Humphrey Max Macaré Dutch Agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE)

Humphrey was born in Bandoeng, Java on the 12/10/21. The eldest of 6 children, his father worked for the railways. The family had arrived in the Dutch East Indies in the early 18 th century. Over the course of the next 200 years, there were many relationships and marriages with the indigenous population leading to the family having an obviously Indonesian appearance and build. Humphrey was a very small man who measured only 5 feet 2½ inches tall and weighed 9 stones 2 pounds with a chest size of 31 inches.

He was conscripted into the Dutch Navy in July 1941 prior to which he had been training to be a teacher. Once in the Navy, he was trained as a telegrapher which, no doubt, was to prove instrumental in him being recruited as a wireless operator for the S.O.E. Following the Battle of the Java Sea, the Japanese invaded Java on the 1 st March 1942. Two days later, Dutch forces were evacuated and Humphrey was able to escape from the naval base at Soerabaja to Tjilatjap where he boarded a ship of the Royal Parcel Sailing Company and sailed to Colombo. There he boarded the troopship MS Nieuw-Amsterdam that sailed to England on a voyage that lasted from the 17 th March to the 3 rd May 1942. On arriving in England Humphrey appears to have been sent to Wrottesley Park nr Wolverhampton. The camp was the main training establishment for Dutch troops during the war and we can assume that Humphrey spent a short time there in between his naval service and joining the SOE. It was only a matter of four weeks or so because his personnel file with SOE begins on the 6 June 1942. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was set up in 1940 to help the resistance movements in occupied countries by running agents and arranging resistance and sabotage behind enemy lines. wanted the organization to “ set Europe ablaze”. The organization had many successes in Europe but it also had some failures, of which the Englandspiel episode in the was by far the worst. Humphrey was to become one of the casualties of this tragic episode.

Many young adults were anxious to volunteer for special service, in spite of being warned of the fate that might await them if they did. Potential agents were first looked over at a preliminary training school at a requisitioned country house – one for each country section of SOE – in southern England. Villagers who lived nearby were led to believe that the men there were training to be commandos. The teaching staff and officers from the country section, in Holland’s case N section, would consult together about whether the students would be suitable for secret work; anyone obviously unfitted for it at this stage could be sent off somewhere else. These Special Training Schools (S.T.S.) were referred to by a number. Humphrey appears to have been sent firstly to STS 6 on the 18 June 1942. STS 6 was West Court a fine 17 th century manor house in Finchampstead, Berkshire which, before improvements made in 1835, still had a moat and a drawbridge! He was there for 3½ weeks.

By this time he had been given a training name which was M Mebins. Agents were told to choose a different name beginning with their own initial letters from their surname. The idea was that from the moment their training started their real names were taboo and they were not to mention them to anyone, in case German agents in England should hear of them. He, in common with the other agents, would have also handed in his naval uniform in exchange for British uniforms with sergeant’s stripes.

1 Training was undertaken in small groups of around 4 men. Pieter Dourlein describes the routine thus “Out of bed at half-past six and straight on to half an hour’s physical exercises, either indoors or out in the open air. Then breakfast, theory and practice, lunch and again instruction until dinner-time. After a day or so of this I felt as if all my bones had been broken and my brains were bursting out of my head. For four weeks we were trained in the use of automatic light firearms, in blowing up small objects with explosive charges , in learning radio signals and map-reading, and in sport – a great deal of sport”.

A note in Humphrey’s file dated 2 July 1942, two weeks into the training, says “ He is very happy in his new life. He seems to consider it a privilege to have been accepted in this Service and appears very grateful. He is doing his utmost to keep pace with the others as far as military training is concerned even though he gets less of it and had to start from scratch”. It is not clear what the significance of this last sentence is and why he should have received less military training than the others. Presumably he had to start from scratch because his naval experience was not directly relevant to the type of training he was now receiving.

A photo which is dated the 5 August 1942 shows Humphrey with three other men in British uniforms with sergeant’s stripes. It seems fairly certain that this is a photograph of Humphrey and his training companions at STS 6.

