At this stage, immediately prior to D-Day, the dangers grew. Our men had to come out into the open in order to brief their forces and even now there were double agents and Frenchmen who thought their own ends could best be served by betraying their friends. In the north-east two of our best men were trapped by a double agent and both were later shot. Peter Churchill and Odette had both been caught somewhat earlier, but the organisation in which they had been most concerned was still able to continue without them, so well had they done their work. The commander in that section, Francis Cammaerts, known as Colonel Roger, was rapidly rebuilding the Réseau and making good its losses.
In the Jura and the Ain departements, where Peter had first realised the Maquis’ tremendous potential value to our cause, was Xavier (Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Heslop, DSO) who had an army 5,500 men under him, all fully equipped with small arms, but, of course, deficient in anything bigger than a PIAT or bazooka. His men were to contain and, if possible, destroy a German armoured division stationed in the south of France which we thought might start to move north at D-Day along the Route Hannibal, a narrow road through the mountains of the Hautes Alpes, a road full of those hairpin bends and deep defiles most suited to the warfare in which the Maquis were trained.
By the first months of 1944, Xavier’s men were in virtually undisputed control of an area the size of an English county, and even then several brigades of German troops were needed to contain them. They had been blooded in action with these forces already and we had arranged to drop a doctor to them; this was ‘Parsifal’,† a well-known Harley Street specialist, who set up a field hospital on the barren plateaux of the Jura and treated not only the wounded Maquisards but also members of the villages in the valleys whose loyalty to a cause in which they suffered heavily gave the Maquis advance warning of troop movements.
Denis Rake, who, it may be remembered, had rather an unfortunate time with Xavier when they were both captured earlier, had also returned to France and he was now with a tough group of Maquisards in the Massif Central. He could scarcely keep them from attempting to liberate France on their own. Everywhere the same keenness for the great day manifested itself.
Xavier wirelessed to us for more arms. In maintaining their perimeter against the Germans they had used up nearly all their ammunition. We decided to send a fully loaded transport plane to them. They told us that they could ensure a large enough landing area and accordingly a supply plane was sent, landed on a secluded plateau and unloaded a vast stock of essential supplies, including drugs and other medical equipment for Parsifal’s hospital, which now boasted a nurse, locally recruited. In charge of arms instruction in Xavier’s zone was Gordon Nornable, MC, who maintained throughout all his varied experiences the uncompromising toughness of his native Yorkshire.
More and more men, aware that D-Day could not now be long delayed, were joining the Maquis and we were driven to desperation – and to desperate means – in the effort to supply them with arms.
Meanwhile sabotage reached new heights. The Germans were driven to fury by its persistence and its effectiveness. Railway lines were the most easy targets and our men were so effective in the wrecking of them that some sectors were never repaired at all. The Germans simply abandoned them. They grew tired of having their repair teams ambushed and their equipment added to the wreckage already on the line. Elsewhere, aircraft were destroyed in their hangars and charges attached to the fuselages of planes parked on the tarmac. Nothing was safe from the attentions of our men.
One of the other most vulnerable targets was lock gates. All sorts of ingenious ways were adopted of blowing these up. They were, of course, an essential part of inland transport, and as the railways became increasingly hazardous, the Germans turned to canal traffic as a means of transporting important supplies. River banks and bridges were patrolled and it became more and more difficult to approach lock installations without exciting suspicion. One of our men near St Quentin in the Oise district formed, with some of his colleagues, a fully equipped fishing party. They had rods and picnic baskets and vacuum flasks and they floated, fishing contentedly, down to the gates. There they attached an underwater charge and punted calmly back past the guards, munching their sandwiches. Ten minutes later the lock gates were stove in by a violent explosion.
