Excerpts

Chapter One the england game A string of events that would have a profound impact on the Jedburgh teams dropped into the Netherlands began more than two years earlier in the coastal Dutch city of The Hague, the nation's bustling political center. On the cold, damp evening of Friday, March 6, 1942, Lieutenant Hubertus Gerardus Lauwers prepared to transmit a coded message to London on his clandestine radio from a building near the center of the city. He had often used this second-floor apartment at 678 Fahrenheitstraat, the home of a newly married couple named Teller, as a place to operate his radio. In fact, he had fallen into a routine of transmitting from the Teller home at six-thirty on alternate Friday evenings. It was from here that he had arranged his first drop of weapons and explosives for the Dutch underground, which had arrived only a week earlier. Now Lauwers set up his transmitter on a table in an unheated room of the apartment. Lauwers, thin-faced and bespectacled, rather frail-looking, was a twenty-six-year-old native of the Dutch East Indies, where he had been a journalist before the war. After the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, he had gone to England to join the exiled Dutch forces in the fight against the Nazis. There he had been recruited by Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), trained as a behind-the-lines radio operator, and parachuted into Holland in 1941. SOE had been organized early in the war to carry out Prime Minister Winston Churchill's plans to build an immense armed resistance movement in the German-occupied countries of Europe. To organize and train resistance fighters and saboteurs, SOE had begun parachuting highly trained agents into Norway, France, Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Working as resistance organizers, they arranged for parachute drops of weapons, ammunition, explosives, and other supplies. They also trained the partisans in their use and in the age- old tactics of guerrilla warfare. When the time came for the Allies to launch an invasion aimed at liberating the occupied countries of Western Europe, well-timed sabotage and interdiction efforts by such groups could cripple German communications and delay German reinforcements from reaching the invasion area. Each SOE organizer, typically, was accompanied by a radio operator. To orchestrate such activities in the Netherlands, SOE had established its Dutch Section in 1941. As one of a number of country sections, Dutch Section was charged with recruiting and training Dutchmen in the United Kingdom to serve as agents--organizers and radio operators--to be parachuted into the Netherlands. Prospective agents were found among the many Dutch citizens who had escaped their homeland at the time of the German invasion and found their way to England. Upon completion of his training in England, Lieutenant Lauwers had been assigned as radio operator for an agent named Thijs Taconis; and on the night of November 7, 1941, the two men, dressed in civilian clothes, had jumped into Holland from a modified British Whitley bomber. Four months later, sitting in his winter overcoat in the cold room in the Tellers' apartment, headphones to his ears and a blanket draped over his knees, Lauwers prepared to tap out his message on the radio's Morse key. Not far away that evening, a French car bearing Dutch plates pulled to the curb on Cypresstraat, near the intersection with the broad thoroughfare called Fahrenheitstraat. In the car was a balding, stern- looking man in civilian clothes--Major Hermann J. Giskes of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence organization. He had been posted to The Hague only two months earlier to serve as chief of the Abwehr's III-F department (counterespionage) for the Netherlands and Belgium. Already he had formed a close working relationship there with the head of Excerpted from Abundance of Valor: Special Forces in the Operation That Went A Bridge Too Far by Will Irwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.