Secrecy is the most important component of any successful military campaign. It is a fundamental rule of combat: you don’t want the enemy to know your next move. The concept goes back to ancient times and the very beginnings of civilization. Nearly a thousand years ago, the brilliant military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu encapsulated this reasoning in his seminal work The Art of War. “Secret operations are essential in war,” he wrote. “Upon them, the army relies to make its every move.”
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formed in 1940 in the wake of the Nazi conquest of Europe. The SOE staff was given the loathsome task of recruiting brave, foolhardy patriots who could carry out acts of disruption and espionage behind enemy lines in France.
There were several pre-conditions: they had to pass for French, be skilled wireless operators, be willing to risk their life for whatever personal reasons; and most importantly, they had to be women. All potential recruits had singular, sometimes highly complex motives for joining: some were bored with life and didn’t want the usual jobs ascribed to women; others were idealistic. Some simply craved the excitement of the unknown.
According to Vera Adkins, SOE Historian M.R.D. Foot and others, the volunteers all knew the risks involved, and they readily accepted them. Most agents, however, never really understood what they were getting into. Many, like Noor Inayat Khan, Madeleine Damerment and Diana Rowden were essentially amateurs pitted against ruthless, highly trained counter-intelligence agents from the Nazi SD (Sicherheitsdienst = Security Service): monsters like Hugo Bleicher and Josef Kieffer.
Winston Churchill famously gave SOE a simple directive: “set Europe ablaze” – with no specific instructions beyond that, apparently.
The ability to keep secrets is only as effective as the integrity of the system of checks and balances in place – not to mention technological skill required – to protect them. In the case of the SOE field agents in occupied France, maintaining secrecy was a matter of life or death. As author Rita Kramer demonstrates in Flames In the Field, the only agents who survived the Gestapo’s purging of the PROSPER resistance group in the summer of 1943 were those who meticulously obeyed the security precautions drilled into them at Beaulieu: In the cities, they made sure that their friends and associates didn’t know where they lived or what their cover name or identity was. In the country, they moved from one house to another every few days; and if they were radio operators, they did not stay on the air for more than a few minutes at a time. They also transmitted from as many different locations as possible.
F-Section leader Maurice Buckmaster was to blame for a suspiciously high number of critical security failures concerning F Section activities in France. The possibility remains that he was actually a mole working for MI6 or French Intelligence as well as either the German Abwehr or even the SD. The laundry list of breaches perpetuated by Buckmaster is damning enough to consider him a traitor to the cause. Henri Dericourt may have been a triple agent working for the SOE, SIS, and the SD – but he couldn’t possibly have done more damage to the resistance than Buckmaster. Agents captured in the field were confident that Baker St. would spot any failures to include a security check. Instead, Buckmaster responded by giving them a warning to be sure and include it next time – and then proceeded to give coordinates for new agents arriving in occupied France.
Bletchley Park noted the discrepancies, but Buckmaster chose to ignore their warnings. Pierre Raynaud told Vera Adkins he believed that by means of deception at a very high level, the British were “giving PROSPER to the SD.”
Historians will probably never uncover the full truth behind the events depicted in Flames in the Field until a new cache of declassified documents is released to the public. Any further damaging evidence relating to the subject is surely still locked away at the National Archives.
Flames in the Field exposes the utter disregard for human life due to both allied incompetence and Nazi savagery exhibited throughout World War II. It highlights the naïve stupidity, the stubborn prejudices and the inherent righteousness of the Allies – while it simultaneously condemns the evil brutality, rigid obedience and blind faith of the Nazis.
Failure to follow established security precautions led to the unnecessary deaths of many brave souls who had been led like lambs to the slaughter into a brutal war – all for the sake of the ideological ambitions of those in power.
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