The secret keeper, p.40
The Secret Keeper, page 40
Air Transport Auxiliary pilots at Hamble Airfield, January 1944.
DB Walker-7866 reprinted with permission of the Air Transport Auxiliary Museum and Archive, Maidenhead Heritage Centre
In all, 174 ATA pilots were killed in action. Four of those were Canadian.
With the listeners, CanCar, and the ATA already on my radar, I was eager to get writing. Then I learned about Canada’s Spy School. There was no way I could leave that out of the book!
Camp X was Canada’s top-secret, paramilitary training school, the only one of its kind in North America. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others in Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive) recognized early on that covert communication and solid intelligence were the way they’d win the war, so Churchill directed the SOE to build something that would “set Europe ablaze.” That something became Camp X. There, they taught sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines; they recruited and trained resistance fighters; and they found safe routes to help downed Allied pilots or escaped POWs get home. The camp’s vast 275 acres were near Whitby, Ontario, fifty kilometres from the United States, across a field from Lake Ontario. In addition to its classrooms and gymnasium, firing range and explosives field, Camp X came with a field of highly sensitive rhombic antennae—and a parachute jump tower. From the base of a ninety-foot ladder, the trainee climbed to a shaky four-foot-by-four-foot platform that offered no railings for either balance or safety. Staying upright would have been a challenge in itself, since they were jostled by strong winds sweeping up from Lake Ontario. From the platform, the trainee grabbed a rope and swung down onto bales of hay provided by a local farmer. Once they hit the hay, their feet dragged until the momentum stopped, then they’d finally let go of the rope. According to the world’s expert on Camp X, Lynn-Philip Hodgson, students did this every day, over and over, until they were (a) no longer afraid of heights and (b) able to land safely and not break any bones.
That was just one of the fun and insightful emails I received from Mr. Hodgson over the duration of my research. His contribution to this book was invaluable. It was with great sadness that I learned he passed away on October 11, 2023.
Lynn-Philip Hodgson was also one of the writers for CBC’s excellent miniseries X Company, which I highly recommend. On the website for the show is a story about a man named Gustave Biéler, an extraordinary, real-life agent from Camp X. Gustave’s reputation went well beyond my idea of Gus, but I did enjoy thinking of him this way: “November 18th, 1942: The SOE deploys Gustave Biéler, a former Montrealer, into France. Despite injuring himself during his parachute landing [he fractured his spine], he goes on to organize countless missions to sabotage German supplies and logistics and is considered one of the SOE’s best agents. Biéler wreaks so much havoc that the Gestapo is forced to create a special team to track him down and capture him. Eventually, Biéler will be charged with the monumental task of helping to pave the way for the D-Day Invasion.” Biéler was arrested by the Gestapo in Saint-Quentin, France, in 1944. He was transferred to Gestapo headquarters and tortured, but he never broke. He was ultimately sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp and executed with an honour guard on September 5, 1944.
More than five hundred agents and instructors participated in Camp X’s programme, having faced up to fifty-two different courses during their training. They learned “unconventional warfare,” including disguises, surveillance evasion, explosives and weapons training (in which only live ammunition was ever used), coding and ciphers, underwater demolition, the interrogation of prisoners, and much more. The most physical exercises, including self-defense, were extremely rigorous. Of the many men and women who trained at Camp X, probably the best known was author Ian Fleming, who went on to share some of what he’d learned in his James Bond novels. Other noteworthy attendees were screenplay writer Paul Dehn, and children’s author Roald Dahl.
After the war, the chief of the SOE declared, “Per capita, the secret war was bloodier than the Somme. The only difference was that the cries were muffled and, in many instances, the corpses were never found.” Nor were most of the records, since the people in charge of Camp X celebrated the end of the war with a huge bonfire. After that, the only source of information available was from actual interviews. Those were practically impossible to access, since every person there was still held to that oath of secrecy for the next four decades. Very little Camp X information is on public record even after seventy years. Imagine the stories those files could tell!
