The Current - The couple who fought Nazis behind enemy lines

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Sonia and Guy d'Artois were part of a secret force that parachuted into occupied France to help fight Nazis during the Second World War. In May, Nahlah Ayed told the story of their love affair — and their mission behind enemy lines — in her book, The War We Won Apart.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. She learned how to handle explosives. She learned how to make bombs. She learned how to blow up bridges. She learned how to do silent killing. That's Nadia Murdoch speaking about her mother, Sonia D'Artois. Sonia was part of a covert force that helped change the trajectory

of the Second World War. And her story is the subject of Nala Ayed's latest book. It is called The War We Won Apart, the untold story of two elite agents who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II. Nala Ayed, of course, is the host of CBC Radio's Ideas. We spoke about her book in May, and we thought on this Remembrance Day that we would revisit our conversation.

Who was Sonia Butt? Sonia Butt was, when we meet her in the book the first time, a 15-year-old girl who grew up mostly in France, who joined hordes of people who were trying to make their way off the mainland of Europe and back home to Britain. So she lived in a broken family. Her father and mother had separated when she was very young. She was a bit of a tomboy. She was adventurous. She had one brother with whom she liked to spend time.

But most of the time, she knew how to operate on her own. And that is kind of her defining feature. She grew up as a French teenager. She knew what it was like to be French. She spoke French fluently. And in the future, of course, that helps decide what her role is during the war. But this was on the eve of war. She makes her way back and becomes, at the age of 17, a member of the WAF, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, which was designed for women to support the Air Force.

And then the story unfolds from there. the Air Force. And then the story unfolds from there. She had, I mean, you write in the book that she'd had a life that was charted by war and sometimes and grew up with a lot of trauma in her life. How did that shape who she was? Yeah. I mean, it really boils down to that point that I mentioned just a moment ago, which is that she really had to rely on her own wits. When her mom and her father broke up, she was only three years old. By the time she was five, she had been taken to hospital with signs of abuse and malnutrition. She had what she described as a mother who was neglectful, if not abusive. And so she was then transported to

the UK where she had to really fend for herself while living with her father and her stepmother. But really, she's had to watch out for herself throughout. And her life was charted by war. Her father was in the Air Force as well. She later marries a Canadian who was also a military man. Both of them are participating in the war effort. And so her entire life was charted by war. And interestingly, Matt, that she spends the rest of her life after the war trying to put that past completely behind her. Why did she enlist, do you think? She talks about this in these extraordinary tapes that her daughter had arranged to have done, which are interviews with her, with a professional interviewer, Robin Fowler. And she talks about

that. She says, she really, you live in this environment where everyone is looking at you and asking the question, what are you doing? What is your part in the war? So she wanted to do so-called war work. And she wanted to do it so badly, Matt, that she did it behind her back, behind her father's back, even before she was qualified to do it. So she went and helped paint army trucks. She participated in the land army on farms, helping out. She helped feed and take care of downed airmen, pilots. So she was very eager to do the work. And she said she wanted to serve her country.

But later, when she became engaged in the France story, it was another home for her friends. So she was serving this other home for hers as well. We'll come back to her story. This is a book about two people, many people, but two at the center of it. Who is Guy d'Artois? Guy d'Artois, I think my favorite description of him is a thunderstorm of a man. He's 22 years old when we meet him.

And he is desperate, like so many men at that time, to enlist and to do his part in the war. He had it in his mind that he wanted to be a pilot, like many young men back then, because that really was the rock star of the war, if you will, or would be eventually. He did not qualify for that. In fact, he even did not qualify to be in the infantry because he had a condition when he was young that disqualified him. So it was several months later before he actually became a member of the military,

was sent over in January of 1940, not as a pilot, not as an infantryman, but as a physical training instructor. And so he becomes part of this convalescent depot, kind of a hospital or a rehab center that helped take care of soldiers who were injured. How do the paths of Guy and Sonia cross initially? Initially. If I have my research correct, and it took a lot of work to figure this out, it would have been around December 4th, 1943, when a number of young men and women gathered in a smoky room in the middle of Marlborough in London,

quietly waiting to be taken to the first phase of the get-to-know-you of the special operations executive. So all these men and women had been recruited for a secret mission. They weren't told exactly what it was, and they were going to be weeded out first before they were told what they were being recruited for. So they met in that room. And, you know, Sonia again talks about what it was like to meet Guy and talks about him wearing, he was at the time wearing an American uniform. I'll explain that if you like in a minute. But he was wearing an American uniform because he was participating in a joint American-Canadian force before he went over to London again. And she said that he looked like a Christmas tree.

