The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Part 1

After the Germans invaded France in 1940, an idea sprouted in the highest levels of Great Britain's leadership. From that idea, the Special Operations Executive was born. And in many ways, it changed the way wars were fought forever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson and this
is a full Disclosure podcast. Um. This episode is actually

(00:21):
sponsored by Focus Features. They have a new movie out
titled Darkest Hour, which stars Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill,
facing the challenges of leadership in her early days as
Prime Minister of Great Britain as World War Two unfolded
in Europe. One. If you just saw the ads, you
might not know that's Gary Oldman. They did some really
amazing makeup work on him to just to give you

(00:42):
a sense of what it's like. That movie is directed
by Joe Wright, who also directed Atonement which came out
a while back, and The Pride and Prejudice that came
out in two thousand five. It's very much in that
vein also the Karenina uh So, if you like his
film those films, you will probably like the s one.
Back when we did our episode on Christopher Lee, which

(01:03):
was one of our our Halloween Classic Horror actor biographies,
we mentioned in the course of that show that Lee
had been a part of Winston Churchill's secret military group
known as the Secret Operations Executive and by the more
colorful nickname the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and since then,
doing an episode on the Ministry has been on my list.

(01:24):
So when we were approached by Focus Features for a
sponsored episode, it was the first thing that we suggested,
and luckily they were game because that meant that I
had a good excuse to put in research time on it.
There is, I should say before we even go in
for expectations, Management purposes so much information on this topic
that we're doing a two parter and even so we

(01:46):
are really only scratching the surface on this. So uh,
just so you know what to expect, We're going to
talk a little bit about how the group got its start,
and then we're going to cover four of its missions, uh,
and then we will discuss what happened to the s
o E after the war. So um, there are so
many more details and things to be gone into, but

(02:06):
even with two episodes, that is beyond our scope, So
just know that there's always more and we recommend some
books at the end of the second episode, and of
course we always have our show notes if you want
to learn more so we'll hop right in so. Writing
for the publication Studies and Intelligence, J. R. Seeger summed
up the role of the s OE in World War

(02:27):
Two this way quote the s O E and the
O s S center mix of combat and academic specialists
into this complex military and political environment with the objective
of disrupting Nazi occupation, forcing the Germans to maintain large
combat forces throughout the region, forces they should have transferred
some more strategic locations. These operations are true adventure stories

(02:51):
that rival any fiction written by Ian Fleming, Graham Green
or Alistair McClane. And as we talk particularly about missions,
you will probably think to yourself, if you have never
heard about these before, gosh, that sounds like a thing
I saw in a spy movie. There's a reason for that,
and it's because these stories did circulate and in sometime

(03:12):
in some ways inspired many of the spy movies that
you've seen. In May of nineteen forty, Germany, of course
attacked France in its quest to control Europe, defeated the
French forces and set up an occupation of the country.
We've talked about that on the show before, and at
this point, Winston Churchill and his colleagues knew that a
different approach was really going to need to be taken

(03:33):
when it came to battling the Nazis because they were
not having uh much success with the traditional methods, and
so a special secret organization was formed called these Special
Operations Executive, also known as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,
and the agents of this organization were to be placed
behind enemy lines where they would mount operations intended to

(03:56):
destroy the infrastructure that supported Germany's war effort and so
the seeds of revolt among the occupied populations. Hugh Dalton
was tapped to head the s o E on July
sixteenth of ninety and Dalton didn't have a military background,
but he was given the order from Churchill himself to
quote set Europe ablaze. Yeah. That line you'll often see

(04:19):
used as as a tagline in in articles and books
about this particular um organization. So in the fall of
nineteen forty, the s OE moved into a pretty low
key base of operations in Baker Street. Two flats normally
rented to families became the secret headquarters, and from that
location Dalton's group began recruiting and soon it had offices

(04:42):
throughout Great Britain, and the locations for these installations were
not offices in the sense that you would think of
an office building, and they were not military style compounds.
They were homes and mansions with ample room inside and
out for training exercises from close hand combat to train derailment.
And the training that happened in these facilities was exactly

(05:03):
what you might expect. It was the kind of things
that you've probably seen in spy movies. So how to
escape handcuffs with everyday implements like pencil and a little
bit of wire, how to apply disguises, how to subdue
and even kill an enemy efficiently without a weapon. So
the ministry quickly grew, establishing offices all throughout the European

