6/22/2023 0 Comments Secret agents in ww2One of those, Liberation, was by leading historical novelist Imogen Robertson, writing under the pen name Imogen Kealey. Events include a memorial service at the SOE memorial in France, which Francis was to attend until the coronavirus lockdown cancelled his plans.Īlongside such ceremonies, a clutch of new novels based on the lives of real agents are being published – it was Prosper’s story that inspired my own, The Winter Agent, in which the leader of Britain’s Paris circuit is given a vital mission to uncover the details of a German counter-attack against D-Day but a traitor in his network sets the Gestapo on his trail.Īnd in March alone, two novels were released about the exploits of Nancy Wake, one of SOE’s most celebrated officers – famous for having killed an SS sentry with her bare hands during one daring operation. But the 75 th anniversary is a point in time to remember. Since the end of the war, recognition of the sacrifice of SOE officers has been patchy, in part due to the secret nature of their mission. She was one of those who were widows without knowing it.” “I was too young to appreciate VE Day, but my mother was affected badly – there was everyone celebrating and she knew nothing about my father because the news of the deaths of the agents hadn’t come back. Photograph: Courtesy of Francis J Suttill Major Francis Suttill and his wife, Margaret, pictured in 1936. “I was invited to an event marking the 75 th anniversary of the liberation of Sachsenhausen,” Francis says. But Major Suttill did not survive to see the Germans driven from France. The BBC’s restoration revealed a reference code on the metal, showing that it had held two sten submachine guns, 600 rounds and 12 grenades – weapons to harry the occupying German troops and ambush them when D-Day arrived. The supply canister featured on The Repair Shop was given to Francis by a farmer’s son who was 19 when it was dropped by the RAF for Prosper on to his family farm. But poor luck, mistakes by one of his lieutenants and the presence in the network of a traitor who was feeding information to the SS led to the Germans capturing Suttill, as well as more than 150 agents and Resistance fighters. For six months he built a large operation that helped destroy the German occupation from within. Prosper’s role was perhaps the most important in Europe: he was to lead the network covering Paris. When war broke out, he volunteered for the army and was eventually recruited to the SOE, a new organisation so secret that very few were aware it even existed. Major Suttill was born in France and educated in England, becoming a barrister. “But it has left its scars and I do well up when people ask me about my father’s time in Sachsenhausen.” “To an extent, I don’t feel his loss because it’s something I’ve never had,” he says. Now a number of events, TV programmes and books are marking the sacrifice of the SOE agents alongside their comrades in uniform.įrancis was only two when his father parachuted into France in October 1942, and he has no memories of him, knowing him only from photographs and the reports Prosper filed while living clandestinely in Paris. More harrowingly, it had also been 75 years since the execution by Nazi Germany of scores of the agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) being held as prisoners of war. This month saw unexpectedly muted events to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the coronavirus crisis dampening what should have been a moment of unbridled joy recalled. He was executed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp six weeks before the second world war ended in Europe.
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