The publication of M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France, on 28 April 1966, represents a significant milestone in the history of British secrecy.Footnote 1 The book, which details the exploits in France of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization formed by Winston Churchill with the stirring instruction to ‘set Europe ablaze’, was the first official history of any secret service published by the British government. Thus, it went against the grain of the long-established convention that the United Kingdom never ‘did’ intelligence and that its activities should never be mentioned, save in the highest circles. Scholars, then and now, regard the book as history at its most meticulous. Stephen Ambrose, the esteemed biographer of American presidents, called it ‘the best-written book that I have read in a decade’.Footnote 2 It was also a bestseller; three months after publication, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) reported that it had sold out, from a print run of 10,000 copies.
As the top civil servant Burke Trend cautioned as early as 1959, by commissioning SOE in France and opening-up secret intelligence work to public view, the government was ‘sending an experimental ship into what were known to be uncharted waters’.Footnote 3 Many intelligence officers, like Edwin (Eddie) Boxshall, who had run SOE’s Romanian desk in London and for whom secrecy was a reflexive obsession, considered the book a dreadful mistake and had fought against its release, to no avail. Publication, then, was a calculated risk and officials knew that the decision could backfire. And so it proved. In 1969, Boxshall wrote that he never wanted to relive ‘the painful aftermath’, so distressing were the events.Footnote 4
The two of us have spent some twenty years investigating the SOE in France story, beginning with an article in the Historical Journal.Footnote 5 Having considered the book’s origins, we have recently become interested in the diplomatic and political fallout.Footnote 6 As we will demonstrate here, studying this fallout sheds important light on the subjects of official history, post-war Anglo-French relations, and Britain’s entry into the European Community.
Hitherto, the most widely discussed aspect of this aftermath concerns the libel actions brought by ex-SOE personnel.Footnote 7 It had been agreed by the steering committee which oversaw Foot’s work that he could name SOE officers and agents, rather than use their codenames. The committee worried that an alphabet soup of codenames ‘would make the narrative more difficult to follow’ and, remarkably, this concern trumped the argument that individuals who had worked with a secret organization could reasonably expect their identities to remain confidential.Footnote 8 This decision caused considerable blowback. The French (F) Section agent Odette Hallowes rejected Foot’s charge that she had suffered bouts of mental illness which had led her to exaggerate the torture she endured at the hands of the Gestapo. Peter Churchill, Odette’s former husband and fellow F Section member, demanded that the book be withdrawn from sale, citing gratuitous comments about his character. Keen to keep these disputes out of court, HMSO spent nearly three years negotiating public apologies and expensive settlements with the individuals concerned, with the taxpayer footing the bill.Footnote 9
A neglected, but equally important, dimension of the aftermath concerns Whitehall’s attempts to minimize the damage caused by the book to UK–French relations at a critical moment in the history of the European project. In his draft, Foot refused to pull his punches when it came to the French resistance and the Free French government-in-exile in London, led by General Charles de Gaulle. While an advocate of resistance in principle, he concluded that the size and impact of the Free France movement had been overstated. He argued that its much-heralded contribution to D-Day and the liberation of western Europe was largely Gaullist theatre, manufactured out of shame for the degree of active collaboration there had been by the French population with their Nazi occupiers. According to Foot, resistance fighters were loose-lipped and every SOE officer was told never to entrust a secret to them – except in dire necessity. So great was this concern, he revealed that the Allies only told de Gaulle about Operation Overlord on the morning of the assault.
French resistance groups deplored the attack on their leader, now President de Gaulle no less, and the overall heroic myth. While (as we shall see) changes were made by Foot prior to publication, as Colonel Maurice James Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F Section, described it, the book caused a ‘storm of indignation among a number of not very vocal French ex-members of my section’.Footnote 10 The weekly news magazine Le nouvel observateur called for the book to be pulped and demanded a national apology.Footnote 11 Sam White, the Paris correspondent of London’s Evening Standard, reported that, according to his resistance sources, de Gaulle regarded the book as ‘international mischief’ by Her Majesty’s Government (HMG), a deliberate attack on French pride.Footnote 12 This reaction alarmed British diplomats at a time when Prime Minister Harold Wilson was preparing a new application, in 1967, for the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community (EEC). De Gaulle vetoed the first bid in 1963 and it was feared that Foot’s book would encourage him to say ‘non’ for a second time.
The aim of this article is threefold. The first aspect is to deepen understanding of the management of official history projects by examining the background that landed the British government in diplomatic trouble with the French over the publication of SOE in France. The second aim is to add to the historiography of Britain’s efforts to join the European Community by exploring what action was taken by officials to clean up the mess on the eve of Britain’s second attempt to join the Common Market in 1967. The Foot issue does not feature in the literature on European integration. There is no mention of it in the three-volume Official history of Britain and the European Community.Footnote 13 To be clear: our intention is not to revisit the motives that convinced the Wilson government to reapply for membership to the EEC, a club which the UK originally refused to join, fearing the supranational features of the treaties and worrying about the impact on Commonwealth relations. There is well-established literature on the combination of economic, geopolitical, and party political factors that made accession to the European Community a measure of ‘last resort’ for British policy-makers by the mid-1960s.Footnote 14 As John Young, Oliver Daddow, and Helen Parr have shown, joining the prosperous nations of the Common Market was seen as a panacea to correct ‘stop–go’ economic performance at home, declining great power status abroad, and fractious politics within the cabinet and on the backbenches.Footnote 15 This article adds texture to this literature by showing how the Whitehall machine closed ranks to protect the second application, at all costs, from the unintended consequences of Foot’s book.
Finally, the article contributes to an important conversation about the merits and especially the ‘pitfalls’ of official history, first articulated by Herbert Butterfield and A. J. P Taylor in the 1950s but more recently examined by Michael Goodman, Patrick Salmon, and two special issues of the journal Diplomacy and Statecraft.Footnote 16 In 1951, in a collection of essays, Butterfield extended an article he had written in 1949 for the Irish journal Studies. Described by his biographer Michael Bentley as ‘one of his most violent essays’, in the piece Butterfield fired a broadside against the genre of official history, declaring ‘I do not personally believe that there is a government in Europe which wants the public to know the truth.’ He continued: ‘We must never lose sight of the separate interests of officialdom on the one hand and the academic historian on the other, never allow the situation to be blurred or the tension and conflict between the two to be quietened.’ There was, he held, a master–servant relationship between the state and official historians. By placing themselves at the service of the state, official historians were compelled to adopt the Whitehall ‘view of history’, to the exclusion of alternative interpretations, and had to accept that there was a ‘secret drawer’ of revelatory documents to which their governmental sponsors would never grant them the key. In short, they had to do what they were told.Footnote 17 Similar sentiments were expressed by Taylor in a series of press articles excoriating what he perceived as the dubious editing by official historians of British and German diplomatic documents of the interwar period.Footnote 18
Central to these diatribes was the issue of access to sources. Butterfield and Taylor considered it unfair – and a barrier to historical truth – that, while official historians had unparalleled access to files, outsiders, denied the same privilege, would have no means of testing the soundness of the works published. One of our motivations for writing this article about SOE in France is that it speaks to Butterfield’s complaint about the dangers of historians getting too close to the state – which is much more powerful and has its own vested interests, which tend to differ from those of the academic historian. Without a shred of remorse, once the project had turned sour, the authorities abdicated responsibility for any problems with the book that stemmed from their insistence that it be based only on the surviving written SOE archive. Content to leave their historian open to criticism, they muzzled Foot from revealing that he had been forbidden from interviewing all but a few SOE veterans, which would have explained some of the book’s shortcomings.