Unfortunately, the perpetrator of this daring raid was picked up in the furore which was subsequent upon it. He was a man of the greatest devotion to duty and no account of SOE would be complete without a tribute to him. His name was ‘Guy’† and he had suffered a dislocation of the spine when he landed on a rock-strewn field after parachuting from his plane. He was in the greatest agony all through his time in France, yet he refused to be brought back or to retire to a safe house, and in incessant pain he organised his Réseau and took part in its operations helped in everything he did by his devoted wireless operator, Yolande Beekman. This sort of determination was typical of the spirit which infused our agents.
In the south also demolitions of locks and inland waterways were high on the list of tasks. Here our men managed almost totally to bottle up a number of ships in the Étang de Berre. More and more targets were presenting themselves day by day as the Germans tried to cover every front upon which the Allied attack could be expected. We had to be very firm in order to restrain our people from using up all their supplies before D-Day ever arrived. Of course, we had many more planes at our disposal now, for each fresh success gained us further approval from SHAEF, and thus made it easier for us to achieve new ones.
Our build-up for D-Day went ahead. We had preserved the independence of each Réseau and still no one was sure who was in command of his flanking units. This was still absolutely necessary. Nothing could have been more tragic than to let the Germans infiltrate at the last minute and so render impotent a weapon we had worked so hard to build up at so great a cost, both in men and in materials, over so many months.
I was determined to keep security at a maximum until the last possible moment. In those districts where, through impetuosity or treachery, our units were unable to maintain this secrecy, a fearful price was paid. In almost every département of France our men waited – waited for the signal that the great day was at hand. There were 306 wirelesses tuned to London each evening, 306 different messages personnels would have to be sent. Each evening we sent large numbers, but most of them were, of course, blinds.
We hit upon a small plan to divert the German attention from the Normandy area where the attack was, in fact, to take place and we told our men to put the word about to their unreliable friends and, through them, eventually to the Gestapo itself that any reference to soup was to the Pas de Calais. The Germans, of course, listened in dutifully every night to the messages personnels without having any idea of their exact significance, but now they thought they were on to something. Sure enough, we broadcast endless sentences of the order of ‘Monsieur Gérard aime lepotage’, ‘Caroline demande du bouillon’, and so forth. The Germans moved a division to the Pas de Calais. It sounds foolish, but of course in Intelligence work you are always trying to see through bluffs and double bluffs. The Germans, it seems, chose unluckily, for while they fell for this small deception and the greater one of the Man Who Never Was, they failed to profit by Operation Cicero and paid no attention to the vital information they acquired through it.
On the whole, as I suggested with regard to Bleicher, their intelligence was in many ways excellent, but they were too prone to imagine a complete triumph when they had achieved only a limited success. It cost them dear in 1940 and it led them into false complacency throughout the war. It never occurred to them that their enemies would fight on whatever the odds against success. This contempt for the fighting qualities of their opponents led them to make many errors of judgement; they always made the mistake of judging others by themselves. When you are a German, that is a formidable disadvantage.
The stage was set for the final battles. We awaited only the word to set things going. On the afternoon of 5 Jun
e 1944, that word was given. That evening, 306 messages were sent out by the BBC. Those messages were indistinguishable from the dummies which we had been sending, mixed with genuine ones, since we started using the BBC for communicating with our men. But that night, for the very first time, every single message was loaded with meaning. To men huddled in mountain huts, to men in bistros in crowded towns who hid behind drawn blinds and locked shutters from the patrols which scoured the streets, to men in the Landes, in the Haute-Savoie, in the Jura, in Lille, in the Massif Central, in the heart of Paris, in tiny hamlets on the Gironde, the Dordogne and in the Corrèze and in the black factory country of the Nord and the Somme, in the forests of the Ardennes and the barren hills above Grenoble, in Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulon, Dijon, Besançon, in Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Le Mans, Orléans and Rennes, every message carried deadly meaning. ‘Vilma vous dit oui’ meant ‘destroy all German rolling stock on the railway line Angouleme–Bordeaux.’ ‘Madame dit non’ meant ‘bring down all telegraph wires between Caen and Alengon and Caen and Évreux.’ All over France similar tasks were started. Arms were brought down from lofts and dug up from beneath cellar flagstones. Uniforms were brought out and buttons polished. France was ready to help in her own liberation. How much would she be able to achieve? D-Day and the days that followed were to tell us.
