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REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING
Helen Fry has specialised in fascinating and revealing histories of wartime intelligence and espionage, especially of the role of women in these activities. Women in Intelligence, The Walls Have Ears, and Spymaster are a few of her recent books, and The White Lady continues this tradition through an examination of two important British secret-service underground networks in Belgium in the world wars in which women played a prominent role. La Dame Blanche (‘The White Lady’) was an operation that smuggled out intelligence about the movement of German troops and supplies across Belgium in the First World War, often warning the British of upcoming offensives, most notably with the gathering of troops in the Verdun area in early 1916. The Clarence Service provided crucial intelligence from occupied Belgium during the Second World War.
Fry writes a clear narrative, but one that is always grounded in a detailed study of the evidence available. Her footnotes and bibliography establish the scholarly nature of her research, although it is always expressed in a lucid and accessible way. In The White Lady, Fry discovers many stories of spying and heroism that have never been told before.
Having said that, the chapters about the various underground networks in Belgium after the German occupation of the country in 1914 are very dense. The cast of characters is so numerous it is difficult to keep up with who is working with whom and to which part of British Intelligence they are reporting. The work of the spies involved observing and counting the numbers of trains containing soldiers, artillery, and other military supplies passing a particular point. The methods of getting this information through to neutral Holland and British agents in Rotterdam were ingenious. As well as invisible ink and messages hidden in buttons and bicycle tyres, they included a form of coded knitting – smuggling out items of clothing that had been knitted with plain knits representing carriages of soldiers and purl knits for wagons with horses and artillery! The coded scarves or jumpers were then thrown over the border to waiting farmers, who would collect them and pass them on.
The Gestapo made it clear: if an agent was captured, their entire family would be rounded up and murdered.
In addition, there were networks smuggling out French and Belgian soldiers, and hundreds escaped Belgium and got back into Allied armies. However, the dangers were all too clear. When Dieudonné Lambrecht, the leader of one of these groups in Liège, was betrayed, he was imprisoned, interrogated, and then executed. Posters telling of his execution were intended to dissuade others, but actually only sharpened resistance and encouraged new members to join the underground networks. Walthère Dewé took over as leader of the group.
At its peak, the White Lady had 2,000 agents working for it, about one third of whom were women. They were ideal spies and couriers as they were ‘invisible’ to the German secret police, who did not suspect women could be involved in espionage, and so were left to move around as they wished. The Germans thought they were simply carrying out domestic duties. A group of Catholic nuns reported on conversations with wounded German soldiers in a hospital they ran, and passed on news of the development of a high-trajectory, long-range artillery gun that was being set up in Laon.
The Clarence Service
In September 1939, MI6 contacted Dewé and other White Lady leaders, all of whom were by then in their sixties or seventies, to set up a new network to report from Belgium in case the country was occupied, as indeed it was in May-June 1940. This time the risks for those agents who participated in what was called the Clarence Service were even greater than in the previous war. The Gestapo made it clear that, if they captured an agent, not only would he or she be executed but their entire family would also be rounded up and murdered.
Initially, information about the German occupation forces, communication headquarters, and deployments along the coast were smuggled out across France into Spain and thence to England. This was too slow for important and current intelligence, but it was not until the summer of 1941 that an efficient radio link was established with London. Now the intelligence being passed out about new factories, airfields, and ammunition depots increased into a weekly report. The intelligence gathered extended well outside occupied Belgium and ranged from the French Atlantic coast to reports of factories and depots inside Germany itself. Many Allied bombing raids were targeted on locations supplied by the Clarence Service.
Despite the loss of Dewé in January 1944, shot while attempting to escape arrest, Clarence had two major roles to play before war’s end. First, in the run-up to and the weeks following D-Day, agents provided valuable technical intelligence about German defences and the movement of troops across northern Europe. They also confirmed the concentration of troops in the Pas-de-Calais area, as German commanders had been fooled by an Allied deception operation into thinking that was where the invasion was coming.
Second, Clarence provided a mass of information about the location of the V-1 missile launch sites, as well as factories producing components for the flying bombs. Many reports were dozens of pages long. This information assisted the RAF in bombing these sites, and helped delay and disrupt the whole V-1 programme. By the end of the war, there were about 1,500 agents working for the Clarence network, 52 of whom lost their lives. Of the 300 agents parachuted into Belgium, about one third did not survive their clandestine missions.
The White Lady is not perhaps Fry at her very best. The story includes so many individuals that no real personalities emerge, and I would like to have seen the intelligence gathered from inside occupied Europe related to other sources of intelligence – for instance, from aerial photo reconnaissance. Nevertheless, she records two little-known underground networks in tremendous detail, and pays an appropriate tribute to a courageous, brave group of women and men from both world wars, whose stories definitely deserve to be heard.
The White Lady: the story of two key British secret service networks behind German lines
Helen Fry
Yale University Press, hbk, £20
ISBN 978-0300275117
