 |
| Photo: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1252238/Noor-Inayat-Khan-international-women-s-day-british-spy-princess-british-military |
Under a full moon, a lone Royal Air Force Westland Lysander airplane
circled a meadow outside Paris in Nazi-occupied France on the night of June 16,
1943. Men carrying an assortment of hunting rifles, shotguns, and antique
pistols emerged from the shadows and lit torches to guide the British aircraft
to a makeshift landing field. The little vehicle said to have the ability to
land on a cow pile, lived up to its legend. The plane came to a halt after a
steep descent and a short approach. Members of the French resistance rushed
forward to retrieve containers of weapons, explosives, and survival supplies
for those men in their ranks forced by their Gestapo pursuers to live in the
wild. The underground fighters tossed mailbags into the aircraft and escorted
the two young women cramped in the cockpit to the woods and shadows. The
aircraft departed with the same stealth and agility it demonstrated on landing.
Men ruffled grass crushed by landing wheels, extinguished the landing lights,
and they too faded into the darkness. The Lysander, flying low to avoid
Luftwaffe patrols sped back to the English Channel and the relative safety of
England. Below, the French countryside lay abandoned in the dim moonlit darkness.
The two women, Diane Rowden and Noor Inayat Khan arrived the next day
at their respective assignments. Noor Inayat Khan, code-named Madeleine, occupied
a safe house in Paris and began one of the great tragedies of a war marked by brutality
and grief.
Before the Crimean War (1854-6), women rarely served with military units
at or near the front lines. That situation changed when Florence Nightingale
and her nurses shared rations with fighting men at the battle lines. By World
War I, nurses, and female ambulance drivers served within the range of enemy artillery
though did not yet engage in the dangerous work of combat. A revolution
occurred in the role of women in war with the end of the Phony War and the
German Wehrmacht rolled its blitzkrieg into France and completed its control
of the country in June 1940.
Following the 1939 invasion of Poland and Winston Churchill’s rise to
power, Churchill found the old SIS military intelligence agency complacent,
bureaucratic, and riddled with security leaks. He created the Strategic Offices
Executive (SOE) in order to bypass the men in the SIS who supported peace
with, and even an alliance with, Nazi Germany. The new group came into being
with only two directives: “Set Europe ablaze,” and to make the lives of men in
the German military “an eternal torment.”
The
SOE inserted men with language skills into Axis-occupied countries to provide
weapons, organize partisans, and radio information back to London. However, the
intelligence and operations services ran into a problem with agents in France.
German and Vichy authorities regularly rounded up young men for forced labor in
German mines, factories, and labor camps. Women freely traveled the French
countryside by bus, rail, and bicycle in search of food, work, and families
missing or displaced by the invasion, and as clerks and nurses for armies on
the move. The new organization began a search for women fluent in French to
fill the need for people to take on the dangerous work of guerilla warfare and
rear-guard action.
Winston Churchill gave the unofficial approval for women in the covert
operations service in April 1942, but the SIS scrapped plans for the
recruitment of women before it got off the ground by pointing out that the 1929
Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention did not offer prisoner-of-war
protections to women. The men who drafted those treaties had not envisioned
women as warriors. Colonel Colin Gubbins, head of SOE military operations, used
his connections to sidestep the legal arguments by enrolling women agents in
FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). As a civilian group that acted as nurses and
ambulance drivers, FANY gave women recruits a thin layer of Geneva Convention
protection if captured. The women of SOE wore FANY uniforms, but their training
and chain of command rested entirely within the SOE. An intensive effort to
find and train agents began in 1942 and by mid-1944 over half of FANY’s numbers
were in the service of the SOE.
One of the earliest of those women, Noor Inayat Khan, trained as a radio
operator for the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). She was the daughter of
Hasra Inayat Khan, a prominent Sufi mystic who traveled the world to bring Sufi
thought to a troubled world. Hasra and Noor were descendants of Tupi Sultan,
the Tiger of Mysore, and the last Muslim ruler of Southern India. The Khan
family ancestry made Noor a princess in the royal lineage.
