Code Name Page 3

  Buckmaster explained that Odette would need an alias during training and asked what name she’d like to use.

  “Would Céline do?” she asked, suggesting part of her real name: Odette Marie Céline.

  Buckmaster confirmed that they didn’t have a Céline, and it would be fine. “I’m going to introduce one or two people to you and then turn you over to a very nice woman in the FANYs,”4 he added. “She’ll tell you about the Corps and how our section of it functions.”

  Odette was fitted with a khaki uniform, complete with military belt and beret, and at home she looked long at herself in the mirror. There was something special happening to her. It wasn’t just a uniform; there was more. She seemed to have taken on a dignity of unique privilege: a Frenchwoman who had been given the honor of representing England.

  Odette in her FANY uniform. IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

  The following day, July 18, Odette strode confidently in her crisp uniform to London’s Portman Square. As she turned a corner, two British soldiers in battle dress saw her and saluted.

  Odette blushed. She had entered a new life.

  * * *

  CANDIDATES FOR SOE WERE processed in four stages, the last two of which sometimes had an inverted order: preliminary school, paramilitary school, parachute school, and finishing school. Female candidates who would be serving as couriers, however, sometimes skipped the paramilitary training, and it appears that Odette did so. Each stop was designed to weed out unsuitable candidates, and only those who passed continued on to the next course. By the end of the training, up to 80 percent would be disqualified.

  The preliminary school was a two-to-four-week course at Wanborough Manor, a country house near Guilford, England, to assess a candidate’s character and potential for clandestine operations. The training focused on three areas: physical development, weapons, and field craft. Candidates learned how to fall, subdue a sentry, and roll down a flight of stairs. Afternoons brought weapons and explosives. Trainees would fire and become proficient with virtually every weapon found in Europe: pistols of all varieties—German Luger, British Enfield and Webley, American Colt and Smith & Wesson, Canadian Browning, and their Italian and Belgian counterparts—as well as the assassin’s silent single-shot Welrod; submachine guns such as the Sten, Schmeisser, Tommy Gun, and M-3; and automatic rifles like the Czech Bren and American Browning.

  And Odette learned a different method of shooting. Instead of the common practice of firing a pistol with two hands, aiming down the sights at stationary targets, SOE candidates did just the opposite: combat shooting.

  “You will always fire from the crouch position,” the SOE training manual instructed, “you will never be in an upright position. You will have no time to adopt any fancy stance when killing with speed. You have no time to use the sights. Any method of firing which does not allow for all these factors is useless. Gun fighting at close quarters is a question of split seconds.”

  Utilizing a one-handed grip, Odette fired with “instinctive pointing” at moving and bobbing targets, at varying distances and heights. She fired from inside buildings, sometimes in poor lighting and sometimes in total darkness. She practiced spinning right, left, and by grabbing a gun from a table.5

  Explosives were a specialty of SOE, and Odette had to master their use and detonation.6 She learned how to put a detonator into a primer, and the primer into the explosive. Fuses7 of all types also had to be mastered so that the agent wasn’t derailed before the train. And since operatives might be caught in compromising situations, Odette also learned how to use close-in weapons: the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, the pen pistol—which could fire a bullet or an asphyxiating gas cartridge—and the ultrathin lapel knife.

  In the evenings, Odette was introduced to field craft: Morse code, ciphers, map reading, Aldis lamp signaling, and night compass navigation.

  Students who passed stage one were then sent to the paramilitary school in Arisaig, Scotland, a three-week course to expand all aspects of training. Here, candidates continued to practice with pistols and submachine guns, but now added live hand grenades and machine guns: the British Vickers, and the German MG 34 and 42. By all accounts, though, the memorable part of stage two was William Fairbairn, the Arisaig combat instructor better known as the Shanghai Buster. Widely considered the father of hand-to-hand combat, Fairbairn had spent twenty years with the International Police Force in Shanghai—a lawless city in those days—and his arms, hands, and body bore testimony of his knife fights with thugs, gangs, drug dealers, and criminals. At fifty-five, he was one of the most dangerous men in the world.

