They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  In 1941, however, Vichy was at its most repressive and we started by underestimating both the efficiency and the ruthlessness with which the Milice performed its duties. In effect we came to fear them more than the Gestapo or the Abwehr. Their cleverest tactic – and the one most difficult to detect – was to lay souricières (mousetraps) such as the one in the attic at Marseilles which trapped Harry Morgan. Because their agents were Frenchmen and indistinguishable from local people, they were able to permeate our organisations with a confidence impossible to the Gestapo and they had the power, like dry rot, of spreading their corrupting influence, among both the discontented and the timid. Thus they could take over whole subsections of our organisation and an agent might fall into one of the traps before we could know that it was not safe any more. Often our suspicions were aroused only after an arrest had been made and, as a result, our man had not contacted us as he should. In that case, we would assume the contact was either blown or treacherous and would give it to no more of our men until we had a thorough report. All the same, the souricières took their toll.

  At ten o’clock Denis went into the Post Office and got through to Doctor Lévy’s number.

  ‘Hullo,’ a woman’s voice answered immediately. ‘I was expecting you to call.’

  ‘Good, may I speak—’

  ‘It’s about the Siamese cats, isn’t it? Well, they’re beauties this time and I’m letting them go really quite cheap. I know you won’t be disappointed. Tiburce’s† produced a beautiful litter, really beautiful—’

  ‘I wanted to speak—’

  ‘I know you’re a friend of Yvette’s and—’

  ‘Doctor Lévy – I want to speak to the doctor—’

  ‘Isn’t that Monsieur Isnard?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid it isn’t,’ Denis said.

  ‘I wish you’d told me,’ the voice said. ‘I’ll call the doctor.’

  ‘Lévy here.’

  ‘This is a friend of Grégoire’s. I need your help. I wonder’, Denis spaced the words carefully, ‘do you know where I can buy some good oysters?’

  There was a stunned silence. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Do you know where I can buy some good oysters?’

  ‘Is this a joke? Oysters? How should I know anything about oysters? Who are you?’

  Denis replaced the receiver. It seemed to him that something had gone seriously wrong, for he had been taught that if there was any possibility of a contact being blown he should sever all connection with it. In a mood of great despondency he caught the bus to Antibes, still carrying his suitcase containing the wireless and the other containing the money. Just one control and he would have had it. He reached the bar in Antibes without any alarms. He had been told that Clément, who was to accompany him to Lyons, would be sitting at a table at the back of the room reading a copy of the Nice-Matin and smoking a short black cigar. He would be wearing a beret. Such a man was sitting at the table farthest from the door.

  Denis went and sat at the next table. ‘May I have a look at your paper,’ he asked, giving the password, ‘I left mine on the bus?’

  The other man replied, ‘I bought this one in Nice this morning.’ It was Clément all right. He went on: ‘I was beginning to wonder whether you were going to turn up. Jacques, let’s have another bottle of red. Well, did you have a good trip?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Good stuff. Are we all set to go to Lyons?’

  ‘I think the contact in Antibes has been blown,’ Denis said. ‘I phoned him and he didn’t know what I was talking about.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s been blown. Probably got your wires crossed. I should try and go and see him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll see me.’

  ‘Give it a try; this sort of thing’s always happening. If you think he really has been blown, come back here this afternoon. I’m usually here till about three-thirty.’ There was a casual air about Clément which at once reassured and troubled Denis; it was all very well to find that one’s colleague was confident, but Denis could not but be uneasy at Clément’s lackadaisical manner. He talked in a loud voice which almost invited people to listen to what he was saying. Denis was happy to take his leave of him – still lugging the two suitcases – and start on the way back to Antibes. The bus was again unmolested by controls and he reached Antibes by early afternoon. He started to walk up the road past the station on the way to the Rue de la Sainte Marie when he saw ahead of him a crowd of people, halted at the top of the road where a bridge crossed the railway line. He stopped in an arcade on the pretext of tying up his shoelace and tried to see what was going on. He soon realised: all travellers were being forced to open their cases. Denis turned and started to walk with leisurely indifference back the way he had come. He watched anxiously for further police blocking off the other end of the street, for we had warned him that this was a common move. He turned left down a broad street running parallel to the sea. At the far end of it was a knot of miliciens, idly patrolling the centre of the road and stopping all those who came that way. He turned again and started away from the town centre towards St Raphael. Down a street leading to the sea another band of miliciens were advancing. With dazzling suddenness the place was swarming with them. Denis kept his head, though the two fatal suitcases hung like lead weights on either arm. He thought of going back to the station and putting them in the consigne, but he realised that the police, if they were being as thorough as it seemed, would probably go through everything that was there and, when they discovered the wireless, would wait for him to come and claim it. He knew how precious it was to the organisation. He kept walking. On the outskirts of the town he looked for a road which led back to bypass the town centre (there is generally such a road looping most French towns, for poids lourds) and, finding it, was able to outflank the controls and reach the Rue de la Sainte Marie once again. By this time he was tired and anxious.

  ‘Doctor Lévy cannot see anyone at present,’ the maid told him. ‘He is out on a call.’

