When Being Dropped Behind Enemy Lines In WW2 Goes Horribly Wrong | Secret War

[Music] [Music] on the night of the 7th of November 1941 a Royal air force bomber of 138 special Duty Squadron took off from New Market Racecourse in suffk on board were two agents of the Special Operations executive they were to drop near the town of omen in German occupied Holland they were told at that very first interview look if you do this you're putting your life on the line it's un evens with you come back just after midnight the pilot identified the Drop Zone below and the men jumped what they didn't know was that they were falling into a trap their Landing Behind Enemy Lines marked the beginning of one of the most disastrous episodes in the history of British intelligence the Germans called the episode England Spiel or the England game this is the story of that deadly game and how dozens of Agents were lured to Holland by the Germans and then the British sent more and more the England game cost the lives of 54 agents and 83 RAF air crew I felt it was no longer a question of whether Dutch agents are operating under dures but how many of [Music] them but the mystery of the England game was that the British had many chances to put a stop to the catastrophe but failed on every occasion how could it have happened were the British incompetent have they underestimated the Brilliance of the German Counter Intelligence service or was there a more sinister [Music] [Music] explanation the Fiasco that became known as the England game began with the German invasion of Holland in May [Music] 1940 thousands of Dutchmen fled the country and its territories including this man Hubertus laas but laas vowed to return and fight laas was a junior mechanic in the rubber industry doing purely clinical work but was a patriotic Dutchman and managed to get a boat from Manila to Canada where he joined the Dutch Army in Exile said to himself jol and dar [Music] ised craving a more active part in the war he traveled to Britain which was standing alone against Hitler he joined the British army but soon attracted the attention of a unique [Music] organization in this building on London's Baker Street Winston Churchill formed a secret army the Special Operations executive or S soe its job was to recruit and train agents to be sent back to their home countries and cause Mayhem Behind Enemy Lines har will the containers and packages for Felix 1 be ready tomorrow night Felix 1 yes it's all tied up Churchill told soe to set Europe Ablaze the initial task given toe was to subvert enemy occupation of Western Europe or any other any other country that the enemy might occupy by devising such underground movements strikes and on as one could and by direct sabotage attacks on Industrial targets been importance or even individuals of importance s soe's operations in Holland were run by n section consisting of eight British officers they chose H blauers as n section's first radio operator and sent him for training he was given a call sign r l [Music] S as a radio operator Behind Enemy Lines lavas was trained to transmit messages in a specific [Music] code in November 1941 he was ready to return to Holland so on the evening of the 7th radio operator lavas was joined by S soe sabur Ty tones and together they jumped into Eastern Holland their mission was to attempt to organize and Galvanize the Dutch underground movement what they didn't know was that the movement had already been penetrated by German spies and the man who organized these spies would prove to be a formidable opponent Herman gizz was a major of the abair German Counter Intelligence stationed in the [Music] ha gas ran a team of Agents from a house in a quied suburb and from there began recruiting Dutch collaborators his aim was to set traps for any enemy agents in the country country and it didn't take long for tones and H laas to fall into one of those traps the first mistake was made by tonis he got a message through lovers that he was to supply a ground on which stores could be dropped and found a ground not far from arnam where he was living his difficulty was going to be getting the stes off the ground he hadn't got a car and he asked a friend he met in the bar the captain in the Dutch Army if he happened to know anybody who ran a transport firm as matter of fact he did whom he introduced to the is in the same [Music] bar the man he was introduced to was matis Adolf ridof a Diamond Smuggler and a drunk he was working for gizz without informing s soe in London tonus told rudoff about the proposed drop near Aram and of His Radio operator H blowers rof was more than happy to agree to lend to KES his Lorry when they met again Roff also gave tonus what he thought was some valuable intelligence he told tonus that the German Navy Cruiser Prince oen was in skam docks for [Music] repairs this was just after the famous Channel Dash when the shanos giz now and the prince again slipped through the naal blade and got up the channel and they slipped into Ton's ear word that the prince oan which had been damaged in the journey was in skam which is a subport of Rotterdam being minted they knew to goodis was bound to report that to London it is next kin gkz alerted His Radio monitoring team to be ready to detect any illegal radio [Music] signal soon enough they picked up a transmitter being operated with the call sign r lser I Roff used a process called Direction finding to track the signal to Fahrenheit Strat a number 678 Fahrenheit Strat on the second floor lived two members of the Dutch resistance vout and Le T this was where Hub laas code name RLS had set up his transmitter before long the street was crawling with [Music] Germans laas spoke for the first time in 1984 about the events that followed but only if his identity was hidden I was due to transmit on the 6th of March 1942 when vout teller came up and told me that there wasn't uh German police