They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  In the light of the final victory, so crushing and apparently so inevitable, it is difficult to recreate the tension we felt in London during those middle months of 1944. To invade the continent of Europe was an undertaking far more perilous, far less sure of success, than it now seems. Now it is the actions of the great armies which most commend themselves to the memoirs of Generals and the analyses of strategists; as time passes, the smaller strokes are lost in the admiration given to the overall effect. It was not always so: in that summer of 1944 many lives were saved by the exploits and the deaths of a few men. Great armies crossed bridges captured by a few irregulars under an English officer. Whole corps of German troops were diverted from the front by the bluff of a few hundred civilian riflemen.

  At Romorantin, for instance, 400 Frenchmen armed with Stens and small arms managed to deny the Germans the use of the bridge over the Loire. The group was led by a British girl, Pearl Cornioley, whose maiden name was Witherington. A strong force of Germans were about to cross the Loire to join up with troops fighting east of Paris. SHAEF gave us the order to divert and hold them off. Pearl was short of trained men, so she armed all the civilians who would help her. She spread them out through the ripening cornfields on the banks of the river. When the Germans came up to the river a furious fusillade greeted them, apparently from troops occupying pre-arranged defensive positions along the far bank. The Germans approached the bridge, but the massed troops of their enemies drove them back. They faltered and retired, convinced that an American detachment had come up at fantastic speed (it would have been at the rate of about 200 miles in two days) and were entrenched against them. They moved farther up the river to find another crossing place. Most of the other bridges had been blown up and this particular corps never did manage to join the fighting in France. It only just was able to take part in the last battles of the war in Germany. By then the issue was beyond doubt.

  It was this kind of holding action – in which considerable casualties could be inflicted – which made the Maquis so invaluable to Allied force commanders. In addition, German communications were hopelessly muddled and in many cases transport came to a halt. So efficient were the Maquis that the Allies were to have their work cut out to restore the facilities which had been so decisively denied to the Germans. I remember that one power plant at Creney near Troyes which Ben Cowburn had offered to blow up had been too well guarded to permit sabotage. It was just as well, for it was the only one in a wide area which was able to supply electricity to the liberated countryside. Ben Cowburn was, however, very irate at his failure.

  On the whole we tried to limit the damage inflicted in the later stages to disruption, for we knew that total destruction of installations could embarrass us more than the Germans.

  The only place where the Resistance was somewhat ineffectual (though this did not prevent individual acts of great bravery) was in Paris. In the capital, there were too many people eager to pay off old scores or to atone for old misdemeanours. The Réseau had been subject to continual waves of arrests and denunciations. As a result, their heads were hardly as well in control of Resistance groups as were their colleagues in other areas. There was too little organisation from the top, too little co-ordination and too little sense of timing. Paris fought the invader with courage (the plaques on the street corners are testimony to it) but with far less success than would have accrued with better discipline. The streets were crowded with armed men who attacked the Germans individually, as warriors might attack a pack of wolves.

  Further, Paris rose rather sooner than wisdom should have permitted and the Resistance came near to suffering the fate of the Warsaw patriots, except that the Allies did not wait for them to be butchered before relieving the city. Any criticism which may seem to be implicit in what I am saying is not meant to be directed at anyone or any section in particular. The hazards in Paris were very great and unity harder to achieve: the outcome was not without its tragic side, but, as throughout the length of France, there was never any doubt of the patriotism of those who recklessly flung themselves upon the enemy. Of the civilian population of Paris in general (as indeed of that of London) no praise can be too high. I remember very clearly, on 26 August 1944, when I entered Paris for the first time since the war began, a small boy of six or seven walked solemnly up to me as I crossed the almost deserted Champs-Élysées. ‘Permit me,’ he said in faultless English, ‘to shake hands with a gentleman. We have not seen any gentlemen for four years.’

  † Field name of Jacques Dufour, member of the STATIONER Circuit.

  † Yvonne Baseden. Field name Odette. Code name BURSAR.