Of the other three in the photograph, I have only identified the man on the far left. He was George Lodewijk Ruseler. At the time that the photograph was taken both he and Humphrey would have been 20 years old. They also had quite a lot in common in that Ruseler had also been born in the Dutch East Indies and had come to SOE after six months as a sailor in the Dutch Navy. He had never been to Holland before. Humphrey had only a little more European experience. The family had lived in Belgium for a year from 1934 to 1935 and Humphrey had returned to Holland to attend a jamboree as a scout representative.

The next training report which was written four days after the photograph was taken observes that “ Humphrey is a very subdued sort of chap and very shy. He will probably get good results on the training but his keenness for going on the real job seems, for the moment, to depend on the place where he will eventually be sent. His interests are entirely centred round the colonies”.

This seems hardly surprising. It was only 5 months since Humphrey had left Java, the Japanese had invaded and taken control of the country and his thoughts were bound to be with his family there living under occupation. Of the Dutch SOE agents, there were several who were from the Dutch East Indies and who, despite bravely serving their European motherland, would have had precious little real knowledge or experience of the Netherlands.

The various books and texts which deal with the training of SOE agents refer to the next stage as being commando style training at Arisaig in the Western Highlands of Scotland. The agents would then go to Ringway, Altrincham for parachute training before going on to Beaulieu to learn the techniques of counter-espionage. This included being sent off on a two or three day exercise to an English provincial town to practice their newly acquire skills. It appears from Humphrey’s file that he was sent at this time to Newcastle.

Following on from this some of the agents would go to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for ten weeks of intensive training as a wireless operator whilst others went to Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire to learn about industrial sabotage. However in

2 Humphrey’s case, his records show that he moved on to STS 52 on the 13 July 1942. STS 52 was Thame Park and, apart from four separate days, he was there until the 1 st October which equates to the ten weeks wireless training programme. It would seem then that, for some reason, Humphrey never went to one of the Scottish training schools.

Thame Park

On the 26 September, one of the days when Humphrey was away from Thame Park, his file records him as being in Dudley in the West Midlands. This fits in with the letter we have which was written by a Margaret Clarke who lived in Dudley to Fred Macaré, one of Humphrey’s brothers, after the war. In the letter, Margaret talks about first meeting Humphrey, who she refers to as “Mac”, when he was stationed at Wrottesley Park. She describes “Mac” as “ only being in England a short time when I met him”. She goes on to say that “ while he was at Wolverhampton I saw Mac many times. My family and myself were all very fond of him. He used to love to sit in front of the fire and talk to us. He would never talk very much about the training he was doing but I did know that he would eventually be dropped into enemy occupied country.

In the letter, Margaret Clarke seems to think that Humphrey was training whilst at Wrottesley Park and that he then went to London. She records that; whilst she initially had a lot of letters from him, there was then a period of three months when she did not hear from him. He then turned up to see her and her family, out of the blue, on his 21 st birthday. The reality would seem to be that the three month absence coincided with his joining SOE and embarking on the training and we can assume that he either did not receive her letters or was not allowed to reply to them. There is a slight chronological discrepancy with the date of the visit to Dudley in that Humphrey’s file records him as being there on the 26 September which was actually 16 days before his 21 st birthday. In any event, he was only there for one night. It is worth noting here that, according to the website of Wolverhampton Council, there was a certain amount of “friendship” between the troops stationed at Wrottesley and the local civilian population of the town Indeed, a number of them did not return to the Netherlands following the end of hostilities in 1945 and integrated into local society so well that the only visual sign of their existence in Wolverhampton today is the number of Dutch surnames listed in the Wolverhampton telephone book. The Dutch crown jewels were actually stored in Wolverhampton Town Hall!

A final note of interest contained in Margaret Clarke’s letter arises when she states that “ I knew something important had happened to him because he seemed changed. He was very quiet and he seemed to be worrying about something. That night he told me that he had been dropped by parachute into Holland and that he had been there for three months. Before he went he said that he was going back to Holland and that he would stay there until our army liberated the country.”

This is plainly not true. Whether Margaret Clarke’s memory was unreliable, writing as she was some four years later, or whether Humphrey had misled her we cannot know. We do know, according to the log of his movements in his file, that he returned briefly to Thame Park before going to STS 51 for four days. STS 51 was Ringway near Altrincham and the venue for intensive parachute training. When undergoing parachute training at Ringway, students did at least two jumps, one from a plane and one from a static balloon.