  ‘May I speak to his wife then?’ Denis asked desperately.

  ‘What name shall I say?’ The maid was very suspicious.

  Denis had a thought: ‘Say it is a friend of Yvette’s,’ he said, ‘interested in buying a cat.’

  The maid returned to say that if he went round to the back where the kittens were being kept, Madame Lévy would see him. Thankful to be out of sight of the main road, Denis went round and knocked on the door of a small shed. Madame Lévy opened the door. When she saw Denis she looked extremely surprised.

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘Madame, forgive me for intruding in this way, but I am desperately keen to see Doctor Lévy.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I have come from England,’ Denis said recklessly. ‘I was given your husband’s name and told to contact him.’

  ‘But you should have been here four days ago,’ Madame Lévy said in a mildly hurt tone.

  ‘But when I gave him the password he did not understand. Is his phone tapped? Is he in danger?’

  ‘We are always in danger, Monsieur,’ said Madame Lévy with a sudden dignity which made Denis blush.

  ‘I quite understand, Madame. Forgive me. It’s simply that I am rather worried – you see, the Milice—’

  ‘Of course. My husband is not here now and will not return till after surgery. If you come back—’

  ‘May I ask you a favour, Madame? If I go and see your husband at the surgery I’m sure he’ll know who I am. Meanwhile, may I leave my cases here?’ Denis felt unable to make the doctor’s wife see the urgency of the situation. ‘I really don’t want to carry them all over Antibes.’

  Madame Lévy looked at the cases apprehensively. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll put them at the bottom of the garden. If they are discovered for any reason – I shall say you brought them. I don’t know what’s in them and I don’t want to know.’

  Denis managed to secure the address of the doctor’s surgery and set off
at once, much relieved at having disposed of the suitcases. There were several patients in the waiting room and Denis perceived that the best thing he could do was to join the queue.

  ‘Next.’

  Denis rose and went into the surgery. Doctor Lévy was sitting at a small desk covered with papers and bottles, for he did his own dispensing.

  ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Doctor Lévy, I have been trying to get in touch with you all morning. I phoned you at your house at ten o’clock—’

  ‘Ah, so you’re the mysterious stranger who called. Well, what do you want?’

  ‘I have just come from England.’ The doctor did not change expression at Denis’s words. ‘I was told your address and the password I gave you—’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘But your wife said you were expecting me.’

  ‘We were expecting some friends,’ the doctor admitted cautiously, ‘but how can you prove that you are one of them?’

  ‘The password—’

  ‘Do not keep talking about passwords.’

  ‘Perhaps this will convince you,’ Denis said, pulling from his pocket a small pill-box. In it were two lethal tablets. He showed them to Doctor Lévy. The doctor inspected them and then looked at Denis.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, slowly removing his glasses in a tired gesture. ‘Come back here at three o’clock. We will look after you.’

  III

  At home, we had decided to reverse our previous principle of infiltration without sabotage, and when Ben Cowburn, still in the field, got in touch with us in February we gave the go-ahead on a plan he had to blow up some engines which were used to haul munitions trains from the German border.

  He was a man of the greatest determination and resource and it seemed to us only just to give him the chance of making the first bangs. We had sent him his own wireless operator at the end of 1941 and so were able to keep in the closest contact. He had transferred his attentions to Troyes in Eastern France where the rail depot was, and in February we gave him the word. He had recruited a number of tough helpers from among the railwaymen who provided, as I have said, one of the most fertile recruiting grounds we had; Ben, a dour north-countryman, had also recruited a reception committee to whom we were able to drop explosives and detonators and small arms. The drop we made to Ben was one of the first and presaged the enormous mass drops which we were later to make to the Maquis as the great day of liberation approached. At the moment we were strictly limited in the number of planes at our disposal, for in the absence of definite results the high-ups were unwilling to believe that SOE was a really effective fighting force.

  I was continually badgered by well-intentioned officers who thought that we should be able to provide up to the minute inter-round summaries of each phase of our build-up. I was neither able nor inclined to do so. I knew that the more paperwork one undertook the less attention one could pay to the actual job itself; it was no use having tidy records if our whole organisation was in tatters. People wonder why we never kept proper files and they jump to all sorts of wild and preposterous conclusions; the reason is simply that when you have worked every night till somewhere between three and five in the morning, you feel little desire to tabulate the events of the day in order to earn the gratitude and admiration of some hypothetical historian of the future. I held the future more important than the historian. The Free French specialised, even in the field itself, in the compilation of exhaustive records; at one stage these were captured by the Germans and men who would never have been caught otherwise lost their lives.

  Ben Cowburn’s men had no difficulty in placing explosive charges where they could do the most damage and on the night of 3 July 1943 the engine sheds at Troyes and their contents went up in smoke. In order to cover the explosion we tried to arrange for a RAF plane to fly over the area so that the Germans might think that bombs had done the damage; we often used this tactic, for though it seldom deceived the Germans, they were willing to lay the blame on the RAF if they could, since it made them look less foolish and was less harmful to civilian morale than the admission that there actually was a Resistance movement. We were prepared to accept this loss of propaganda if it prevented the taking of civilian reprisals.