(05:25):
theater and recruiting people in every locality. Yeah, I should
also note that they also had locations that were just
dedicated to things like technology development and communications, but they
were all squirreled away in these these sort of innocuous
looking living places. Volunteering for duty with this organization meant

(05:46):
in essence that the people that were offering their services
knew that they were very likely to be killed in
the field for example, wireless operators deployed by the s
o E into occupied France had an average life expectancy
of just six weeks. And even people that were hired
into things like secretarial work back in Great Britain were

(06:08):
told in no uncertain terms that that job could result
in capture, torture, and execution by the Germans. But the
knowledge that the Nazi regime had to be stopped outweighed
people's concerns of personal safety. Once a potential agent was
trained in combat and completed a parachute course, then they
were ready for field operations. This doesn't sound like a

(06:29):
lot of training, but it was rigorous and grueling, and
by the time I got through it, they were considered
to be ready beyond all doubt. Yeah, they did an
astonishing amount of training, especially because in many cases they
were going into really unkind just um climate conditions, and
it was apparently one of those things like if you

(06:50):
survive all this, then you are ready. So clearly it
definitely pushed people's limits. And in addition to training agents,
the s o E also supplied them with new technologies
and some old school theatrical style tricks to aid them
in their missions. So prop makers were hired to work
in a North London shop concocting concealment devices. Molds of

(07:12):
tree trunks were really popular as camouflage devices, so they
could hide everything from radio equipment to explosives. This is
one of the aspects of this that reminds me a
little bit of the Ghost Army in their deceptions. Special
clothing was made that would be fashionable and stylish, but
could also conceal any number of tricks and disguised weapons.

(07:33):
There was an entire department that was instituted just to
create false documents, providing agents with new identities and any
other papers that they might need on missions. In a
house in Hertfordshire, clever minds worked tirelessly to create all
manner of gadgets and assistive implements. A cigarette pistol that
was loaded with a single shot was developed, as was

(07:54):
a canoe that could actually drop underwater when it was needed,
which was nicknamed Sleeping Beauty. What everyone who knew about
the s o E was a fan and my six
evolved from a group that was contemporary with the s
o E called the Secret Intelligence Service or s i S.
Sir Stewart Menzies the head of the s I S
thought that the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was amateur and dangerous.

(08:17):
He felt like their covert approach could lead to all
kinds of very real problems, both for themselves and for
his own group. These were valid concerns because the s
o E was working outside the normal chain of command
that would keep other government entities aware of their movements.
So there's a pretty high likelihood that their missions could
directly interfere with his own agents that were working to

(08:39):
collect intelligence to aid the war effort. Menzies was very
blunt in his position that the s o E posed
greater danger than the benefit it offered justified, so he
lobbied against it. Yeah, and he was not the only one.
There were certainly a lot of people that one. A
lot of people did not know about it for quite
a while. And to the people that didn't know about it,
there was some that's not really the way we do things, um,

(09:04):
So it met with some resistance right from the beginning. Uh.
The s i S, as we said, was not the
only detractor. The s OE often requisitioned aircraft from Bomber
Command without having to give any details as to the
planned used for those planes, and the ability for another
branch to just swoop in and take planes really rank
rankled the bombers, particularly because of concerns that their assets

(09:26):
were being used in missions that potentially could be deemed unethical. Additionally,
there was doubt that a small unit could be effective
at all. It seemed really unrealistic to expect anything but
bombers to stop the advance of Germany's Nazis. In March
of ninety one, there had been a failed SOE mission
called Operation Savannah that was the first attempts to drop

(09:48):
free French operatives into German occupied France by a parachute.
The objective was to ambush a Nazi bomber unit and
kill as many pilots as possible, But that mission had
to be aboarded when it turned out that the information
they were using to plan the mission was outdated, the
pilots weren't going to be accessible to the operatives as

(10:08):
had been expected. Yeah, it was one of those things
where like their schedules had changed and they were being
driven from place to place in a different in a
different way than had originally been planned around, and so
it was like what do we do? And they just
canceled the whole thing. But despite the failure of this
much contested mission, there had been objections as to the
use of agents stressed as civilians to carry out such

(10:31):
a task. Again, that falls in the that's not how
we do it category, and there were certainly still internal
pressures to close down the s OE. The group survived,
and that was because Winston Churchill felt that this new
clandestine branch of their anti Nazi agenda was vital to
turning the tide of war. Fortunately, just shy of a
year into its existence, the s OE executed a mission

