The women who waged secret war on the Nazis

Women of SOE: A History of Their Secret Missions in Wartime Europe, Kate Vigurs, Yale University Press, £12.99

Before parachuting into German-occupied France to train the resistance, Jeanne Bohec, the only female explosives instructor to serve with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), was issued with a ‘tiny… ladies pistol… a toy’, she later recalled dismissively. Another SOE operative, the half-Belgian special agent Elaine Madden, remembered steadying herself to jump through the joe-hole of a customised four-engine Liberator bomber above enemy-occupied Belgium, when her dispatching officer leant in to tell her, ‘Honey, I am going to give you the last kiss you will get in a long time.’ Then he picked her up by the straps of her harness and kissed her firmly on the lips before throwing her out of the aircraft. And Edith Bonnesen, a Danish civil servant who joined her country’s resistance against the Nazis, managed to keep her cool and discreetly walk out of detention in a Gestapo prison in Copenhagen. Yet the men in the resistance group she returned to accused her of sleeping with German officers to secure her release.

As Kate Vigurs neatly summarises at the start of Women of SOE, the SOE was established in 1940 to organise, train and support the resistance across occupied territory and, in Churchill’s oft-quoted words, ‘set Europe ablaze’. It was 1942 before the organisation recognised that women could move around more easily behind enemy lines than able-bodied men of conscription age, and started actively recruiting them as couriers and wireless operators. Although given largely the same training as their male colleagues, and eventually undertaking the same roles, there is no question that female experience differed significantly from male, and that it was later also underrated, making this a welcome survey.

Vigurs has made it her personal mission to shed some light on the wartime service of the women of SOE. Her earlier volume, Mission France, was the first book to interweave the stories of all 39 known women deployed by the organisation’s French, or F Section, 13 of whom did not return. A few, such as Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom and Noor Inayat Khan were already well-known, but many of the women and their achievements had been largely forgotten. Vigurs took an even-handed approach to remembering them all.

Women of SOE (previously published in hardback as Mission Europe) is a sister volume, shedding light on the women recruited by SOE’s other European country sections to serve in enemy-occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. (Strangely, there is no mention of the female SOE agents who served in Italy.)

Once again, Vigurs’ stated aim is to draw attention to those women ‘largely overlooked by historians and authors’, although several of the more effective agents she focuses on, and the one traitor, are already the subjects of dedicated biographies. Nevertheless, there are 20 fascinating core stories here, woven through country-specific chapters. Collectively, the picture they build is one of deep courage, considerable achievement – though often through national resistance work rather than with SOE – and the complexity and weaknesses of the organisation that sent volunteers to serve behind enemy lines.

Among the most effective agents covered in Women of SOE are two Poles. Krystyna Skarbek was the first female – and longest serving – Allied special agent of the war. When Skarbek was arrested in 1941, Vigurs wonders ‘whether it was simply fate’. It seems not, as Skarbek’s later achievements included establishing regional contact with Italian partisans, saving several lives, and securing the defection of a Nazi garrison on a strategic pass in the Alps. The other is Elżbieta Zawacka, among the first women to serve in any military capacity in the war, who played a key role gathering and disseminating intelligence before joining SOE, and later in the largest organised act of defiance against German occupation: the Warsaw Uprising.

Weapons instructor Jeanne Bohec, who served with de Gaulle’s discrete SOE section for France, known as ‘RF’ as opposed to ‘F Section’, is notable for not only training members of the resistance in the use of explosives but also undertaking sabotage. And Elaine Madden served very effectively as a courier, then volunteered to help trace any surviving agents in concentration camps after the war. Such stories remind us of how able these women were, and how significant their contributions, but there are also other lessons to be drawn from this history.

Interestingly, several of the women profiled were not officially SOE agents, although they were trained – or served in missions supported – by SOE and sometimes also other agencies such as MI6, or MI9, the latter of which was responsible for escape and evasion. Most notable among these are the three courageous volunteers from Palmach, an elite force of the Jewish paramilitary, the Haganah, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. Hannah Szenes, a prewar poet and playwright, is the best known of the Palmach volunteers. Parachuted to Yugoslavia in March 1944, Szenes was part of a mission to support Allied efforts to rescue Jews in Hungary, the country of her birth. However, she was captured almost immediately after crossing the border. Despite brutal interrogation, she bravely refused to reveal her mission details and was later executed for treason.

It has since been questioned whether any of the Palmach missions should have gone ahead. Not only did they achieve very little, they may also have jeopardised existing work on the ground. Vigurs defends them for proving ‘that there were those who cared’ and were willing to make ‘the ultimate sacrifice’. And it seems that this was a significant part of Szenes’ motivation. She had always been aware both of her mission’s slim chance of success and of its symbolic importance. ‘Even if they catch me’, she told a colleague before leaving, ‘the Jews will be notified. They will know that at least one person tried to reach them.’ Arguably in that regard, if none other, her service was successful. She is now a heroine of Israel.

The experience of another female agent, Beatrix Terwindt, who was parachuted straight into the arms of waiting Gestapo officers in the Netherlands, is important for a different reason. One shocking refrain through this history is the recurrence of errors made by SOE in London. When Elaine Madden arrived in occupied Belgium she found ‘Made in England’ printed in gold lettering on the lining of her allotted handbag. Such kit was only issued to women who had to pose as civilians, but SOE’s incompetence was not gender specific. The first man dropped to Denmark, Tommy Sneum, was incorrectly issued with Swedish currency. But it is Terwindt’s story that exposes one of SOE’s most shocking failures.

The Germans knew that Terwindt was coming because they had already captured an SOE radio-operator and were using his wireless transmitter to arrange new arrivals, 54 in total, in a cat-and-mouse scheme known as Englandspiel. Vigurs says that Terwindt was ‘betrayed by her countrymen’, but arguably SOE was more at fault. The captured radio operator had deliberately omitted his normal security checks. He even prefaced his first message-under-duress with CAU, before ending it with GHT. London ignored the warnings. Terwindt was one of only four of the agents trapped by Englandspiel to survive, and later provided valuable testimony.

There are many more powerful stories recounted in Women of SOE, but it is a shame that Vigurs does not consider what might collectively distinguish the women’s service from the men’s. It would be interesting to know what conclusions she draws about the sexism they encountered, for example, which was so ingrained among both Allied and enemy forces. Similarly, it would be useful to assess whether there is any significance in the women being volunteers rather than conscripts, and how many were motivated by the desire for gender equality as well as patriotism, as Elżbieta Zawacka certainly was.

Astonishingly, there is no definitive list of the courageous women who served as agents with the SOE. The national memorial, unveiled in 2013 at the village of Tempsford in Bedfordshire, near the former Special Duties Squadron base from where most were flown out, lists 75 women from 13 different nations. This omits at least one, Sonia Olschanezky, who was recruited and trained behind enemy lines, and includes another, ‘Angela’, whose full identity remains unknown.

Vigurs does good service in bringing some more of these women’s stories out of the shadows, but her decision to pay tribute to them all equally has a downside. Although many of these women gave valuable service before they joined the SOE, only six seem to have made significant contributions afterwards. The work of nine others holds mainly symbolic value as one broke her leg on landing, five were captured before they could really get going, and three arrived only as the war ended. Another four never left Britain as their missions were made redundant by the German surrender.

This makes for frustrating reading, but it does not mean Women of SOE is without value or interest. Above all, it is a compassionate book, a tribute to the female resisters and SOE agents, an important companion to Mission France, and a salutary reminder that women demonstrated the same courage, determination and ability as men, and that the resistance across enemy-occupied Europe would have looked very different without their service.