† Andrée Borrel was killed in Natzweiler concentration camp on 6 July 1944. Gilbert Norman (Archambaud) died in Mauthausen on 6 September 1944.
† Field name of Joseph Antelme, code name BRICKLAYER. He died in Gross Rosen concentration camp in September 1944.
† Noor Inayat Khan was killed in Dachau on 13 September 1944.
† Field name of Dr Geoffrey Parker, code name PASTRYCOOK.
† Field name of Gustave Bieler, organiser of the MUSICIAN Circuit. Killed in Flossenbürg on 5 September 1944.
Chapter 12
Flame
The nervous strain of waiting to be attacked had taken its toll on the Germans. They had troops stationed here, there and everywhere, and on the slightest hint of danger they moved them from one place to another. This sort of jitteriness lent itself to exploitation by the Maquis. There were two main objectives for our men: the Hermann Goering Division and the Panzers on the Côte d’Azur. We were watching their every move. On D-Day the Maquisards were in position. Soon after the Normandy landings, Hilaire’s organisation got notice from one of their scouting parties that the Hermann Goering Division was making ready to move north to the battlefront, in the firm belief that there were no enemy troops between them and it. It was to be the job of Hilaire, Aristide, and all in the south-western districts, to show the Germans how mistaken they were.
Industrial sabotage now reached new heights. Already much had been done in the immediate pre-invasion period. In March 1944, for instance, the Dunlop factory at Montluçon had been virtually immobilised, thanks to the activities of one of our organisers working in close association with the managing director and with the participation of the workers. The explosives for the job were brought into the factory in lorries working for the firm. Similar operations were now stepped up all over France. Indeed, production was so dislocated that though the Germans were not driven from France for several months, the factories under their control became largely useless to them.
On the Route Hannibal, Roger and Xavier waited for the German armour to begin its perilous journey north. On the day after D-Day they heard that they had packed up and were preparing to start the journey. An army of 5,500 men waited for them in the defiles of the Hautes Alpes, the Jura and the Haute-Savoie.
All over France we gave the OK for previously reconnoitred demolitions. On D-Day plus two the bridge at l’Hôpital-sur-Rhins, over the Rhone, was destroyed. It was a steel girder modern bridge and it took hours to fix the charges in place and a ladder had to be used to get the charges to the spot where they would do the most damage. The mission was completed with signal success and the Germans were denied the use of the road for over two weeks. In that time large numbers of troops had to be diverted to other routes. More and more roads were sealed off; those that were not became more and more crowded.
The railways were under constant surveillance and the employees, most of them resisters themselves, kept our section heads accurately informed about train movements and what they were carrying. Often the engine drivers themselves were tipped off about the time and place of demolitions so that they could get clear. The Germans had guards on some of the trains, however, and sometimes the drivers had to take their chances with their passengers.
In the south our men took control of whole sections of the country and many places were liberated long before Allied troops reached them. Xavier raised the Allied flags in villages of the Jura and the Germans ventured from their garrison towns only at the peril of their lives. The area north of the Loire was less easily controlled by our men, for the nature of the country, densely populated, full of Germans and offering little cover to guerrilla fighters was not suited to the Maquis. Lille, of course, was very eager to get into the fight and there Sylvestre had organised a large number of resisters whose activities caused the Germans plenty of trouble and greatly hampered the productive capacity of the factories.
In the area immediately behind the battle zones the Maquisards were active in dislocating German transport and communications. All telecommunications between German headquarters were sabotaged in the days subsequent to D-Day. Down came the wires and German liaison was ruined. Dispatch riders were then sent out. They were shot down. Large numbers of troops had then to be deployed to ensure safety of communications. And every man used for this purpose was one man less fighting the invading troops on the beachhead.
