Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [239]
Some senior British officers opposed the SOE’s mandate on both pragmatic and ethical grounds. They perceived the unlikelihood of stimulating successful mass revolt, such as Churchill wanted, and were uncomfortable about promoting terrorism by armed civilians. The chief of the Air Staff, Portal, in February 1941 attempted to insist that one of the first SOE parties parachuted into France should wear uniform: “I think the dropping of men879 dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated,” he told Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office. “I think you will agree that there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air, and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.” Such fastidiousness may seem ironic when displayed by one of the architects of area bombing. But it illustrates the sentiments of many senior service officers. Others, such as Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command, became fanatical foes of the SOE, because they resented the diversion of aircraft to support its networks.
Sir Stewart Menzies and his subordinates in the Secret Intelligence Service hated their amateur rivals, first, on Whitehall territorial grounds, and, second, because in the field ambushes and acts of sabotage excited the Germans and made more difficult discreet intelligence gathering by the SIS’s agents. An early SOE hand in the Middle East, Bickham Sweet-Escott, wrote of his own introduction to cloak and daggery: “Nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine880 the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during that summer of 1941.” Matters were not much better a year later, when Oliver Lyttelton was dispatched to the Mediterranean as minister resident. He recorded: “I was disturbed … by the lack of security881, waste and ineffectiveness of SOE.” The same strictures were often voiced in London.
Between 1940 and 1943, the highest achievement of the SOE in most occupied countries was to keep agents alive and wireless transmitters functioning, with most success in rural areas. The Soviet Union’s entry into the war prompted a dramatic accession of strength to resistance groups from Europe’s Communists. A second critical development in France was Germany’s 1943 introduction of massed forced labour, known as the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Tens of thousands of young men fled into hiding in the countryside, to the maquis, to escape deportation to Germany. They formed bands under leaders of differing and often mutually hostile political hues. Most were preoccupied with feeding themselves through banditry which enraged its bourgeois victims, rather than with fighting the Germans. Many French people882 asserted bitterly after the war, in private at least, that the Germans behaved better than did Communist maquisards. There is a widespread delusion that resistance groups were commanded by SOE officers, but this was rarely so. Most British agents fulfilled a liaison role, exercising varying degrees of influence upon French group leaders through their control of cash and supply drops.
Above all, until the spring of 1944 resistance groups were poorly armed. Only then did the Allies possess sufficient aircraft and weapons to begin equipping maquisards wholesale. A whimsical November 1941 proposal883 from Lord Cherwell to drop containers of arms randomly across occupied Europe to encourage