Also serving in the North African campaign was Mike Sadler, who left England in the late1930s with the intention of becoming a farmer in what was then Rhodesia but ended up becoming the ‘best navigator’ in the SAS. Mike served with soldiers whose names are now part of the historical fabric of the special forces, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Mayne and Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the SAS. Mike took part in many of the early SAS missions, in which the elite fighting force built its reputation attacking German airfields deep behind enemy lines in North Africa. ‘My resounding memory is that it was such tremendous fun,’ Mike explains in the book.
The adventures of Captain John Campbell, who was erroneously branded a coward at El Alamein but later went on to win the Military Cross and bar, while in Italy serving with Popski’s Private Army, make another remarkable story. He was later described by Popski, a charismatic British officer of East European heritage, as the ‘most daring of us all’. John is the only surviving officer who served with that elite force.
Among the most dangerous ventures of the war were the night missions to occupied France flown by the RAF’s Moonlight Squadrons, of which Leonard Ratcliff is a rare survivor; Corran Purdon recalls his part in the daring St Nazaire Raid, which led to imprisonment and the MC; and Bill Towill, a pacifist until Dunkirk, describes the horrors of jungle warfare behind enemy lines with the legendary Chindits.
Men who served in the Jedburgh Teams, a secret SOE unit, recall their experiences in France and the Far East. All were young volunteers who wanted to see some real action before the war ended. The soldiers were trained in covert communication, silent killing and sabotage, before being parachuted into occupied France just before D-Day to assist in organising the Resistance movement. Some of those who survived volunteered to serve in Burma, including men like John Sharp, who won the Military Medal, Fred Bailey, who fought alongside both the Maquis and Burmese guerrillas, and Harry Verlander, who escaped death by a hair’s breadth when he was attacked by a Japanese officer wielding a samurai sword.
Tales from the Special Forces Club presents their unique stories of courage, conviction and fighting spirit. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
CHAPTER 1
The Secret Life of Noreen Riols
Training SOE Agents
‘The disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on German security services throughout occupied Europe by the organised forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.’
General Eisenhower, May 1945
It was on a Monday morning in August 2011, when a black London taxi cab dropped me at the corner of a leafy crescent in Knightsbridge, that I made my first visit to the Special Forces Club as a guest of one of its original members.
The club is as anonymous today as it was when it opened after the Second World War, its address only known to a select few. I press a small bell fixed to the building’s outer wall adjacent to a heavy, tan-coloured oak door, and a few seconds later the door clicks open.
‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ a young receptionist enquires helpfully.
‘My name is Sean Rayment and I’m here to see Noreen Riols,’ I respond. A few elderly club members milling around in the lobby immediately turn and look at me, with a mixture of suspicion and interest.
‘She is waiting for you through there,’ responds the receptionist, pointing at a half-open door through which the morning sun is starting to shine. As I walk past another office two middle-aged men look up from behind their computer and stare unsmiling as I pass. I feel as though I have just been frisked.
Looking into the room, I see that Noreen Riols is reclining in a slightly worn, red velvet armchair which has the effect of diminishing her delicate frame. She is sipping a cup of breakfast tea while reading a copy of The Times and appears perfectly at home in the cosy, peach-coloured drawing room.
‘Noreen?’ I ask hesitantly as I enter the room.
‘Yes?’ she replies, looking slightly confused before a smile fills her face. ‘You must be Sean. I’m sorry, I was expecting someone older. Please, come in and sit down. Now, would you like a cup of tea?’
After months of research, searching and seemingly endless emails and telephone calls, I have come face to face with Noreen Riols, one of the very few members of the SOE still alive.
As a journalist and former officer in the Parachute Regiment, I have met members of covert intelligence agencies, such as MI5, MI6, the SAS and more obscure organisations such as 14 Intelligence Company, which operated exclusively in Northern Ireland from the 1980s and whose existence was never officially acknowledged by the British government, on numerous occasions. I have always been struck by the physical ordinariness of those who inhabit the covert world. They might be super-fit and have brilliant analytical minds, but from the outside they tend not to stand out from the crowd; they are mostly neither too tall nor too short, fat or thin, handsome or ugly – just ordinary. For those who live their lives in the covert world of espionage and counter-espionage, blending in, being almost invisible within the crowd can be a life-saving quality. And Noreen is no exception. Sipping tea in the Special Forces Club she looked like everyone’s favourite granny, with a kind, smiling, gentle face. It was curious, therefore, to think that some 70 years earlier Noreen was one of a select band of SOE personnel who were training agents to conduct assassinations and sabotage across Europe as Britain and its allies fought for their very existence.
Noreen and I shake hands before she adds: ‘There aren’t very many of us left, you know.’ By that she means members of the SOE, the wartime clandestine force created in July 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, and Hugh Dalton, the Minister for Economic Warfare, with the aim of conducting sabotage, espionage, assassinations and forming resistance movements against the Axis powers in occupied countries.
Noreen was one of the many women employed by the secret organisation during the war. Today, aged 86, she is one of the few surviving members of F Section – the department which dispatched more than 400 agents, including 39 female spies, into France between 1941 and 1945. The methods of infiltration included parachuting, landing by aircraft and using fishing boats and submarines.
The section was one of SOE’s most successful and was responsible for creating dozens of underground networks across France. Many of the agents were Britons who were fluent in French and were recruited from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations. Some were already serving in the armed forces, while others were recruited because of their knowledge of France, all united by their loathing of the Nazi ideology and the desire to strike back at a regime which had already enslaved millions of civilians.
But it was a dangerous and demanding occupation, and newly trained agents were warned that they had a 50 per cent chance of surviving the war. Those who were captured faced torture at the hands of the Gestapo followed by almost certain execution.
SOE’s primary role was to help organise the French Resistance into a fighting force capable of mounting sabotage, with the primary targets being the rail and telephone networks.
‘Isn’t it funny that now that there are so few of us left we are in more demand than ever?’ Noreen adds before returning to her seat. ‘Now tell me, what do you want to know? There are no secrets any more.’
* * *
Noreen Riols was born into a naval family on the Mediterranean island of Malta. From an early age she had decided that she too wanted to lead an adventurous life which would begin with taking a degree at Oxford. War broke out before she was ready to go to university, but she was already becoming a capable