(10:53):
that justified Churchill's unwavering support. So before we get into
the details of that mission, we're going to pause for
a quick sponsor break. By June, the Nazis that were
occupying France had bases and supply chains up and running

(11:13):
throughout the country. A U boat base had been established
in Bordeaux, which was one of six that the Nazis
established in France over the course of the war. That's
so we realized that the power station at Pessek was
supplying power to the submarine base, as well as to
several factories and chemical manufacturers in the area that had
all been seized by Nazi troops, so knock out the

(11:36):
station and Germany's production in the area would grind to
a halt. Bombers were considered for the task, but it
was quickly determined that there was just too great a
risk for to the civilian population for bombers to be used,
so a plan code named Operation Josephine B was cooked up.
It required a small group of operatives to parachute into Pessock,

(11:59):
get to the trans Armor station by getting past a
high fence, deal with guards, get into the main building,
and then plant explosives in key areas to blast the plant.
To execute this plan, the s o E turned to
the Free French forces and three men volunteered. Those men
were Sergeant Jean Pierre Fourmand, sub Lieutenant Raymond Cabao, and

(12:20):
sub Lieutenant On Blai Vomnie. The mission actually took some
time to play out. The men were parachuted in on
May eleventh, and their reconnoisance made it clear that while
the wall that was around the compound was lower than
they thought it was, it was nine ft versus the
sixteen feet they'd anticipated. There were guards right inside of it,
and there was a high tension wire atop it. The men,

(12:43):
through their own investigation and through contact with other French operatives,
gained some additional information that would aid their mission. Though
the guards knocked off just before midnight and the main
building was essentially unguarded after that. Yeah, there was some
laziness that played to their benefit that come up a
few times um. When they moved to execute this mission,

(13:04):
Formont was able to scale the wall, vault over that
wire and then make his way to the ground inside
the fence, and then he just let his fellows in,
and over the course of half an hour, the men
pretty easily made their way into the station, planted their explosives,
and made their getaway on bicycles. And as they pedaled away,
eight perfectly timed explosions went off behind them, destroying the

(13:27):
facility and in turn cutting power to the U boat
base and to all of the railways in the area
that supplied the Nazi troops. The German war effort in
the area was halted for weeks. That definitely sounds like
a scene out of a movie. The bicycles while the
things explode behind them. Yeah, it's one of those things

(13:47):
where when you're reading accounts from people that were there.
You realize how much of cinema has been built off
of those firsthand accounts, because they do talk about like, oh,
we were peddling madly and we could hear the bombs
behind us, and I turned to look briefly, but then
I had to keep peddling, and and it's like, oh, yes,
this is all just like movies, and it's it's taken

(14:08):
from the kinds of things that these men wrote about
in their private journals. So this mission, unsurprisingly given what
we just described, was considered a success, but it also
evidenced a problem that would repeat itself on subsequent missions.
The Germans blamed the locals and then punished them with fines, imprisonment,
and curfew. In the case of the Sex explosion, retribution

(14:31):
would be far harsher. After a nineteen forty two s
OE operation in Czechoslovakia, so the German Protector of Czechoslovakia,
Eric Reinhard Heydrich, was targeted for assassination. He had moved
into a country estate north of Prague and had to
travel the approximately twelve miles about nineteen kilometers back and

(14:52):
forth to the city to Prague Castle most days, and
he did this without a security escort, because he felt
that employing one would make him look weak and afraid,
and that was not the image he wanted to project
of himself or Germany. So the most logical plan for
an assassination was to strike Haydris Mercedes as it traveled
between his home and Prague. The s o E worked

(15:15):
closely with check Intelligence services on this plan, begetting in
October of The route was examined carefully looking for the
best locations who attacked the vehicle, ideally at a spot
where the car would have to slow down and which
was distant enough from where the s S units were
garrisoned that it offered the s o S people the
best possible likelihood of escape. Czech soldiers who had been

(15:39):
stationed in exiling Great Britain were reviewed for potential participation,
and out of two thousand possible candidates, twelve were selected
for training. And the soldiers did not know precisely what
they were being selected for, but the mortal danger of
the situation was communicated to them. After agreeing to the training,
the men were put through a grueling six program at

