Madeleine's War (42 page)

Madeleine's War
is fiction: the plot and the characters have been invented. But the background—the context—is real.

SC2 is modeled on SOE, the Special Operations Executive, set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to parachute agents—male and female—behind enemy lines in occupied territories all over Europe, to carry out acts of sabotage and to prepare Resistance workers for an uprising when the invasion occurred. The existence of the organization—especially its use of women—was a closely guarded secret for several years.

The female agents were often recruited through FANY, and were trained in remote locations in Scotland and England, where they were taught sabotage techniques, communications skills, disguise, and how to resist interrogation because, as stated in the text, half of them were caught within six months of being dropped behind enemy lines. As part of their training, recruits were taught how to spot if they were being followed, and how to lose a tail when it was necessary. They were sent on exercises where they had to live off the land in the most inhospitable parts of the Highlands. As described, they were made to memorize a poem that could be used as the basis for code should their one-time pads be lost or used up. When they were parachuted into occupied territory, their silk one-time pads were sewn into their clothing. They were not sent out into the field until they could transmit Morse code signals of at least forty words per minute.

Carborundum powder—silicon carbide—
was
used to disable the axles of railway wagons, and cyanoacrylate
was
developed as a gunsight but found wider use as a powerful adhesive. All efforts were made to make training as realistic as possible, with recruits being duped at critical times.

The Paris Gestapo were headquartered in the avenue Foch, where they had several prison cells for interrogation purposes. The Gestapo did penetrate SOE security, and did break their codes. They announced this to SOE in a series of dramatic communiqués following D-Day and just before they withdrew from their locations in Paris and elsewhere in occupied France. This news was leaked to Members of Parliament, and this is how the existence of SOE was revealed.

The headquarters of SOE were near Baker Street, much as were those of SC2, hidden behind a misleading “front” set-up. They did provide the BBC with its nightly broadcast of mysterious codes, many of which were made up.

There was a ten-mile coastal exclusion zone around the southern half of Britain throughout most of the war.

Winston Churchill did operate much of the time from a bunker below ground, under King Charles Steps, off Whitehall. These offices may now be visited as a tourist attraction.

The Manhattan Project—the Allies' top-secret operation to create an atomic bomb—employed hundreds of scientists of many nationalities in Los Alamos in the remote New Mexico desert, and French physicists were central to the success of the development of nuclear physics, winning Nobel Prizes for their efforts. The communists in France
were
at odds for most of the later months of the war with General de Gaulle, who worried about their links with Soviet Russia. He also tried to play up the role of French forces in the liberation of the country, and sought to minimize the role played by British and other Allied special forces.

After the invasion of 1944, when Allied forces swept south and then east through northern France towards Paris, German forces did hold out at three Atlantic ports where they had submarine bases: Brest, St. Nazaire, and La Rochelle. The latter two locations were in areas honeycombed with underground caves; and it was in one of these, at Lascaux, that during the war prehistoric paintings were discovered, showing many animals, some of which were extinct.

All the prisoner-of-war camps and concentration camps existed just as described in the text. Lysanders were one type of small aircraft used to drop agents into occupied territory and, most of the time, they flew when the moon was full.

Peter Watson is a well-known and respected historian whose books are published in twenty-five languages. He was educated at the Universities of Durham, London, and Rome, and his writing has appeared in the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and numerous publications in the United Kingdom. From 1997 to 2007 he was a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has written two previous novels,
Gifts of War
and
The Clouds Beneath the Sun
, under the pen name Mackenzie Ford.