The Dangerous Book of Heroes Read online

  Paine wrote against this new America in a series of letters, To the Citizens of the United States. His books were burned and he was publicly booed and hissed. He was even shot at by his disgruntled farm manager, though, typically, Paine did not prosecute.

  In 1809, after further illness, Paine died in New York. His request to be buried in the Quaker cemetery was refused. Ten years later his remains were brought home to Britain, but burial there was also prohibited. His bones have since disappeared, although his skull is claimed to be at Sydney University in Australia.

  Thomas Paine did not invent all the radical theories, principles of freedom, and social philosophies he promoted, but in Rights of Man he was the first to combine them into a system of government. His ideal was not a leveling of society but one of equal opportunity. Other British radicals campaigned with and after him—Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, Samuel Whitbread, Richard and John Carlile, Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Fry, John Wilkes, Emmeline Pankhurst, and many more. While violent, false revolutions failed abroad, a true revolution began to take place quietly and successfully in Britain.

  After the defeat of military dictatorship in Europe in 1815, a catalog of democratic, social, and political reforms was enacted in Britain throughout the nineteenth century. This included repealing the law of seditious libel and publication. These principles of human rights, justice for all, and liberty—begun from the first modern document of rights, the Magna Carta of 1215—were sent out into the world and our modern, Western society created.

  Further editions of Paine’s great works were published. Voting rights for everybody was slow in coming, but in 1856 the colony of Tasmania held the first secret ballot, which became British law in 1872. Women first voted in 1880 in British local elections, while New Zealand introduced the first national women’s vote in 1893.

  How advanced our now casually accepted rights then were is shown by events outside the English-speaking world. Frenchwomen, for example, did not receive the vote until October 1944, and other countries later still. Thomas Paine was more than a century ahead of his time. His League of Nations was finally created in 1919 and its successor, the United Nations, in 1945.

  Yet now Britain is suffering another step back. Many of the liberties and rights hard won by Paine and others are being lost, to British governments and to the laws and directives from the unelected European Union.

  In this twenty-first century, the European Court of Justice ruled that E.U. institutions have the right to suppress criticism that damages “the institution’s image and reputation,” or in other words, any criticism at all. This ruling is identical to the law the British government introduced to muzzle Thomas Paine back in 1792—seditious libel and publication. Paine wrote then that only “when opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, will truth finally prevail.”

  Recommended

  Thomas Paine by A. J. Ayer

  Tom Paine: America’s Godfather by W. E. Woodward

  The Light’s on at Signpost: Memoirs of the Movies Among Other Matters by George MacDonald Fraser

  The Women of SOE: Setting Europe Ablaze

  In Manchester, northern England, they trained as parachutists. This began with rolling correctly on the ground, then jumping from a truck moving at 30 miles per hour, and ended parachuting from an airplane at five hundred feet with only thirty seconds before landing at 69 miles per hour—at night.

  In Inverness, Scotland, they trained in unarmed combat, in silent killing, in sabotage using the new British plastic explosive, in living off the land, in using weapons, including enemy weapons.

  In Beaulieu Palace in England’s New Forest, they were instructed about coded messages and secret inks, to blow safes, to forge documents, and to live in enemy territory. They were awakened and “interrogated” in the middle of the night.

  They became wireless operators, arms instructors, couriers, organizers, liaison officers, decoders, and saboteurs. They learned new identities, code signals, and passwords. They were each given an “L-pill,” a lethal capsule of cyanide to use should they be captured. They were parachuted, landed by light airplane, or taken by sea into occupied Europe. After that, they were completely on their own.

  They were from different backgrounds and education, from different countries and of different ages, of opposing religions and no religion. Yet they had one thing in common. They were the women of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE)—who carried the fight for freedom behind enemy lines in World War II and, according to Winston Churchill, “set Europe ablaze.” More than five hundred SOE agents were sent into Nazi Europe to organize resistance; fifty of these were women.

  The first woman wireless operator sent into France was Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, a Sufi Indian born in the Kremlin of Tsar Nicholas in 1914. Her father was the head of a Sufi sect, an ascetic Islamic movement that emphasizes a direct, personal experience of God. Her mother was American, a relative of Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, who established the Christian Science sect in 1879.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  Khan was the great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the man the British came up against during the conquest of Mysore in India. Her family lived in London and Paris, where Khan studied music for six years and played the veena, an Indian stringed instrument, as well as piano and harp. She also studied at Sorbonne in Paris for her degree in child psychology. Before the war, Khan wrote children’s stories for French radio, while a book of her children’s fairy stories was published in Britain in 1939. She spoke French like a native.

  At the fall of France the family escaped to Britain, where Khan’s brother, Vilayat, joined the Royal Air Force and she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). From there she was recruited by SOE in late 1942 to be trained as a wireless operator. Her code name was Madeleine.

  A supporter of Indian independence, Khan had said, “I wish an Indian would win high military distinction in this war. It would help to build a bridge between the British and the Indians.” Of the thirty-six thousand Indians who died in World War II, that Indian was to be Khan herself.

