Victoria's Cross (22 page)

A further factor explaining the lack of SOE VC recommendations is that the head of Section F was Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who
proved himself almost equal to Noor when it came to making elementary blunders that cost the lives of captured agents. Before the war Buckmaster had been a journalist with
Le Matin
, and subsequently joined the Ford Motor Company in France. He left France when the war started and joined the British army just in time to experience the Dunkirk retreat. Buckmaster was no professional soldier and was plagued by uncertainty in an organization that officially did not exist. He ran F Section with insufficient guardedness, ignoring warnings that some circuits in France had been penetrated and were being used by the Germans to transmit disinformation to London and trap agents when they arrived in the field. His superior and overall head of SOE was Brigadier Colin Gubbins, an archetypal professional soldier who gained an MC for rescuing men under fire during the First World War. Gubbins did not need to make his view of the VC known; the unquestioned assumption of all long-service senior officers was that only men serving in the armed forces were really eligible, no matter what the 1920 warrant said. SOE's agents – men and women – were the overlooked and unofficially distrusted soldiers of a secret army.
⁵⁴

But perhaps the most compelling explanation why Ward's fight to get a retroactive VC for Szabo failed is that SOE and its mostly courageous, sometimes fallible agents were tainted with an aroma of personal and professional scandal. Traitors, double agents, poor management, outright incompetence – SOE suffered from them all. What little information about SOE did filter out after the war's end merely fed the appetite for sensationalism, the ill-informed and deliberately misled press doing what it always does with espionage – focus on glamour.

The story of Odette Sansom was seized upon by the post-war press, who in the grim days of 1946 could hardly believe its luck. Here was an attractive female agent whose adventures titillated the sadomasochistically inclined; but it was also a story with a happy ending – she
survived and was about to marry a male war hero. A wave of publicity followed the official notification of Odette's GC on 20 August 1946 in the
Gazette
; several newspapers the following day published her citation in full. Her tale of tussles with Nazis, physical and mental abuse, the concentration camp, ultimate freedom and romance was captured (and perhaps embellished) in a bestselling biography and subsequently a 1956 film,
Carve Her Name With Pride
.
⁵⁵
Irene Ward later suggested to Anthony Eden that giving Odette the first George Cross awarded to a woman was a blunder:

I have nothing to say about her bravery in captivity, but I think it must be well known to you – as it is to many people – that she and Peter Churchill would not have been arrested at the time they were had they not disobeyed orders for their own personal reasons, and that those in full possession of the facts asserted that as a result some valuable lives were lost. I, of course, have always thought it unfortunate that the George Cross should have been awarded in this instance without waiting for news of some of the other girls; and we are all only too painfully aware of how the light of publicity is shed on a few individuals while others equally or more eligible for it are passed by. I don't think anyone reading Violette Szabo's citation for her G.C. would be left under any illusions as to her contribution both in the field and in captivity; and I can see only one way to ensure that posterity recognises that her contribution was, in fact, far greater than Odette's.
⁵⁶

Irene Ward's main objection to Odette's GC was that she had disobeyed orders and that this had led to the deaths of other agents in her network; the fact that Odette was also technically married to Mr Sansom while she was conducting an affair with Peter Churchill,
⁵⁷
another SOE agent, offended Ward's strait-laced morality, but the greatest sin was unprofessionalism.
⁵⁸
Against strict orders, Odette, who was already in France, went to meet Peter Churchill when he landed by aircraft on
15 April 1943. Odette was already known to the occupying authorities; she had been negotiating with Hugo Bleicher, an Abwehr agent, again defying London's orders. Peter Churchill was ordered to avoid Odette until she had broken contact with Bleicher. Nevertheless, the couple returned from the landing ground to the Hôtel de la Poste in Saint-Jorioz. Next day Bleicher arrested them both and rounded up members of their network.

