The women of war
I find many of these books in second-hand bookshops in London and also at the stalls in the Portobello market which often yield unexpected finds. I can recommend any of the following titles as interesting and informative on the subject of the SOE provided one can find them: Odette by Jeremy Tickell (pub: Chapman & Hall 1949); Moon Drop to Gascony by Anne Marie Walters (pub: Macmillan 1946) who was herself a FANY agent; The White Rabbit by Bruce Marshall (pub: Evans Brothers Ltd.1952) and Specially Employed by Maurice Buckmaster (pub: Batchworth Press 1952).
The last book was written by the man who selected, supervised or "ran" most of the women agents and who obviously knew their stories well. However the two most comprehensive books on the subject are Marcus Binney's The Women Who Lived For Danger: Women Agents of SOE in the Second World War (pub: Hodder & Stoughton 1988) and the definitive history of the SOE by Professor MRD Foot: SOE in France (pub: HMSO 1966).
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Recently there have been some new books about these women agents as a new generation discovers these remarkable tales of individual heroism. One story which could have had a slightly different slant is that of Noor Inayat Khan, the only woman of Indian origin to become a member of FANY. A novel based on her life has been written by Canadian writer Shauna Singh Baldwin, The Tiger Claw (pub: Knopff 2004). There has also been a new biography published recently it is Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayet Khan by Shrabani Basu (pub: Sultan Publishing 2006).
Although The Tiger Claw offered the author a great opportunity to write a very stirring and exciting account unfortunately it turned out to be much below expectation. Baldwin's plot construction is weak and half way through the narrative seems to loose focus mainly because of the complicated flashback structure that she has used. Her control over language is also quite inadequate so all in all the book is disappointing. This was also my complaint about her first book: What the Body Remembers. The subject was interesting but it was poorly researched with many small inconsistencies which could have been corrected by any South Asian and it could certainly have been better told and written.
I find that as I grow older I am rapidly becoming less tolerant of bad writing and unsatisfactory research and am easily bored with a book which contains more solecisms than can be reasonably accepted by a reader. Poor plot construction, contrived action and loose ends are also unacceptable as far as I am concerned -- that is one reason why I could not read The Da Vinci Code and am waiting for the movie to be released to see for myself what the hype was about.
It is therefore particularly sad to see an opportunity to write a good novel being wasted because Noor's story provides much material for drama as well as reflection. It is not the ordinary tale of heroism and courage one would like it to have been, rather it is a story of how a young and impressionable woman was used in the desperate fight against the Nazi war machine.
By all accounts as an individual, Noor was singularly unsuited for the role of spy. In fact her suitability to be sent into the field was questioned even during the selection process where the ultimate exercise was the mock Gestapo interrogation, intended to give agents a taste of what might be in store for them if they were captured. It helped them practice maintaining their cover story and taught them how to withstand at least the initial stage of interrogation and torture.
Noor's escorting officer found her mock interrogation "almost unbearable" and reported that "she seemed absolutely terrified " so overwhelmed she nearly lost her voice" and that afterwards, "she was trembling and quite blanched." Her finishing report, which the official historian of F Section found in her personal file long after the war, read: "Not overburdened with brains but has worked hard and shown keenness, apart from some dislike of the security side of the course. She has an unstable and temperamental personality and it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to the work in the field."
Next to this comment, Buckmaster wrote in the margin: "Nonsense." showing clearly that her superiors had decided to send her into action regardless of her suitability because at that stage of the war they were extremely short of agents with the right background, training and linguistic abilities.
Noors's background appeared ostensibly to be particularly appropriate for an agent going into occupied France. She was fluent in French having been brought up in Paris where her Indian father was a well established member of the Islamic Sufti community. He claimed to be descended from the royal family of Mysore (hence Basu's title: Spy Princess).
Although they were Muslims, Noor became more European in behavior and outlook as she grew older. As a student at the Sorbonne, where she took a degree in child psychology and studied several modern languages Noor dressed and behaved like any of her contemporaries, more European than Oriental to all intents and purposes. However beneath the veneer of Parisian sophistication was a gentle, shy, sensitive, musical, dreamy and poetic girl living by "a different rhythm" than others.
When the father died the mother and other siblings looked to Noor, as the eldest, for direction. With the occupation of France they felt unsafe and managed to get on one of the last boats leaving for England. There Noor enlisted in the Women's Auxillary Air Force (WAAF). She underwent various kinds of training including specialized signals training.
Then quite suddenly and without any warning she received the sort of summons that had come for other agents recruited by the SOE, a faceless man in Whitehall interviewed her and told her about the need for wireless operators to work with other British officers organizing resistance groups in occupied France. Apparently at this point he made clear the risk of capture, torture and death at the hands of the Gestapo but Noor seems to have welcomed the prospect of action and she readily accepted the offer.
Noor was to be the first woman to be sent over as a wireless operator, all of the women agents before her having been sent as "couriers." Did she realize the dangers she was going to face or did her naive romanticism rule her thoughts? Certainly from the way she and her group behaved in France it seems that the dangerous consequence of their situation was not at all uppermost in their minds.
The story of the "Prosper" group, as their cell was named, reads like an episode of the hilarious BBC series 'Allo 'Allo. It was pieced together by Jean Overton Fuller after the war from the accounts of those who had known and worked with Noor during the months between her arrival in April 1944 and her arrest in the autumn of that year.
It is shocking how inept and naïve these agents were. All that could go wrong did go wrong from farcical situations where Noor casually left a briefcase containing her codes out on a table in the entrance hall of a pension to an incident where the whole group lunched together in Paris. It was unprecedented for an entire cell to be seen together in public and a sure signal for disaster.
Amazing other breaches of the most elementary security precautions also occurred. Noor carried her notebook wherever she went throughout her stay. In it she kept a record of all the messages she had sent and received since arriving in France, in code and in plain text. The tell-tale messages were on the table beside her bed when she was arrested in her room, along with her codes. They would prove invaluable to her captors.
The agents who survived their stay in occupied France were those who scrupulously obeyed the laws of caution. In cities, they took care that even their associates did not know where they lived or what their cover name and identity was. In the country they moved from one house to another every few days. If they were radio operators, they did not stay on the air for more than a few minutes at a time and transmitted from different places whenever possible. Those who eluded capture were seldom those who were seen dining together in black-market restaurants, talking things over in English!
Therefore it was inevitable that the entire cell would eventually be rounded up by the Gestapo and sadly it was to all come to an end for Noor the same way it would for so many other brave agents with the interrogation, torture and transfer to a grim prison and an early morning execution. It must have been small consolation to her family that Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross by the British Government and the Croix de Guerre by France to become yet another footnote in the annals of war.