Most Secret

S
O much happened in the two years that I spent at the Admiralty, I had a finger in so many pies, that I have found it difficult to say exactly when it was that this thing began. From my engagement diary it seems to have been about the middle of July in 1941, and I should say that it began with a telephone call from McNeil.

I reached out for the receiver. I remember that it was a very hot day and I was flooded out with work. There was dust all over my desk because I had the window open, and outside the bricklayers were repairing what the
Luftwaffe
had done to us. I said irritably: “Six nine two.”

“Is that Commander Martin?”

“Speaking,” I said shortly.

“This is Brigadier McNeil. I am speaking from one hundred and sixty-four Pall Mall.”

“Oh yes, sir?” I replied. The address meant nothing to me, and I wondered sourly why the Army could not say in short time who they were and what they wanted.

“Captain Oliver gave me your name. We’ve been talking about an operation this morning. I think perhaps I’d better come along and see you.”

“Very good, sir. When would you like to come?”

“About three o’clock this afternoon? Is that convenient to you?”

“That’s quite all right for me. I’ll expect you then.”

He came to me in the afternoon. He was a man of forty-five or fifty, a typical soldier, very smartly dressed. His belt, his buttons, and the stars and crowns upon his shoulders were beautifully polished; his uniform sat on him without a crease, and the red staff tabs blazed out immaculate from the lapels of his tunic. He had short, greyish hair and china-blue eyes. He looked pleasant enough, determined, absolutely straight, and—I thought at first—rather stupid. You felt to look at him that he would be wonderful upon a horse.

I got up as the messenger showed him in. “Good afternoon,” I said. “Will you sit down?”

He laid his hat and gloves upon the corner of my desk, and dropped his gas-mask on a chair. He said: “I understand that Admiral Thomson is away?”

“He’s away a good deal, sir,” I replied. “We deal with routine matters from this office in his absence. Anything that’s beyond us goes down to V.A.C.O. by the courier.”

He sat down on the chair beside the desk, and I went back to mine. “V.A.C.O.?” he said.

“Vice-Admiral for Channel Operations. Admiral Thomson.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “That’s his proper title, is it? Just wait a minute, and I’ll write that down.” He slipped a pencil and a notebook from his pocket; I watched him as he wrote, slightly amused.

He put them away again, and turned to me. “Well now,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning. You know the office that I come from?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t, sir. One hundred and sixty-four Pall Mall, did you say?”

“That’s right. Well …” He paused for a moment, considering his words. “We do various things from that office,” he said at last. “We come directly under the War Cabinet.” He hesitated again. “One of our jobs is to do what we can to keep up the morale of the French.”

I nodded, and waited for him to go on.

“That’s Cabinet policy, of course,” he said. “We mustn’t let them lose faith in a British victory. They never have lost faith, taking it by and large. Even in the worst days they believed that we would win. It’s our job to keep their faith in us alive.”

I passed him a cigarette. “I suppose our wireless broadcasts help in that,” I said. “Do they—the average Frenchman—does he listen to them much?”

“Oh, everybody listens,” he said. “The B.B.C. is doing a good job, for all that you read in the newspapers. But that’s not my concern. You’d never keep their heart up upon broadcast talks and news alone. But something concrete, any little bit of activity or sabotage that can be contrived—that puts new life in them. Just any little thing to show them that the Germans aren’t having things all their own way. These daylight sweeps that the R.A.F. are doing over France help us enormously.”

I knew now what was coming, more or less. “This activity and sabotage,” I said quietly. “You mean, you send people over to the other side?”

“Sometimes,” he said shortly.

He blew a long cloud of smoke, and seemed to consider for a minute. “What I came over to see you people about was this,” he said. “One of our young men produced a scheme the other day—a proposal that we thought rather well of. But what he proposed was so much a naval operation that I put it up to Captain Oliver. He sent me over here to see your admiral.”

I took a cigarette myself from the packet on my desk and lit it. “This is all a bit outside my line,” I said. “Anything like this would have to go to the V.A.C.O.”

“Yes, I expected that.”

I was curious, of course; anybody would have been. I said: “If you care to tell me about it I can probably tell you straight away if it conflicts with anything that we are doing. Or if you’d rather, sir, I’ll put in a call to Admiral Thomson right away and make an appointment for you to go down and see him.”

“He won’t be in London very soon?”

“Not before Thursday of next week,” I said. “I could fix up for you to see him then.”

He shook his head. “I’d better not wait so long.” He thought for a moment, and then said: “I think I’d better have your view on it. It has to do with the fishing fleet based on Douarnenez.”

