Deborah Swift: Operation Tulip – incredible courage in occupied Holland

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Deborah Swift to the blog as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. She’s a USA TODAY bestselling author of twenty books who is passionate about the past. Before becoming a writer, Deborah was a costume designer for the BBC. Now she lives in a former English school house in a village full of 17th century houses, near the glorious Lake District. After taking an MA in Creative Writing, she enjoys mentoring aspiring novelists and runs an award-winning historical fiction blog.

Deborah loves to write about how extraordinary events in history have transformed the lives of ordinary people and how the events of the past can live on in her books and still resonate today. The Poison Keeper featured the Renaissance poisoner Giulia Tofana, and won a Wishing Shelf Book of the Decade Award and a Coffee Pot Book Club Gold Medal. Her most recent books are The Silk Code and The Shadow Network both set in the Second World War.

Over to Deborah!

What attracted you to the difficult year of 1944 and to the Netherlands?

I had started the series with Nancy Callaghan – a fictional Secret Agent from the SOE (Special Operations Executive) – and the first novel was set during the scandal of Englandspiel, which was a disaster where British agents were captured by the Nazis when they were parachuted into Holland. I wanted to continue Nancy’s story and so searched for a period of the war where the Dutch people were under the most pressure. This turned out to be The Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter in Dutch) – the freezing winter of 1944 when half of Holland was liberated, and the other half was left starving behind enemy lines. It struck me that this period of the war when the Nazis knew they would be defeated, but the Dutch people were ever more desperate, would provide plenty of opportunity for conflict. Also, it showed both sides – the Resistance and the Gestapo – in their least organised and most chaotic period of the war, both sides fighting like cornered rats.

How did you prepare to write Nancy as a Nazi and to resist the urge to make Detlef Keller and Fritz Schneider stereotype SS officers?

Truus Oversteegen with Sten gun

Nancy Callaghan is a fictional character but followed in the footsteps of many real women who did this kind of work, pretending to be Nazi sympathisers. One of the most famous is the French agent Jeannie Rousseau, who spoke fluent German, and played on a German officer’s desire to show off in order to unearth details about the development of the new V2 ballistic missiles. For information about how it might have felt to be a Dutch agent befriending a Nazi for the Resistance, I used the book Seducing and Killing Nazis by Sophie Poldermans, which tells the stories of the Oversteegen sisters and Hannie Schaft who undertook these dangerous roles.

The Nazis in the book are after all people under their uniforms, not stereotypes, with different desires and different attitudes to the war. Detlef sees it as something that must be ‘got through’ before he can continue his life, whereas Fritz Schneider (his boss) sees it as a path to greater influence. Both soon discover their preconceptions are wrong. I used a variety of research mostly from non-fiction books about Germany in the war. Two that I found particularly helpful were The SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee and The Nazi Officer’s Wife by Edith Hahn.

How did you research clothes and food?

Most of my research was done through books. One illustrated book that I used extensively was The Dutch Resistance 1940 – 45 by Michel Wentling and Klaas Castelein, which showed me exactly which uniforms were worn by the different branches of the Nazi collaborators, and also the clothes worn by men and women of the Resistance.

Also extremely helpful were eyewitness accounts and biographies of people who had survived the Hunger Winter, such as The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–1945 by Ingrid de Zwarte, and The Occupied Garden which is a family memoir of war-torn Holland. Both these describe the indignities of digging up tulip bulbs for food, or people dying in the streets if cold or starvation because fuel and food supplies were so short.

What are the challenges of thinking like a 1940s woman in an ‘unwomanly’ role?

I had a few difficulties with this in the editing process, because what was considered ‘womanly’ in 1940 is very different from what is considered womanly today. I was encouraged by one of my editors not to have the man open a door for a woman, or have her cook food in the kitchen, as it reduced her agency – but I argued that in the 1940s these were typical behaviours, and the woman couldn’t be depicted as just today’s woman in 1940’s clothes.

Being a woman in a man’s world was a necessity in the Resistance when the leader of your network was eliminated by the Nazis. This happened to Marie-Madeleine Fourcade who was the leader of the French Resistance network Alliance, under the code name Hérisson (Hedgehog) after the arrest of its former leader, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau. Hedgehog continued to lead the network, but had some difficulty persuading hr British contacts that she was in fact in charge. Her memoir is published as Noah’s Ark.

In Occupied Holland most of the men were either collaborators with the Nazi regime, or had been removed to Germany to work in German factories. Women were forced to take on the roles of saboteurs, assassins, and wireless operatives simply because men were too obvious and would be immediately deported if discovered. They were also able to travel by bicycle as couriers, taking messages and even weaponry between Resistance cells.

The role of Nancy’s partner Tom, who doesn’t think things through and ends up in serious trouble, is designed to contrast with Nancy and her role in planning and running a network. Most of the women undertook these roles out of necessity, and they didn’t consider themselves particularly brave. I think they were psychologically tougher than men expected, and this is still true of women in conflict situations today – that they are easily underestimated. There has however been an increasing interest in female agents of WW2, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to write this series.

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Connect with Deborah
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/swiftstory   @swiftstory
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authordeborahswift/
Website: www.deborahswift.com
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/deborahswift1/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/deborah-swift
Amazon: https://author.to/DeborahSwift
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What’s Operation Tulip about?

Buy the ebook: https://mybook.to/Tulip

Bookshop links: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/operation-tulip-ww2-secret-agent-series-deborah-swift

My thoughts…

In the shifting sands of trust and the desperation brought about by hunger and isolation Nancy Callaghan continues her mission of resistance in North Holland in the Hunger winter of 1944/45. She seems to have nine lives, but much of this is down to her competence and instincts honed in shatteringly dangerous situations. She is not an unbelievable Lara Croft, but a well-drawn flesh and blood woman shrinking from the ramifications of her mission, but carrying it out despite her fear – true courage.

Her boyfriend, Tom, an unassuming code expert, but lacking the steel to work as an agent in the field, wangles his way into Holland too ‘rescue’ her, but his unpreparedness in face of the dangers brings its own danger.

Deborah Swift draws these two characters beautifully and in depth. She does throw Nancy into such dangerous places that I almost couldn’t bear  to read on, but Nancy is clever and cool in extracting herself and playing on the arrogance and vulnerability of the German authorities she infiltrates. 

The author does not flinch from describing the terrible famine in occupied Holland or bombing and fire damage, emphasising the distressing impact on people with but without gratuitous detail. 

This is a writer who can write deeply and fluently, showing characters, action, landscape and dilemmas cleverly and in a way to draw the reader into the centre of the story. Recommended! 

Follow Deborah’s book tour!

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers –  INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO,  AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO  and RETALIO,  and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories.  Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA,  Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

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