airforce pilots who would later fly in RAF squadrons in the Battle of Britain. She was shot at, chased, captured and escaped before returning to London with the information on microfilm that Germany had plans to invade the Soviet Union. British prime minister Winston Churchill was notably impressed.
She was later arrested by the Gestapo in Budapest, but escaped to Romania in the boot of a car, and spent time in Cairo doing office work while the SOE considered whether she was a double agent (she wasn’t) following her apparently “easy” escape. She was reactivated and sent to France in July 1944 shortly after D-Day first to convince Poles working for the Germans in the Alps to take up arms against the occupiers – a mission that involved a climb of 600 metres through dense forest – and shortly after carried out the audacious venture that would bring her to wider attention.
French resistance leader Francis Cammaerts had been arrested along with SOE officer Xan Fielding and French agent Christian Sorensen, and they were awaiting execution in Digne-les-Bains. Skarbek brazenly arranged a meeting with Albert Schenck, the Gestapo liaison officer, purporting to be the niece of British general Bernard Montgomery. Despite knowing who she was, her personality was so persuasive and she so scared Schenck with forecasts of the fate that would befall him after the allied victory that he and Belgian Gestapo officer Max Waem accepted a two-million franc bribe, sweetened with assurances for their post-war safety, and released their captives. “They could have so easily shot me,” she later said.
It was an astonishing act of bravado that fitted Vera Atkins’s description of her as “very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself”. It would also earn her the George Medal, the Order of the British Empire in 1947 and the Croix de Guerre. Befitting her reputation she is often described as the inspiration behind the femme fatale-like character of Vesper Lynd, the agent who appears in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale, and also Tatiana Romanova, the Soviet cipher clerk in From Russian With Love.
Yet despite surviving missions that would have likely led to the demise of any number of her SOE colleagues, she met her end tragically but perhaps in a manner befitting a woman whose life had been lived as though it were drawn from a novel. After making what was for her a mundane living in London as a waitress and telephone operator, on 15 June 1952 – by which time she had legally adopted her pseudonym Christine Glanville after becoming a British citizen in 1946 – she was in the lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel in Earl’s Court. A spurned lover Dennis Muldowney appeared unexpectedly and stabbed her in the chest. Muldowney stayed beside her body until the police arrived, admitting murdering her and demanding to be executed promptly, believing he would be reunited with Skarbek after death. He was hanged three months later.
The hotel had been popular with Poles exiled during and after the war, and when it was sold in 1971 her suitcase was found in a storeroom. It contained her SOE papers, her commando knife and her medals, all of which are now on display at the Sikorski Museum dedicated to Polish heritage in London. There is a bronze bust of Skarbek at the Ognisko Polskie club and restaurant in Kensington.
She was in the news again recently when the current owners of the hotel wouldn’t accede to requests to put up an English Heritage blue plaque at the scene of the crime, although the cultural organisation is still hopeful this will happen.
Like Skarbek, Lise de Baissac also fled to England at the outbreak of war. Although she had been born in 1905 into a French family, because they lived in Mauritius and the island was a British colony they had British passports. They had moved to Paris but when the Germans invaded France she and her brother Claude (who was planning to join the British Army) travelled to Britain via Portugal, Spain and Gibraltar using their citizenship. When SOE was recruiting French-speaking women De Baissac’s special qualities immediately became apparent – her file stating that she was “quite imperturbable and would remain cool and collected in any situation... very much ahead of her fellow students”.
In September 1942 she was parachuted into France using the code name “Marguerite” to establish a safe house for undercover agents in Poitiers, to organise arms drops from Britain and to assist local French saboteurs. She also struck up a daring acquaintance with the widely loathed local Gestapo commander, but her network was exposed and she had to be flown rapidly back to Britain.
She returned in 1944 and using her expertise in disguise – on her previous mission she had pretended to be an archaeologist which allowed her to cycle around the countryside unchallenged – played the role of a displaced Parisian refugee, helping her brother, also now an agent, reconnoitring potential landing grounds in Normandy as D-Day approached. It was terribly dangerous work, and exceptionally for a woman she participated in armed raids against German positions. Shortly after the allied landings she rented a room in a house occupied by a German officer. One day she returned to find German soldiers had moved into her room and were sitting on the British army parachute she had fashioned into a sleeping bag. “Fortunately, they had no idea,” she said. She would eventually be liberated by US troops.
Like Noor and Skarbek, France awarded De Baissac the Croix de Guerre. She also won the Légion d’honneur and she became a Member of the British Empire. But unlike Noor and Skarbek she lived out her life in full, dying in Marseille aged 98 in 2004. She was highly regarded by the SOE who noted that “the part she played in aiding the British underground movement in France cannot be too highly stressed. She was [an] inspiration and by her initiative alone caused heavy losses to the Germans”.
Women in France weren’t accorded the vote until 1944 and when suffrage was finally granted it was in part due to the role women like De Baissac played during wartime. Indeed, the Second World War effectively prompted the emancipation of women on a large scale, certainly across Europe and in the United States. Expecting women to perform key duties in the military and the national workforce for the duration of the war and then insisting they return to lives of domestication afterwards was not a viable, nor reasonable, political outcome. Asking the likes of Noor, Skarbek and De Baissac to risk – in some cases give – their lives in the pursuit of victory, duly necessitated that women be repaid with the same rights and opportunities they had so courageously struggled for.
So it is a VE Day like we least expected, and one narrative about the victory that, amid the usual nostalgia for Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day, perhaps we rarely consider. And while trite comparisons with Covid-19 that invoke wartime rhetoric are best avoided perhaps it’s an apposite moment to acknowledge the diversity of those taking the fight to the pandemic in Britain and across the world. A Muslim, a Pole and a Frenchwoman, all crucial to Britain’s victory in the Second World War. Perhaps it’s a pity that such stories weren’t told during the 2016 referendum and the intervening years when, ironically and among others, these nationalities and cultures seemed especially out of favour – an example of multicultural Britain playing a significant and positive role many years before the term was even coined.
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