Ward was not alone in questioning Odette's GC; doubts were raised by several contemporaries in SOE and later by Foot in the first edition of his history of F Section of SOE, the damning comment there being that Odette's experiences in Ravensbrück had ‘induced in her a state of nervous tension so severe that she had considerable difficulty for many months in distinguishing fantasy and reality'. Foot amended a subsequent edition following legal action by Odette that was settled out of court. Selwyn Jepson, Odette's original interviewer at SOE, wrote privately to the Treasury that she ‘was so keen to be a martyr that she ought to be tied to a bedpost and whipped'.
⁵⁹
Yet although Odette is likely to have made some appalling mistakes, blinded by her sexual desires, it would be unfair to castigate her from the comfort of an armchair; no one who has not suffered at the hands of the Gestapo can imagine what mental and physical terror had to be endured. On 1 January 1946 Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins signed Odette's GC recommendation:

The Gestapo tortured her brutally to try to make her give away this information [the whereabouts of other operatives inside France]. They seared her back with a red hot iron and, when that failed, they pulled out all her toe-nails; but Ensign Sansom continually refused to speak and by her courage, determination and self-sacrifice, she not only saved the lives of these two officers but also enabled them to carry on their most valuable work.
⁶⁰

Many male soldiers had received the VC for much less. Yet even with this recommendation it was a struggle to get a GC for Odette. A letter from Gubbins dated 6 June 1946 revealed that he feared that Odette might be denied the GC unless ‘we were able to produce concrete evidence that she refused to speak under torture. I am afraid that such evidence is impossible to obtain, for, as this torture was carried out in solitary confinement, the only witnesses would be the torturers themselves or the Gestapo interrogators. I hope and pray that these men have long since been shot.' The authorities had to make do with circumstantial evidence in the form of supporting statements from those with whom Odette worked in France, and the fact that the operatives for whose names she was tortured remained free from arrest.
⁶¹

Ward realized that, with Odette having gained a grudging GC, her argument for a posthumous VC for Violette Szabo was always going to be a struggle.
⁶²
The tall, dark-haired, striking Violette Reine Elizabeth Szabo was a highly professional, popular and courageous SOE agent. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, and the widow of a French legionnaire, Szabo joined SOE on 1 July 1943, even though she had a one-year-old daughter, Tania. Her first SOE interviewer, on 27 August 1943, recommended her for training:

A quiet physically tough, self-willed girl of average intelligence. Out for excitement and adventure but not entirely frivolous. Has plenty of confidence in herself and gets on well with others. Plucky and persistent in her endeavours. Not easily rattled. In a limited capacity not calling for too much intelligence and responsibility and not too boring she could probably do a useful job, possibly as courier.
⁶³

Later reports were ambivalent, that of 7 September 1943 stating: ‘I seriously wonder whether this student is suitable for our purpose. She seems lacking in a sense of responsibility and although she works well
in the company of others, does not appear to have any initiative or ideals. She speaks French with an English accent.' By 8 October the instructors seemed to have decided that Szabo was unsuitable:

I have come to the conclusion that this student is temperamentally unsuitable for this work . . . when operating in the field she might endanger the lives of others working with her. It is very regrettable to have to come to such a decision when dealing with a student of this type, who during the whole course, has set an example to the whole party by her cheerfulness and eagerness to please.
⁶⁴

Yet despite such negative comments Szabo left for France on 7 June 1944, where her courage was questioned by none. The final paragraph of her GC recommendation, dated 10 July 1946, read:

Although Szabo was continuously and atrociously tortured she never by word or deed gave away any of her acquaintances or told the enemy anything of any value. She showed great courage in exhorting other women prisoners to be of good cheer and walked proudly to the gas chamber,
⁶⁵
knowing full well the fate that was in store for her. She gave a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness to all that had the honour of knowing her. She is very strongly recommended for the George Cross.

Prior to news of her death, Szabo had been recommended for a Civil Division MBE. It may seem incredible to modern readers, but as far as the army was concerned, Szabo was a civilian and she therefore merited a civil award. Szabo's file in the National Archive contains various reports from French sources who worked with her up to her arrest: one, dated 27 June 1945, described her:

Jeune femme d'un courage extraordinaire. Elle a donne un tr
è
s bel example de cran, et elle a
é
t
é
tr
é
s d
é
brouillarde. Nous avons
é
norm
é
ment d'admiration pour elle
.
[Young woman of extraordinary courage. She showed lots of guts, and was very resourceful. We have enormous admiration for her.]