Once the training was completed, agents were sent to yet another requisitioned stately home to mark time whilst waiting to go on operations. For Humphrey, this was STS 61, Gaynes Hall at St Neot’s near Huntingdon, where he arrived on the 15 October having been recorded as spending the previous week stopping at the Green Park Hotel, which is probably in London.

Humphrey’s operation was “Celery” and in addition to using his training name of Mebins, he also had a codename “Schaap” and a name to be used whilst in the field, Barend Merens. The SOE file relating to operation Celery contains the following cover story for Barend Merens.

Name: Barend Merens Address: Herangracht 104

3 Born: 12.10.22, Bandoeng, Dutch East Indies Profession: Studeerend Nationality: Nederlander

At the time of his birth his parents were living in Burgermeesters Coopsweg 53, Bandoeng. At the age of 6 Barend went to the Lagere School in Bandoeng, in Helmersweg, where he remained until he was 12. He then came with his parents on holiday, and spent a year, in Brussels. The following year, when he was 13, he returned to Java and attended the Mulo School in Bandoeng, in Gebriastraat. He remained at this school until he was 16. From this age, until he was 17; he went to the Kweekschool Onderwijzers in Bandoeng (Papandajanlaan). In the beginning of 1940 he returned to Holland and continued his studied there. He was supplied with money by his father who had to remain in Java since his job was a very responsible one with the Dutch East Indies Railway. Barend left Batavia on 27/10/40 on the M.V. Djambi, arriving in Rotterdam on the 4/04/40. He went straight to Amsterdam where he has been studying ever since to pass his examinations as a schoolmaster.

In many respects, the story is very much the story of Humphrey’s early years. Presumably, the idea was that it is easier to remember the truth when being questioned by the enemy than an elaborate fiction. It departs from the truth in regard to Humphrey’s departure from Batavia obviously making no mention of his being conscripted into the Dutch Navy and instead creating a story about leaving on a ship bound for Rotterdam. To this end, his file also contains an itinerary of the MV Djambi’s voyage together with a detailed drawing of the vessel and notes on its colour scheme which presumably he had to learn and memorize.

As already mentioned, the operation which Humphrey was to be engaged upon was codenamed “Celery” and the majority of the other agents who were subsequently captured during this unhappy episode were also engaged in operations which had the ignominy of being named after garden vegetables. “Celery” comprised of a three man team, the others being Horst Steeksma who was 23 years old having been born in Berlin in 1919 and who had been a company sergeant-major in the Prinses Irene Brigade and Meindert Koolstra a 26 year old who had been in the mounted police before volunteering for parachute training in the same brigade as Steeksma. Humphrey was their wireless operator.

Humphrey spent his final ten days in England at Gaynes Hall from where it was a short journey for the agents to travel to Tempsford from where the aircraft would take off that would parachute them to their dropping zone. RAF Tempsford was perhaps the most secret RAF airfield in World War II. It was home to the Special Duties Squadrons, 138, which dropped SOE agents and their supplies into occupied Europe, and 161 Squadron, which specialized in personnel delivery and retrieval by landing in occupied Europe. Hitler personally knew of the existence of an airfield from which the RAF was carrying out these activities, but the Germans were never able to find its location in order to bomb it.

Gaynes Hall

The agents would be driven to Tempsford in a large staff car with a FANY driver, sometimes after a farewell dinner with the head of N section. In an unprepossessing brick building, Gibraltar Farm barn at Tempsford, they would be given their final

4 briefing and handed their operation orders, to read, memorize and hand back. They would be then armed with knives or handguns and equipped with three sets of pills. These consisted of “knock out drops” for stupefying the enemy, Benzedrine for keeping awake during long hours and a single cyanide capsule, one bite of which would bring death in 5 seconds in a dire emergency. They would then put on an overall over their clothes and strap on their parachute. This is the routine which Humphrey would doubtless have followed on the evening of the 24 October 1942 before meeting the aircrew and climbing into the Halifax, the plane that was being used for these drops.

Gibraltar Farm Barn

In fact, Humphrey did not parachute with the others from “Celery”. Steeksma and Koolstra had already jumped together three days earlier along with two others. Instead, Humphrey was joined by two other former sailors. Jan Hofstede, operation “Tomato”, was a 24 year old who had apparently shown promise at Arisaig and Beaulieu, and Charles Pouwels who, like Humphrey, was also Dutch-Indonesian. At nineteen, Pouwels was even younger than Humphrey and was the wireless operator for “Tomato”. George Ruseler who was in the left of the photograph on page 2, was dropped 4 days later.