And then, as Dot would say with a fond sigh, there was Hydra, Camp X’s one of a kind, fifteen megahertz shortwave transmitter/receiver responsible for sending and receiving Allied radio (including telegraph) signals around the world. Hydra was the most powerful telecommunications relay station of its kind, “handmade” after a few Canadian amateur radio enthusiasts sold the camp their apparatuses. Hydra was connected to a huge array of rhombic antennae in the field to the south of Camp X’s main building, and because of its reach and the topography of the land, it could reach Britain, other Commonwealth countries, and the United States, while keeping both coding and decoding information relatively safe from the prying ears of German radio listeners. Communications officers like Dot were in direct communication with Bletchley Park. In fact, on May 8, 1945, Bletchley Park notified Camp X directly that the war had ended. Seventy years later, they held a reenactment of that moment in Morse code (link in Sources).
One other unexpected but fascinating section of the book came to me rather late—in fact, I discovered this treasure as I was completing my edits. I had already decided Gus would be taken as a POW after that fateful night in France, but I had to think about after the war, when he came home. I began to search for dates of when the Canadian POWs might have arrived in Halifax, and this article in the National Post popped up, completely out of the blue: “The Untold Story of How Canadian POWs Helped Liberate the Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.”
This was perfect for Gus. Heartbroken by the task of driving three hundred beaten, emaciated women from Ravensbrück to safety, he was stunned into near silence. But Dot knew what he needed: a true listener. No one listened better than she did.
Time lines and facts are tricky sometimes, and while I aim to stick to the truth, fictionalizing a few dates and details can help me out of the occassional rough patch. For example, Dot’s interception of U-409 before the Battle of Sicily was fictitious, though U-409 was not. It happened to be the only U-boat skulking around the Mediterranean around that time, which was why I used it. U-409 was actually sunk on July 12, 1943, in the Mediterranean Sea northeast of Algiers by depth charges from the British destroyer HMS Inconstant.
Lucky Dash, sailing on the Queen Mary and meeting Bing Crosby! The Queen Mary was actually sailing to and from Australia at that point and would not return to Halifax until April, when it was assigned to the Atlantic. Who knows where Mr. Crosby was, but that charming blue-eyed crooner did entertain the troops whenever he could.
World War II mobilized thousands of Canadian women for the first time. When the men went to fight, over 1,200,000 women went to work full-time, in addition to raising families and “keeping the home fires burning.” They worked in almost every possible job, from factory workers and munitionettes to butchers and typists. They drove buses and streetcars, they ran farms—they even worked in the logging industry, where they were called “lumberjills.” Canadian women who had once resigned themselves to having very few choices in life took a courageous step forward and became top-secret listeners and codebreakers, or heroic pilots. As far as I know, Wrens were never sent to work in private industries, like when Dash went to GECO, then Eisens, then CanCar, so I used a little creative license to get Dash into the right places.
I love what I do. I love that I get to learn about history and experience a taste of what our predecessors’ lives were like. Where do I get my stories? History is full of them, just waiting to be discovered.
What am I working on next? Ah well, that’s a different question. For now, I’m going to keep that secret to myself.
Sources
The following publications and videos are just a few of the many that provided factual information about the story’s time and place and the people involved.
BOOKS
Bashow, David L. All the Fine Young Eagles: In the Cockpit with Canada’s Second World War Fighter Pilots. Toronto, ON: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1996.
Ellis, Mary. A Spitfire Girl: One of the World’s Greatest Female ATA Ferry Pilots Tells Her Story. South Yorkshire, England: Pen & Sword Books Ltd., 2016.
Gossage, Carolyn. Greatcoats and Glamour Boots: Canadian Women at War (1939–1945). Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 2001.
Hodgson, Lynn-Philip. Inside-Camp X: The Top Secret World War II “Secret Agent Training School.” Port Perry, ON: Blake Book Distribution, 2000.
Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson. Great Britain: Constable and Company, 1962.
McKay, Sinclair. The Secret Listeners: The Men and Women Posted Across the World to Intercept the German Codes for Bletchley Park. London, England: Aurum Press, 2012.
Wheeler, Jo. The Hurricane Girls: The Inspirational True Story of the Women Who Dared to Fly. London, England: Penguin Random House UK, 2018.
Whittell, Giles. Spitfire Women of World War II: The Courageous Heroines Who Flew Through World War II. Great Britain: Harper Press, 2007.