And she found him boisterous and loud and a bit obnoxious. And in fact, the two of them had, once they get into the training, a fairly antagonistic relationship where they, you know, they jostled. She pushed him into the river once. He smeared her face with mud. They had this kind of tension between them, and he called her a weak little girl. So it was not entirely clear that they were actually going to end up as a couple later on what was the special operations executive and i mean put it in the context of of the war describe kind of what's happening at that time in the war and what this thing is that's created yeah it would take a long time to explain entirely everything but imagine the moment when dunkirk uh the the evacuations from of the war. And the other option was something that Churchill himself was interested in, the prime minister

at the time, and created what is called the Special Operations Executive. It was effectively a secret army. And what it was meant to do is to work behind enemy lines to be delivered to those areas where there is a German occupation ongoing. And they would help deliver weapons, provide training, maybe even conduct operations of sabotage themselves to try to undermine the occupation from within. It's like an invisible front. Exactly. What was the role of women in the SOE? Yeah. Well, it was a gradual inclusion of women in the SOE. Initially, they were in the office, and the second, sort of the effective second in command was a woman, Vera Atkins, who's

essential to this entire story. But women as field operators were few and far between at the beginning. But by the end of the war, there was a real recognition, and it's documented, that women actually were perfect candidates for this kind of work. Because they wouldn't be suspected, because they could move around much more easily than a young man could, because they weren't necessarily combatants. And it was not lost on, and it was explicitly said by people who were involved, that it was not lost on them that pretty women in particular could get away with, you know, smiling their way through checkpoints. And so many women were pressed into service and they were sought out for this kind of work. And so Sonia was one of them.

And there's this great scene where she describes her sitting across from Morris Buckmaster. And he says, you know, we might have a job for you, but it involves you going back to France behind enemy lines. And she goes, well, how do I get there? She already had made up her mind that she was going to do this. I mean, in many ways, these are ordinary people who are being trained to do extraordinary things. Who were part, I mean, aside from these two,

who was part of this special operations executive? It's a really interesting question, Matt, because I tried so hard to find a common point between all of them. And I asked all the historians that were involved in this and people who were involved in the story, and there wasn't one thing. But if I had to say what they all had in common, I would say the fact that they straddled cultures and they lived lived in in more than one world which is again a reason that i found it compelling they were kind of they were called by one person half and halves they were people who knew french culture and language very well but they also were british or they were canadian or they were from you know other countries which was a huge advantage a massive advantage and perhaps maybe for the first time for some of them one person described that

this way that for the first time in their lives, their divided lives, they felt that they could serve the divided parts of their personality equally, countries that they had loyalty to serve them both loyally. And so this was a moment when they found themselves useful as people who were divided in their culture and language. They're going to be dropped behind enemy lines into incredibly dangerous territory. How were they trained for this, if these are ordinary people? Yeah, well, this is part of the criticism that happens later, but they are given a few weeks, a few months, I guess about three months, depending on the person of training.

First, they were given a psychological assessment in which they were tested to see if you could actually handle the kinds of tests that you would face in a war zone, especially operating alone. And once you pass that, then they went to Scotland, to the highlands, hidden away from the world. It's almost as though there's no war going on. It's quiet, you know, the sun sets at 3.30, and it's the perfect place to train a secret army. And so they are taught how to, they are taken to the local train station and taught how to drive a locomotive. Sonia hadn't learned how to drive a car yet, and she was being taught how to drive a locomotive.

Because they might be thrust into these positions where they have to do almost anything. Exactly. And where to put the charges, an explosive charge, so that it blew up in a way that would derail it. How to use different kinds of weapons. And Sonia, as far as I could tell from reading her material, is that she had never handled weapons before. And there she was learning how to take them apart, grease them and put them back together. They learned how to do silent killing. They learned how to kill someone quietly. And what's interesting about this, Matt, is that even then they weren't quite sure what their role was going to be, to the point that I found a quote somewhere in one of the books saying a woman had asked out loud,

you know, I'm not sure what we're being trained for here. I was recruited. I answered an ad for a bilingual secretary. And so it's a very secret and quiet and very intense way of training. But by the end of it, these people can operate. They can unlock a door without a sound. They can steal documents quietly from a building and they can kill someone if they have to.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. they had a very antagonistic relationship and kind of, you know, they were teasing each other a lot. But, you know, in interviews that have been done with both of them,

they both said, oh, it was all innocent, there was nothing to it. But at one point, it was Christmas, actually, just before, Christmas of 1943, the two of them joined a group of agents who decide to go attend Christmas Mass. And so for the first time since they joined this strange organization, they were going to experience a normal moment, a normal life moment. And so they take this barge over to another place to go to the church. And it was there that they first held hands. And that night, they held hands throughout the church service. And as I say in the book, everyone felt the heaviness of that moment.