Under SOE's "Plan for Holland", agents started to be dropped into the Netherlands in 1941. Among one of the first teams parachuted in, on a November night, was Thijs Taconis, a trained saboteur, and his wireless operator, Hubert Lauwers. The German security police then penetrated the embryonic Dutch underground movement and a stool pigeon informed on Lauwers, who was captured early in March 1942. He was forced to transmit messages to England, but was confident that SOE in London would spot a false security check that he included in his transmission. Unfortunately it did not. Shortly afterwards it told him to receive another agent. "Watercress" arrived on 27 March. He too was captured and the process went on as further agents arrived. The lack of radio security checks continued to be ignored by SOE in London. Up to October 1943, SOE sent 56 agents to Holland of which 43 were parachuted straight into the waiting hands of the Germans. The deception was run in parallel by the (military intelligence) who referred to their operation as Nordpol and the Sicherheitspolizei (secret police) who called it Englandspeil (The England Game).

By the time Humphrey was parachuted in on the 24/10/42 the operation was completely compromised and the reception committees which the agents were expecting to meet them were made up, not of members of the , but of members of the German intelligence service aided by Dutch collaborators.

For a brief time after landing, the Dutch collaborators would pretend to be members of the resistance and try and elicit information from the agents about their real names and tasks while they were off their guard. Soon after, however, the agents would be sprung on, handcuffed and taken away for interrogation in Driebergen or . After three or four days of questioning they were then taken to a prison in a former seminary in Haaren, near Tilburg in the south of Holland. Pieter Dourlein describes what he saw when he was taken there after his capture

“We walked through the corridors of the prison (Haaren) and up to the second floor. Soon we stood before a long row of cells, formerly the rooms where young Dutchmen had prepared themselves for the priesthood. Now every room had bars over the skylight and a small spy-hole. In the first cell there were two young men I did not recognize. Soon I saw two faces I had seen on the aerodrome at Ringway where I learned parachute jumping. Then there were two or three others I had seen before. I had met them at hotels where I had stayed during my training. At last I saw my friends with whom I had been trained but who had been dropped before me. There were other men, at least forty.”

5 There is no doubt that Humphrey would have been one of those men. By the time Dourlein described the above scene Humphrey would have been held at Haaren for 4½ months and he was to remain there for a further 8½ months. During that time it would seem that the agents were treated in accordance with customary practices for prisoners of war and they were told that their lives would be spared. However things were to change as the power moved from the Abwehr to the Sicherheitspolizei

On the 27 November 1943, all but four of the agents were blindfolded and sent to prison in Assen, thirty miles from the German border. Some four months later, in April 1944, they were then moved on to the concentration camp at Ravitsch (Rawicz) in Silesia. A P.O.W. card in Humphrey’s file records him as being seen there by an escaped French agent in July 1944.

In early September nine of the agents, including Humphrey, were then moved on – nobody is quite sure where or when – probably to Gross Rosen in Poland, which even among Nazi concentration camps had a dark name. The remainder were sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen in Austria. Both were concentration camps adjacent to granite quarries where the inmates were forced to work mercilessly. The Nordpol agents at Mauthausen were massacred on the 6/7 th September 1944 and it would seem that the same fate probably befell the agents at Gross Rosen. No records are available as they were destroyed by the retreating Germans before the Red Army arrived to liberate the camp.

Of the 56 agents parachuted into Holland up to October 1943 only 8 survived the war.

Humphrey, along with 8 of his colleagues, was posthumously awarded the Bronzen Kruis (BK), (Bronze Cross) for bravery by the Dutch government on the 6 June 1953. The citation reads “By his courageous efforts against the enemy has distinguished himself as an Agent form a secret Intelligence Service, which had sent him into occupied territory, where he, under very difficult circumstances, had a life-threatening mission to fulfill which, by enemy counteraction, has lead towards his death”.

Sources

SOE in the Low Countries, M R D Foot

London Calling North Pole, H J Giskes

Operation North Pole, Pieter Dourlein

The National Archive, File HS 9/973/3, Personnel File – Humphrey Max Macaré

Dutch Ministry of Defence

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