• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2501 0

for 3 months’. Another operator, whom he had trained, had been arrested in March 1944. While London was keen to help, skilled operators could not be conjured out of thin air. Commander Cohen approved a scheme whereby a wireless and two Ascension operators, ‘specially chosen and . . . amongst the best Agents now available’, would be sent out ‘during the next moon period if possible’. Codes and sets for three locally recruited ‘professional radio operators’ would also be dropped, and ‘other wireless operators will follow’. The first three agents, all ‘Ascension-trained’, parachuted in on 4 July, but it took a further month before another six operators (three Ascension and three wireless) were dropped in on 4 and 5 August. One of these agents was specifically instructed to concentrate on ‘German rail transport arrangements’. Reflecting the careful security which now applied to the infiltration of agents, and to prevent the agents from carrying any compromising material with them, such as a British box of matches or bar of chocolate, a note on the file recorded that they were searched twice, by Jempson in London and ‘before leaving aerodrome by the Escorting Officer’.

A sketch map of German defences at the Pas de Calais made by a Service Clarence agent in November 1943.

Brussels was liberated on 3 September 1944, and soon afterwards the SIS unit attached to 21st Army Group headquarters reached the city. On 18 October London told the head of the unit that to meet the army’s needs he should speed up the delivery of information, concentrating on ‘operational intelligence, not only from opposite his front, but from well on the flanks’. Before continuing its advance into the Netherlands, officers were hived off to form the nucleus of an SIS station, initially to liaise with the Belgian Sûreté, which was also in the process of re-establishing itself in Brussels. Accompanied by the Sûreté chief, Fernand Lepage, Jempson himself landed at Arromanches in Normandy on 11 September and arrived in Brussels two days later, basing himself at the Hôtel Métropole. Here his priorities were V-2 weapons (reports were still coming in of V-2 tests at Venlo in eastern Holland) and the penetration of Germany. On 15 September Jempson reported that he was sending a Service Clarence man into the Reich to prepare a reception committee for six agents to be dropped in by parachute during the next moon.

By 1944 SIS’s Dutch Section, P.8, was running five networks in the Netherlands reporting through some thirty wireless sets, and they were part of a standing committee with their Dutch opposite numbers BI (the Bureau Inlichtingen), SOE and its Dutch equivalent BBO (Bureau Bijzondere Opdrachten). Paralleling this London organisation was the NBS, the Nederlandsche Binnenlandse Strijkrachten (Dutch Forces of the Interior), which was created to co-ordinate Dutch resistance. In September it set up a headquarters in Brussels, including SIS and SOE representatives. After the first Allied troops crossed the Dutch frontier on 11 September, it was widely assumed that the Netherlands would soon be liberated, and resistance groups stepped up their activities. A national railway strike was called to assist the Allied advance. But the costly failure of the ambitious operation to seize a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem was followed by a period of military stalemate which lasted through the winter. Behind the enemy lines, German security units, reinforced by withdrawals from France and Belgium, punished the Dutch for their premature action. Food supplies collapsed and the civilian population suffered appalling privations, with an estimated fifteen thousand people dying of hunger. While SIS wireless links carried news of the suffering to the outside world, money and letters of authorisation from the Dutch government to spend large sums on relief measures were dropped in with Dutch and SIS agents.

Meanwhile No. 2 Intelligence Unit, which had moved to Eindhoven, continued to supply tactical military information and serve as the link for the transmission of intelligence