  His specialty was silent killing. Without weapons.

  While Odette was not required to attend Arisaig, her future circuit leader, Peter Churchill, excelled here, as enemy soldiers would soon learn.

  * * *

  FROM WANBOROUGH ODETTE PROCEEDED to finishing school at Beaulieu. After showing her identification at a front-entrance checkpoint, she was driven to a charming New Forest country house set on a small lake, behind which was a deep wood.

  The irony was striking. Here, in a setting of paradise, Odette would learn the fine arts of espionage and, again, killing.

  In the morning she awoke to the clatter of activity in the kitchen and moments later a servant appeared. He politely let her know that she was required to be on the tennis courts—in gym shorts and sneakers—at eight o’clock sharp. Physical training, he said.

  While slim and in arguably good shape, Odette wasn’t particularly fond of fitness training, especially during the breakfast hour. She finished her morning tea, donned the gym clothes, and trudged to the courts. There, a young Adonis led the group through exercises, and Odette discovered that she wasn’t nearly as fit as she had imagined; her muscles were on fire.

  “Now we’ll just have a breather and a few questions,” the instructor said as the women gasped for air. “Céline!”

  It took a moment for Odette to remember that Céline was her alias here, and she finally looked up.

  “I’m so sorry. Yes?”

  “Suppose a big SS man came for you; what would you do?”

  “Er . . . how big?”

  “Very big,” the instructor said. Six foot one and broad shouldered.

  Odette pondered the scenario. “I would run away in the opposite direction,” she finally muttered, “as fast as I could.”

  “Suppose he caught up with you?”

  “Then I would pinch him.”

  The instructor restrained a laugh. “Oh, you’d pinch him, would you? Anything else?”

  “I’d pull his hair.”

  “You’d pinch him and pull his hair. Poor chap. My heart bleeds for him.” The instructor focused his tone.

  “Ladies, it will be my unwelcome and embarrassing duty to teach you other and less refined methods of disabling would-be masculine aggressors. It comes in a later lesson and I very sincerely hope that you will take it in the spirit in which it will be dished up.”

  He then told the group to put their hands on their hips, and the exercises continued.

  While there would be more weapons practice, the main purpose of Beaulieu was to teach prospective agents spycraft: radio and house security, losing a tag, dealing with border controls, and handling the ubiquitous inspection of their papers. Simple questions such as “Why haven’t you drawn your tobacco ration for the past two weeks?” could spell doom for the hesitant.

  More than anything, agents had to learn to play the part: to be the person indicated by their cover. Survival depended on not only having their story straight—memorizing every detail provided by F Section—but also being able to improvise convincingly when questions strayed from the script.8

  The Beaulieu staff also monitored the students while they slept. Did any talk in their sleep? If so, in what language? Some nights, male candidates would be sent to a local bar or cafe to meet a contact. After a drink or two, there would be a chance meeting with Christine Collard, a stunning blonde who was supposedly a Fren
ch journalist. The contact would invite her over, introduce her as a helpful former acquaintance, and then invariably be called away, leaving the two alone. Christine would be quite amorous—to the point of suggesting that they leave for someplace more comfortable—and ply the recruit for indiscretions. Her real name was Marie Christine Chilver—“Fifi,” as Baker Street called her—and she was an SOE agent provocateur. A number of otherwise promising recruits failed this test and were rejected; candidates who had mastered countless weapons and explosives, survived punishing fitness regimens and twenty-mile mountain treks, memorized Morse, and perfected compass night marches, only to be felled by Fifi.

  While in France, it was critical for an agent to be able to distinguish the uniforms of Vichy and Axis police, as well as Gestapo, SS, Wehrmacht, and Luftwaffe soldiers, and to identify their ranks and credentials. During one class, the instructor called on Odette and pointed to a uniformed German on a wall chart.

  “What’s this chap, and what do his badges of rank mean?”