  We now had Réseaux (nests) in a fair number of key places, including Nice, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Annecy, Lyons, Le Havre, Rouen, Troyes and Lille. I cannot, of course, give details of the setting up of each of these, and the agents whose personal histories I give are representative of many others whose adventures both resemble and differ from theirs. Certain men both by reason of our orders and their force of character became responsible for several groups in these early days, supervising recruiting and maintaining morale; it was only too easy for agents and French recruits to feel neglected and become dispirited. Men like Peter Churchill (Raoul) in the south, Major Suttill (Prosper) in Paris and Richard Heslop (Xavier) in the east were tremendously valuable, and their dynamism and that of others like them held the organisation together.

  From the beginning of 1942 these men were the lynch-pins. They instilled that esprit de corps which enabled the talents of the other agents to emerge. Their flair was of tremendous help in the field, both in the selection of French recruits and in the allocation to them of suitable tasks. Apart from the railwaymen, most of our best section heads were drawn from the ranks of professional men – doctors, dentists, lawyers and school-teachers – while what one might call the yeoman class (gamekeepers, small farmers and so on) provided the most reliable rank and file.

  By the terms of the agreement we had made with de Gaulle I was forbidden to recruit any Frenchmen into the London end of our organisation and this was a rule to which we adhered rigidly, though we were often able to avoid its apparent rigours by the employment of technical exceptions – dual nationals, Mauritians and French Canadians. I always tried to have as little as possible to do with the politics of the Resistance both in England where I found them distasteful and in France where we were bound, by the terms of our mission, to avoid all interference in internal matters. Our job was, at all times, strictly military.

  IV

  Doctor Lévy hid Denis Rake in his cellar for six days while the Milice conducted one of the most thorough checks which they had ever had in Antibes. Denis and Clément were to go to Lyons by train and it was upon the railway station that the Milice were keeping their most vigilant watch. It was not until the second week in March that the miliciens switched their attentions to another area and our two men were able to board the train.

  ‘Frankly, I think we could have risked it earlier, old boy,’ was Clément’s view as they settled themselves in their second class compartment. ‘I’m not in favour of hanging about when there’s a job to be done.’

  ‘I don’t think we’d have ever got through,’ Denis replied.

  ‘Nonsense. Of course we’d have got through. These Vichy boys are no use at all.’

  All the same, Denis thought, they could recognise a wireless set when they saw one. The battered suitcase which contained Denis’s was on the rack above his head.

  They reached Lyons without incident and there were able to meet their contact in a tiny café on the Quai Perrache. She was a tall, fair-haired woman of striking handsomeness whom they called Renée.† She was in fact an SOE agent, one of the first women to work in France for us. Denis was quartered in a small and grubby hotel near a railway bridge. The patron was extremely surly and extremely sleepy and hardly paid any attention to the fiche which Denis was obliged to fill in, storing it away in a drawer which Denis was pleased to observe contained a large number of used fiches which had plainly never been surrendered to the authorities; Frenchmen are not always over-punctilious in their efforts to pay their taxes and to conceal fiches was a fairly elementary move in this evasion. Denis’s room smelt abominably from the faulty drainage of the hotel (there was only the most primitive sanitation) and a large dog quite as
surly as his master completed the picture. The dog was not such a bad thing in fact for it deterred inquisitive visitors by growling in the most offensive manner.

  That night Denis went to the cinema with Clément. It was the first real moment of relaxation since he landed. The film was absorbing and as the lights went up in the interval, Denis observed: ‘How marvellous this is!’ Unfortunately he said it in English. He and Clément left the cinema quickly.

  It was not always wise to relax too much.

  Soon Denis was operating his wireless from the various safe houses which Renée was able to arrange through local contacts. One day, after he had been working for nearly a month, the patron stopped him.

  ‘I am afraid I shall need your room from Monday,’ he said.

  Denis, knowing that the hotel was almost empty, replied: ‘But why, monsieur? I pay my rent.’

  ‘I shall require the room,’ the man insisted. ‘It’s booked.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I can move to another.’

  ‘I shall need all the rooms.’

  Denis realised that he would have to go and the sooner the better. He talked to Renée about it.

  ‘We should have found you somewhere else before,’ she said. ‘I don’t much like the idea of you living in a hotel anyway.’

  ‘Why not tell the hotel man the position?’ Clément suggested. ‘He’ll probably change his tune if we tell him you’re a British officer.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Renée said. ‘That’s just about the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘Anyway I’ve just about had enough of sleeping on the railway line,’ Denis said. ‘I wake up more exhausted than when I went to sleep.’

  Renée met him next day in the Place Lyautey and by this time he was getting very worried for he had seen the patron walking with a member of the Milice down the embankment on which the hotel stood. Accordingly he paid off his bill – on which he was grossly overcharged – and left. He had long disembarrassed himself of the wireless set which was hidden in a safe house and only collected when needed for skeds by the protection team with whom Denis worked, while the money had been incorporated in the Réseaux funds, so he had nothing incriminating on him. Renée had procured him a proper identity card and a carte de travail which showed him to be a signal box operator on the SNCF. His name was Gerard Blanc.