  ‡ Field name of Marie Joseph Gonzagues de St Genies, organiser of the SCHOLAR Circuit.

  † Field name of John Farmer, organiser of the FREELANCE Circuit.

  † Christine Granville (originally Krystina Skarbek), field name Pauline.

  Chapter 13

  Aftermath

  What then, in actual fact, were the achievements of the French section of SOE? In the last chapter I have made some attempt to outline the major successes which our men had during the invasion period. In the earlier ones I have tried to show the sort of difficulties, both administrative and personal, which they encountered and conquered. I hope that the increasing trust which the higher command came to place in the capabilities of SOE has emerged during the course of the narrative. In the beginning, the Generals were suspicious of our effectiveness and uncertain of our fighting qualities. By the end, neither was ever in doubt.

  SOE finally came of age on D-Day plus fifteen. It was on that day that General Eisenhower’s message came through to our office. It was Most Urgent.

  This was the situation: our hold on the Normandy beachhead was far from secure; we had come up against very stiff resistance and we were pinned down; all our forces were fully committed; any reinforcement to the Germans might swing the balance and prove fatal to our cause. Those reinforcements were on the way. A Panzer corps was moving towards Normandy and was expected to cross the Eure near Évreux within the next twenty-four hours across the only remaining bridge. This bridge was the only one the RAF had failed to destroy. It had to be destroyed before the Panzers crossed it.

  What General Eisenhower wanted to know was this: Could SOE destroy that bridge?

  It was our chance to prove ourselves once and for all. My staff and I met in my office to consider the position. SHAEF was looking to SOE to save the balance of the battle. Could we meet the challenge?

  ‘It boils down to this,’ I said. ‘Have we got someone who can get to that bridge and lay the charges under it before the Panzers get there? It’s sure to be heavily guarded so it needs someone who’s known locally and who can get across without too much difficulty – in other words, someone the guards will recognise as harmless.’

  ‘Hervé’s near there,’ Vera Atkins said.

  ‘Has he got any explosives left?’ I said. ‘That’s the question.’ I got through on the phone to our wireless station. ‘When is Hervé’s next sked?’ I demanded. ‘It should be tonight, unless he’s changed it.’ We waited while the man at the other end went to find out.

  ‘Tonight at eight-fifty,’ he reported at last.

  ‘Take this message for him,’ I said. ‘“BRIDGE AT ÉVREUX MUST REPEAT MUST BE DESTROYED NORMANDY BATTLE HINGES ON IT HAVE YOU EXPLOSIVES FOR JOB REPLY MOST URGENT MESSAGE ENDS.”’

  ‘I’ll keep the line open for him,’ the officer at the other end said. ‘He’ll be able to reply at once.’

  ‘Good.’ I put the phone down. ‘If he hasn’t got enough explosive,’ I said, ‘it’s all up. It’s too late to fly any in. Anyway the place must be crawling with Boches now.’ The very outcome of the war seemed to us in that office to hinge on whether Hervé could do the job.

  At eight-thirty we were all in my office, waiting for the result of Hervé’s sked. We sat silently, staring at the phone. It rang at a quarter to ten.

  I snatched it up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Co
lonel Briggs here at SHAEF. Any news?’

  ‘We’re waiting to hear.’

  ‘The RAF have failed again with the bridge. The Panzers will be there in three hours.’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything till I’ve heard from my man. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Let me know at once when you hear something. The Supreme Commander’s very anxious.’

  We waited. Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was our wireless station.

  ‘We have made contact with Hervé,’ was the news. ‘He understands the importance of the mission.’

  ‘What about explosives?’ I asked in as calm a voice as I could. ‘Has he got sufficient?’

  ‘I will read you his message. Here it is: “MESSAGE RECEIVED AND UNDERSTOOD WILL DO IMMEDIATELY EXPLOSIVES AVAILABLE VIVE LA FRANCE VIVE l’ANGLETERRE.”’