  “He’s a Feldwebel in the Luftwaffe, and he’s wearing the Iron Cross, Second Class.”

  The instructor nodded and pointed to another.

  “He’s an Oberleutnant in the Panzer Grenadiers,” Odette said, “and I don’t know what his medal ribbons mean. I consider the medal ribbons to be of no importance.”

  “Your opinion is not shared by the staff, Céline,” he replied. “I must insist that you pay attention to what we know to be of importance.”

  At the map-reading class, Odette was quizzed on the field requirements for landing Lysanders and Hudsons. She gave the proper measurements.

  “Right,” the instructor said. “What is the Morse sign for the letter ‘L’?”

  Odette paused and then said, “Dot, dash-dash, dot.”

  “Wrong. Think, Céline.”

  “But it is that.”

  He assured her that it was not.

  Odette frowned. “Of course. ‘L’ is dot, dash, dot-dot.”

  “Good. But you must think calmly before you answer. The lives of an aircrew depend on accurate signals.”

  On the gun range, candidates continued to practice with various weapons, and Odette displayed her newfound skills. When it was her turn to fire at a target with a Sten submachine gun, she sent a quick blast and waited for the marker’s response.

  “All on,” he yelled. “Three bulls. Next please.”

  Beaulieu students also trained for the downside: arrest. A number of times throughout the course, Odette and the others were roused in the middle of the night and hustled before men in German uniforms for interrogation. Recruits were stripped and forced to stand for hours facing blazing lights; shock and awe when cobwebs clouded memory and judgment.

  When the intelligence work was over, Odette learned how to canoe, navigate by the stars, poach, steal chickens, and trap and cook a rabbit without removing the skin. She was also introduced to agents who had returned from France and candidly explained what had happened to others who didn’t.

  The stories only made Odette more resolute and it was here, at Beaulieu, that she went all in on her commitment to go to France as an SOE agent. So committed was she emotionally that the make-believe of the exercises began to irritate her, a response not missed by the school’s instructors.

  On August 25 Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Woolrych, the commandant of Beaulieu, sent Buckmaster the school’s final evaluation of Odette:

  “She has enthusiasm and seems to have absorbed the teaching given on the course. She is, however, impulsive and hasty in her judgments and has not quite the clarity of mind which is desirable in subversive activity. She is excitable and temperamental, although she has a certain determination. A likeable character and gets on well with most people. Her main asset is her patriotism and keenness to do something for France; her main weakness is a complete unwillingness to admit that she could ever be wrong.”

  Buckmaster was torn. Odette had the fighting spirit he was looking for but exhibited glaring weaknesses in vital areas. He drove to New Forest to speak with her before making a decision.

  “Well, Céline,” he began, “I’ve had your report.”

  The tone of Buckmaster’s voice wasn’t cheerful, and Odette could feel impending rejection. “I hope it is satisfactory.”

  “Not altogether. It’s . . . mixed.”

  Odette took a breath, and Buckmaster waited a moment before continuing.

  “I am very much exercised about you, Céline. The work I had planned for you to do is so desperately important and so . . . so interlocking that we can only dare to send people who are cool in their judgment and who have a crystal clarity of mind. I believe you to be single-minded, loyal, and tenacious. But, let’s face it, there is the question of this mercurial temperament of yours which comes out every now and again like a nettle rash.”

  He looked at her—now pale white—and asked if she would be very disappointed if he said no.

  Odette was at a loss for words. The evaluation was spot-on, she knew, but the thought of failing before she had even set foot in France—of not doing her duty as grandfather had urged—was crushing.

  “Major Buckmaster,” she finally said, “I would never let anybody down.”

  “That I know. It’s very difficult.”

  Buckmaster cast his eyes off in the distance and pondered the decision. Impulsive. Hasty. Temperamental. Arrogant. Yet she was French, had a tenacious determination, and was a born fighter.

  He went with his instincts. Odette would continue the training.