They all knew that by then, that by the time the war ended, they may no longer be alive. They may not live out the lives that they hoped to live. And so, my sense is, and this is just my sense, that, you know, I'm sure you've heard all kinds of stories about wartime marriages that happened very quickly and were very hasty. And the question is why? Well, there's this urgency to live. They eventually get married. They do.

How does that impact their roles in the war effort? It's so interesting, Matt, watching some of this playing out in the documentation in their file, which is full of information. I got that from the National Archives in the UK. file, which is full of information. I got that from the National Archives in the UK. And there is this debate going on in the background about whether that coupling would help them or hinder them in the field. But ultimately, after they have their short honeymoon, they're brought into the office again, and they're told, we're really sorry, but you cannot go in together. And what happens then, Matt, is Sonia says, if you are not sending me in with my husband, then I am not going. And so she leaves and that's how it ends for her. Until she's on the tarmac watching her husband of only a few

weeks getting on a Halifax, gets on the plane, takes off. And Buckmaster assumes she's going back to her WAF days and says to her, is there anything I can do? And she says, yeah, you can get me a mission as soon as possible. And five days later, Matt, she was gone. What are some of the things that she and Guy did once they landed behind enemy lines? Yeah, it's a long list. For Guy, he was basically responsible for training and equipping about 3,000 men. He himself personally led one of the battalions so their job was to make sure that the lives of German forces were made difficult once the Allied forces landed, that they could not send reinforcements to Normandy to help out in the fight.

And so their job was to derail trains. Their job was to ambush convoys, to cut roads, to make it hard for these forces to move. And so Guy participated in that. So did Sonia. She helped train men into ambushing convoys. She supported a network that actually ended up destroying a communication system in its entirety. And so their job was to sabotage and to slow down those reinforcements as much as possible. And they both did that.

With extraordinary danger. I mean, there's a story of her sitting at a cafe with a member of the Gestapo. Oh, it really is a heart-stopping story. You can sort of visualize it. And she tells the story where she was living openly because she had lost track of what was parachuted with her, which was her clothing. In other words, if a German convoy had picked up that clothing, they would have realized there was a female agent in the area that had just landed because they were still attached to parachutes. And so she decided to live openly, which can you imagine what that's like? And not only that, to do that, she actually physically went to the black market restaurants to have dinner where a lot of German officers did the same. And one day she was sharing a table with one of them, and she

dropped her purse. It fell off the back of her chair with an unmistakable thud of something heavy. And so her companion or the person sitting next to her reached down to get it. And she describes how she grabbed it just in time. And thank God she did, she says, because had he grabbed it himself, he would have realized instantly that there was something more than just makeup in this little bag, that there was a pistol in that bag and she would have been discovered. So that's how close she got. And there were many other examples of stories. That's how close she got to getting caught. You said something earlier, which was that when the war was over, she went out of her way to try and put this experience behind her in the rearview mirror.

Tell me more about that and why you think she did that. Yeah, it's a really great question. One thing that I know for sure, one of the reasons she did that and didn't want to talk publicly about it, although she did at the beginning a little bit, is something her family indicated. She talks about a little bit in her interview, which is that she did not want to overshadow her husband. Her husband continued in the military and actually had some incredible feats of work after that, which are also in the book. So that was something that was in deference to her husband, that she didn't want to talk about her role in the war, which was equal or similar to what he had done.

The other reason, I mean, she says this later in life in some interviews as well in a British newspaper. She says that the war was not my whole life. It was just part of my life. She was a forward-looking woman. She appeared, it's my sense that she lived in the moment, that looking back to her was not always easy. It was not always something that she looked back on fondly. She had had a very difficult childhood, and she had a very difficult time during the war, and went through some horrific experiences, some of the worst that a woman can go through during war. And so, for her to move on, I mean, she moved continents. She literally crosses the ocean by herself, comes to Canada to a place she's never seen, and is adamant about building

a new life. And so I think that motivated her. She was very resilient. Part of this is also about how women and their time in war were seen at that time, right? And the way that that was acknowledged or not acknowledged, the incredible prominent role that women like Sonia played that was dismissed or, again, played down. It's extraordinary to me, Matt. At the highest levels.

