In A Dangerous Enterprise, Tim Spicer charts the history of this little-known, yet remarkable flotilla. Commanded directly by the Secret Intelligence Service, the 15th MGBF was an extraordinary group of men thrown together in the most secret of adventures.
Between 1942 and 1944 a very small, very secret, very successful clandestine unit of the Royal Navy, operated between Dartmouth in Devon, and the Brittany Coast in France. It was a crossing of about 100 miles, every yard of it dangerous. The unit was called the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla- crewed by 125 officers and men, it became the most highly decorated Royal Naval unit of the Second World War. The 15th
MGBF was an extraordinary group of men thrown together in the most secret of
adventures. Very few were regular Royal Naval officers- instead the unit was
made up of mostly Royal Naval Volunteer Officers and ‘duration only’ sailors.
Their home was a converted paddle steamer and luxury yacht, but their work
could not have been more serious.
Their mission was to ferry agents
of SIS and SOE to pinpoint landing sites on the Brittany coast in Occupied
France. Once they had landed their agents, together with stores for the
Resistance, they picked up evaders, escaped POWs who had had the good fortune
to be collected by escape lines run by M19, as well as returning SIS and SOE
agents.
It is a story that is
inextricably entwined with that of the many agents they were responsible for
- Pierre Hentic, Yves Le Tac, Virginia Hall, Albert Hue, Jeannie Rousseau,
Suzanne Warengham, Fran ois Mitterrand and Mathilde Carre, as well as many
others. Without the Flotilla, such intelligence gathering networks as Jade Fitzroy
and Alliance would never have developed, and SOE’s VAR Line and MI9’s
Shelburne Escape Line would never have been realised.
Drawing on a huge amount of
research on both sides of the Channel, including private archives of many of
the families involved, A Dangerous Enterprise brings the story of this
most clandestine of operations brilliantly to life.