  Khan landed by Lysander airplane in northern France one night in June 1943 and made her way to Paris. Many SOE wireless operators were tracked when the enemy took cross bearings of their signals and arrested them—it took about twenty minutes to locate them—and by that autumn there was a shortage. Khan was busy throughout the day and night transmitting and receiving messages, decoding and encoding signals, for other networks as well as her own.

  Moving from one safe house to another, she remained just one step ahead of the Gestapo. At one address, she transmitted from an apartment block full of German officers. SOE twice offered Khan repatriation to Britain, but she refused and remained working. There were then so few wireless operators that her work was vital.

  Although there were several thousand brave men and women in the French Resistance, security was at best basic, at worst nonexistent. Even with the Free French Forces, living in and paid by Britain, security was a joke. Eventually, Churchill was forced to deny them all vital information, while British intelligence fed false information to the Nazis through the Free French—it took only two days for it to reach Berlin.

  In October a Frenchwoman betrayed Khan to the Gestapo for 100,000 francs ($12,000). Many SOE captures came about through betrayal. Khan was arrested with some files and taken to the Gestapo’s Paris office at 84 Avenue Foch for interrogation. She escaped almost immediately but was recaptured climbing down the outside of the building. She was interrogated, attempted another escape, was recaptured again and tortured. The Gestapo gained no information from her other than the captured files.

  German torture of women included, as well as the usual beatings, cutting off breasts, pulling out fingernails and toenails, sleep deprivation, rape, laying red-hot pokers against the spine, near-drowning, and other horrors. The chief of the German police, Heinrich Himmler, ordered: “The agents should die, certainly, bu
t not before torture, indignity and interrogation has drained from them the last shred of evidence that should lead us to others. Then, and only then, should the blessed release of death be granted them.”

  Giving up on her, the Gestapo sent Khan to the German prison of Pforzheim. Her hands and feet were manacled, the manacles were chained together, and she was kept in solitary confinement for almost a year. Her food was passed through a hatch in the door, the door itself opened only to change her drinking water. In September 1944, Khan was removed to the Dachau concentration camp. On the twelfth she was taken to a bloody yard with three other captured SOE agents, Elaine Plewman, Madeleine Damerment, and Yolande Beekman. In pairs, kneeling and holding hands, the women were shot in the back of the head.

  Noor-un-nisa Inayat (meaning “light of womanhood”) Khan was awarded the posthumous George Cross, the highest civilian British award for gallantry, and made MBE, Member of the British Empire.

  Violette Szabó was born Violette Bushell, the daughter of a British veteran of World War I, who’d married his mademoiselle from Armentières and taken her to England. Thanks to her mother, Violette spoke excellent French. At the beginning of the war she was working behind a counter at Woolworth’s in Brixton, London.

  In 1940 she met and married Etienne Szabó of the Foreign Legion, a Hungarian who’d made his way to Britain to continue the fight against the Nazis. Violette joined an antiaircraft battery before having her only child, Tania, born in 1942. Etienne died at the 1942 battle of el-Alamein, never having met his daughter. A few months later Violette was recruited by SOE.

  Five feet tall, she turned out to be a crack shot and kept her fellow SOE recruits in cigarettes by winning them at public shooting galleries. She’d cut out the cardboard bull’s-eye with just four shots. She passed all the courses, although she damaged her left ankle parachuting, and became a liaison officer code-named Louise. She was commissioned ensign and returned her L-pill, determined that she would never use it.

  Landed by Lysander in Normandy one April night in 1944, Szabó began her first mission in and around Rouen: to find out who—if anyone—had survived of a French Resistance group that had been betrayed, and to contact them. At great risk, using the false identity of Corinne Leroy from Le Havre, she located the only four survivors of fifteen and passed on the message from London to blow a vital railway bridge. Szabó was arrested twice by the French police but talked her way out, explaining that she’d come to Rouen to search for missing relatives. The night after the second arrest she left for Paris. That same night, the railway bridge was destroyed.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  In Paris, Szabó met her British field organizer, who arranged her return to Britain for debriefing. Years before in Britain, in another lifetime, she and her husband had vowed that they would buy a dress from Paris for their daughter. This Szabó now did, bringing it back to Britain in her airlift across the English Channel.

  Her second mission, after parachuting into Limoges on D-day plus one (June 7, 1944), was to liaise Resistance activity in support of the Allied invasion. She and Resistance leader Jacques Dufour were intercepted by German SS troops. During their flight, Szabó twisted her ankle again. She sent Dufour on to escape while she delayed the SS, firing on them with her Sten machine gun. She received a slight flesh wound and was captured after she’d run out of ammunition.

  Imprisoned and interrogated first in Limoges, Szabó was then transferred to Fresnes Prison in Paris. She was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo at 84 Avenue Foch. As well as the names of other SOE agents, French Resistance fighters, and Resistance circuits, the Germans wanted her “poem”—the key to her personal message code. With that, they would be able to send false messages to London and decode her earlier messages.