The National Archives, at Kew, holds ample material for researchers interested in the production of, and fallout from, Foot’s book. Among the documentary delights are the reflections of Patrick Reilly, British ambassador to Paris from 1965 to 1968, who was decisive in launching the damage control. Using this material, plus private papers, this article makes three arguments.
The first is that the diplomatic debacle with the French owed its origins partly to the British government’s rationale for commissioning the book in the first place. In the book’s preface, Foot explained briefly: ‘The project derives from the continuing concern expressed, both in parliament and outside it, that there should be an accurate and dispassionate account of SOE’s activities in the war of 1939–1945.’Footnote 19 Privately, the justification went deeper. There was, to borrow Butterfield’s expression, a ‘view of history’ that officials wanted to publicize. The key reason for sponsoring the work was to correct the narrative that Britain had played little or no part in wartime resistance. After 1945, a lopsided picture of resistance had emerged. From across the Channel, French historians neglected to mention the gallantry of SOE officers who had made hazardous nighttime landings into France and had launched acts of sabotage against the occupying forces. The Allies, it was argued, would not have retaken Europe without Le Général, who had fought a lonely battle against Hitler’s Germany and Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy puppet. From across the Atlantic, American historians queered Britain’s pitch by claiming that the best support for resistance in occupied territories came from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). From behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet bloc historians announced that the most successful resisters were communists, a particularly dangerous assessment to be gaining intellectual momentum in the context of the ongoing ideological struggle between East and West (the so-called Cultural Cold War). Against this background, officials in London pushed for a history to extol the British contribution, setting HMG on a diplomatic collision course with the French downstream.
Secondly, the diplomatic row also owed its origins to the substandard and blinkered vetting of the manuscript by the Whitehall machine. Prepublication review took a staggering three years. While warnings were raised about Foot’s treatment of the resistance, these had to compete for attention with a concern from the officials in charge of the vetting process of ensuring that the book did not offend establishment figures. When their political antennae should have been alert to the French reaction, they were more interested in cleansing the text of material that might damage the reputations of statesmen like Winston Churchill. In a classic case of double standards, they did not extend the same courtesy to Odette and Peter Churchill, whom they snobbishly referred to in official records as ‘small fry’.Footnote 20 Such elite arrogance proved costly as the ‘small fry’ got their revenge by suing for libel. There is a certain irony in the history of an organization widely seen as being an army of amateurs being managed into print by men who themselves were no more than enthusiastic amateurs when it came to the world of publishing. The results of this amateurishness were disastrous.
The final argument is that British officials sought to smooth over tensions with France by directing their anger at Foot. The official line became – in the words of the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department (PUSD), the Foreign Office liaison with the intelligence services – that Foot had gone beyond the ‘proper role of the historian’, a horrible slur which conveniently failed to attach any blame to the secret motivation for commissioning the work in the first place or the committee of officials tasked with making the manuscript ‘safe’ for publication.Footnote 21 The crux of the post-publication tension between Foot and officialdom was the research methodology which had underpinned the project: an exclusive reliance upon the surviving SOE archive. Foot was permitted to interview only a handful of survivors, all from the British side. Not a single French resister was consulted. Although Foot defended his opus with pugnacious pride, he was powerless as the authorities cauterized the diplomatic wound by both cancelling a French language edition of the book and putting the revised second edition into indefinite ‘cold storage’.Footnote 22 For Foot, the experience was a stark reminder that he was an official historian, with the emphasis on ‘official’, not ‘historian’.
I
The seeds of trouble with the French were planted in the 1950s. Over the decade, British officials convinced themselves that an official history of SOE was desirable for three principal reasons. Firstly, such a work would satisfy the growing pressure in ‘responsible academic circles’ for SOE’s contribution to be set in its ‘proper place and perspective against the general background of the war’.Footnote 23 For all that had been written about SOE, there was no coherent sense of the organization’s significance, since authors tended to focus on particular agents and operations, divorced from their overall historical context. Secondly, an official history would refute allegations of incompetence directed at SOE’s leadership. The chambers of parliament were legendary for holding fiery exchanges on whether bad decision-making by SOE headquarters had resulted in the torture and death of brave female agents. The cause of these women, whose service record remained hidden in classified files, was picked up mainly by Dame Irene Ward, Conservative MP for Tynemouth. A tireless campaigner against injustice, Ward accused HMG of overseeing a ‘conspiracy of silence’ and demanded an enquiry to determine whether SOE networks in Europe had been penetrated.Footnote 24 By the late 1950s, Ward’s campaign had to be combatted. Disturbingly, she had written to the foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, declaring that, ‘unless somebody is going to play straight with me, I have every intention of raising the question of the Secret Service in the House’.Footnote 25
The third reason for the official history was what set in motion the controversy with the French. The 1950s witnessed a surge of interest in the history of wartime resistance. To the vexation of Whitehall officials, no one was bothering to give the British their due credit, and it was concluded that something had to be done about this. In France, as Edward Hale from the Cabinet Office Historical Section lamented, there was an ‘absence of any information about the part played by SOE’. This, he warned, ‘created a bad impression’ among the French people that Britain had left its allies to the mercy of the Nazi enemy.Footnote 26 At the first annual international conference on the history of resistance, in Liège, in 1958, there was no mention of SOE by participating French historians. The British delegation came away concerned that Britain’s role in supporting resistance was, at best, being forgotten and, at worst, being erased.Footnote 27
French historians were not alone in failing to acknowledge the British contribution. From 1945, there had been much American braggadocio about the OSS, much of it at the direction of the OSS chief, General William Donovan. As legislators contemplated a proposal to establish the Central Intelligence Agency, Donovan had encouraged American historians and even filmmakers to bruit his service’s achievements, to convince the sceptics on Capitol Hill that intelligence was a game worth playing.Footnote 28 Donovan’s campaign to ‘sell’ US intelligence did not pass without comment in London. On 9 November 1945, the SOE deputy head, Harry Sporborg, wrote that the ‘contribution which this country made to resistance should not be overlooked or swamped by the propagandas of others’, adding that ‘the spate of publicity on this subject in the United States renders the question of giving publicity here more importance’.Footnote 29 Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, cautioned that ‘there may be some danger of opinion on the continent as well as in the United States forgetting the extent of British help’.Footnote 30