ARTICLES
Florence, Elinor. D-Day: Decoys and Dummies. https://www.elinorflorence.com/blog/d-day-decoys/.
Peterson, Anna. “The ‘Always Terrified Airwomen’ of the Air Transport Auxiliary: Defining Femininity Among the Women Who Flew Military Aircraft in Second World War Britain” (undergraduate thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2007).
Robertson, Dorothy “Robbie.” “I Go (Not) Down to the Sea in Ships: Recollections of a Canadian Wren” (unpublished memoir, 2005). Courtesy of Jerry Proc. Available at https://navalandmilitarymuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/CFB-Esquimalt-Museum-I-Go-Not-Down-to-the-Sea-in-Ships.pdf.
VIDEOS
ATA Museum and Archive: https://atamuseum.org
Baxtor, Jason. CTV News. https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/we-called-ourselves-the-spies-wren-veteran-says-of-service-at-hmcs-coverdale-1.4680148.
Bob Wilson’s World War I story, based very loosely on: https://lermuseum.org/second-world-war-1939-45/1942/leonard-j-birchall-the-saviour-of-ceylon-4-apr-1942.
“Canada’s female ww2 pilots: ATA women trained to be able to handle anything” Global News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pzI9y1AmFA.
Canadian Army Film Unit: https://canadianfilmandphotounit.ca/2014/02/24/the-canadian-army-newsreel-on-the-home-screens/.
Canadian Car and Foundry: https://www.thunderbay.ca/en/city-hall/canadian-car-and-foundry-.aspx.
Canadian Women Flyers: http://canadian99s.com/women-in-aviation-history/.
Cousin Fred’s story, based very loosely on: https://lermuseum.org/second-world-war-1939-45/1942/canadian-pilots-in-malta-june-oct-1942/.
Gagnon, Michelle. CBC, “ ‘We Were Sworn to Secrecy’: Canadian Women Share Stories of Their Efforts to Help Win WWII”: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/d-day-code-breakers-women-1.5159789.
German Codebreaking of World War II: https://www.feldgrau.com/WW2-German-Code-Breaking/.
Gillogly, Jim. NovaOnline, Crack the Ciphers: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/faceoff.html#cipher1.
Hathaway, Sheri. The Western Producer: https://www.producer.com/farmliving/canadians-living-with-rationing-in-wartime/.
Inside Camp X: Trained to Forget, CBC: https://youtu.be/UZt4rvv7Zgs.
Learn Morse Code: https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/.
Legion Magazine’s Canadian Fly Girls: https://youtu.be/2f0zz1eF9G8.
McMurtry, Alice. BlogTO: https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/10/geco-munitions-plant-scarborough-ontario/.
Reenactment (seventy years later) of Bletchley Park transmitting to Camp X that the war was over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08kJhPkRUsg&list=LL&index=11.
Rosies of the North: https://www.nfb.ca/film/rosies_of_the_north/.
“Spy School Secrets: The True Story Behind Camp X.” Canada’s History: https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/military-war/spy-school-secrets.
“The Secret Life at Camp X,” Legion Magazine: https://legionmagazine.com/en/the-secret-life-at-camp-x/.
“This Is the Spy School Equivalent of a Fire Drill, and It’s Insane,” The Smithsonian Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eCto9BQQI0&t=19s.
X Company, CBC Gem series: https://gem.cbc.ca/media/x-company/s01.
Toronto Railway Museum, 2021. Locomotive No. 6213: https://torontorailwaymuseum.com/?p=724.
Warnicka, Richard. National Post: https://nationalpost.com/news/liberation-1945/the-untold-story-of-how-canadian-pows-helped-liberate-the-women-of-ravensbruck-concentration-camp.
Acknowledgments
All novels contain secrets, but not all of them are based on secrets. Fortunately for me, as well as for the Wilson sisters and many others, the forty years set out in the Official Secrets Act is over, so it’s possible now to learn many things that had been concealed. And yet, due to the fierce determination of those secret keepers and the passing of time, a lot of those stories are still buried. Some are waiting to be found. Some are gone forever.
