Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  On her return, Lindell discovered that while she had been in London, the Germans had sentenced her to death. Changing her identity to the Comtesse de Moncy, she rented several rooms at a small hotel in the market town of Ruffec and made them the headquarters and collection point for her new line, which she called Marie-Claire. Over the next year, Allied airmen were brought to Ruffec by Lindell’s associates, then escorted over the Pyrenees to Spain.

  The Marie-Claire network, however, was best known for its rescue of the survivors of Operation Frankton, one of the most daring British commando raids of the war. In December 1942, a small group of Royal Marine commandos, using canoes, paddled up a river leading to Bordeaux and placed limpet mines on five German ships anchored there, then exploded them, causing heavy damage. Though most of the commandos drowned or were captured, two managed to get away. Following instructions they received in London, they traveled nearly a hundred miles to Ruffec, where they made contact with the Marie-Claire line.

  Lindell, meanwhile, had been seriously hurt in a bicycle accident a few days earlier and was hospitalized with five broken ribs and a head injury. But when one of her agents told her about the commandos, she insisted on slipping out of the hospital and overseeing their rescue herself.

  Before she sent them south, along with a couple of RAF airmen, she told them, “We’ve got only one rule for Englishmen in our care—no girls. From past experience, we know that once they meet a pretty girl, everything goes to hell. So we shall take care to keep them away from you.” She and her organization were true to her word—and got them safely into Spain.

  Lindell ran her line for more than a year before being betrayed to the Gestapo in November 1943. She was arrested at a railway station on one of her many trips south. Put on a train bound for Paris, she managed to divert the attention of her guards long enough to leap off the train, but as she did so, she was shot in the head and cheek. Astonishingly, she survived and, after several surgeries, was sent in September 1944 to Ravensbrück, an infamous concentration camp north of Berlin. The only camp designed specifically for women, it was built on an estate owned by Heinrich Himmler. Of the 132,000 women and children sent there during the war, more than 70 percent died—of starvation, torture, beating, hanging, shooting, horrific medical experiments, and, beginning in November 1944, in a newly installed gas chamber.

  From the day she arrived at Ravensbrück, Lindell refused to follow orders. Not surprisingly, she became known as “die arrogante Engländerin” (“the arrogant Englishwoman”) to camp officials, who seemed as cowed by her haughty aggressiveness as her MI9 superiors were.

  Thanks to her nursing experience, Lindell was assigned to the camp hospital, where she was credited with saving the lives of several prisoners by stealing medicines meant for German personnel and administering them to the inmates instead. Near the end of the war, when the Swedish Red Cross arranged for the evacuation of Scandinavian prisoners from Ravensbrück, Lindell browbeat the camp commandant to include in the evacuation all the British women in the camp, several of whom had been involved in the French resistance. Among them was twenty-three-year-old Yvonne Baseden, an SOE agent dangerously ill with tuberculosis, whose life Lindell saved by insisting she leave the hospital and get onto an evacuation bus.

  Yet another of the gray, emaciated, wraithlike inmates liberated from Ravensbrück at the war’s end was Dédée de Jongh. Even though she had freely admitted to creating the Comet line after her capture in 1943, she managed to avoid execution because the Germans could not bring themselves to believe that such a pretty, delicate-looking young woman could have devised such an intricate operation.

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  BY THE END OF the war, it had become commonplace for many people in France and the Low Countries to aid downed Allied airmen—so commonplace that, according to MI9, some twelve thousand citizens of those nations had done it. Other estimates put the number far higher.

  Allied fighter and bomber crews, in turn, were briefed by MI9 on how to evade capture and seek out rescuers if shot down. They were given a compass, silk maps of the countries they were flying over, and other emergency supplies to sustain them while looking for help. If downed, they were told, their most immediate objective was to shed their parachute and get clear of their landing spot as soon as possible.

  As the war progressed, that goal became increasingly easy. Whenever the thunder of planes was heard in Belgium, Holland, or northern France, crowds of people would gather outside to watch the enormous armadas pass overhead. If parachutes were seen, onlookers would hop on bicycles or run in the parachutes’ direction in the hope of getting there before the Germans.

  In February 1943, an American pilot shot down on his way back from a raid on the French port of Saint-Nazaire was spirited away by several women who raced up to him as he landed. In August of that year, two American sergeants downed near Brussels were each greeted by crowds of several dozen Belgians and passed on to escape lines.

  That same month, another U.S. sergeant, who was shot down near the French town of Toulouse, was swarmed by some thirty Frenchmen as he drifted to the ground. They immediately removed his parachute and uniform and gave him civilian clothes to put on. “In four minutes,” he said, “I looked like any one of the Frenchmen who had rescued me, and my flying suit and equipment had disappeared.”

  In Belgium, a woman who had spent more than three years in a German concentration camp for aiding the escape of downed Allied fliers observed more than fifty years later that she never regretted the heavy price that she and other members of the Belgian resistance paid for helping the Allied cause. “The airmen who come for reunions feel they can’t thank us enough,” she said. “We say if it wasn’t for the English, we might be German now.”

  When Abwehr officers in northern France captured several members of the French resistance in late 1943, they were astonished by what they found in their captives’ belongings: detailed plans of the port of Saint-Nazaire on the Brittany coast. When an Abwehr colleague at the port saw the documents, he threw up his hands. They were precise drawings of giant submarine bunkers and locking installations then being built at Saint-Nazaire by the Germans. Allied spies, the officer complained, were forever sneaking in and gathering information about the construction. No matter what he and other security officials did, they “were quite unable to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.”