More alarming was the growing appropriation of the resistance by Soviet and satellite historians. As eastern bloc writers conceptualized it, the resistance was a mass uprising of the proletariat, led by communist parties, with the purpose of liberating occupied countries not only from fascism but also from their pre-war capitalist oppressors.Footnote 31 In October 1949, the Foreign Office’s secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), reported that in Italy the communists were making every effort to ‘arrogate themselves all the credit for partisan activities’.Footnote 32 In 1961, at the annual international conference on the history of resistance, this time in Milan, Soviet historians participated en masse to argue that the resistance was a communist-led ‘social movement’ that saved workers from capitalist exploitation. After the conference, the Oxford historian and SOE veteran William Deakin reported that ‘a deliberate and coordinated attempt is being made on the Soviet side to denigrate and distort the British position in relation to occupied Europe during the war … the intrinsic purpose of this operation is to capture exclusively for the Russians the myth of European resistance’.Footnote 33
In terms of creating the vacuum that others sought to fill, Britain had only itself to blame. The time-honoured ‘culture of secrecy’ that refused even to officially acknowledge the existence of its intelligence agencies extended to cover SOE, despite numerous publications leaving the public in little doubt about the organization’s existence. The official position can be seen in the attitude taken towards the 1958 Liège conference. An invitation to participate sent to London received the curt response: ‘We are not going.’Footnote 34 Yet, while the UK would not be present in an official capacity, approval was given for the SOE officer Brigadier Richard Hugh Barry to present a paper that was scrutinized in advance by the authorities.Footnote 35 Barry was accompanied by two Foreign Office minders – Boxshall and Margaret Jackson, wartime personal assistant to the head of SOE, Colin Gubbins. Rather than attending as representatives of HMG, all three participated as members of the Special Forces Club, a private drinking den in Knightsbridge for SOE officers and their immediate families.Footnote 36 Barry, whose sanitized paper was limited to eight pages, left Liège disappointed that he could not say more. Reporting to officials, he explained that British reticence ‘leads to a feeling of irritation amounting in some cases to resentment, which not only leads to loss of goodwill, but is reflected in the history which is ultimately written’.Footnote 37
With resistance historiography being written by Britain’s friends and enemies in ways that ignored the British contribution, the authorities in Whitehall concluded that an official history was needed to change the narrative, even if this meant potentially alienating powerful constituencies in Paris and Washington. It was a gamble, as acknowledged by the foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, in May 1960:
Unless there is an authoritative account of the part played by this country, our contribution to European resistance is likely to be misrepresented. But I have to think of the national interest; and I have to think of it in terms of the present and future rather than of the past … Then I have to consider the effect on our relations with our wartime allies, and whether the inevitable revival of old controversies and the re-opening of old wounds would not do more harm than good.Footnote 38
When it came to France, there were certainly old wounds to consider. De Gaulle had a long-standing antipathy towards Britain. Patrick Reilly, in unpublished memoirs, wrote that de Gaulle ‘imbibed his Anglophobia with his mother’s milk and from his father’s lips’.Footnote 39 The resistance leader Pierre Brossolette, in an oft-quoted remark, noted that de Gaulle needed reminding that Nazi Germany was the main enemy, since his natural inclination was to villainize Britain.Footnote 40 The relationship between SOE and the Free French had been a frosty one. De Gaulle resented SOE operating on French soil without his knowledge or permission. He distrusted SOE’s motives and harboured the suspicion that Britain did not share his desire to restore France to its former status. The suspicion was mutual. From what remains of the SOE archive, we can see that SOE officers viewed de Gaulle as ‘incalculable’, ‘unreasonable’, and ‘uncompromising’.Footnote 41 In the early days of the relationship between SOE’s F Section and the Free French’s fledgling spy service, Frank Nelson, SOE’s first chief, stressed ‘quite brutally’ that co-operation between the two ‘must be one sided’, adding ‘I should wish our F Section to be fully cognisant of everything that the de Gaulle people are doing, but I do not wish the de Gaulle organization to be in the least cognisant of anything that S.O.E. are doing.’ Nelson’s explanation for this was openly Francophobic: ‘One of the racial characteristics of the French Secret Service is a type of indiscretion which is completely horrifying to me.’Footnote 42
As the war concluded, de Gaulle endeavoured to downplay SOE’s contribution to France’s liberation. Famously, on 25 August 1944, from a window overlooking the Hôtel de Ville, the sacred site of France’s revolutions, he delivered an improvised speech to an exuberant crowd of Parisians declaring that the country had been ‘liberated by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, that is to say of fighting France, that is to say of the true France, the eternal France’.Footnote 43 It was, as the irreverent critic Jean-François Revel later described it, typical of the ‘hyperbolic truisms’ that characterized his oratorical style.Footnote 44 F Section agents whom de Gaulle encountered in liberated areas were told that they had 48 hours to leave the country – scant reward for what they had endured. In September 1944, the SOE fighter Peter Lake met with de Gaulle in Saintes only to be told by the irascible general ‘You have no business … leave … in a tone of voice which there was no mistaking.’Footnote 45 The F Section commander, Maurice Buckmaster, recalled a similar encounter involving an agent called George: ‘George was carried in triumph in a jeep through the streets of Toulouse. De Gaulle heard about this, came roaring down and told him to, in very rude French which I won’t repeat, the equivalent of “get the hell out of this, I don’t want you in this country”.’Footnote 46 This was the beginning of the Gaullist myth of the war: an idealized telling of history which held that France had liberated itself, owing to the fighting élan of its people and de Gaulle’s singular ability to unify the nation’s spider’s web of resistance movements. It was, as Patrick Bishop has written, a narrative invention designed to recover French self-esteem in the post-war period, build unity after decades of political division, and erase memories of how France had been crushed militarily and psychologically by the German blitzkrieg, which had culminated with the trauma of the French army in 1940 abandoning the City of Light without firing a shot.Footnote 47
This myth proved remarkably durable, aided in part by the British silence about its covert wartime activities, noted above. There is even tantalizing evidence that during the 1950s Britain played along with the Gaullist version of events, using this to the benefit of Anglo-French relations. The resistance served as a useful tool in the armoury of British diplomacy, to be deployed to help offset periods of turbulence in the relationship. During Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘exuberant’ state visit to France in April 1957, one of several instances of ‘post-Suez, fence mending’ royal diplomacy that year, the young monarch highlighted in her speeches the part played by the French resistance, an acknowledgement that delighted the Parisian press in their coverage of the goodwill trip.Footnote 48 Similarly, the decision in June 1957 for the Queen Mother to unveil a plaque in memory of the Free French at their wartime London headquarters, No. 1 Dorset Square, was motivated by a desire among a group of SOE alumni-turned-politicians to build bridges after Suez. The SOE officers behind the plan treated it as though it were a special operation, even assigning it a codename, ‘Operation Croix de Lorraine’, a nod to the famous emblem of the French resistance.Footnote 49 Of course, there was a marked difference between general praise for the resistance and what a detailed examination would reveal in an official history, when considering its role alongside SOE.
