Mission Europe: The Secret History of the Women of SOE by Kate Vigurs review: 'written with compassion'

There is no sentimentality or heroine worship in this account of the women SEO agents active in occupied Europe during the Second World War, writes Vin Arthey

Kate Vigurs’ first book, Mission France, told the stories of the 39 women agents of the Special Operations Executive who were active in that country during the Second World War. There were also agents working in other occupied areas of Europe, however, from the Netherlands and Belgium to Poland and Denmark, and in Mission Europe she looks at the role they played.

Surprisingly, perhaps, there were more female agents working in France than in all the other occupied European countries combined. In an extended prologue, Vigurs explains why this was: turf wars between SOE, MI6, MI9 and other secret agencies, secrecy and politics within resistance groups in each country and their governments in exile, and the problems involved in getting potential women agents out of their home countries, training them, and then getting them back in again.

Kate Vigurs | Courtesy of Yale University Press

The quintessential feature of this book is its even-handedness as the background, character and operational biography of each of these women is explored. Some became national treasures or the subjects of books and films after the war, whilst others retreated into anonymity. There is no sentimentality and no heroine worship in this book. It is written with compassion. We learn of the failures as well as the successes, the fear as well as the courage, the betrayals as well as the loyalties. We learn, too, of over 3,000 British women, mainly those of the Female Auxiliary Nursing Yeomanry (the FANYs as they liked to call themselves), who trained and supported their European comrades.

The book is structured country by country, mainly in order of the date of Nazi occupation, and the reader will quickly become aware of the complexities involved. The training was tough, with an emphasis on dealing with interrogation and on parachute jumping, which was frightening for many of the agents. Just as brutal was the flight to the drop zone, often in the bitter cold, laden with kit and wearing their “striptease suits”, as the agents called them, which they had to step out of and hide along with their parachutes when they landed.

The agents’ stories are often chilling and, of course, they are told from the women’s perspective, including details of how they dealt with relationships with male comrades and proposals of marriage. Detail was key: there’s a shrewd example of how Elżbieta Zawacka, who had escaped from Poland and was later parachuted back in, briefed Polish trainees on the changes in clothing and social behaviour that they should be aware of when they were back home.

Telling of her escape from Belgium to Dunkirk, Elaine Madden mentions the three British soldiers, Knocker, Smudger and Gary (”our saviours”, she called them) who helped her and Simone Duponselle by lending them “their greatcoats, tin hats and gasmasks – everything except their trousers” - male camouflage so they could get into a boat to take them to the UK, where they could begin their training as SOE agents. Back in Belgium in 1944, Elaine was sending information to London HQ on the V1 and V2 rocket sites, and later helped liberate concentration camps and repatriate prisoners.

There were, of course, tragedies. Danish agent Varinka Muus was with a group of friends in Denmark, most of whom only knew her by her nom de guerre, “Miss Haviid”. They were listening to a Swedish news bulletin when the announcer said that her mother, Monica, had been sentenced to death. She was unable to express her sorrow. Also poignant is the story of the Jewish agent Hannah Szenes who was born in Hungary but in 1939, at the age of 18, decided to go to Mandate Palestine to study agriculture. Qualified, she went to work on a kibbutz but soon began training with the Palmach, the military group that was set up to defend the Palestinian Jewish Community, and then with SOE, to be parachuted into Yugoslavia and work with the anti-Nazi partisans. Her group disintegrated, but tasked to “help Allied airmen” she pressed on to Hungary, where she was arrested, tortured and executed. Szenes was also a poet, and her last poem was found in her cell after her execution. This is the last verse:

I could have been

twenty-three next July;

I gambled on what mattered most,

The dice were cast, I lost.

Mission Europe: The Secret History of the Women of SOE, by Kate Vigurs, Yale University Press, £20