HALF THE STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 767, 2 April 1954, Page 13

HALF THE STORY

THE EDDIE CHAPMAN STORY, by Frank Owen; Allan Wingate, English price 10/6. THAT was Eddie Chapman: a British agent playing a hazardous game as a member of the German secret service, or a traitor living in luxury in Europe on his earnings as a German spy? In this book we are told only half the story, and in a postscript the author hints infuriatingly at another side, which, even after ten years, must stay an Official secret. Chapman was the only Englishman to win the Iron Cross during the war, an award given in 1943 to the member of his section of the German Secret Service "who had shown the most outstanding zeal and success during the year." A notorious safe-breaker, Eddie Chapman was serving a sentence on the Channel Island of Jersey when the Germans arrived in June, 1940. After his release and a short internment in France, he joined the German secret

service and was trained as a saboteur and spy, salary £45 a month. In December, 1942, he was dropped by parachute on his first mission, which was to blow up two power-houses at the De Havilland aircraft factory near London. He escaped to Portugal as a steward in a British freighter. Next he was offered £50,000 to go back to England to obtain details of our Asdic apparatus that was causing U-boat commanders such anxiety, but at first he was reluctant to return: "I had made enough money; now. I only wished to lead a life of pleasure for a while." Much of his story is taken up with this life of pleasure as a Wehrmacht officer in Germany and the occupied countries; it ends with his return to England in July, 1944, ostensibly still working for the Germans. On the face of all this (one wonders) why wasn’t he shot as a spy? Occasionally, however, he hints that his allegiance was not wholly German and of his interest in Hitler’s new secret weapons, but much has to be looked for between the lines.

W.A.

G.