Book Club: The Walls Have Ears

LITERARY REVIEW

REVIEW

DURING World War II, captured German generals and other senior officers were taken to Trent Park, a mansion house in North London.

On arrival, they were greeted by a one-legged Scottish aristocrat named Lord Aberfeldy. He was, he told them, their welfare officer and a second cousin of the king, who was very concerned that they should be treated well.

But this was all an elaborate charade. Aberfeldy was no royal relative – he was an intelligence officer called Ian Munro, who also happened to be a very good actor. So enthusiastically did he throw himself into this role that, according to a colleague, “he became too grand to talk to any of us” and “expected orderlies to address him as Your Lordship”.

His job was to butter up the generals and keep them happy. While Aberfeldy flattered them and brought them treats, they were less likely to notice what was unusual about Trent Park, which was that everything that could be bugged was.

Hidden microphones were everywhere: in the light fittings, in the fireplaces, under the floorboards in the generals’ bedrooms. There were even some hung in the trees in the grounds. The whole place was wired for sound and, in rooms hidden from view, secret listeners tuned in to everything the Germans said.

This was one of the most effective intelligence operations of the war, yet probably the least known. Its records have been declassified only over the past 20 years, and Helen Fry’s remarkable and insightful book throws new light on its workings.

It was run by Thomas Joseph Kendrick, a man with 30 years’ worth of experience in the secret services behind him.

 

WHILE working as a British passport officer in 1938, he became the “Oskar Schindler of Vienna”, arranging for hundreds of Jews to leave Austria after the Nazi takeover. He was arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo and expelled from the country for espionage.

Returning to London, he was the ideal commander for a new unit setting up a special bugging operation in the Tower of London. When war was declared, and the first German prisoners of war (PoWs) arrived – most Luftwaffe pilots and U-boat officers – Kendrick was ready.

Early results were promising, although, very occasionally, one of the shrewder prisoners became suspicious. Wilhelm Meyer, a pilot shot down over the Thames in November 1939, asked a cellmate: “Do you think listening apparatus are built in here?” But even Meyer finally decided he was being over-cautious.

Most were blithely unsuspecting as Kendrick’s team recorded every word they said.

As the war went on, and more and more PoWs arrived, Kendrick expanded his work. Three more sites, including Trent Park, were fitted with cutting-edge recording technology shipped over from the Radio Corporation of America in New York. With Allied victories in North Africa, more senior German officers were taken captive. (There was, of course, a huge influx of high-ranking Wehrmacht personnel after D-Day.)

As operations grew, Kendrick needed extra listeners. His interview techniques could be terrifying for candidates.

He once handed a would-be recruit a pistol across his desk. “If you ever betray anything about this work,” he said, “here is the gun with which I expect you to do the decent thing. If you don’t, I will.” His original listeners were British-born, but fluent in German. Soon, because of the variety of accents and dialects they were encountering, he needed native German-speaking emigres, most of them driven into exile by the Nazis.

They were the “King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”, as one man sardonically described them.

Kendrick also used “stool pigeons” – fake fellow prisoners who joined real PoWs in their cells and subtly encouraged them to talk. One of these, a fluent German speaker, was the father of singer and actress Olivia Newton-John.

Another, whose name has never been revealed, was a former inmate of Belsen, imprisoned for his political views. After release, he had been conscripted into the German army and then captured by the British.

Unsurprisingly, his loyalty to the Nazi regime was non-existent. He was one of the first to reveal the horrors going on in the camps. But Kendrick’s greatest successes were with the generals at Trent Park. The more senior they were, the more they knew (and could unwittingly reveal) about the German war effort.

Most of them were eccentric, arrogant parodies of the Prussian officer class. One, Lieutenant-General Gotthard Frantz, wore a monocle at all times, even under sunglasses, and went to bed with all his medals on.

Another was heard to exclaim in utter bafflement, “We have the best generals and we are losing the war!”

As Fry wryly comments: “Clearly, talking too much within earshot of the hidden microphones may have had something to do with that (the loose talk).”

Others, however, more sensitive and intelligent, became severe critics of the Nazis – although toasts were still raised on Hitler’s birthday. “Pity it has to be English beer,” remarked one of the generals.

 

RIVALRIES developed at Trent Park between pro-Nazis and those utterly disillusioned with the progress of the war.

Kendrick’s methods of dealing with the generals was unusual, to say the least. As well as listening in on their every conversation, he took to wining and dining them. There were even lunch trips to Simpson’s on the Strand.

When Winston Churchill found out about this, he was furious and had them stopped – so Kendrick relocated the lunches to The Ritz.

Helen Fry likens the atmosphere at Trent Park to a traditional London gentlemen’s club.

Living a life of relative luxury, with their egos stroked and sense of self-importance encouraged, they relaxed – and played straight into Kendrick’s hands.

However unorthodox his operation, it worked. His listeners never set eyes on a single German PoW, but eavesdropped on more than 10,000.