(16:00):
an s o E training center in Scotland. The training
was intense it pushed the men's physical, technical, and mental proficiency.
They learned to make bombs, to rock climb, to survive
all manner of conditions without any kind of aid, and
then their psychological fitness and limits were constantly scrutinized. This
mission came with a very high risk of capture, and

(16:21):
the s o E leadership wanted to find the men
who were the most capable of performing even in the
incredibly high pressure and high risk situation that this mission
was requiring. Yeah, there are a lot of talks about
how they really tested their how much stress they could handle,
and how it's easy to perceive that as the trainers
being sort of messochistic, but they really were trying to

(16:43):
find exactly where their limit was so that they knew
who could really have the best chance of executing and
surviving the plan. Two Czech soldiers were eventually chosen, Joseph
gub Cheek and Young Kubis, who emerged as the most
suitable for the mission, which was co named Operation Anthropoid,
and they were told in preparation that what they were

(17:04):
training for was an assassination mission and that it was
very likely that they would not survive, but both men
agreed to the job, gup Cheek acknowledging that such a
risk was simply part of war, and Kobish actually thanking
command for selecting him. This mission was really a logistical challenge.
There would only be a four to five second window
during which the car was in range, and the explosive

(17:26):
needed to be one that was small enough to carry
in a briefcase, powerful enough to pierce the armored Mercedes,
and designed in such a way that the person deploying
it would not also be killed. A hybrid grenade was designed,
which was powerful but light enough for an operative to
throw it. The explosive designed by the s O E
was so powerful that the two men were told they

(17:47):
would have to take immediate cover after it was thrown
because it was expected to throw a great deal of shrapnel.
It has also been theorized that the bomb may have
been laced with a biological agent known only as X,
but this is something that the bomb's designers always denied. Yeah,
it comes up in the German records, as a German
doctor said that he thought that something like that had

(18:09):
happened as well, but it's never been confirmed. And the
men were dropped into Czechoslovakia on December ninety one, and
for a month no one heard from them. It turned
out that God Chick had hurt his leg on the landing,
and locals had taken care of the two men, moving
them from safe house to safe house over the course
of six weeks, and during that time they also gathered

(18:31):
information and refined their plan. So we're going to pause
there while the men planned the completion of their mission,
so we can have one more quick sponsor break and
then we will jump back into the action. May two
was selected as a date to carry out the mission.

(18:52):
So I want to point out that that's how five
month gap between when they were dropped and when they
actually carried it out, and that was not uncommon. It
wasn't like they would just drop people into occupied territory
and they would quickly go do the thing and then
come back. They usually were having to survive for a
while because they had to get boots on the ground,
see what was really going on, whether it confirmed the

(19:13):
intelligence they had been given, and then refine the plan
and make sure that they were ready for everything. So
if these there these cases were there large gaps between
their arrival and the actual fulfillment of the plan, and
that is why. And while gob Chick and Kubish waited
near the selected location on that May S day, an
accomplice nearby watched the road, ready to signal with a

(19:36):
mirror when Hydric's car approached. And that morning, for some
random reason, Hydrake had chosen to walk about the grounds
of his estate with his family, and so his trip
to Prague ran a good bit later than normal. Eventually,
though the two assassins saw the hand mirror flash signal,
they prepared to execute on all the training and planning
that they had done leading up to that moment. As

(19:58):
the car approached and slowed down, dab Chick stepped into
the road and fired at the car with a Spend
submachine gun, which jammed. Kubish threw the explosive into the
car and it immediately detonated. He was hit with the shrapnel.
Hydrick and his chauffeur, Johannes Klein emerged from the vehicle
firing weapons. The Czechoslovakian operatives returned fire, but then Hydrick collapsed.

(20:22):
He had in fact been hit by shrapnel and clins
gun jammed. Kubish was able to get to a safe
house on a bicycle and got Chick was pursued by Kline,
but he eventually managed to wound the Nazi and flee
to a safe house himself. Initially, the men actually thought
their mission had failed because when they had last seen
both of those men, they were alive. Hydrick was taken

(20:45):
to a hospital and went immediately into surgery. He had
a broken rib, a ruptured diaphragm, and a damaged spleen.
He lived for eight days before he died of septi simia.
Hydric had been a high ranking Nazi and Hitler was
infuriated by this assassination. A man hunt for the killers
was mounted. House to how sweeps were carried out, but

(21:07):
the two men had taken refuge in the catacombs of
a cathedral, and while the s s hunted for Gab
Chicken Kobish. The locals paid a steep price for this attack.
This time it was far worse than the fallout after
the power station had been destroyed. The small village of
Litiza was targeted on the grounds that it was believed
to have some kind of connection to the attack. A

(21:29):
hundred and ninety nine men lived there, and all of
them were executed. There were a hundred women and children,
and they were all sent to concentration camps, where most
of them died in gas chambers. There was also a
radio transmission that linked another village to the plot, and
all of that village's inhabitants were executed by the ss GB.