  Parachute Training School

  Ringway, Manchester, England

  “NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” the Ringway major barked, “the mental reaction to one’s first parachute jump has been likened to that of a man who decides to commit suicide by jumping off the top of the Nelson Column—with the strong possibility that the attempt will fail. In Ringway, the attempt will positively fail. You will float through the air with the greatness of ease, like daring young men—and women—on the flying trapeze.”

  Odette sighed, and the major went on explaining the training. There would be four jumps, he said, two from a balloon, two from a twin-engine bomber nicknamed the Wimpey.

  “You will enjoy every moment of it!” he boasted.

  Odette took it with a grain of salt and did her best to quickly gain coordination. Buckmaster’s words had troubled her, and she knew that the slightest failure here would destroy her goal to fight the Germans on her home soil. She focused her efforts, rolling softly on the coconut mats, swinging gracefully on the rungs, bending her knees properly in the Japanese roll.

  After several days she was cleared for her first balloon jump. That afternoon, however, the instructor decided there was time for one more practice jump before the real thing later that day. It was a simple exercise: an eight-foot drop from a mock-up Whitley bomber.

  “We’ll have just one more jump,” he said, “before we break off. Now don’t forget to keep those knees together, Céline.”

  Odette paused. “May I be excused from this one? I’ve done several this morning and I particularly want to be fresh for this afternoon.”

  “Be excused? That’s a word we don’t welcome at Ringway. You’ve been doing very well,” he told her, “and this is the last jump. Have a crack at it, ma’am.”

  Odette went up the ladder into the fuselage and jumped awkwardly from the hole.

  Her weight had been too far forward and her feet had hardly touched the ground when her face crashed into the matting. Burning sensations flashed through her body—her right ankle, right knee, and face seemed to be on fire. She tried to stand but couldn’t.

  At the medical clinic she was told that she had a concussion and a badly sprained ankle, perhaps even a cracked metatarsal. The swelling in her face had closed one eye, and she was sent to London’s Ophthalmic Hospital for treatment.

  When the injuries healed, she was back in Buckmaster’s office. The major asked if she was willing to return to Ringwa
y to complete the training.

  “Certainly, if you think it is necessary. I don’t want to go again,” Odette admitted, “because it’s uncomfortable and tiring and indeed a bit frightening. But if I am to land in France by parachute, then of course I must return to Ringway.”

  Buckmaster asked how she felt about being sent by submarine and Odette winced.

  “That’s like parachuting in reverse. I don’t suppose I should like traveling in a little metal box under the sea any better than I would dropping down from the sky clutching a silk umbrella. But again, if that’s the way you want me to go, I’m quite prepared to risk the claustrophobia.”

  Buckmaster smiled and mentioned they might use an alternate form of insertion. He suggested that she get her children settled as the office was preparing her identity cards and mission plan. She would be leaving soon.

  * * *

  ODETTE BROUGHT HER CHILDREN together and did her best to explain that she would be leaving for a while.

  “Good-bye, Francoise. Look after Lily.”

  “You will write to us, won’t you, Mummy?”

  “Yes. I’ll write. Good-bye, Lily. Look after Marianne.”

  “I will, Mummy, where are you going to?”

  “A place called Scotland. Good-bye, Marianne. You’ll look after Francoise and Lily for me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, Mummy. Where’s Scotland?”

  “It’s a long way away, Marianne. And you’ll all be good girls until I come back.”

  “When are you coming back, Mummy?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “Are you going to the war, Mummy?”

  “Yes, I’m going to the war. But I’ll try to come back soon.”

  Dropping her children off at St. Helen’s was excruciating and heartbreaking. There was nothing the Gestapo could do to her now, she felt, since it would be only physical.

  This was the ultimate torture.

  * * *

  BEFORE ODETTE SET FOOT in France, Hitler gave new orders to the military and Gestapo regarding spies and commandos. On October 18, two weeks before her arrival, he decreed: “I therefore order that from now on, all opponents engaged in so-called commando operations, with or without weapons, are to be exterminated. It is immaterial whether they are landed for their operations by ship, or aeroplane, or descent by parachute.”