Edward Wilkinson (secret agent)

Edward Mountford Wilkinson (1902–1944) was an agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), who was landed in France in 1942, arrested the following year and executed in 1944. His codename was 'Alexandre', his training identity 'Ernest' and his false identity in France 'Edmond Paul Monfort'.^{[1][full citation needed]}

France awarded him the Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 and he was mentioned in despatches. He is mentioned on the Valençay SOE Memorial and panel 210 of the Runnymede Memorial.

Life

Early life

Nicknamed Ted or Teddy by his family, he was born in Saint-Louis (Missouri) to a French mother and English father - he (died 1936) was a porcelain maker and she (died 1938) was from Alsatian stock, with relations running a restaurant on rue des Pyramides in Paris. He had two brothers - George, also an SOE agent in France, and Herbert, killed as a fighter pilot in Tunisia.

Edward was baptised a Protestant in the Palais d'Orsay, Paris on 26 June 1904 and studied in the city at the lycée Henri-IV. He returned to the US, where he became a racing driver on the Salt Lake circuits. He returned to France, where he met Yvonne Diebolt, a mother of three whose husband refused to divorce her. She and Edward moved to Angers, where he became a sales rep for Arthur-Martin and put heating appliances in seven departments with Yvonne's help. In 1940 he fled to the UK and became a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, volunteering for SOE the following year.

He then began his SOE training in Wanborough Manor (map-reading, radio, sabotage, weapons, unarmed combat), Arisaig (physical training), Beaulieu (secret life, resisting interrogation, surviving in the countryside, practical work, opening safes and handcuffs, railway sabotage), Ringway (parachute drops) and London (testing his fake identity). On the night of 1–2 June 1942 a Handley Page Halifax took off from RAF Tempsford carrying Wilkinson and Benjamin Cowburn. They parachuted blind and navigation difficulties meant the drop was a long way from the planned site - rather than landing at Bellac they ended up 65 km away near Grand-Bourg and lost sight of each other. They met again at Tarbes two days later and went to Lyon to meet Virginia Hall, who gave them a radio operator.

Paris, Angers and Lyon

However, the operator asked for a delay to sort out some personal business and so the pair went to Paris, crossing the demarcation line wedged in the cubbyhole of a railway tender, a method first used by Cowburn. They took a night express from Bordeaux to Paris, where they separated, but the radio operator was delayed and they regularly met again. Cowburn returned to Lyon (again in a tender) to report what had happened and Hall told him the operator had failed to get across the demarcation line and so was being replaced by a more resourceful one.

Wilkinson caught a train to Angers and with Yvonne's help set up a small network. He returned to Paris from time to time to try to meet the radio operator at the agreed rendezvous point. He finally managed this, but instead of the expected man it was Denis Rake, sent by Hall without a transmitter. Wilkinson found out that Rake had got into a relationship with a German staff officer in Paris and demanded he end it, but Rake initially refused. Wilkinson then decided to go back to Lyon and to go with him Rake in the end had to comply with Wilkinson's demand.

They recrossed the demarcation line and got to Hall in Lyon, who gave them a transmitter. There Wilkinson also met Richard Henry Heslop, a friend from training, and the three men decided to cross the demarcation line near Limoges. In that city Rake lived in a rented room at a café and the other two in a hotel, with the trio dining that day in the restaurant of the hôtel des Faisans. They would not tell Rake where they were staying and he thought they did not trust him. He did not turn up at that hotel on 15 August and - despite an SOE rule to continue as normal in that situation - the other two went looking for him and were arrested as soon as they went past that hotel a second time.

Rake had been arrested at a police checkpoint three hours earlier. Afraid of his landlady's curiosity, he had well-hidden his radio transmitter in the cloakroom at that hotel, but the policeman found 65,000 francs in his case, not pinned together in bundles of ten as was then usual. Heslop and Wilkinson claimed only to have met Rake the day before, but Rake's and Wilkinson's tickets had consecutive numbers and their identity cards were in the same handwriting despite claiming to be from different towns.

Final months

All three men were moved to Castres prison and on November 8 to Chambaran camp. On November 11 the German Army crossed the demarcation line. The head of the camp favoured the Allies and released all three men. With little money and no papers, Wilkinson and Heslop resumed their journey towards Angers but suspected Rake of having led to their arrest and so left him behind. Three days' walk got them to Le Puy-en-Velay, where they met one of Wilkinson's acquaintances, Jean Joulian, who procured fake papers for them.

They moved on to Paris, where Wilkinson met William Grover-Williams, another friend from training, who helped him reestablish radio contact with London. Wilkinson was now too well known in Angers and so SOE instructed him to set up a network in Nantes, with Heslop staying in a boarding house set up by Yvonne and with her leading the 'Privet' network. However, the Gestapo spotted Heslop and he had to flee to one of his men's homes, with Yvonne moving to Nantes to join Wilkinson.

Wilkinson still had no radio operator and thus frequently went to Paris. In June 1943, via the secretary to the police commissioner in Limoges who had made contact with one of Wilkinson's childhood girlfriends, he was requested to help two comrades in dire trouble. He suspected a trap and Heslop (then in Paris), France Antelme (his Paris contact) and Francis Suttill all advised him not to go. On 6 June France Antelme (another member of the network) saw Wilkinson and his childhood girlfriend enter the Le Globe cafe on boulevard de Strasbourg but did not see them come out again - it had an out-of-sight exit onto rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. Both were arrested, she dying in Ravensbrück concentration camp and he in Mauthausen concentration camp without breaking under interrogation.

References

1. David Site Harrison.

Bibliography

• (in French) Michael Richard Daniell Foot, Des Anglais dans la Résistance. Le Service Secret Britannique d'Action (SOE) en France 1940-1944, annot. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Tallandier, 2008, ISBN 978-2-84734-329-8
  • French translation of the British official SOE history of its work in France SOE in France. An account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940-1944, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966, 1968 ; Whitehall History Publishing, in association with Frank Cass, 2004.
• Denis Rake, Rake's Progress; the Gay - and Dramatic - Adventures of Major Denis Rake, MC, the Reluctant British War-Time Agent, with a foreword by Douglas Fairbanks, Hardcover, 271 p., 22 cm, Publisher: Leslie Frewin, 1968, ASIN: B001JPUDB6, ISBN 009087580X
• Richard Henry Heslop, Xavier: the famous British agent's dramatic account of his work in the French Resistance, Hart-Davis, 1970, ISBN 024663989X.
• (in French) Gilles Perrault, Les Jardins de l'Observatoire, Fayard, 1995. Le présent article s'appuie sur les chapitres 13 à 20.

External links

• Service record at the National Archives HS 9/1593/2