(21:51):
Chick and Kobish probably would have stayed in hiding and
not been discovered, but they were eventually betrayed by a
collaborator named Carol Kurda. The says storm to the church
where the men were hiding, and a two hour firefight
played out in which both gab Chick and Kubish were killed.
Kubish had been captured, injured but still alive, and the
Germans actually took him to a hospital for treatment, hoping

(22:14):
they could get information out of him, but he died
very shortly after he was taken into custody. We're going
to stop there, uh, not going to specifically call it
a cliffhanger, because we are going to talk about people
literally climbing cliffs in the next chapter. The next time,
we're going to pick up with a raid on a
Greek viaduct meant to help stop the Nazis supply lines. Yeah,

(22:36):
there's so much more to this story. Like I said,
even in two episodes were barely touching it. There's so
much stuff and it's amazing. So instead of usual listener
mail today, I'm doing generalized listener pronuncia agent correction, my
least favorite subject of all. That doesn't bother me. If
that's my worst crime, I'm okay. Like, I will always

(22:57):
try to do my best, but I won't always get
it right, and that's fine. Um. Several people have written
to comment that we pronounced the name the French name
j E A n n E. I'm not even gonna
say it wrong. I know that's like that one French
word I never get right. Um. There are others, but
that one has always been like a thorn in my side.
So apologies, We'll keep working on it. I shall point

(23:18):
out that, um, we have also gotten some corrections that
are themselves incorrect. Well, and this is a thing that
happens all the time with pronunciations. We will get We
will get emails thanking us for pronouncing a word correctly
and emails criticizing us for pronouncing the exact same word incorrectly. Yeah,
it's I mean, we've talked about this many times before.

(23:39):
There are so many factors involved one people's ears here
words differently. Um. In addition to the subtle variances in pronunciation.
We always do our best, we don't always get it right.
I did have to laugh though, when someone had emailed
us and asked why we did not pronounce the R
in George Millier's name, but we did pronounce the R
in the Lumier brother's name. There is no R and

(24:01):
George Millier. So that's why I'm not I don't mean
to make fun of that person. It's just just an
example of how like your perception of what you hear
and what things are is not always clean. For lack
of a better word, UM, yeah, I mean we all
have done it. I just thought it was kind of
entertaining on that particular example. We'll also get emails sometimes

(24:21):
that are like, the way that you pronounced the word
is this, and then the phonetic pronunciation that they spell out.
I'm like, okay, that is how we said it, so
obviously how you pronounce this, like how you pronounced the
words the letters PO you are as poor, is not
the same as how we pronounced po you are as poor,
because that is the same thing that I had in

(24:42):
my notes. Well, the beautiful thing to remember is like
when we did an episode on Creons, which is how
I say it, there was like a crazy bonfire of
of madness on our social media because there are people
that say it very differently from one another, all of
whom native English speaker, and that people got really ugly

(25:02):
with each other about it. And I was like, y'all
need to just calm mad um. But to me, that's
you know, I mean, of course you want to get
things right and not misconstrued meanings through mispronunciation. But um,
you know, that's kind of one of the wonders of
of being a human is that we all do it
a little different. Sometimes we find ways that are patently wrong,

(25:23):
and others smiths just to flourish anyway, they're getting eight
or ten contradictory emails about how to pronounce something. It is, Uh,
that's the scoop. My apologies to people who maybe go
crazy with those. It's it's fine. I'm sorry. I'll do
my best. Uh. I understand there are certain little pecadillos
that I am very nippicky about that I have learned
to just let go. But sometimes it's hard. If it's

(25:44):
a thing you love or care about. I understand anyway,
If you would like to write to us and correct
us in some way, you can do so at History Podcast.
At house works dot com. You can also visit us
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(26:06):
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(26:28):
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