On a trip to America, Hasra met Ora Ray Baker, a relation of Mary Baker
Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church. They were married in France in
March 1913 and traveled to Moscow where Hasra accepted a teaching assignment
at the Conservatoire. Noor was born
in the Kremlin on New Year’s Day 1914. Further travels had made her
multi-lingual and familiar with European terrains. She studied child psychology
at the Sorbonne, wrote a children’s book, Twenty
Jataka Tales, and performed in a children’s radio program in Paris. Her
father had returned to India where he died in 1927.
With
the outbreak of war, Noor and a sister joined the French Red Cross as nurses,
and on the invasion of France found themselves cut off from their unit. The
Khan family regrouped in Bordeaux and escaped to England aboard a Belgian
Freighter.
Though raised under Sufi doctrine, she and a brother felt that Fascism
was of such a significant evil that their pacifism must be set aside in the
face of the Axis threat. They joined the Royal Air Force where Noor rose in
rank until she felt her talents were not used to her fullest potential. A
request for greater responsibility and her fluency in French brought her to the
attention of the SOE, who soon called for an interview. She left a favorable
impression on her interviewer and agreed on the spot to accept training for an
eventual drop into Occupied France.
In training, her instructors noted that she was “clumsy,”
“otherworldly,” and “not burdened with brains.” Those handlers who did praise
her efforts were often considered smitten by her dark beauty, as was Leo Marks,
code master at SOE. Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE operations, refused to
accept the criticisms, as she was an excellent wireless telegraph operator
whose skills the French underground desperately needed.
Following a rigorous training program, she landed in France on 16 June
1943 under a full moon. News of her pending arrival reached the French
Resistance fighters—the Maquis—through the Prosper circuit under Francis
Suttill and his radio operator, code-named Archambaud (Gilbert Norman). Another
SOE agent, Henri Déricourt, met her on landing. He was not yet suspected of
working for the Germans. The Maquis took her to Paris to meet Cinema, Henri
Garry, so named for his striking resemblance to the American film star Gary
Cooper, to take her assigned place as radio operator for his Cinema circuit.
Soon after the meeting, London thought the name “Cinema” gave too much
information to German eavesdroppers and changed the circuit name to “Phono.”
Garry took her to meet Professor Alfred Serge Balachowski and his circuit
operating out of the École Nationale d’Agriculture at Grignon. Following the
meeting, on 1 July, a large group of German police arrested and interrogated
the director, Monsieur Vanderwynckt, but returned him when they could get no
information about Resistance cells from him. They came back again to arrest
Balachowski, and on 10 July, arrested Vanderwynckt.
Within days of her landing, The Gestapo arrested Francis Suttill and his
radio operator, Gilbert Norman, and hundreds of Free French fighters in the
Prosper circuit. The Germans forced Archambaud to continue communications with
London. He had no choice but to cooperate after London failed to observe
security checks that would have warned them the radioman was operating under
duress. Before the collapse of the Prosper circuit, German intelligence had no
knowledge of the SOE, but now, thanks to their Prosper network prisoners, knew
precise details of its organization and of scheduled drops. The Gestapo knew “Madeleine”
was in France; they only needed to find her.
In communications with London, the SOE offered to fly Noor back home by
the next available Lysander flight. She
refused to leave her French compatriots without a radio operator. The date and
location for D-Day landings were a secret, but Noor was aware that every agent
operating in France increased the probability of the success of the invasion.
Her refusal to abandon France made her now the most important Allied agent
operating in the country. With the collapse of Prosper and the arrests of
Balachowski sub-circuit, Noor operated alone.
She
had come on air on 22 June, just days after her arrival, and for the next month
coordinated landing and pickup sites, established escape routes for airmen shot
down over France and identified targets for RAF bombers. In early August, she
had lunch with a fellow agent, “Octave,” and on returning to her apartment near
the Bais de Boulogne in Paris, found it crawling with Gestapo. She slipped away
unnoticed, and on 13 August met with “Claire” at a Paris rail station.
To avoid detection, she stayed constantly on the move with her wireless
set. Two German officers in a rail car on one occasion demanded to know what
was in her suitcase. She opened the case, revealing the radio inside. She told
them it was a “cinematographic projector.” “See the bulbs,” she said. “Haven’t
you seen one before?” The soldiers apologized and moved on. This, from a woman
raised on spiritualism, who believed that telling a lie was a great sin.