And under the section proposing a citation: ‘Proposée pour la M.C. et pour une décoration française.'

Szabo's GC was gazetted on 17 December 1946, although inevitably her citation was largely fictitious: few of those who might have verified it were around to be consulted. Stories about her capture, including that she used a Sten gun to fend off her attackers, are now widely regarded as inventions or embellishments. But she was unquestionably valiant under extreme torture and abuse before she was wretchedly murdered: if the requirement of the VC, unspoken during the war itself, was that one had to perform some supererogatory act
and
also run the risk of almost certain death, Yeo-Thomas deserved the VC – and Szabo, who did die, even more so.

The award of the George, rather than the Victoria, Cross to Major Hugh Paul Seagrim is also difficult to explain. Seagrim was one of five brothers who joined the British, or British Indian, armies prior to the Second World War.
⁶⁶
He had wanted to train as a doctor but the death of his father meant the family was too poor to send him to university. He tried to join the Royal Navy but was turned down on the grounds of colour blindness. Instead he went to Sandhurst, and because the pay was better in the British Indian army, he joined the 19th Hyderabad Regiment but was attached to the 1st Battalion, the Burma Rifles. In the 1930s he took three months' leave to travel in Japan. Clever, eccentric and popular, Seagrim frequently said he would sooner be a postman in Norfolk than a general in India.

When war against Japan broke out, the by now Major Hugh Seagrim was ordered to organize the Karen levies in Burma. Force 136, an organization established by SOE, dropped parachutists into the Karen Hills in 1942, and they joined up with Seagrim's force, which regularly
passed on valuable intelligence by wireless. In January 1944 he was awarded the DSO for his ‘determination, courage and devotion . . . of the highest order'. In March 1944 Japanese forces closed in on Seagrim, torturing and murdering Karen villagers to persuade them to betray Seagrim. He was finally tracked down to the village of Mewado, where the Japanese threatened to arrest all the inhabitants and burn down the village unless the headman pinpointed Seagrim's exact location. Seagrim, who by now had enormous affection for the Karen people, chose to surrender to the Japanese rather than permit this to happen. He was imprisoned close to Rangoon, along with several Karens; all were sentenced to death. Among his last words were: ‘I do not mind what you do to me. But, I do ask you, if you are going to punish anyone, punish me. Do not punish these Karens. It is only because of me that all these Karens have got into trouble.'
⁶⁷
Seagrim, along with seven Karens, was executed by firing squad on 14 September 1944 and, almost two years later, he was gazetted on 12 September 1946 with the George Cross.
⁶⁸

A decade after the end of the Second World War, Irene Ward published a history of the FANYs in which she tried to rationalize – perhaps to herself as much as for the reader – the unjust manner in which military decorations had been adjudicated during the war:

The bestowal of Honours is always a matter for criticism – sometimes unjust criticism . . . to give the minimum decoration for the maximum effort is a deplorable way of acknowledging outstanding service. I can only assume – and this can be said about other awards also – that secrecy was so well maintained that those who recommended individuals for relatively minor recognition were unaware of the distinguished services rendered, or perhaps those who sifted the names had never heard of SOE.
⁶⁹

A hierarchy of committees must be navigated to gain the VC and unhelpfully their deliberation is kept well away from public scrutiny;
secrecy inevitably fosters distrust and suspicion. The VC's history is one of amorphous definitions of what constitutes conspicuous courage, sometimes stretched to accommodate fairly ordinary acts of military duty, occasionally shrunk to absurdly narrow limits, ruling out all acts save those that defy human imagination. For some individual women, who so clearly performed heroically under unimaginable pressure in occupied France during 1943–4, the pity is that they were not even considered for this prestigious honour.