which was modelled on SOE experience and run by British and American officers based at Prae Wood in St Albans, close to the Sussex administrative headquarters at Glenalmond, a commodious Victorian house where Section V had been located earlier in the war. The training programme included a week-long exercise where pairs of potential agents were scattered across England, given locations of safe houses and instructed to send information (for example about military convoys) back by radio. A report of the fourth of these exercises, based in the East Midlands in early May 1944, gives a flavour of what was involved. With an emphasis on ‘tradecraft and its practice’, the students performed well and no one was ‘arrested in “flagrante delicto”’. The local police were in on the exercise and the trainees ‘all had to be brought in on an obviously framed up charge in order to undergo the experience of interrogation’. The police reported afterwards that the teams had stood up well to questioning (one individual was ‘interrogated for some 8 hours’ by the Nottingham Police) and they were commended for the hiding of ‘maps, documents and compromising papers’, as ‘searching of their rooms in their “safe” houses in no case produced any result’. On the radio side, ‘105 messages were sent, of which only 2 were indecipherable and of the remainder 70% were without fault’. The students were carefully debriefed afterwards. One female radio operator had put her partner in danger by telling the police that she had met him in Nottingham, while unbeknown to her he had claimed to have no ‘friends or acquaintances’ in the city. This was a salutary lesson and the training officer observed that the woman now seemed ‘to have grasped the importance of detail and of co-ordinating cover stories’. Only one participant refused to play the game, and had made ‘little or no attempt to learn his cover story or to apply it under interrogation’. His attitude was ‘that the matter was quite childish and he was merely there on an exercise which in fact was well known to the police concerned’. This did not go down at all well and he was ‘severely talked to about his general manner during the exercise’. He admitted ‘that he played the fool’, and his partner thought he had offended ‘from a feeling of “je m’en foutism”’, but ‘that he would in fact take the matter very seriously if it were the real thing’.
At the time of D-Day, although only fifteen Sussex teams had been dropped into France, ninety-five students had completed their training, and by mid-June twenty teams were in the field, reporting both by wireless and using the new ground-to-air Ascension device. Between 5 and 8 June, one team, ‘Ossex/6’, sent in reports which, along with German order-of-battle details, first identified the Panzer Lehr Division, about which one Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) officer remarked: ‘If the Sussex scheme produced no other intelligence, it would have been worth while for these reports alone.’ Following the invasion, other teams supplied immediately useful information, such as ‘Brissex/20’, who on 7 July reported on German barge traffic along the Seine, as a result of which ‘the R.A.F. took immediate action’, sinking twelve barges ‘during the following 24 hrs. from the details given in his message’. By the end of August 1944 over thirty of the forty-five Sussex teams despatched had made radio contact with base, and up to 800 messages had been sent.21
During the run-up to Overlord the possibility of a co-ordinated assassination operation was discussed. Targeted killings had been contemplated at intervals since the beginning of the war and this was in part what SOE potentially existed to do. In May 1942 SOE-trained Czechoslovaks had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the German Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Another SOE operation, ‘Ratweek’, in 1943-4, aimed to kill as many collaborators and members of the German security forces as possible across Europe, though in France it was successful only in Lyons where one agent ‘disposed of’ eleven individuals.22 In