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Secret War Heroes

By Marcus Binney

Hodder & Stoughton $310

Marcus Binney recounts the wartime activities of the male agents of Britain's Special Operations Executive  (SOE). Founded by  Winston Churchill in 1940, the SOE was  a forerunner of the SAS. The organisation sent operatives   deep undercover in Nazi-occupied Europe, where they  organised local resistance fighters and sabotaged key enemy targets.

Secret War Heroes tells the stories of brave, fascinating men such as William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, two avuncular-looking grey-haired gentlemen responsible for combat training.

Before the second world war, Fairbairn  spent 27 years with the Shanghai police,  rising to the rank of chief inspector. An expert in oriental martial arts - he  studied under masters in Japan and China - Fairbairn was charged with police firearms training, which he helped revolutionise with the introduction of a realistic walk-through firing range. He could draw, aim and fire  his gun in  a third of a second.

Sykes  teamed up with Fairbairn in the police and  the  pair had plenty of experience fighting the city's criminals. Shanghai was so crime-ridden before the war, with shootings  almost every night, that  the police became experts  in close-quarter combat techniques.

The pair invented the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife for the new British commando forces.  They also devised an effective combat training system, which was later adopted by special forces in other countries,  including the US, which modelled its OSS (later known as  the CIA) on the SOE.

Not all SOE missions were  dangerous. Binney relates the story of Operation Postmaster, which might have been lifted straight from the pages  of a Graham Greene novel. (James Bond creator Ian Fleming   makes a cameo appearance  as a commander in Naval Intelligence.) In Postmaster, SOE operative Gus March-Phillips and his comrades audaciously seized and made off with the Italian cargo liner Duchessa d'Aosta,  her crew and valuable cargo, from the port  of Santa Isabel  on the Spanish island of Fernando Po  while her officers were being lavishly entertained on shore at an SOE-funded Christmas dinner party.

In a similar coup, Mauritian agent  Percy Mayer cut important enemy lines of communication,  enabling the Allies to make an unopposed landing on Madagascar and seize the harbour at Diego Suarez.  This was of vital strategic importance because the occupying Vichy French  forces had just agreed that the  port could be used by German and Japanese submarines to attack shipping lanes. Mayer's wife also sent the Allies vital intelligence.

The author recalls fond childhood memories of his stepfather, George Binney, regaling  guests at dinner parties with tales of his war-time exploits through a cloud of cigar smoke.   Secret War Heroes is dedicated to him.   During Operation Rubble, he spirited a year's supply of  ball bearings for tank and aircraft manufacture from neutral Sweden through a German naval blockade to England. A second  such mission  was sunk when the Swedish government,  fearful of  being occupied by Germany  (as its neighbours Norway and Denmark had been),  detained  his ships.

If some of the accounts in Secret War Heroes seem familiar, it's because most have been told elsewhere, although  Binney had access to  recently released files.  Still, with about 13,000 SOE operatives  having helped three million active resistance members in Europe alone, we can expect more of the same.



Secret War Heroes