I wrinkled my forehead; few naval officers know much about the coast of Brittany, for all that it is only just across the way. “Douarnanez?” I said. “That’s the place just by the Saints, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s on the west coast, twenty or thirty miles south of Brest. There’s a long bay running inland just north of the Ile de Sein, and Douarnenez lies at the head of that bay. It’s time we did something for Douarnenez. They’ve been having the hell of a time.”

“Why is that?”

He knocked the ash off his cigarette. “Well,” he said, “they’re a very independent sort of people round about those parts, and they don’t like the Germans. And they don’t like being conquered, either. You know, the Bretons never really think of themselves as French. They have their own language and their own customs, just like the Welsh in this country. There’s always been a Separatist movement among their intellectuals, never very serious—Brittany for the Bretons, and all that sort of thing. And now the Bretons don’t regard themselves
as having been defeated. They say that the rest of France ratted on them, and let them down.”

“About right, too,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, anyway, that’s the way they look at it. In Douarnenez they were pretty uppish with the Germans just at first, and there were a lot of executions.”

“Uppish?”

“Throwing excrement at German officers, and demonstrations of that sort. The
Boche
won’t stand for that; he shot thirty of them in one day, in public, up against the market-place. That only made things worse, of course. I don’t know how many have been executed in all—possibly a hundred, maybe more. It’s difficult to get the figures. It’s not a very big place, about fifteen thousand inhabitants, I think. Now they’ve gone sullen and all bloody-minded, and the Gestapo are working on them.”

“That doesn’t sound so good,” I said.

“It’s not. That’s why I want to do something for them. Put on a bit of a show.”

I glanced at the solid, well-dressed officer before me with a new respect. It was impossible not to like him, not to appreciate his manner. He was absolutely candid, absolutely direct. He sat there looking at me like a great St. Bernard dog.

I asked: “What sort of show have you got in mind, sir?”

He said: “Well, there are several of the German
Raumboote
based upon the port. We want to do something against one of those.”

I thought for a minute very hard. “The
Raumboote
is rather like our own M.L., isn’t it? I’ve not had a great deal to do with them myself.”

“Much the same sort of thing,” he said. “They use them for the fishery patrol.”

“And you want to do something against one of those?” I reflected for a moment. “That’s because they are based upon the port, and because everybody knows about them?”

He nodded. “That’s exactly it.”

Instinctively I recoiled from the idea. “I see that you want to create a diversion, sir,” I said slowly. “But tell me, why must it be a naval diversion? What I mean is this. Anything done upon the sea tends to develop into a big show, because you have to cover your stake. A ship—any sort of ship—takes a long time to make and costs a lot of money. You may plan to fight your
Raumboote
with one ship, but before long you’ll find it necessary to send other ships in support of your one ship.
And before you know what’s happening your little show has turned into a considerable operation.”

I paused. “I don’t know much about these matters,” I said diffidently. “But I should have thought a land diversion would have served as well. A bomb laid up against an oil-tank, for example. There you only risk one man and one bomb.”

“It wouldn’t have the same effect,” he said. “As a matter of fact, an oil-tank is very difficult. It has been done, but the chance of getting away without detection is very small. A bridge is easier, and high-tension cables are very simple, of course. You can hurt them quite a lot by blowing up the pylons, and they can’t put a guard on every pylon in the country. But none of those would influence Douarnenez very much.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “Their minds are turned entirely to the sea. I thought the same as you at first, but you must understand the sort of town it is. The whole life of the place is centred round the harbour and the fishing fleet. It’s just like Brixham must have been thirty years ago.”

I nodded without speaking.

“It’s got the strongest fishing fleet in France,” he said. “But I suppose you know all about that.”

“I’m ashamed to say I don’t,” I said. “I know it’s quite a big fleet. How many vessels sail out of Douarnenez?”

He pulled out his notebook again. “I can give you that.” He fumbled for a little, and found the page. “On March 1st there were a hundred and forty-seven sardine-boats, Diesel-engined wooden vessels sixty to seventy feet long. There were thirty-six sailing tunnymen, ketch-rigged, about a hundred and ten feet long. And there were seven sailing crabbers, about a hundred and thirty feet. A hundred and ninety vessels all told, excluding small boats.”

“That’s a very strong fleet,” I said. “What do all those ships do now?”

“They still go out fishing.”

“Are those the fishing-boats that the destroyers see when they make their sweeps? Between Ushant and Belle Isle?”

He nodded. “Those are probably the ones they see. The tunnymen go down to the Bay of Biscay; the sardine-boats don’t usually go south of the Ile de Sein. It’s the sardine fleet that concerns us now.”