car standing around the corner as I say I didn't expect any trouble but just for security sake Bart and I left the apartment and uh we told Mrs Stella what to do should anything happen after the war Lee teller became Mrs laas they told me please throw away the wireless so I when they left I I went to the window and I saw several police police cars coming up the street so I went to the room where the vios was I took it and I went to the balcony at the uh at the backside of the apartment and I show to V discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and adree podcasts presented by world-renowned historians all on History hit watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your m M device download the app now to watch everything from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to operation Barbarosa and D-Day immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description Herman gizar now turned to leftenant Joseph shria of the security police the SS Giza sent in sha to make the arrests in house laas protested his innocence but it was no use laas had got in his pocket his false identity card with the address of the flat on it so they took him back to the flat what did everybody see as they went in but his wace [Music] set lava's wireless that LE teller had thrown out of the window had snagged on a washing line below gkas and his men easily recovered the transmitter whole series of pieces bad luck then overwhelmed him that was he that was his set covered in his fingerprints sha searched lavas and found three coded messages in his pocket gas may have caught the radio operator but he didn't know his code so he ordered one of his men Hinrich to interrogate him first they started to try and get my code immediately and I said well all right uh I'm not going to give it of course then uh hry said uh well we don't need it we'll find it ourselves I said oh okay you do that now the Brilliance of gizz's plan became clear he guessed that one of the three messages was the story planted on lavas about the prince oen being in skan so gkas played his hand he told Hinrich to pretend he'd cracked lava's code and understood the contents of one of the messages I suddenly heard Hinrich say the prince again which was the text of one of my messages at this part of it well that gave me quite a shock because I I didn't know how that they they could have known that without decoding the message love has thought cpes they've broken my code at sight this is awful what am I to do he told the Germans what his code was having forgotten the elementary rule in resistance if the Germans have got you say nothing for two days at least gives the rest of the circuit a chance to Scara change that address his change that identity get away the first part of Gus's plan had been accomplished he had a radio he had an operator and now he had his code then he put the next phase of his plan into action could he get lavvas to send messages to London requesting more agents and even equipment be sent if he could he'd have the makings of a major intelligence [Music] coup 3 Days Later Hub laava accomplice Ty tonus was arrested and joined lavas in [Music] prison then on Sunday the 15th of March laas was taken from his cell he'd already missed three scheduled Transmissions to S soe they'd be wondering what had happened to him gkas drove him through the city to the headquarters of the radio monitoring section where they were holding lava's captured radio set then at number nine parkg that Sunday gkas gave laas an ultimatum transmit to London that afternoon or both he and tonus would be shoted he wanted lavvas to send the three messages found on him when arrested finally lavas agreed call sign R LS was back on the air his signal was picked up by S soe cryptology station in grenan buckinghamshire later that evening A dispatch Rider delivered his messages to nearby Bletchley Park Bletchley was where the messages were decoded hello s section finally they arrived at s soe headquarters and N section all s soe agents had an additional security check an extra form of code hidden within all messages only the agent and S soe knew the nature of the security check in lava's case his Security check was based on the number 16 he had to make a deliberate spelling mistake in the 16th letter or any multiple of 16 for example in this message lavas might have spelled the 32nd letter incorrectly when this deliberate mistake was written into messages and decoded s soe would know that its agent was still free and not in danger during our training it was always hammered in how important this Security check was because as they said it is the only way we have to know whether you're a free agent or whether you have been [Music] arrested on this occasion laa sent the message with his Security [Music] check believing all was well London sent lavas a new message to expect the arrival of another agent code name Arbor the Germans ordered lavas to reply that our bore would be welcome lavas decided to do something clever he thought the Germans might spot his Security check so he inserted a fake one and admitted the real one I suggested that I would code the messages for them and instead of writing stop I wrote step and he said what you doing now well you asked me what mistake do I make I said the mistake was always made in a word [Music] stop so instead of revealing the letter 16 rule he told them that his Security check was to misspell the word stop in every message he became known to the decoders in England as STP step stop because STP and stap and stop occurred so often in the traffic that he [Music] said s soe procedure was correctly followed the absence of the real Security check was spotted and the message was delivered to S soe with the stamp Security check [Music] emitted it was a clear sign that lavas and His Radio had been compromised the message was handed to the head of n section major Charles