They picked up enormously valuable intelligence on the secret weapons programme that produced the V1 and V2 rockets; on battle plans and troop positions; and on U-boat bases and new aircraft technology.

“You have done a Herculean task,” Kendrick was told towards the end of the war.

It was on a par with the better-known work at Bletchley Park and the cracking of the enigma code.

Helen Fry’s richly researched book, packed with surprising and fascinating detail, will bring the covert listeners of the time some of the attention they deserve.

– The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II is published by Yale, 320pp

Normandy Memorial Statue

D-DAY MEMORIAL

Three British soldiers are depicted here charging up the beach and into the hellish unknown, their camaraderie beautifully captured in bronze.

THE dwindling band of brothers who took part in the greatest military operation of all time will, on Thursday, 6 June, have their first sight of the new monument to their 22,442 comrades who never came home. They have been waiting 75 years for this moment.

The monument has just been erected on the spot where so many young men charged ashore and gave their all. It will be formally unveiled on Thursday – the anniversary of D-Day – in front of veterans, bereaved families and world leaders including the Prime Minister and the French President.

The monument, which is beautifully captured in bronze, is a depiction of the camaraderie of three British soldiers charging up the beach and into the hellish unknown. Standing 9ft tall and weighing several tons, the three figures are not based on any individuals and deliberately carry no regimental markings or insignia. The great D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944 involved hundreds of thousands from all the Services and the Merchant Navy, too. The ultimate purpose of this colossal multinational endeavour, however, was to put Allied infantry on French soil and keep them there.

That is why the award-winning sculptor David Williams-Ellis has distilled the essence of D-Day into this powerful and dynamic study of that quintessential hero – the ordinary British soldier doing his duty.

“They are in standard battle dress and in my mind one is a lance corporal and the other two privates,” said Mr Williams-Ellis. He spent months researching every aspect of the invasion and talked to many veterans before embarking on this great undertaking.

“There is no rank on them, it’s just a suggestion. I wanted it to be a scene expressing camaraderie and leadership. I will leave the viewer to judge which is the lance corporal.”

Mr Williams-Ellis has also sought to represent the three main fighting components of a standard infantry section. One figure is armed with a Bren light machine gun, one has a Sten machine gun, with the other clasping the trusty Lee Enfield .303 rifle.

“He is just about to get the rifle into his shoulder and fire… I wanted to create something that really had energy.”

The statue is the first phase of a memorial that will not be completed for at least another year. Spread across a 50-acre site at Versur-Mer, overlooking a ten-mile stretch of sand codenamed “Gold Beach”, it will feature stone columns engraved with the names of every serviceman under British command who perished in the invasion and the subsequent 77-day Battle of Normandy.

Among the women honoured will be two brave nurses who were still tending to the wounded when their hospital ship, the Amsterdam, was sunk off Juno Beach.

Every other allied country involved in the landings has long had a national memorial on French soil. Not so Britain – until now. The omission has been a source of disappointment to the veterans who are still raising funds. For them, Thursday’s inauguration ceremony will be a very happy milestone.

Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff and a trustee of the Normandy Memorial Trust, said: “Anyone who talks to the veterans and to the loved ones of those who fell can be under no illusion about how much this memorial means to them. Now it’s really happening.”

The project has been made possible thanks to a £20million grant from the Treasury’s Libor Fund (of penalty fines from errant banks) plus donations from the philanthropist Michael Spencer. Thousands have also been donated by readers of a British national newspaper. However, a further £7.5million is still urgently needed to complete it.

TO understand how the events of 1944, resonate to this day, just listen to some of the heartbreaking messages and testimonies on the memorial’s website. They include the stories of men like Squadron Leader Jack Collins DFC and Bar, from Newcastle, a Typhoon pilot who was killed leading 245 Squadron over Caen in 1944.

His son Mike Collins was four when he died. He talks movingly of his excitement, as a toddler, on seeing his father’s picture in the paper, not realising it was a report of his death. Like all the relatives of those who fell, Mike now cannot wait to see the memorial take shape and to see his gallant father finally included on the Roll of Honour.

Book Review – Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France

REVIEW

Intro: Astonishingly, the casualty rate of D-Day was even higher than the Somme – just one of the insights in a devastating new account of the horror of the Normandy campaign 75 years ago.

THE D-Day landings 75 years ago spark a concoction of emotions – pride and awe at the courage and heroism; despair and grief at the sacrifice of so many young lives; and, incomprehension.

What was it really like to step out on to those deadly beaches on June 6? The tale is best told by those who lived to tell it.

The aptly named Sergeant Bob Slaughter leapt from a landing craft into 6ft of water as a hail of German artillery and gunfire from the clifftop above tore into his platoon.

“Good men screamed as bullets ripped into soft flesh and others screamed as the fierce, flooding tide dragged the non-swimmers under.”

As he struggled to the beach, a body floated by, the face already of a deep purple colour.

