Down to
a sunless sea
Michael Howard
SECRET FLOTILLAS: CLANDESTINE SEA LANES TO FRANCE AND FRENCH NORTH AFRICA, 1940-1944 by Brooks Richards HMSO, £65, pp. 729 Something like 300 clandestine boat trips were made to France or French North Africa by the British during the course of the second world war. Their purpose was either to land agents or to evacuate escaped POWs and others that it was important to smuggle out of the country. Almost every one of these voyages might provide material for a Hammond Innes adventure story; the background of high intrigue, the colourful personalities involved, the desperate improvisations, the rendezvous missed, the enemy sentries bamboozled, the traitors in the camp, the hair-breadth 'scapes, the ultimate triumph. And not only Hammond Innes: much of what Brooks Richards has to tell us might have come out of the pages of Patrick O'Brien's novels of the Napoleonic Wars; or from accounts of many wars even before that. The British had been doing this kind of thing for centuries, and on the whole did it very well.
Like other things the British did very well, such as code-breaking, the govern- ment in its wisdom has kept the records of all this secret for half a century, and now make up for it with a great thick official volume written by one of the foremost participants in the operations, Sir Brooks Richards. For Sir Brooks it has clearly been a labour of love, and like all such labours it is rather self-indulgent. He has also been indulged by publishers who do not need to make a profit and do not mind putting out a 700-page volume, lavishly equipped with maps, at a price that few private purchasers can afford. A commer- cial publisher would have ridden hard on Sir Brooks, forcing him to prune his lavish narratives, provide more of a continuous and analytic overview, and produce a lean- er, more balanced work at a more attrac- tive price in which the shape of the wood could be discerned beyond all those lush trees. About a tenth of the book, for exam- ple, is occupied by the reports — fascinat- ing and amusing certainly — of one Lt. Krajewski, who ran a series of operations from Gibraltar. We get, in fact, something like a regimental history; of immense inter- est to everyone associated with the unit, a useful source for historians describing the wider picture, but rather expensive caviar to the general.
We are provided — as in regimental histories — with a very broad sketch of the general background, especially the difficul- ties and intrigues that lay behind the opera- tions. They were bedevilled until 1943 by the lack of appropriate vessels — under- standably the Navy gave such operations very low priority — and by the rivalry between the various services concerned. Not only was there the persistent conflict between SIS and SOE, but a further one with the Free French, which itself created two opposing factions within SIS.
After 1942 this was further complicated by intra-French rivalries, and the determi- nation of the Americans to have an inde- pendent share of the action. There is little overall assessment of the value of these operations. Sir Brooks pays generous trib- ute to the part played by the RAF whose continuous landing and evacuation of agents eventually made possible the organi- sation of the French Resistance and the dominant part played in it by the Free French. But initially only five such opera- tions took place before 1941, and seaborne forces do not seem to have done much bet- ter: SOE did not successfully land a single agent in 1940. Thereafter seaborne opera- tions seem to have been of value primarily for the evacuation of large numbers of RAF escapers and of Polish troops in the Mediterranean.
In the Mediterranean indeed the picture was slightly different. One such boat-trip landed Mark Clark for his clandestine con- versations in Algeria before Operation TORCH. Another landed the SIS unit that set up the French resistance cell that trained and instructed Admiral Darlan's assassin. Another provided enough weapons to arm the entire male population of Corsica; most of them unused since the German garrison prudently withdrew in good time. Once the tide had turned, the flotillas were able to play their part in the Allied attack. Until it did, they could do little more than show the flag, keep in training, and afford valuable outlet for the courage and high spirits of the heroic young men whose adventures are recorded here.
Sir Michael Howard's most recent book is The Lessons of History.
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