II
The Hermann Goering Division entered Hilaire’s district. At once roads were blown up, trees fell across alternative routes and shots ripped into marching columns from crumbled and deserted farmhouses. The advantage of guerrilla warfare in France is that the movements of a road-bound enemy are so easily plotted. There are few usable roads and you can tip off a waiting force of the imminence of the enemy’s arrival with the greatest confidence. By now all security had been abandoned in those areas actually engaged in fighting. Hilaire and Aristide were in close contact, cutting off stragglers and maiming transport. The Hermann Goering Division had to stand and fight. It lumbered angrily through the endless foothills of the Gironde, harried and stunned by the constant pressure of attacks. It twisted and turned as bridge after bridge crumbled before it and forced it to turn about. Each village concealed its ambush and the crack troops heading for Normandy were tired and exhausted before they had reached halfway to their objective. And they yet had before them the remorseless Maquisards of the Dordogne, the Corrèze and the Creuse, who in turn took their toll on the diminishing band.
Now Hilaire’s organising genius was seen to its fullest advantage. The disposition of his arms dumps was such that each village knew where it could arm itself and had qualified leaders to control and direct its effort. The Hermann Goering Division ground to a halt and fought, fought an enemy who, when you stood and urged him to come in, would not show himself but who, as soon as you thought the coast was clear, was again on your flanks, carrying a sting whose effectiveness no corps commander could ignore.
It was during this delaying action against the Hermann Goering Division that Violette Szabo was caught. She and Anastasie,† a leader in the Dordogne, were on a briefing mission to some patriots in the region of Salon-la-Tour when they ran into a German ambush. They might well have got out, for Violette’s quick eye spotted the Germans before they were able to open fire, but as they left their car and scrambled through a hedge into a field Violette twisted her ankle. Anastasie tried to carry her, but she cried to him, ‘Get out, run for it, I’ll hold out.’
He looked at her and hesitated for a second. It was the kind of tragic decision agents were sometimes forced to take. He knew what the rules said in such situations: it was an agent’s responsibility to save him
self rather than sacrifice his life in the vain attempt to save another’s. Anastasie ran across the field towards some woods. Violette lay in the field and started to fire at the Germans who came scrambling through the hedge in pursuit of the fleeing agents. She held them off long enough for Anastasie to get clear (otherwise we should not know this story) and then she was captured, her ammunition having run out, and taken away. After a long captivity borne with dignity and great courage, she was taken to Germany. At Ravensbrück concentration camp she was murdered by the Germans. Even her murderers could not restrain their admiration for her. The British Government recognised it too, by the posthumous award to her of the George Cross.
Aristide’s men from the Bordeaux area were not slow to join in the fighting against the Hermann Goering Division and the ponderous wriggling of the Germans to escape from the net of torture into which they had blundered began to take on a desperate quality.
Meanwhile, in the Hautes Alpes, Roger and his men were busily blowing up sections of the Route Hannibal. The German panzers were pinned by giant landslides and their transport columns decimated by Maquisards who closed in on their rear. The Germans began to scour the mountains, preparing full-scale attacks against positions that were empty when finally they were stormed. Whole platoons blundered about the deserted uplands and were mopped up by bands of relentless and tough Maquisards for whom this battle was the opportunity to eradicate the four years of their country’s shame. The villages were openly devoted to our cause and the British and French flags flew on the Mairies of the more daring and more remote ones. Now we decided to drop more arms, for, farther to the north, Xavier told us that his men were running short of ammunition. On the night of France’s national day, 14 July, we sent seventy planes to the Jura, brought to the right place by the radio of Yvonne† and the planning of Lucien.‡ A vast carnival of red, white and blue parachutes descended on the upland plains to make it clear that we in London were also celebrating France’s national day. Enormous quantities of supplies were thus dropped and Xavier was able to arm still further bands who now made for the hills, anxious to strike a blow against the Boches from which either fear or complicity or lack of opportunity had earlier prevented them.
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