The decision to commission SOE in France, albeit without any guarantee of publication, was made by Patrick Dean, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Trend, then a rising star in the Treasury, on 3 May 1960. As Dean put it, ‘the only way to discover whether one can be written is to try and write it’.Footnote 50 Ministerial approval came from the foreign secretary, on 18 May.Footnote 51 It was a momentous decision. Under the 1958 Public Records Act, which prescribed a fifty-year rule on the declassification of state documents, researchers would not get access to Second World War records until the late twentieth century. In the case of SOE records, there was no guarantee that they would ever be released, since intelligence archives at the time existed in what Wesley Wark has called a ‘Never-Never Land’.Footnote 52
Not everyone was happy with the decision. William Mackenzie, author of a classified history of SOE completed in 1948, considered it a mistake to focus on France, which was bound to arouse the wrath of resistance figures, rather than produce a ‘broad and not very detailed survey of SOE as a whole’. With a case-study approach, he cautioned, it was impossible to avoid ‘the difficulty of having to deal with the parts played by individuals’, especially dramatis personae like de Gaulle.Footnote 53 The deputy secretary to the cabinet, Frederick Bishop, was enraged. It was, he asserted, ‘quite wrong to produce an official history’. By trumpeting SOE’s successes, he argued prophetically, such a work would ‘stimulate, rather than dispose of, the bitter controversies about some of the personalities involved’.Footnote 54 These concerns were dismissed. After staying silent while other countries had boasted about their secret wartime missions, Britain too was ready to engage in what Timothy Melley has called ‘performative secrecy’ about the ‘covert sphere’ – a selective lifting of the veil for the purpose of shaping public understanding.Footnote 55
II
Trend established a steering committee to advance the project, working together with SOE veterans Boxshall, Peter Wilkinson, and Norman Mott, all of whom had established post-war careers with secretive parts of the Foreign Office. To write the history, the committee turned to M. R. D. Foot, an Oxford don who spoke French and who had served in the Special Air Service during the war. Remarkably, Foot was never cleared by the Security Service (MI5) for the position. Years later, in a conversation with Trend, he learned that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the custodian of the SOE archive, had no desire to let MI5 know that ‘anyone was starting to paddle in this pool’.Footnote 56 The vetting process entailed Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the official biographer of King George VI, confirming that Foot was ‘all right’, a classic example of what Peter Hennessy has described as the ‘good chaps theory of government’, where being a gentleman opens doors denied to lesser mortals.Footnote 57
Foot was bound by strict rules, and the research was difficult. He was forbidden from telling anyone what he was working on, even his wife. He was allowed to consult files from the SOE archive, but could only do so in a locked room in the Foreign Office basement once the material had been vetted by his minder, Boxshall.Footnote 58 To leave the room, which contained a poster on the door warning ‘Private Eye is Watching You’, he needed to ring a bell. The archive itself existed in ‘almost inextricable confusion’.Footnote 59 At least 87 per cent of SOE records had been destroyed.Footnote 60 Many had perished in a much mythologized fire at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters in 1946, but far more when SIS unceremoniously disposed of them by the filing-cabinet load in a space-saving exercise. Making matters worse, efforts by inexperienced archivists to collate the most important papers into a central filing system had been largely unsuccessful.
SIS records were off-limits to Foot; in effect, they were ‘secret drawers’. Significantly, he was to base his history only on the surviving written record, and was expressly forbidden from talking to all save a few SOE veterans. He had an invitation to join the Special Forces Club but was told by Boxshall that, if he tried to accept it, the Foreign Office would use its veto power to block him.Footnote 61 Limiting Foot’s ability to interview surviving members came from a fear that people might look to influence his judgement or tell tales out of school. But, downstream, it was a decision that proved short-sighted and contributed to much of the hoo-ha. Documents are not a perfect window onto the past, especially documents that deal with the smoke-and-mirrors history of secret intelligence. By preventing Foot from corroborating his document-inspired arguments by talking to those with first-hand knowledge of events, officials increased the likelihood of mistakes and misrepresentations. In effect, they foolishly determined that methodological triangulation should not be part of the official historian’s toolkit.
Once Foot had finished writing, Trend invited different Whitehall stakeholders for their thoughts on the text. Clearance from a security-driven point of view was remarkably straightforward, with SIS content that the manuscript had not betrayed ‘sources and methods’. However, objections were raised regarding the book’s evaluation of the resistance. Martin Young, from the Foreign Office, was alarmed by what he regarded as Foot’s ‘anti-French’ bias and deplored the book’s ‘criticism or belittling of the French resistance and also of de Gaulle’. As well as calling for the deletion of fifty-three passages that were ‘regrettably critical or otherwise undesirable’, Young recommended that the book needed a ‘disarming introduction’, explaining that it was ‘dealing with a subject close to de Gaulle’s own heart and to the pride of Frenchmen in general’. He also recommended that ‘if Foot can say deservedly nice things about de Gaulle and the French so much the better’.Footnote 62 By early 1964, these issues had been addressed to the satisfaction of Trend, now cabinet secretary, and the foreign secretary, Rab Butler. In a submission to Downing Street, Trend noted that Foot had ‘added an introduction to put his story in its historical perspective and to disarm French susceptibilities as far as possible’.Footnote 63 Recommending publication, he described the work as a ‘scrupulously fair and balanced presentation of the events’. Having read Trend’s missive, Butler wrote to Number 10, stating that he was ‘assured that the publication of this book would not be likely to involve us in embarrassment with the French or any other foreign Government’.Footnote 64
By the end of the year, concern with the book’s reception in France surfaced again. In November 1964, worrying feedback arrived from the embassy in Paris over parts of the book that detailed the extent of anti-Gaullist feeling in Britain during the war. This, warned Peter Ramsbotham, head of chancery, was ‘much more likely to be picked up and used against us by French official propaganda than anything which the SOE organisation might have said and done’.Footnote 65 Crispin Tickell, a respected voice in the diplomatic service, offered a mixed assessment: while he considered the criticisms of de Gaulle mostly fair comment, because the general did not ‘worry much about our susceptibilities’ in his own self-promoting memoirs, he worried that ‘Foot’s strong prejudices’ about French incompetence and fighting spirit would ‘certainly reopen a lot of old wounds’.Footnote 66
Significant reservations were raised by Patrick Reilly, who in early 1965 had been appointed British ambassador in Paris. A committed Francophile who was said to know the names of every préfet and minister going back decades, Reilly had a natural feel for French sensitivities. Specifically, he was concerned about the manuscript from the perspective of protecting a renewed effort by the UK to join the EEC. Between 1960 and 1964, as deputy under-secretary for economic affairs at the Foreign Office, Reilly had been involved in the negotiations with the French that ended with de Gaulle’s veto of British entry in 1963. As a member of the committee on EEC membership, he supported that body’s assessment that accession to the Common Market was in Britain’s best interests.Footnote 67
By the mid-1960s, a second application was only a matter of time. The economic rationale for joining the European project had become compelling.Footnote 68 The EEC’s six founding members, especially Italy and West Germany, had enjoyed swift and sustained economic growth. This contrasted with the sickly British economy, which was not benefiting from the Commonwealth to the extent that post-war policy-makers had hoped. Then there were the geopolitical advantages. EEC membership offered Britain an opportunity to maintain status in the world, which had been weakened by Indian independence, the Suez Crisis, and the end of empire in Africa. Continued exclusion from a large and prosperous power bloc on its doorstep risked Britain being cut further adrift as a global actor. EEC membership also helped with the Special Relationship. Europeanists in the US State Department considered British accession to be a useful counter-balance to French ambitions in Europe, and to restore harmony to the Atlantic Alliance, with France threatening to withdraw from NATO integrated command structures.