  Szabó’s poem was composed by the head of SOE coding, Leo Marks. It’s the most famous of them all and might be the epitaph for all SOE agents:

  The life that I have is all that I have

  And the life that I have is yours.

  The love that I have of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have a rest I shall have

  Yet death will be but a pause,

  For the peace of my years in the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  Szabó gave the Gestapo no information. She was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women. She and two other captured SOE agents made two plans to escape, but each was thwarted. On February 5, 1945, Violette Szabó and her two friends were executed in a dark passage by a single shot into the back of the neck. A Ravensbrück survivor remembered Szabó as “outstanding” among the thousands of women imprisoned there.

  On December 17, 1946, wearing the dress her mother had bought her in Paris, four-year-old Tania Szabó was presented with Violette’s posthumous George Cross by King George VI at Buckingham Palace. Tania later wrote her mother’s story in the book Young Brave and Beautiful.

  Like Violette Szabó, Lilian Rolfe was born to parents who were British and French. When the war began in 1939, Rolfe was living in Brazil. She worked for the British embassy, reported shipping movements in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1943 joined the WAAF. Because of her native French she was recruited by SOE and trained alongside Violette Szabó, specializing as a wireless operator. Rolfe’s code names were Claudie and Nadine. She was landed in France in April 1944.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  She worked preparing for the D-day invasion of June. Arranging vital drops of arms and explosives, she sent sixty-seven messages from a highly active Gestapo region. Her field organizer was arrested, but she continued operating. In July, a month after D-day, Rolfe took part in an engagement against German troops before finally she was captured. She, too, was interrogated and tortured at Avenue Foch, and then sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp north of Berlin. There she joined Violette Szabó and their friend Denise Bloch.

  Rolfe contracted a disease of the lungs from her forced labor and had great difficulty breathing. Toward the end she could barely stand. On February 5, 1945, she had to be carried by stretcher to her execution with Szabó. She was awarded the posthumous MBE.

  Denise Bloch was French, a Jewess, and worked with the Resistance from 1942. She escaped to Gibraltar and in Britain was trained by SOE as a wireless operator at the same time as Szabó and Rolfe.

  The SOE organized, armed, supplied, trained, and directed the French Resistance; reliable communications both ways were critical. Although all SOE work was dangerous, wireless operators were particularly vulnerable, since dedicated German radio units monitored frequencies to track the operator agents.

  With the code name Ambroise, Bloch was returned to France in March 1944 to join the Resistance circuit at Nantes. In the immediate aftermath of D-day, this circuit sabotaged the railway and high-power lines at the Nantes port, disrupting German efforts to send supplies, soldiers, and equipment to the Normandy invasion area.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  On June 18, Bloch was captured during a Gestapo raid and taken the usual route to Ravensbrück via Avenue Foch. On February 5, with Violette Szabó and Lilian Rolfe, she was shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were burned in the crematorium along with those of one hundred thousand Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Slavs, Jews, and other “undesirable” women between 1938 and 1945. Bloch was awarded the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.

  Ravensbrück saw many SOE agents. Yvonne Baseden was captured and also met the three friends in the concentration camp. The Gestapo did not realize that Baseden was an SOE agent—they thought she was simply another Resistance worker—and no execution was ordered. She was included in the last Red Cross transport to Sweden and survived the war.

  Eileen Nearne, an SOE field agent along with her two older sisters, Jacqueline and Francis, was captured in July 1944 in Paris. She’d just finished transmitting a signal to London when German soldiers brok
e in. By that time the head of SOE codes, Leo Marks, had introduced the simple but brilliant “one-time pad,” a pad of unique codes written on silk. As soon as a code was used, the agent burned that piece of silk. The only copies were in London for decoding, and every agent had a different pad so, if a pad was captured by the Germans, they were unable to retrieve any messages at all. The one-time pad is still used today.

  Nearne had burned her pad and dismantled the radio, but the German soldiers found her pistol. She was interrogated and tortured at Avenue Foch and sent to Ravensbrück in September 1944. There she was reunited with Szabó, Rolfe, and Bloch. At first Nearne refused to work, so her head was shaved in preparation for her execution. She changed her mind—a decision that both saved her life and led to her freedom. In December she was sent to a labor camp near Leipzig, but when she was moved to another camp she escaped into a forest. All three Nearne siblings survived the war, and the eldest, Jacqueline, played agent Cat in the film about the SOE, Now It Can Be Told.

  Of the agents who were captured, most were intercepted in the second half of 1944, after D-day, when they were most active supporting the American, British, and Canadian invasion forces. Odette Hallowes, though, was one like Khan, captured earlier in 1943.

  Born as Odette Brailly and brought up in Amiens, France, Brailly married Roy Sansom, son of a British officer billeted with her family during World War I. With Roy she moved to London, had three daughters, and volunteered for SOE service. She trained as a liaison officer. Code-named Lise, she was lifted into southern France by fishing vessel from Gibraltar in the autumn of 1942. With her field organizer, Peter Churchill, she was captured by a German double agent in 1943 and sent to Fresnes Prison. From there she was taken daily to the Gestapo headquarters on rue de Saussaies and tortured.