Corporal Walter Halloran managed to reach dry land and simply ran for his life, ducking and weaving to minimise the risk of being killed.

“If you stopped to help someone who’d been hit, then there were two casualties, not one, because the moment you stopped moving you got shot,” he said.

American war correspondent Ernie Pyle witnessed the terrible aftermath when he landed the next day and waded ashore, amid shattered corpses floating in the water. His powerful description echoes down the years.

“Strewn all over those bitter sands,” he wrote, “were submerged tanks and overturned boats, burned trucks and shell-shattered Jeeps and sad little personal belongings” – toothbrushes, a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it and even a tennis racket.

“Lying in rows were the bodies of soldiers, covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill.”

Here was “a shoreline museum of carnage” and the waste of it all appalled him, even though, after nearly five years of war, it was the necessary first step in liberating Europe from the grip of the Nazis.

Voices such as these are one of the standout strengths of James Holland’s impressive new account of D-Day and the Allies’ subsequent, long drawn-out battle to secure a foothold in Normandy.

Not that he stints on the bigger picture. Seasoned World War II historian that he is, Holland is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to military matters.

The reader is in safe hands navigating each aspect of this complex campaign – from the glider and parachute drops inland with which it began, to the bloody struggles on Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno and Gold (the five beaches) and beyond.

He reads the minds of the generals, their tactics, their blunders – on both sides.

 

AND he examines the strategic context – the importance of air power in softening up the enemy and destroying vital infrastructures such as the roads and railways that might otherwise have rushed reinforcements to the front line; the Navy’s role in making the invasion possible in the first place.

He praises the enormous achievement of getting 132,000 men over the Channel on that first day alone, then topping up their numbers to a staggering two million in the coming weeks, providing the weight of manpower to make victory certain, however great the human cost.

He approves of the methodical way in which the British, American and Canadian Allies went about their business – building up their strength of men and arms to the point where defeat was virtually impossible, consolidating their gains, rather than rushing ahead, ensuring supply lines of weapons, fuel and food were in place.

It may have been a much less dashing form of warfare than the gung-ho Blitzkrieg mentality of the Germans, but, in the conditions of 1944 (as opposed to 1940, when Hitler’s armies overran large swathes of Europe), was so much more effective.

But what drives Holland’s narrative – and puts his account of the Normandy campaign at least on a par with doyens in the field such as Antony Beevor and Max Hastings – are the memories, in their own words, of scores of those at the sharp end.

Their individual stories, seamlessly woven in, makes this a Bayeux Tapestry of a book. All human life – and, more pointedly, death – is there.

“Bugger!” yelled the gentlemanly paratrooper Lieutenant Richard Todd, in pain as his canopy opened and a rope cut into his hand on the very first drop into France at 2am on D-Day to seize a strategic canal bridge.

Undaunted, he sneaked up on an enemy machine gun nest with his commanding officer and wiped it out.

There are men like gunner Lance Corporal Ken Tout in his tank, toe-to-toe with 20 camouflaged German Panzers in a grim firefight outside the town of Saint-Aignan as the Allies fought their way through the impenetrable bocage, the high hedges, small fields and narrow lanes of Normandy. Inside the belly of the tank, he desperately traversed the turret, trying to arrow in on the enemy, and “the day degenerates into chaos, noise, flame, smoke, grilling sunshine, stinking sweat, searing fear, billowing blast, and our tank shuddering and juddering even as it stands still on the exposed, so exposed crest of a ridge”.

A German shell flashed past. Missed by inches!

Tout returned fire: there was a puff of smoke, a shape jerking backwards among the trees, then thick black smoke tinged with flame. “The Panzer was dead.”

When he got to the crumpled German tank, he saw the commander leaning out of the turret – just the top half of him, it turned out. His entire bottom half had been eviscerated.

Earlier in the campaign, as they advanced towards Caen, he and his colleagues had, out of curiosity, clambered on the burnt-out wreck of a German tank and peeked inside, where what remained of the crew still sat, blackened and wizened.

“The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies,” he recalled, “created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.”

It could just as easily have been their tank that “brewed up”, such was the haphazard nature of the vicious conflict in which they were engaged – and that realisation only added to the horror.

 

HOLLAND counts the grim cost of D-Day and the Normandy campaign – 209,000 Allied casualties out of two million who crossed the Channel; up to 20,000 French dead, mainly from Allied bombing; 300,000 German soldiers killed, wounded, missing or captured – more than half of those who fought.

Over the 76 days of the battle, the daily casualty rate averaged out at 6,870, making it worse, he notes, than the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres in World War I, which are usually cited as benchmarks for wanton slaughter.

Holland concludes: “It was a terrible battle, and what followed until the final surrender in May 1945 was every bit as horrific.

“Yet out of this tragedy, a better world did emerge. We must look after it and remember how easily we can throw this haven back into turmoil.”

– Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France by James Holland is published by Bantam Press/Penguin Books for £25, 720pp