  I repeated it to the staff round my desk. Then I put the phone down and rang Colonel Briggs at SHAEF. ‘The Supreme Commander’s orders have been transmitted and will be carried out immediately,’ I told him.

  ‘I hope so,’ Briggs said. ‘If those Panzers get through, God knows what’ll happen.’

  ‘They won’t get through,’ I said.

  What happened that summer night in Évreux we shall never properly know. Immediately after receiving his orders Hervé went to see the local postman. From him he borrowed his uniform and his bicycle. He refused to say what he was going to do except to tell the postman that it was pour la France. From that time Hervé was never seen again by anyone who lived to tell the tale. My view is that he loaded the explosives into the postman’s satchel and on the bicycle carrier. Then he cycled boldly up the bridge and past the guards who controlled it. As he reached the centre of it, before the guards could do anything to stop him, he flung the bike and himself to the ground and pressed the instantaneous detonators on the charges he was carrying, so blowing the bridge and himself to pieces.

  The next morning an RAF reconnaissance plane flew over the Eure. There was no bridge standing. On the far side of the river, the wrong side, a Panzer corps was drawn up. That corps never crossed the Eure. That afternoon it was knocked out by a Typhoon squadron.

  The next morning we had a short message of congratulation from the Supreme Commander.

  From that day to the day when the last German was driven from French soil, SHAEF knew that it could rely on the bravery of our men to accomplish behind the enemy lines any mission short of meeting full German divisions in pitched battle. Our office was jammed with new battle orders for our agents, and the Maquisards who worked under them, and our wireless station worked night and day sending the orders to them and reporting back to us that mission after mission was completed, and that the Réseau in question was waiting eagerly for its next assignments. We were never short of them.

  Sir Winston Churchill, in the dark days of 1941, gave us the order to ‘set Europe ablaze.’ After the war General Eisenhower was able to say that the operations of SOE, together with those of the Maquis with whom they were so closely associated, had shortened the war in Europe by nine months. In nine months a lot of towns are destroyed in a modern war, many millions of pounds of equipment are used and many lives are lost. If it is true that the war in Europe was shortened by nine months, SOE needs no further testimonial.

  Books have been written since the war suggesting that the ‘fifth column’ is a much overrated weapon. I think such books are mainly concerned with the German fifth column in the Low Countries and in France during 1940, but the suggestion that what they say applies equally to Allied clandestine operations seems to me to be not without currency. Therefore I should like to point out once again that SOE was not a fifth column at all: it was a military organisation with strictly military objectives. For that reason it does not fall within the deprecated category of fifth columns.

  The sabotage – and there was plenty of it, as I have pointed out – was ancillary to an overall military and economic end, the facilitation of Allied victory and the reconquest of Europe.

  Ours was not a disjointed series of defiant and foolhardy acts, but a unified tactical and strategic operation. What made it so unusual – indeed there has never been anything like it before in the history of warfare – was that a large number of clandestine groups were welded together by a central direction which was immune from the hazards facing the individual members of the secret army and which yet was able vicariously to share in those dangers and often warn people of them, by the information which it was able to cull from many different sources and evaluate and sort out in London. At no time was SOE immune from disasters and, like most military commands, we had our share of them, but there can be no doubt that the constant dangers which the wireless operators ran in their efforts to keep us supplied with information were amply compensated by the advice and warnings we were able to give and the cohesion and sense of purpose we were able to create.

  I emphasise the military nature of SOE because this appears to have become obscured in the scrutiny to which the events of the war have lately been subjected. I do not quarrel with those historians and politicians who criticise the running of wartime organisations, whether SOE or any other, but I do think that they should have some accurate perception of the status, nature and intention of those whom they are criticising. SOE has been treated by some writers as though it were a sort of glorified concert party into which men and women were inveigled by the London staff and then, inaccurately briefed and insufficiently trained, dropped into occupied France. This is so far from the truth as to demand a reply. In fact, all members of SOE were volunteers, carefully selected and weeded out, who knew exactly the sort of dangers into which they were going.