blizzard blizzard had joined s soe from military intelligence he was highly regarded by his superiors in soe and was fluent in Dutch but now he had to make the most important decision in his life had lavas made a simple mistake in his messages or had he and his radio been captured blizzard decided they were mistakes and chose to ignore lava's emitted Security check to this day no one knows [Music] why blizzard composed a reply to lavas and his German captors confirming the dispatch of the new agent code name Arbor it came to me as a terrible shock I didn't understand it I uh was quite confident that they must have noticed the omission of my security [Music] check an extraordinary situation had developed where s soe were choosing to ignore their own procedures and lava's warnings that he'd been [Music] compromised as a result they were allowing the agent to be used giza's England game was about to kick [Music] off Arbor duly arrived at the next full moon the Germans assembled at the drop zone around midnight they heard the Drone of a twin engined bomber the Germans flashed the code signal and the RAF pilot made his Final Approach [Music] abore dropped straight to the waiting [Music] Germans for Gus's England game had claimed its first victim gkas instructed laas to Signal London that Arbor had arrived [Music] safely lavas assumed s soe knew that wasn't the case because once again he admitted his Security check but once again s soe ignored it now Gus and shida decided to play on Arbor's worst fears [Music] under interrogation they told their new captive that he'd been betrayed by agents in [Music] London AR real name Albert bson thought the entire s soe was compromised and began to talk even about the top secret s soe training school at Buy in Hampshire the were able to describe the wallpaper in the various classrooms at buy which of the staff there wore glasses which smoked a pipe and which preferred [Music] cigaret on the 27th of April the England game entered a new phase when s soe sent laas A peculiar message go to the cigar shop in Harlem and make contact with arrow say you come from bow lavas had no idea what the message meant but security Chief Joseph shria read it and knew it would be of use he went to see the captured agent tonis in his cell they talked for about an hour and Sh then said I well I must be a but have a cigar produced his Cigar Case bother was empty so Sha asked tonus did he know a cigar shop in Harlem not thinking tonis answered you must mean Martin 30 seconds with a telephone book and shrier had the address gkas and Tria Now set another trap they sent a Dutch collaborator masquerading as one of the resistants to the cigar shop he found the shop and told the shopkeeper he'd come from bow to make contact with arrow the tobacconist said that Arrow wasn't in but upstairs he'd find another agent in the Attic the collaborator met an S soe man called andringa who promised to take him to Arrow together they left Harlem for the hag andringa led shida's men to arrow and both men were arrested on a tram the two agents admitted they were to meet others in a hotel so two more agents were arrested there in turn this led the Germans to Amsterdam where yet two more agents Han yodan and Hank sez were captured the cigar shop contact had led to six arrests in quick succession like H blers hodan was a radio operator Herman gizz thought if he could use Yan's radio he could play an even bigger England game but yodan refused to reveal his code or his Security check so ggz decided to take a chance [Music] he put his own man on the radio and told London a new operator was being tried out the messages were sent uncoded and without any Security [Music] check in London major blizzards endsection now committed an act of unbelievable recklessness they signal back to yordan instruct new operator in use of security check so yodan was forced to reveal his code and his Security check the Germans now have their second radio link with [Music] London by the next moon blizzard sent in two more agents announcing their arrival on the newly captured line they and their radio fell straight into German hands two more arrived the next month with the same inevitable results the prison cells were filling fast since the capture of laas and the beginning of the English game gizar had arrested 13 s soe agents five were radio operators whose captured sets provided five separate links with London entirely under German control but seen from Baker Street everything seemed to be going well over a dozen agents were in place all their radio operators were coming up on schedule and as expected many requests for equipment weapons and ammunition were received and approved no one had any idea that they were being dropped straight into German [Music] hands then a new man joined s soe and started asking questions about n section n section staff might have been ler to the sort of traffic they were getting bu back from Holland the one man who noticed that anything was odd was Leo Marx soe's new coding officer who arrived in the Autumn of 42 Leo Marx did not tell his story until 1984 I'd go back to the office late at night just to read back traffic and I was struck by certain messages from h where the security check had been omitted and consistently omitted so I made one or two inquiries as to why and was given answers which were reassuring oh yes we know all about that nothing to worry about for the time being Marx let the matter rest British Army is ready for the attack day and night sh Ro troops rehearse for the time when they will stage the real show Britain is the bridge head to Western Europe on whatever Coast these men will land this is the way they will do it by mid 1942 the Allies were already planning for the invasion of Europe they would call D-Day s soe would have an important role to [Music] play General Colin gobbins s soe director of operations was called in to draft