Research is such an interesting journey. Sometimes it can be dry, but most of the time it’s fascinating. I am neither a historian nor a trained researcher, so despite the fact that this is my eighth novel based on Canadian history, it’s all new to me. Over the years, I have written to some of the most generous and knowledgeable experts asking for help. I introduce myself out of the blue then send a gentle bombardment of questions their way, fingers crossed. I have found that it is a rare thing to be denied answers from these experts. All are passionate about their specialties, and they want the world to understand what they are about. What might seem like a trivial point to others makes so much difference to how I understand the history and my characters, and I am so grateful for their insights and patience.
When I began to write this story, we were all still in lockdown, so I was unable to visit the WRCNS Room at the Naval Museum of Halifax. Then my family and I moved to Alberta, and I have not found any kind of exhibit about the Wrens here, so I relied on the few contacts I had made online. I am indebted to JoAnn Cunningham (retired chief petty officer first class) of the Nova Scotia Wren Association for introducing me to I Memory Project, and in particular the story of Wren Dory Smelts Hocking and the information about the two LORAN stations in Nova Scotia.
My husband thinks it’s pretty funny that my favourite soundtrack these days is anything based on the rumbles of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in Spitfires and Hurricanes. I can’t help it. Every time I dig into a different part of our history, my heart awakens to new experiences, and this time it was the growl of those fighters! Special thanks to volunteer Barry Halliwell at the Hangar Museum in Calgary, who gave me a personalized tour of their “Jenny” and helped me understand the differences between the Spitfire and the Hurricane, among other things.
I want to thank Linda Duffield, volunteer researcher at the Kenley Revival Project, which “preserves and protects the heritage of the most intact fighter airfield from World War II,” the Kenley Airfield. Linda offered insight into the Air Transport Auxiliary then referred me to the Maidenhead Heritage Centre, of which the ATA Museum and Archive is an integral part. I find it kind of funny that I am terribly afraid of heights, but now that I have spent so much time researching and watching warplanes, I am on the hunt for a Spitfire to fly me somewhere. Anywhere at all. The Maidenhead Heritage Centre in England actually offers Spitfire simulation flights, which is very tempting.
My thanks to Maidenhead Heritage Centre’s volunteer researchers John Webster and Peter Rogers for all their assistance in helping me fill in so many blanks when it came to the ATA. Both John and UK Airfield Guide Dick Flute wanted to be sure I mentioned the important fact that while the ATA-girls receive well-earned attention, they made up only about 10 per cent of the whole organization. John was also the one to educate me on the “temporary” airfields located in occupied territories. These basic facilities with steel plank–surfaced runways were given code numbered identification—for example, B-21 (Sainte Honorine) was an actual airfield in occupied France. Interestingly, one of the last surviving ATA pilots, Jaye Edwards (a British-born woman known as “Pete Petersen” when she was in the ATA), flew Spitfires into forward bases in France in support of D-Day operations. Ms. Edwards lived in Canada for many years and died at the age of 103.
Many thanks to the Canadian War Museum for granting permission to reproduce the remarkable photos of Wrens intercepting German radio transmissions at HMCS Coverdale, as well as the intercepted communication of Hitler’s death. Codebreakers, warplane pilots… and now covert agents! Quite a few readers told me in advance of publication that they’d heard of Camp X, but until this book, it was a well-kept secret from me. What an amazing part of Canadian history!
The world’s expert on Camp X was the brilliant Lynn-Philip Hodgson, who recently passed away. He was the author of Inside Camp X, but he was so much more than that. A passionate teacher, Lynn spoke about Camp X to countless people, including over one hundred thousand public and high school students, and almost every Lions, Kiwanis, Probus, and Rotary Club in southern Ontario. He was the only Canadian invited to the sixtieth anniversary of the Office of Strategic Services (CIA), and in 2013 he was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for dedicating thirty-five years to preserving Canada’s history and heritage. He was the Canadian Association editor of Eye Spy Magazine, and the list goes on. So you can imagine how nervous I was to approach him to ask my questions! To my relief, Lynn was incredibly helpful, patiently giving me answers to everything I asked and offering a great deal more insight. Then he told me that his wife, Marlene, enjoyed my books, so I sent her an early draft of The Secret Keeper to see what she thought. I breathed much easier after he told me she had “thoroughly enjoyed it.”