Against this background, Reilly wrote a letter of protest to the steering committee, explaining that the book had the potential to cause ‘serious trouble’ for Anglo-French relations and damage a new application for EEC membership:
There is a good deal in the book which is likely to be resented by committed Gaullists and the General himself. He is after all made to look pretty silly in places. If Anglo-French relations were reasonably good at the time of publication or de Gaulle himself were no longer the ruler of France and Head of State, the book might easily pass without serious protest. As things are, Anglophobe supporters of the regime could easily make much capital out of it: and no amount of emphasis that the author’s views are his own only will affect the fact that the book is published by HMSO.Footnote 69
In sum, he demanded that ‘every possible effort should be made to remove any language not essential to the story to which exception could reasonably be taken by the French’.Footnote 70
Reservations about Foot’s manuscript were not confined to diplomatic circles. Buckmaster submitted a staggering thirty-five typed sheets of criticisms, to protest against how he had been portrayed but also to question the wisdom of Foot’s assessment of the resistance. In his words, the book was ‘full of cynical innuendoes, of tendentious conclusions based on a haphazard and arbitrary assessment of motives’.Footnote 71 Boxshall was horrified by comments like ‘Gaullists seemed unable to understand what security meant’.Footnote 72 Another SOE alumnus, Douglas Dodds-Parker, now a Conservative MP, declared simply that the book ‘MUST not be published’, arguing that ‘every sensitive French nerve would be set on edge by the general tone’.Footnote 73 Dodds-Parker’s intervention should have carried a certain clout. Having played decisive roles during the war in the reconquest of Ethiopia and the surrender of Italy, and through establishing intelligence liaison with the OSS, he was a revered figure on SOE matters. A passionate Francophile, whose exploits had earned him the Croix de guerre and enrolment in the Légion d’honneur, his contacts with French resistance luminaries were extensive.
Yet, remarkably, such correspondence failed to set off any alarm bells in London. Mott concluded that Foot neither ‘trod unnecessarily hard on French toes’ nor said anything negative about the amour-propre of the French that had not been said before.Footnote 74 Only once the book had entered production was Foot allowed to meet with Buckmaster, and only with a government lawyer at his elbow. By Foot’s telling, the meeting was less of a conversation than a staring match between two rival public school boys, with Buckmaster, wearing his old Etonian tie, determined not to blink before his Wykehamist adversary, and vice versa.Footnote 75 The treatment of Buckmaster is significant in terms of what it reveals about the differing attitudes that existed between Foot, the historian, and the authorities about the importance of witness testimony. Despite the old boy rivalry, Foot respected Buckmaster and decided to act upon several of his suggestions, adding the somewhat pointed observation that ‘much trouble would have been saved if he and I had been allowed in touch some years ago’.Footnote 76 This attitude stood in marked contrast to that of the SOE veteran and now Foreign Office mandarin Peter Wilkinson, who dismissed Buckmaster as a cross between a crank and a blowhard, stating witheringly that the colonel’s views ‘deserve the scantiest consideration’.Footnote 77
While concerns about the possible French reaction continued to be raised piecemeal, they found themselves competing with other issues that were occupying the attention of the steering committee. Chief among these priorities was a desire to protect the reputations of surviving coalition members. When officials should have been focusing on the diplomatic ramifications of Foot’s critical evaluation of the French, they were too busy pandering to the thin skins of Britain’s political elite. Trend had instructed the steering committee to ensure that all references to prominent British politicians were ‘carefully examined for accuracy and propriety’, and ruled that such individuals be afforded every opportunity to confirm that they were portrayed in a light that was satisfactory to them.Footnote 78 In effect, the ‘Great and the Good’ were allowed to take out their red pen.
Among those to take advantage of this privilege was Winston Churchill. The former prime minister, ever vigilant about being wronged, sent word through one of his private secretaries, Anthony Montague Browne, that he was troubled by Foot’s characterization of him and de Gaulle as being ‘equally infantile’ in their meetings together. ‘A distinction should really be drawn’, declared Browne, ‘between de Gaulle’s prima donna attitude and the overburdened prime minister.’Footnote 79 Foot agreed, meaning that, while de Gaulle was chastised in the final text for his childish outbursts, Churchill was not. Other coalition figures to benefit from Foot’s generosity included Clement Attlee (deputy prime minister), Lord Selborne (minister of economic warfare and SOE’s second political head), and Oliver Lyttelton (minister of production). The only hint of tension in making requested changes concerned feedback received from Anthony Eden, the wartime foreign secretary. Eden was ‘not happy’ with the assessment that he and Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare who set up SOE, were frequently at loggerheads and demanded its removal.Footnote 80 This was too much for Foot to stomach. In response, he suggested that Eden ‘may have forgotten in twenty years much that was notorious at the time’, and refused to amend the passage.Footnote 81 Here, Foot was wholly correct. Eden and Dalton, two very different personalities, regularly clashed over the political control of SOE.Footnote 82 As Eden saw it, Dalton paid insufficient attention to the concerns of diplomats, especially when it came to SOE’s exploits in or out of neutral countries. As Dalton saw it, Eden was ‘like the little boy trying to clutch all the toys’.Footnote 83
III
HMG took the remarkable decision not to inform the French government about Foot’s book until publication was imminent. This was partly rationalized on the grounds that ‘we do not want to give them any opportunity of suggesting alterations in the admittedly unlikely event that they should somehow be associated with it’.Footnote 84 Also, the steering committee felt that everyone involved had done an exemplary job. The committee praised Foot for behaving ‘really … admirably’, acknowledging the historian’s willingness to ‘stay up most of the night’ to make changes when required.Footnote 85 In so far as the book’s treatment of the resistance was concerned, officials were confident that due diligence had been taken, and that adverse reaction from French readers would be minimal. They were wrong.
On 11 May, Foot received a short letter from none other than de Gaulle, an early sign that this was to be no ‘ordinary’ book. At first blush, the letter appeared complimentary, with the general calling it a ‘very interesting contribution to the history of the Second World War’.Footnote 86 However, there are hints in the wording that de Gaulle was not being completely sincere. His comment – ‘Thank you for sending it to me, and I am very grateful for the terms in which you kindly dedicated it to me’ – was written in an idiosyncratic Gaullist style which suggested he was making the compliment through gritted teeth.Footnote 87
On 1 June 1966, Buckmaster wrote to Boxshall: ‘I cannot begin to tell you what distress this book has brought to my French friends – a distress which not unnaturally they vented on me.’ He continued: ‘I am far less happy about his evaluation of several of the agents and still less happy about the results which this book may have on Anglo-French relations.’Footnote 88 Tellingly, Buckmaster did not blame Foot for this. Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph, he argued that the book’s failings ‘weren’t the author’s fault’ but Whitehall’s since ‘official records are thoroughly incomplete’.Footnote 89 On 3 June, Boxshall received word that, during a dinner party the night before, Major Laurence Grand, who had headed Section D, one of SOE’s organizational forerunners, had told guests that his French colleagues intended to lodge a formal protest with the authorities.Footnote 90 Officials decided to ignore Buckmaster’s missive and the dinner party scuttlebutt, with Boxshall, entirely in keeping with official attitudes towards Buckmaster until this point, remarking contemptuously: ‘As far as his fear that the book may have unfortunate results on Anglo-French relations, no doubt the views of Her Majesty’s ambassador in Paris on this subject are more authoritative than Colonel Buckmaster’s.’Footnote 91 Here, Boxshall was conveniently forgetting that one of the loudest voices against the book had been Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador.
The French press were quick to attack the book. Le nation française described it as being ‘harsh if not insulting for the French resistance’.Footnote 92 Le nouvel observateur was scathing in its assessment. ‘Scandal surrounding a book’, emblazoned one of its headlines.Footnote 93 The magazine highlighted Foot’s failure to interview surviving participants, calling this a ‘curious way of writing history’.Footnote 94 ‘Errors, errors – that’s the French verdict on the SOE book’, reported the Evening Standard.Footnote 95 French journalists even took issue with the trivial revelation that F Section members had returned to England with so much French perfume that they resorted to using it as lighter fluid.