what was known as the plan for Holland while dday was to be the main event in June 1944 the plan for Holland was devised to help the landing Force speed through the Netherlands to the German [Music] border over a thousand men of the Dutch resistance were to be trained by S soe as a secret army the operation's leader was Coden named Jurgens he and another radio operator were dropped into Holland in June 1942 but major Herman gkar and Joseph Sha's men were waiting for them they were both immediately captured and their mission discovered the next month s soe sent in another sabur he too was captured along with his radio but this agent called van HED gave gas his first real problem the battle of the Atlantic was at its peak convoys of supplies and equipment Bound for Britain were under constant threat from German submarines van HED brought orders for an attack on the German radio station controlling these OTS in the Atlantic s soe would expect results gas had to think fast he leaked a story to the Dutch press that there had been an attack but it was unsuccessful s soe thought the agent had just had some bad luck and continue to send supplies from 90 RAF sorties the German reception committees collected 15 Tons of weapons half a million gildas in cash over 50 radio sets 900 machine guns 2,000 pistols and revolvers 8,000 hand grenades and 50 50,000 rounds of ammunition but there were clues that something was not quite right that s soe should have spotted dozens of the raf's aircraft were not returning to base no one in London was suspicious despite so many aircraft being shot down and the Germans always recommended the same dozen dropping zones to London like these fields north of Aram after the war the road leading to these fields was named engeland [Music] Camp four more agents were dropped in September 1942 10 in October and four more in November all were intended to reinforce the plan for Holland operation all were [Music] captured Baker Street still seemed oblivious to what was happening but s soe's codeman Leo Marx noticed something strange looking back through the communication history with Holland he saw that all the mess messages that have been sent were perfect no agent ever sent error-free codes in January 43 I felt it was no longer a question of whether Dutch agents are operating under dures but how many of them and I wrote a report in the strongest possible language attempting to quantify just how many I believed were highly is suspect and why I believed it on Purely technical coding grounds irrespective of these appalling highly suspect Security checks when actually put on record there is really something grievously wrong that nobody has yet explained but Marx's warnings were ignored eight more agents parachuted to their fate the very next [Music] month at s soe headquarters there was still no action but there was a change of command blizzard head of n section left for a war office job his number two Seymour Bingham now took over Bingham had lived in Holland before the war and had been working in the British Consulate before the Germans arrived Bingham changed nothing but by this time Leo Marx was convinced that something was very wrong in Holland and something had to be done so he devised a cunning trap for those receiving s soe messages he would send a message to the suspect agents in Holland pretending to be a German radio operator he went down to grenon where the transmitting station was and stood by the bit's elbow while she sent a message to and sent her immediately she finished send HH and she sent straight away eight dots four and four and got four and four back it stood for H Hitler it was the automatic closure used by every German Wilds operator so it wasn't an S soe agent who answered mark had the proof he was looking for as a result of the mistake that the Germans made I was able to say in the final report that I thought the entire Dutch resistance movement was in enemy hands now that might at the stage on the evidence I had have been a gross over statement but I said it and felt it and knew in order to get this up at the right level one had to say it strongly and with total conviction the 22-year-old Marx showed his evidence to S soe director of operations General Colin gobbins he examined it very very carefully very rapidly instructed me under no circumstances whatsoever to discuss this with anyone else in soe he also said that if ever I felt it necessary to take the holy unorthodox steps I had taken I was to come directly to him and to nobody else and said well done and that was it despite Marx's clear-cut evidence gubbins did nothing instead s soe sent yet more agents to the waiting Germans they dispatched three in March three in April and three more in May all nine went straight to prison and their radios were seized by gizz though bewildered Marx remained loyal to [Music] gobbins I would not know directly what action was taken but if you're asking did gobbins take that report seriously yes he did and if you're asking did he do everything he humanly possibly could as a result of that report yes he did as to why agents continued to be sent in that I cannot answer since that first fateful blunder over hua's Security checks months before Herman gizer had been able to capture 58 Dutch agents the next clue that all was not well reached s soe from the captured agents [Music] themselves the prison where they were held was unusual it was the Catholic Seminary at Haron in the south of Holland it was from these cells that the first warning of the disaster emerged it was Tapped Out in mors code over the water pipes from prisoner to prisoner miraculously the message got through to the Dutch resistance and finally reached London via the Secret Service MI6 the message was that eight S soe agents had been arrested at first n section head major Seymour Bingham didn't believe the message but then agreed to internal inquiries he could find