Absolutely. It's really extraordinary to me that these women were expected to go through some of the most dangerous places and dangerous tasks, and then when they came back from the war, would not be given even something similar to the recognition that the men were getting. And so I just want to tell you a quick story about that, that there were five women who were recognized by the king, who were inducted into the order of the, became members of the order of the British Empire in the civilian division. Not the military. Not the military one. And so one of the senior SOE members on that list, Pearl Witherington, and by the way, that list included Sonia, Pearl Witherington comes out and says,

I am not accepting this award, and says, there is nothing civil about what I did. And so that rebellion started a bigger rebellion. And a year later, the king issues another decree, those same five women, including Sonia, are moved from the civilian division to the military one. And that is a massive victory, but it took decades for those women to be properly recognized, including the women who were in the office back in London, like Vera Atkins. It took decades for them to be properly recognized and to have a monument built in their name. Not until Sonia was in her 80s did she actually get a Légion d'Honneur from the French government.

So it took a very long time. Why did you want to tell this story? This story, from the beginning, took hold of me and I couldn't let it go. Sonia was such a compelling character to me. She was both a combatant and a civilian. She was a fighter and a victim. And there she was jumping out of a plane at 20 years old. I mean, I've always been interested in stories of immigration and war, and especially women in war. And so I've told stories like this from around the world. And this is a Canadian version of that.

It fits right into the kinds of stories that I have told before, except it's in the past. And I could not interview the protagonist, which will be eternally something I regret. But it's part of our history, and it's an important story, and it needs to be told. You say in the book, she had defied all expectations. She thrived when they predicted she would fall apart. She imbued the next generation with the belief that they too could do anything. Yeah. You sound quite taken with her.

You know, it is. She sounds like an incredibly powerful person. She really does. You know, I've maintained all along that this is a journalistic endeavor. I did this using my journalistic tools, using sources from the past, some sources from today. And so I had to maintain some distance from the subjects and from the story and from the family. And I'm really grateful for how respectful everyone involved was of my journalistic independence.

But it's hard not to think about the fact that there are lessons to be learned from this story and from both of their stories, from Sonia and her husband, Guy, and the way they were participating, did their part in the war, and the way they lived afterwards. There are so many lessons contained in this story.

And I definitely felt her determination. I felt I could hear in her voice her resilience. Her determination to move on was admirable. And her determination to outperform expectations was also impressive. I really was impressed with that. And so I think as can, as a country, we can learn from her courage, from her determination, and from her resilience.

I was going to say, how should we remember her? Hmm. And it's not just her. Yeah. There's she as well, but she's quite a character. Yes, she is. Yeah, I think, listen, that generation built the country and the world that I opened my eyes to.

And, you know, we're of the same vintage, I think, approximately. And it's a world that's now changing again. But, you know, we need to remember that they built this world that we live in. And that, you know, what kind of world do we want to live in? And what of that do we want to preserve in the future? I think this story really makes us think of two things. You know, coming as it does at a moment, sort of an inflection in our history. I don't want to be alarmist, but it's a very young century.

We don't know what kind of century it's going to be ultimately, but it has been rather violent for the first 24 years. And, you know, the doomsday clock, which is, you know, a metaphorical way of keeping track of how close we are to global catastrophe is as close to midnight as it has ever been. And they say that part of the reason is these wars that are going on right now, and the polarization that is going on right now, and climate change, and the wars that that might bring on later. And so, you know, it really begs us to think about what roles we want to play if we are confronted with conflict, not just at home, which is, you know, who knows, but also abroad, which indeed, we're in this moment right now. Are we going to do what Sonia and Guy did? Are we going to be conscientious

objectors? Are we going to be protesters? Are we going to be charity workers or just people who bear witness, who honor the losses and the suffering of people abroad by listening and engaging with the news and just understanding what is happening in the world? And so I think these stories help us, invite us to not ignore what is going on and to pay attention and to bear witness. Nala, thank you very much. You're welcome. Nala Ayed is the host of CBC Radio's Ideas. Her recent book is The War We Won Apart, the untold story of two elite agents who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.