A particularly fierce critic in the French press was Andre Dewavrin. Universally known as ‘Colonel Passy’, Dewavrin was the former head of Free France’s secret services, the Bureau central de renseignements et d’action (BCRA), which he had run from 10 Duke Street in London, 100 yards from SOE’s Baker Street residence. Passy was appalled by Foot’s characterization of him in the book. By the author’s telling, behind Passy’s baby face and easy smile, was a ruthless, thoroughly amoral brute. Passy was angered by the book’s discussion of the tense relationship between SOE and BCRA, suggesting that he ‘could go on and on describing the omissions, inaccuracies and indiscretions’.Footnote 96 Vexing to him was the claim that SOE’s leadership, as well as members of the coalition, had not regarded bringing de Gaulle to power as one of their objectives. Also troubling was Foot’s revelation that the British believed that every message sent by the French using their own code could be read by the Germans. ‘If this were true’, Passy fumed, ‘then it was surely criminal of the British to allow us to go on using them.’Footnote 97 In Le Figaro littéraire, he admonished: ‘Let no one pretend that it [the book] represents official history: it is – worse still – an officially muzzled history.’Footnote 98
Passy’s outrage could not be ignored. He was a hero of the resistance and one of the most decorated men in France. During the war, he had been chosen by de Gaulle to lead the BCRA, which the Allied commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, calculated was worth six Allied divisions. Worryingly for officials, in a letter to Reilly, he claimed that his criticisms of the book had ‘received the personal approval of General de Gaulle’.Footnote 99 Amid the furore, Foot spoke with Passy in Paris. Describing the encounter to the authorities, Foot wistfully noted that, had this conversation occurred prior to the book’s publication, he would have been spared from getting ‘several facts wrong’.Footnote 100 With his reputation as a historian being slandered in the French press, Foot protested to officials that he should be able to defend himself by highlighting that he had been prevented from verifying the accuracy of his manuscript through triangulation with French sources and witnesses. Shockingly, he was told that, should he pursue this line of self-defence in public, the official counter-claim would be that he had been allowed to meet everyone he had deemed necessary, and that, if he had wanted to see more, he should have insisted upon doing so.Footnote 101 The threat worked: when asked by a curious journalist why did he did not pursue more witness testimony, Foot blamed time constraints, spreading the fiction that he ‘owed it to the survivors, and still more to their dead companions, to get something into print quickly to show that the dead deserve honour’.Footnote 102
Donald Arthur Logan, head of press relations at the Paris embassy, was so unnerved by Passy’s intervention that he questioned the wisdom of publishing a planned French translation of Foot’s book: ‘Would it not be worthwhile reconsidering, from the political point of view, whether it would not be better for our relations with the French to leave the book in English only?’Footnote 103 Logan’s feelings on this hardened after speaking with a Parisian journalist who had served in the resistance. The journalist told him that ‘matters connected with the resistance were so controversial that to publish any general edition in French would be very hazardous’. The journalist argued that, if a French edition was unavoidable, it should be published by an academic press, at a prohibitively high price, to ensure that ‘only serious students would get hold of it’ and not the general public.Footnote 104 Echoing Reilly’s earlier concerns about the book, Logan worried about the potential for a translation to turn French public opinion against a renewed bid by the UK to join the EEC. In his job at the embassy, he was directing various cultural initiatives designed to endear the British to French audiences, and wanted nothing to undermine these efforts. On his watch, British films like Goldfinger, The Ipcress file, and Alfie were shown at the Cannes Film Festival – although, as he quipped in his unpublished memoir, Sean Connery and Michael Caine would not have been his preferred choice to ‘persuade a sceptical Europe of the moral and cultural leadership that British entry into the new European arrangement might bring’.Footnote 105
Foot had fought hard for a French translation of his book. In September 1964, he explained to the steering committee that ‘there was a real danger that the communists in France would produce their own highly slanted version of the history if no official translation were to exist’.Footnote 106 This, he emphasized, in a nod to the book’s secret origins, ‘would do much to destroy the effect we hope the history will have in France’.Footnote 107 As publication of the English-language version approached, he continued to stress the point. In September 1965, he suggested that Henri Michel would be a suitable translator because he understood the ‘idiosyncratic vocabulary’ of the subject, which many former partisans were fastidious about.Footnote 108 In February 1966, Foot telephoned William McIndoe, head of the Cabinet Office Historical Section, to ‘register his anxiety that, if we did not set in train very quickly a French translation, we would be beaten to the post by a French pirated edition’.Footnote 109 Despite Logan’s concerns about a translation, this remained the view of both Trend and the Foreign Office in London going into the summer of 1966. As J. Jackson of the Foreign Office’s IRD wrote around this time, ‘We do not think that we should allow Gaullist reactions to deter us from arranging a French edition.’Footnote 110
Matters were complicated by a row between HMSO and Le nouvel observateur. On 1 June, the magazine appeared on sale with an announcement on the back page declaring that extracts from Foot’s book would appear in it the following week. Fayard, the prospective publisher of the French-language edition, thereupon warned HMSO that, if the serialization went ahead, they would no longer be interested in the French volume rights to the book.Footnote 111 With this, HMSO took legal action to protect the copyright. On 10 June, the president of the Seine Tribunal approved an injunction to prevent the publication of the offending article. He also granted permission for the seizure of any copies already printed.Footnote 112 Over the ensuing days, the British embassy in Paris was criticized as Le nouvel observateur reported that policemen had kicked down the doors of their office and read out a proclamation from the queen, a blatant falsehood but one that stirred up cries of ‘la perfide Albion’ among the French populace.Footnote 113 Worse followed: the magazine then claimed damages in a French court from HMSO amounting to £2,000.Footnote 114
Although HMSO was successful in defeating this litigation, the spat brought back into focus the merits of moving forward with a French edition. On 14 July, Reilly expressed his unease: ‘I feel bound to advise that the question of a French publication should be put again to ministers before proceeding further with the signature of a contract with Fayard.’Footnote 115 His rationale for advising against publication was twofold. Firstly, he worried about the ‘risks of a severe French, especially Gaullist, reaction’.Footnote 116 Given that there had already been fierce French criticism of the English edition, he was certain that such hostility was ‘bound to increase considerably when the French readership of the book is greatly extended by the publication of a French edition’. Secondly, he feared litigation. He noted that a ‘major criticism’ was that ‘Foot did not consult French archives or even French participants’, meaning that errors of fact had been made about individuals. Given that Fayard could not grant HMSO an indemnity, it was feared that damages from a French edition could stretch to £20,000.Footnote 117
Reilly was joined in questioning the wisdom of a French translation by Bernard Ledwidge, the resident minister (number two) at the Paris embassy: ‘It is not clear to me that the point has been fully grasped by ministers in London that publication of a French version might lead to a series of very bitter rows here.’ Not only was there the danger of recriminations between British and French commentators about ‘whether credit and blame for various exploits are fairly divided between SOE and French organisations’, but there was the risk that the book would ‘re-open old wounds in the French body politic which are only now beginning to heal’. In particular, he worried about conflict between Gaullists and Vichyites. While confessing that it was not in his nature as a bibliophile to advise against publishing a book, Ledwidge stressed that ministers needed to consider that, ‘whereas the subject matter of the book is of direct concern to only a few people in Britain, it touches on the very deep feelings of many millions in France’.Footnote 118
