Down the WW2 Rabbit Hole: the Secret Army Against Hitler

By Sharon Maas

My latest novel, The Last Agent in Paris, is what you might call a delayed birth.  It all started around 2018, when I decided to change course in my writing. Up to then, my novels had all been historical post-colonial fiction set in either Guyana, on South America’s north-eastern shoulder, or India: Guyana being the country I grew up in, India being a sort of adopted homeland.

But it was time for a change, and the inspiration came from an unusual source: my Granny Winnie’s living-room wall back in Georgetown, Guyana. That wall was covered with photos of her eight sons, four of whom had gone off to fight the war in  Europe. Guyana was back then British Guiana, a colony, and we were all British citizens. BG – as we called our homeland –was in a far-off corner of the British Empire, and the men were not called up to fight. Dad and his brothers were all volunteers.

As a child I thought Dad looked so handsome in his RAF uniform. I felt proud, even without knowing the details of what he and his brothers had been through. One of them, my Uncle Douglas, was killed when his warship was torpedoed off the coast of Singapore in 1943. The family legend goes that that everyone was seated around the family dining-table when a photo of Uncle Douglas fell to the floor with a crash. Granny cried out:  ‘Douglas is dead!’  And so it was.

It was those photos, that family anecdote, which finally, decades later, piqued my curiosity and urged me to delve deeper into WW history: to learn the stories of men and women who actually were there, facing trials and sacrifices we can only wonder about today. I had never questioned my father, or any of my surviving uncles, about their war experiences, and that was a grave omission. Each one had a riveting story, stories that were eventually lost.

And now, in 2018, it was too late to talk to Dad, who had passed away in 1998. Like any young person of the day, I had taken my freedom, my fun, the adventures open to me, for granted, never giving a thought to the heroes and heroines who had made this possible, many of them paying the ultimate price. I felt it was an omission that I had to atone for in some small way. I felt that the next step in my writing life would be just that: find and follow a few personal stories, sing (write!) about these unsung heroes and heroines, so that others – my readers – could also remember.

And so, in a way it was guilt that shoved me down the rabbit hole of Special Operations Executive, better known as SOE. 

Of course, like all schoolchildren I had learnt about WW2 in history classes. But my curiosity now went beyond the official narrative of bombs dropping and Spitfires screeching and troops marching and cities reduced to rubble. Beyond the famous and familiar names associated with that war: Hitler and Churchill, Goebbels and Himmler, Eisenhower and Rommel. I sought the personal stories of those who actually been there, lived through it all. The anonymous heroes we’d never learn about in history class, the men and women who were prepared to give their lives for the collective future of the generations to come: for us, for OUR future, and that of our children. My research took me straight to SOE, an organisation I’d never heard of before, and certainly not in history class. 

SOE was Churchill’s personal brainchild, a clandestine plan to “Set Europe Ablaze”, not through the established processes of war, but through the “ungentlemanly” means of subterfuge and sabotage. In France, this amounted to a veritable secret army of specifically trained agents who would support the French Resistance. They would be covertly dropped into France, along with the necessary weapons, explosives, and money. 

And so, down that rabbit hole I ventured. 

As I  explored the labyrinthine paths of SOE I found another war, one so secret that even MI6 knew practically nothing of it at the time. And yet: that underground war had perhaps just as much an impact on the final victory as the dramatic events we learned about in history class. 

By then, 2018, the once-secret workings of SOE were public knowledge, well integrated into the known WW2 story. There’s no shortage of books available on the agents and their work. As I devoured these books, I found myself in a veritable warren, one path leading into another, one person’s story linking with another. Scenes barely mentioned in one book came into eye-opening relief in another. I’d get a passing glimpse of one real-life agent in one book, only to afterwards discover a whole book written about that very agent. The stories, both in fiction and non-fiction –  but always reality-based –  provided by the hair-raising, often terrifying, exploits of SOE agents proved almost addictive to me. 

Inevitably, the rabbit-warren led me to Noor Inayat Khan. Noor had been an undercover agent recruited by SOE to work as a wireless operator, in order to sabotage the Nazi presence in WW2 France and eventually prepare the way for the June 1944 invasion on the Normandy coast. It was an incredibly dangerous task, a mission for which Noor seemed completely unqualified. The daughter of a well-known Sufi master, she was a peace-loving, deeply spiritual musician and author of children’s fairy stories. Petite, friendly, soft-natured, she was the very opposite of the female ass-kicking super-heroine contemporary readers often encounter in books and films. 

I was immediately galvanised. In fact, I fell in love with her. I knew at once that one day, I would write her story. But the time, 2018, was not right. I was already under contract for several WW2 novels which had to be written.  And so I embarked on a literary adventure lasting through several books, learning more even as I researched and wrote.  Beneath the surface of WW2 France, I gained a deeper understanding of how the war in France was fought and won, a story we’d never heard in history lessons.

Meanwhile, Noor was safely tucked away in the back of my mind. I knew her time would come. This year, 2024, is that time. And as it happened, I was now living in India, Noor’s own paternal homeland, a country she loved, as do I. Writing it was as if she was right there at the back of my mind, encouraging me onwards, sometimes smiling, sometimes crying. Because Noor often had reason to cry…

Writing it required some adjustment on my part. My previous WW2 books had all been pure fiction, though based on reality. Noor’s story was different. This was not fiction. This was real life. This had all really happened. My aim was to not allow her to fade from our collective memory, just one of many forgotten heroes whose names mean nothing to future generations.

Noor and the other heroes and heroines of this war gave up their safety and often their lives to defeat the forces of evil, and so here we are today. In my mind, the best way to honour their sacrifice is to simply remember them. Remember the lives they lived, and thank them in our hearts. The Last Agent in Paris is my contribution. 

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Sharon Maas was born into a prominent political family in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1951. She was educated in England, Guyana, and, later, Germany. After leaving school, she worked as a trainee reporter with the Guyana Graphic in Georgetown and later wrote feature articles for the Sunday Chronicle as a staff journalist.

Her first novel, Of Marriageable Age, is set in Guyana and India and was published by HarperCollins in 1999. In 2014 she moved to Bookouture, and now has ten novels under her belt. Her books span continents, cultures, and eras. From the sugar plantations of colonial British Guiana in South America, to the French battlefields of World War Two, to the present-day brothels of Mumbai and the rice-fields and villages of South India, Sharon never runs out of stories for the armchair traveller.

Find out more about Sharon on her website https://www.sharonmaas.com/

THE LAST AGENT IN PARIS

As the bombs rained down on Paris, my family fled before the Nazis could take us. I never thought I’d see my beloved home again. But I’ve come back to fight for the people I love. And now, I’m the last agent standing. The freedom of the world rests on my shoulders.

Paris, 1940. As Nazi soldiers march down the Champs Elysees, Noor’s heart is shattered. Her family is forced to flee their home to the safety of England, and as Noor watches the French coast disappear in the distance, she vows to do everything she can to stop Germany from devouring her beloved country.

Training as a wireless operative in England, Noor’s perfect French makes her the ideal candidate for undercover work in her beloved Paris, and she is soon assigned to an illustrious spy network led by a mysterious man named Prosper.

Day after day, Noor walks the treacherous streets of Paris looking for safe places to broadcast messages to London. But Nazi officers lurk around every corner, and Noor’s heart thunders in her chest as she evades detection, tightly clutching the briefcase containing her radio equipment. She knows it would take just one stop and search for her life to be over.

With each passing day her mission becomes more lethal as, one by one, her fellow agents are captured. Someone is betraying them, but who? And when Noor becomes the last agent in the network, can she keep the links with England alive, to help win the war?

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Category: On Writing