In July 1943, she escaped a trap set in Grignon by the Germans by
killing or wounding the agents sent after her. For her bravery, the French
government in exile, headed by General Charles de Gaulle, awarded her the Croix
de Guerre with Gold Star
Her movements thwarted the Sicherheistdienst
(SD) wireless detection station, which had her radio traffic under observation.
Her arrest came on October 13, not from triangulating her radio signals, but
from a description given by an unknown double agent, possibly Déricourt, or by
Noor’s landlady who betrayed her for a sum of money. Agents recognized her on
the street and closed in, but Noor slipped away from them. With the information
given by her betrayer, she was captured at a bakery on the ground floor of her
apartment building and escorted to Gestapo interrogation cells at 84 Avenue
Foch, a short distance from her apartment. A search of the flat turned up her incriminating
message log. Conveniently for the Germans, Noor had proposed in her last
message that she lie low for a while, giving SOE nemesis Josef Goetz time to
process her logs and prepare for a game of deception with the British.
London received word of the arrest of Noor and Garry but discounted the
news when her radio came back on the air. Months passed before the SOE began to
suspect that her wireless set was compromised. As a result, France Anthelme
with his w/t operator, Lionel Lee, and courier Madeleine Damerment parachuted
into a drop zone they thought the Phono circuit controlled. The Gestapo waited
for them as they fell to earth. The Germans continued their ruse, informing
London on Noor’s radio that Anthelme had fractured his skull on landing. Four
agents sent earlier to form the “Scientist” circuit also landed into the
waiting hands of the Gestapo, and all seven met execution in extermination
camps.
Noor escaped soon after her imprisonment in a fifth-floor cell at 84
Avenue Foch. She made it to the roof before her guards quickly recaptured her
and returned her to her cell. In a neighboring cell, another captured SOE agent,
John Starr, had achieved a trusty status; and on the other side, a Frenchman,
Colonel Faye. Starr had artistic talents, and the Germans used him to draw
charts and graphs for them, allowing him pencils and paper in his cell that he
used to communicate with Noor. She, in turn, tapped out Morse code with Faye.
She devised an escape plan that called for Starr’s help as a prison trusty. He
obtained a screwdriver, and the three of them took turns with the tool to
loosen the bars in overhead skylights. The guards permitted makeup for women
prisoners that the escapees used to make a powder and cream plaster to conceal
damage to the walls. When the time came for the escape, Noor had not yet
loosened her bars, and the two men waited on the roof for two hours. When they
finally hoisted her out of the skylight shaft, an air raid siren wailed, the
guards checked the cells and discovered the damaged cells. Within minutes, the
guards returned the three roughly to their cells.
Incredibly, their prison-keeper, SS Sturmbannfuhrer
Hans Kieffer did not have them beaten and executed. Instead, he demanded they
sign an oath that they would not attempt another escape. Noor and Colonel Faye
refused and were sent immediately to a secure prison in Germany.
The SD placed Noor into a category known as Nacht und Nebel, prisoners who were destined to disappear into the
“night and fog.” Chains bound her hands and feet and a guard stood continuous
watch outside her cell. During her stay, the prison warden took pity on her and
ordered her hands free, but a guard reported him to the SD. The warden
received a withering reprimand, and the manacles returned. The Gestapo ordered
her sent to the concentration camp at Natzweiler where she was beaten and
possibly raped by a particularly sadistic guard (executed for war crimes at
Nuremberg). Due to the color of her skin, the guard assumed her a Creole. He
considered his treatment of her as above punishment, as “colored” and Nacht und Nebel prisoners had no
protection under rules of conduct from Berlin.
Following some confusion by the camp’s commander as to how she should
die, she was sent to Dachau where she was executed by a bullet to the head and
burned in the ovens.
For her service to the British military and for her contributions to the
French Resistance and to the success of the Allied invasion at Normandy, she
received posthumously the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star.
Of the fifty women sent into action for the SOE, fifteen were captured
and only three of those survived. The women warriors of the SOE proved women
could, indeed, carry their weight in warfare. Though largely unknown in
America, the freedom-loving French and British have not forgotten “Madeleine.”
/GettyImages-185837254-58573e6b5f9b586e029b4ec0.jpg){kind=link}