Reilly’s and Ledwidge’s warnings made them few friends in London. N. Thompson, the director of publications at HMSO, explained that negotiations with Fayard had been concluded and cautioned that, should ministers decide to back out now, it would appear like bad faith on the part of HMG and cost the publishing house some £3,500.Footnote 119 The Foreign Office PUSD warned that, if the book was not published in French, negotiations with other foreign publishers presently in train would have to be abandoned. These included advanced dealings for translated editions with publishers from Italy, Norway, and the United States.Footnote 120 In an important development, however, Trend, as the prime mover behind the whole SOE in France project, started to have doubts. The trigger for this was the shock of the July sterling crisis. As Helen Parr and Jeffrey Pickering have argued, the crisis was the decisive episode that brought the simmering proposals for a new British application to the EEC to the boil.Footnote 121 This was ‘Labour’s Suez’; despite his successful stand against devaluation, the crisis was the transformational moment that forced a reluctant Wilson to seek a European solution to the sterling problem, and more generally established consensus among Britain’s ruling elite that the only escape from economic decline was a ‘second try’ at EEC membership.Footnote 122 Against this background, on 9 August, Trend stressed to senior officials involved with the book: ‘Even if it loses us money, we ought to be sure of our ground before publishing a French edition.’Footnote 123
IV
While officials in London prevaricated over the best course of action, the embassy in Paris, on the front line of Anglo-French relations, became increasingly exasperated by the fallout from Foot’s book. In August – observing that ‘Peter Churchill has dared to tread where Odette would not’ (in pursuing a libel case before a jury) – embassy staff urged London to pay him off with an out-of-court settlement. A court case, they feared, would be scrutinized by the French press, especially around the aspects of the SOE story ‘which would present British participation in the resistance in the dimmest possible light’. In turn, this would undermine the embassy’s efforts to nurture the ‘emotional links which still do a lot to bridge the intellectual gap which separates our governments’.Footnote 124
In October, the embassy fretted about the imminent publication of Inside SOE by E. H. Cookridge, which was being marketed as the book that Foot wanted to write but, as an official historian, was prevented from doing so. A private author with a fertile imagination – who had erroneously claimed in the past of being a secret agent and a confidant of the SIS traitor George Blake – Cookridge had submitted his manuscript for prepublication review but only as a token gesture, since he refused to make any changes. Alarmingly, he was more scathing than Foot about the penetration of SOE’s networks in France, which the embassy feared would ‘revise resentment in certain French quarters about SOE’s mistakes and the subsequent death of a number of French agents or sub-agents’.Footnote 125 Passy, who had read an advance copy, was ‘hopping mad’ about the book. Especially troubling to him was Cookridge’s allegation that, on his orders, his subordinates had beaten up a Frenchman called Maurice Dufour, a hero who had masterminded the escape of Allied pilots and prisoners-of-war from Nazi-occupied France, simply because he had joined British intelligence in preference to BCRA. On this point at least, Passy had good reason to be worried. Decades later, it was revealed by the investigative journalist Michael Bilton that Passy, from the basement of 10 Duke Street, had presided over a ‘mini-Bastille in the centre of Britain’s capital city’, where many of de Gaulle’s own countrymen, including Dufour, were subjected to brutal beatings.Footnote 126
On 9 November, Denis Greenhill, deputy under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote to Reilly declaring that ‘we would like very much to be able to recommend to ministers that we should go ahead’ with the French translation.Footnote 127 Reilly disagreed. On 24 November, he produced his longest letter of protest yet, emphasizing ‘I cannot feel reassured about the consequences of publishing the book in French.’ Reilly recapitulated his concern about the possibility of libel actions by ex-Free French members. Foot had been highly critical of certain individuals, whom he had named, and had revealed that SOE headquarters had been so exasperated by their incompetence that they would not allow the Free French to run operations themselves but instead encouraged ‘two resistances’. This, cautioned Reilly, was fertile ground for libel action. Reilly repeated the danger of touching off French criticism at a time when HMG was hoping to change the French attitude to British membership of the EEC. A French translation, he warned, would be weaponized by ‘those who wish to keep us out of the Common Market’. Reilly also stressed that, while it might seem odd in Britain that feelings about the resistance should run so high in France, ‘the French are quick to resent criticism from the outside and in the present case they would be very sensitive because the book is published by HMSO and its publication in French would be expressly authorised by HMG’.Footnote 128 In essence, he was communicating that the resistance was more than ‘history’; after de Gaulle’s political comeback in 1958, which had helped to avert possible civil war as the country ripped itself apart over the Algerian crisis, it was the glue that held the Fifth Republic together.
With the fate of the French translation unclear, Fayard’s president, Charles Orengo, demanded a meeting with Thompson. On 28 November, Orengo met with Thompson in London, where he tried to ease concerns about the volume, arguing that the ire of the old resistance leaders had already been exhausted by the English-language edition. As an ex-resistance fighter himself, he stressed that he had ‘no doubt’ about this.Footnote 129 Whitehall dithering was harming his relations with other resistance writers who had seen their publishing schedules pushed back because Fayard had wanted Foot’s book to come first. With the manuscript now translated, at some cost to the publisher, Orengo underlined that he would not accept any further delays so that Foot could make revisions.
Orengo’s intervention forced Trend’s hand. On 14 December, he called a conference in his office with his most trusted advisers and key Foreign Office figures. As J. Jackson put it, several ‘points in connection with SOE in France had come to a head at the same time’, meaning that a decision now had to be made.Footnote 130 Fayard needed an answer. Also, Foot had just been offered a chair at the University of Manchester, meaning that his bandwidth for future work on SOE in France was diminishing. After a long discussion, it was agreed that the French edition should be postponed, potentially for three years, by which time it was hoped that a fully revised second edition of the English text would be finished and the political context would be more propitious. This was rationalized on the grounds that the embassy’s objections ‘outweighed the historical and political advantages which we had originally expected to derive from the book’.Footnote 131 A few months later, the decision was taken, following further communiqués from Reilly about ‘European Common Market developments’, to cancel the French edition permanently.Footnote 132 This was done in the knowledge that HMSO would be liable for breach of contract, with Treasury lawyers estimating that Fayard could sue for loss of earnings and translation costs amounting to £5,000.Footnote 133 Interestingly, Orengo graciously accepted the decision and called off his lawyers. ‘Not as bad as we thought’, reported HMSO’s literary agent.Footnote 134
Despite his teaching commitments at Manchester, plus exacting work on editing the Gladstone diaries for Oxford University Press, Foot found the time over the next two years to complete an extensively revised second edition. However, by the time it was ready, the authorities were keen to put this particular experience of official history behind them. In November 1969, Trend accepted the verdict of the diplomat Dame Barbara Salt that the work ‘should never see the light of day’.Footnote 135
What is striking from reading the correspondence associated with this decision – now declassified – is just how vituperative officials had become towards Foot by this point, conveniently disregarding three cold truths: he had been appointed to champion Britain and SOE’s cause, even at France’s expense; he had been required to do so almost exclusively from access to the surviving written record; and it had been the steering committee who had failed to make the book both legally and politically fireproof. Moreover, officials seemed to hold the absurd view that the job of ‘official historian’ conferred infallibility. Salt, in scathing language, branded Foot a ‘nuisance’, held him personally responsible for Peter Churchill ‘jumping on the pecuniary bandwagon’, and decreed that the revised second edition should be put into ‘indefinite cold storage in our archives’, as if it were a piece of meat.Footnote 136 Peter Wilkinson – who, lest we forget, was part of the steering committee and who had previously dismissed Buckmaster’s concerns with barely concealed contempt – wrote sneeringly: ‘I am horrified to learn how much the publication of SOE in France has cost the taxpayer partly at least for the really almost unpredictable reason that a scholar of Winchester and New College and a professional historian was found guilty of not verifying his references.’Footnote 137 Such assessments were a far cry from the steering committee’s earlier judgement that Foot had behaved ‘really … admirably’. In effect, the institutional memory about the book was being rewritten.