nothing wrong he also called for the return of two senior Agents from Holland of course they never arrived but it did not seem to raise any suspicions but then came an incident that no one could ignore two Dutch s soe agents escaped from Haren prison [Music] they hid in the men's L till about 2: in the morning and then climbed out using a rope bed from their bed clothes from the Upper Floor they brought to the ground floor wonderful night for escaping drenching rain nevertheless when they were still in the grounds they could hear the Jack Boots of a century approaching they lay at absolutely flat absolutely still on the ground of the jackbot P the two men went on the run and avoided capture for over 3 months in that time they crossed occupied Belgian and France and eventually reached neutral Switzerland and found their way to the Dutch legation in [Music] burn in in late November 1943 they sent a full report to London revealing the England game disaster but Herman gers of the ab there outsmarted s soe again he sent a coded message to London warning them to expect to escape Dutch spies who were in fact German agents so when the two men reached Britain they were thrown in prison and interrogated finally it was the RAF who halted this deadly game 138 special Duty Squadron had expected losses from their secret sorties but on missions to Holland they'd lost five times more men and machines than was expected by winter 1943 12 planes and 83 crewmen had failed to return Pilots were reporting sudden encounters with night Fighters where no night Fighters should have been Navigators were reporting Drop Zones too perfectly lit finally in December 1943 bomber command suspended all s soe flights over [Music] Holland the England game was over it was a disaster for S soe questions were asked at the highest levels in government there were calls for S soe to be killed off while the likes of MI5 and MI6 wanted to take it over but the minister responsible for S soe Lord selbourne reminded the cabinet that s soe was Churchill's own brainchild Seymour Bingham was simply removed from Baker Street and posted out of the way to Australia his predecessor Charles blizzard seems to have avoided any blame even though it was he who dispatched 40 of the doomed agents look this back in Holland Herman gkas realized it was over this radio game's Master of Ceremonies composed a mocking farewell message sent uncoded simultaneously over 10 captured radios on April Fool's Day 1944 it read for Bingham and success is limited you were trying to make business in Netherlands without our assistance we think this rather unfair in view of our long and successful cooperation as your sole agent but never mind whenever you will come to pay a visit to the continent you may be assured that you will be received with the same care and result as all those who you sent us before so long for the England game over the Germans turned on the captured agents they were transferred to the matous concentration camp in [Music] Austria there they were set to work quarrying stone for the Reich half of them died on the notorious death steps as they were made to March carrying huge Granite blocks on their backs the rest was shot just two survived the only female agent in the game game Beatrix turent and who blowers the man who started it [Music] all after the war the Dutch Parliament mounted a massive inquiry how could so many patriotic Dutchmen have lost their lives over two years they interviewed hundreds of witnesses their conclusion was that s soe's n section had been incompetent though who precisely was incompetent was never revealed there is a fear that certain people might be embarrassed where certain truths to be told about their participation in various SE soe activities but for some s soe were not entirely to blame they' been confronted by a daunting adversary and anyway spying is after all a high-risk occupation it was a combination of deaf police work by the Germans and lack of imagination in London that turned out fatal to all these chaps but when people were recruited into sooe they were told at their very first interview before even they'd been checked out by MI5 look if you do this you're putting your life on the line it's about evens when you come back and in Holland those were precisely the odds about half the agent said didn't come [Music] back but was it as simple as that investigating the England game has never been easy since all signal section records including Marx's reports disappeared after the war and all radio messages were destroyed in a fire but in 2004 new documents were discovered that had been withheld from the Dutch inquiry in 1949 they contained a clue this note sent by Sir Evelyn shukra of the foreign office to the British Ambassador in the hag refers to the penetration of s soe and mentions the use of double double agents who could these double double agents be one name that has suggested is who Blas himself in 1995 Leo Marx traveled to Holland to meet him Marx at least was convinced that lavas was not responsible and H laas died on the 13th of June 2004 so if it wasn't lvas who could it have been Dutch journalists had a suspect this man n section c more Bingham was he the man responsible for sending 54 agents and 83 air crew to their deaths Bingham had been born in Holland and was rumored to have a relative who worked for Herman gkz and Joseph shida during the war the fact that these rumors persist today may explain why many government files relating to the England game remain sealed suon till the year [Music] 2031 [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 57,398

Keywords: Timeline World History, Timeline, Full Length Documentary, History Documentary, World History, learn history, history facts, s.o.e, paratroopers, spies, world war 2, ww2, behind enemy lines

Id: fnNWJqdtXUQ

Length: 51min 20sec (3080 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2024