  It has been suggested that women agents should never have been sent, that they were forced to undertake missions to which both by temperament and by nature they were unsuited and in physique and spirit inadequate. The dead cannot be revived by such accusations, they can only be dishonoured. Those of us who know of the work done by women like Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, Denise Bloch, among those who died, and by Lise de Baissac, the sisters Jacqueline and Eileen Nearne, and Nancy Wake among those who survived, can only feel anger and contempt for those who try to denigrate Baker Street by questioning the ability of women to fight alongside men and who impugn the efficiency of headquarters by doubting the readiness of brave women to face perils and, if necessary, to die for their countries. These women did an invaluable job and one for which, whatever people may say, they were admirably suited. Coolness and judgement were vital qualities; none lacked them. Courage was their common badge.

  From the purely practical point of view, women were able to move about with far greater freedom than that accorded to men and they were less likely to be snapped up by German forced labour organisations. Also, I believe that their presence often had a steadying effect on the men who commanded them, while their resourcefulness more than once saved their less fortunate colleagues. For my part, I am inured to the attacks of those who, for reasons either personal or idealistic, doubt the competence no less than the striking power of SOE, but I cannot suffer in silence those who use the bravery of our women agents as a debating point.

  During the last months of 1944, when France had been liberated, I was privileged to go the rounds of our Réseau and meet those who had fought with our men. I cannot think back to those days without a pang of nostalgia. How unified the Allies seemed! There was no town where we were not received with acclamation, no country village where toasts of undying friendship among the great nations were not drunk, no department which did not proudly display its battle honours gained in the defeat of the universal enemy. Everywhere Frenchmen looked forward to the resurgence of their country and to an era of peace and amity among all peoples.

  The Resistance was a vital factor in this recovery of the French national spirit. The courage of the men who had fought in the Maquis typified what every Frenchman now wanted to believe to be the true essence of the nation. From the purely morale point of view, the Maquis wa
s a tremendous fillip. It enabled the French to be proud of something. And they had something of which to be proud.

  In many towns I visited the cemeteries where Frenchmen and their British colleagues were buried side by side in graves heaped with the tributes of those who fought with them and of those who did not dare to fight but could not forbear to honour. I saw more graves than there are names in this book and more ordinary men and women of France died for the Resistance than there are words in it.

  As a triumph of human courage, as a tribute to the eternal hope which leads men to sacrifice everything in the defence of what they believe right, as an indication of the unity which can bind, for however short a time, men of different political, moral and religious views, the Resistance is never likely to be equalled. For in it every shade of opinion that cared for the dignity of man and for his freedom, every man who in the darkest hour yet believed that right would prevail, found its and his place. In it men and women were welded together in an unflinching and mighty confidence. All were heroes.

  Appendix 1

  Report of Sabotage and Guerrilla Warfare in Aristide’s Réseau (gironde) as officially communicated by Aristide (Major R. Landes, MC) to SOE Headquarters in October 1944.

  April 1944

  GROUP ‘PIERRE’ (MÉRIGNAC)

  Cut telephone line, sawed through telegraph poles situated on Avenue Bellevue 500 yards from Deux Poteaux (Mérignac-Centre). These twenty-five telephone and telegraph lines linked AA posts, also Staff HQ of Hitler-jugend. Telephone lines cut at various points at the sncaso aircraft works and within the camp. Destruction of telephone lines and electric current linking gun batteries and projectors at Cornier, on the Camarsac road near Bordeaux. Telephone lines cut at the Command Post at Quatre Pavilions near Bordeaux, linking the AA batteries on the coast. Telephone lines and railway signal lines cut 400 yards from the powder-factory at Bordeaux–Lacanau. Telephone lines linking the Peugeot factories at Mérignac with various enemy HQs cut: these lines were very important to the Germans; they were cut in several places over a section of 1,000 yards. Blowing up of a distributor post which supplied electricity to several AA batteries, also a radio detection-finder post situated at Mérignac.