Foot had assumed that HMSO would compensate him with a slice of the sales from the English edition, especially where it had been a bestseller. However, he was told by an official, with mandarin assured arrogance and dry mockery, ‘But my dear sir, we cannot fritter the taxpayer’s money away on royalties.’Footnote 138 A third impression of the first edition was published in paperback in 1976 – but, shockingly, no one bothered to tell Foot. This, conceded one official, was ‘probably deliberate’.Footnote 139 Put simply, Foot was scapegoated by officials as they attempted to cover up their mistakes.
V
In conclusion, this article has discussed an overlooked episode in the history of post-war Anglo-French relations and the development of the European project: the aftershocks from the publication of Foot’s landmark history, SOE in France. While British officials could never fully predict in which direction the horse would bolt by publishing the first official history of a secret organization, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they failed to give sufficient thought to possible second- and third-order consequences. This is staggering when we consider that the steering committee was created explicitly to look beyond the horizon for problems and was chaired by Trend, the consummate cautious bureaucrat.
In their eagerness to reclaim, or at least rebalance, the history of resistance, officials underestimated the potential of a work based almost exclusively on the British archival record to upset the French memory of the war. While focusing their attention upon ensuring that the manuscript did not offend senior politicians, they dismissed important and repeated warnings about the manuscript’s likely reception in France. Buckmaster’s protestations generated eye-rolls. Surprisingly, officials paid scant attention to the counsel of Patrick Reilly, despite his deep knowledge of French sensitivities.
The upshot of these errors was a diplomatic disturbance with the French that came at the worst possible time for the British government as it looked to make a second bid to join the Common Market. In an unedifying attempt to resolve the diplomatic kerfuffle and safeguard a future EEC application, officials, rather than admit their own mistakes, reneged on promises made to Foot and cast him as a second-rate historian who should have been more careful. After press criticism struck him where he was most sensitive – his scholarly bona fides – he was unable to properly defend himself in public. Appallingly, when he looked to reveal that officials had blocked his access to survivors, the authorities resorted to blackmail, telling him that they would retaliate by spreading the lie that he had never asked to conduct more interviews. The treatment of Foot, who throughout the project had shown a high quota of gritted-teeth tolerance, serves as a salutary parable about the disparity in power relations between historians and policy-makers, and would have prompted Herbert Butterfield to say, ‘I told you so’. As anyone who had the pleasure of meeting him will know, Foot, who passed away in 2012, was unquestionably thick-skinned. But one could imagine more sensitive souls being pushed to the edge by what he experienced as an official historian: the hostile feedback, the legal actions, the impugning of his scholarly competence, the censorship of what he could say about the book’s construction, and the suppression of the translation and revised edition. And what, in the end, came of officialdom’s scapegoating of Foot? In 1967, when Britain again asked to join the EEC, de Gaulle gave an emphatic ‘non’ anyway.
Interestingly, Trend confided in Boxshall that ‘he did not regret the decision to publish SOE in France’.Footnote 140 By the early 1970s, he had even become the driving force behind what would become the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, by Harry Hinsley and others, published in five volumes between 1979 and 1990. However, determined to learn lessons from SOE in France, Trend ensured that the Hinsley project was a different animal from Foot’s effort. Hinsley was largely prohibited from naming individuals and detailing operations. There was to be no assessment of the war-fighting competencies of Britain’s allies. This was the price of the blowback from Foot’s book. As Hinsley put it, he was instructed to write his account ‘sans monstres, sans héros’ – without monsters, without heroes – and he was told explicitly that it was ‘meant to be bloodless’.Footnote 141 For some readers, this made the text heavy-going and dry, with Maurice Oldfield, a former head of SIS, complaining that ‘you get the impression that the intelligence war was won by committees in Whitehall’.Footnote 142
With chilling echoes of Foot’s treatment by officials, Hinsley, too, had to show extraordinary levels of perseverance to navigate what at times were serious attempts to abandon the project altogether.Footnote 143 The secret services had originally agreed to co-operate with the history by granting file access to properly vetted researchers. However, while MI5 and GCHQ were true to their word, SIS point-blank refused Hinsley and his team access to any of its records.Footnote 144 On the eve of the first volume’s publication, SIS even had the chutzpah to ask the Palace to offer Hinsley an early knighthood in return for burning the manuscript and walking away.Footnote 145 Further research is needed on this, but there seems to be a pattern of official historians of intelligence, certainly from this era, having to brave strong headwinds to get published. The problems faced by Hinsley did not repeat precisely those faced by Foot. But they certainly rhymed.
For all the difficulties he endured, Foot could take pride in knowing that his book paved the way for further official histories of intelligence downstream. In the 1980s, Whitehall decided to brave the subject of SOE once again by publishing SOE in the Far East (1983) and SOE in Scandinavia (1986), both by Charles Cruickshank.Footnote 146 In managing these works, it appears that officialdom learned nothing from the experience of SOE in France.Footnote 147 Like Foot before him, Cruickshank was restricted to working solely from the SOE archive, meaning that the books were heavily criticized for failing to consult foreign records, scholarship, and surviving witnesses. When it came to the Scandinavian volume, Cruickshank spent a grand total of eight days in Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen (achieving what, exactly, is unknown), and curiously described the book in terms modern readers would recognize, as a ‘work from home’ effort.Footnote 148 In 1987, officials commissioned none other than Foot to tackle SOE in Belgium and the Netherlands, an appointment rationalized on the grounds that he was by then the doyen of SOE history and therefore the obvious choice. However, officials refused to eat humble pie. According to Foot, he received a ‘grudgingly worded’ letter of invitation from the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, lacking any contrition for past behaviour towards the author.Footnote 149 SOE in the Low Countries was eventually published in 2001.Footnote 150 Foot was also entrusted by officials to edit for publication William Mackenzie’s in-house history of SOE. This was published in 2000, some five decades after it had been written.Footnote 151
The biggest rolling back of the curtain of secrecy came with the publication of authorized histories of MI5 in 2009, SIS in 2010, and GCHQ in 2020.Footnote 152 None of these works would have been possible without Foot’s determination to see his work published. Alas, the files that underpin the commissioning of these histories remain closed. One must wait, therefore, to know if they, too, qualify as livres problématiques.
Acknowledgements
For assistance in helping to translate French-language material, we are grateful to Adam Agowun, a Wolfson-funded PhD student in French Studies at the University of Warwick’s School of Modern Languages and Culture.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Open access