  As D-Day approached, Saint-Nazaire was hardly the only German military facility in France to suffer such intrusions. Everywhere on the country’s coasts, it seemed, intelligence agents from occupied Europe were penetrating top secret enemy bases and stealing fortification blueprints and other material that the Allied planners of D-Day had asked them to gather. In effect, the agents were collecting the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle that, when put together, would give the Allies a minutely detailed picture of the German defenses they would face during the invasion. “As fast as the intelligence came in,” one British historian wrote, “it was followed swiftly by greater demands. The more the information poured in, the more the demands grew.”

  Abwehr officer Hermann Giskes, who had been reassigned to France after his Englandspiel triumph in the Netherlands, was a firsthand witness to the European spies’ success. “We had no illusions about the difficulty of stopping this illegal activity,” he later remarked. “These hydra grew new heads quicker than we could cut them off….It was obvious that we were only intercepting a fraction of the material which was getting to the enemy.” He called the situation “catastrophic.” In October 1943, Life magazine noted that “practically all the Allied war plans for the invasion of Europe are based on information about the conquered territory supplied by underground intelligence systems. Most of the information would never have reached London if the exiled governments were not there.”

  Although agents from throughout occupied Europe helped in the collection of this intelligence mosaic, most of it came from French and Polish operatives. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s Alliance network was particul
arly active, despite its recent crippling loss of agents. One Alliance operative—a French naval engineer working at Lorient, another German submarine base on the Brittany coast—provided a flood of information about the complex, including the number and movements of the U-boats based there. Another Alliance agent was hired as a workman to paint the offices of the Todt Organization, the Reich’s engineering and construction agency, in Caen, a city close to the English Channel that would become a pivotal battleground during the upcoming campaign in France. In the course of his work, the painter managed to spirit out plans for the area’s German fortifications.

  Perhaps the most spectacular intelligence exploit of all was the product of still another Alliance operative—a painter and art teacher in Caen who bicycled down the coastline of Normandy and made sketches and drawings along the way. The fruit of his efforts was a fifty-five-foot-long map showing the position of every German gun emplacement, fortification, and beach obstacle along the coast, together with details of German army units and their movements. Smuggled to London in March 1944, the map proved an invaluable resource for Allied military commanders directing the invasion.

  The Poles provided additional key intelligence, notwithstanding the loss of Interallié, their most important intelligence network in France. Roman Garby-Czerniawski, the Polish air force officer who founded Interallié in 1940, was betrayed to the Abwehr by his French girlfriend in November 1941, and the operation was rolled up. It was soon replaced by a new Polish-run organization called F-2, which by 1944 had nearly three thousand operatives, most of them French, working in ports, railway stations, armaments plants, and even German war production offices. Like the Alliance workers, F-2 agents provided a cornucopia of information about the German order of battle, coastal fortifications, and defense lines, as well as train, ship, and submarine positions and movements. Many of the agents were forced laborers whom the Germans had brought into places like Saint-Nazaire and Lorient to do construction and other menial jobs.

  Other invaluable sources of intelligence were Polish slave laborers working in armaments factories, shipyards, and major industrial plants inside the Reich itself. On numerous occasions, the material they provided led to the Allied bombing of important strategic targets. “We can state categorically that the Polish Intelligence Service is extremely active,” a German military report gloomily noted in July 1943. “It is already operating in a vast number of protected German factories through the workers employed there. This creates great threats to the production of military matériel. Such threats are multiplied, since Polish Intelligence, supported by the fanaticism of the Polish resistance, works with much skill and is difficult to contain.”

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  DESPITE HIS ARREST BY the Abwehr in 1941, Roman Garby-Czerniawski made his own crucial contribution to the success of D-Day and the subsequent Allied offensive in France. One of the colorful band of double agents used by the British in their D-Day deception campaign, he managed to help persuade Hitler and the German high command that the Allies would launch their invasion of Europe from the Pas de Calais area in northern France, more than 200 miles away in Normandy.

  Garby-Czerniawski began his career as a double agent (in his case, a triple agent) soon after his arrest, when he offered to collaborate with the Germans, specifically by going to Britain and spying for them. Declaring that he would “do for Germany what he had been doing in France against them,” he promised to gather information on British aircraft and tank production, troop deployments, and, above all, Allied plans for the invasion of the Continent.

  Roman Garby-Czerniawski

  Agreeing, the Abwehr smuggled Garby-Czerniawski into Britain. Once there, he claimed he had escaped from German custody and was treated as a returning hero by the Polish government in exile. A few weeks later, however, he revealed the truth to the head of Polish intelligence, who, with General Władysław Sikorski’s blessing, handed him over to MI5. It, in turn, passed him on to its so-called Double Cross Committee, whose mission was to devise a plan to mislead the Germans about the location of the upcoming D-Day landings. Although suspicious at first of Garby-Czerniawski’s true intentions, the committee finally concluded that “his loyalty is entirely to his own country,” deeming him “a loyal and patriotic Pole.” They gave him the code name “Brutus.”

  Of all the former German operatives in Britain whom the committee enlisted to pass on disinformation to the Reich, Garby-Czerniawski, as a former head of an intelligence network himself, was by far the most skilled and persuasive. “From their knowledge of him, the Germans will expect him to achieve the impossible or bust,” reported his MI5 handler. “Brutus is a professional spy and an artist at producing the most detailed and illustrated reports.” Judging from the cable traffic between him and Germany, it was clear that his supposed masters had complete trust in his information and regarded him as one of their top double agents. According to MI5, his reports were “studied not only by operational [intelligence] sections, but by most prominent persons in Berlin, including Hitler and Goering.”

  In his first major deception, Garby-Czerniawski convinced Hitler and his men that the Allies were seriously considering an invasion of Norway, thereby ensuring that the 350,000 German troops stationed there would not be deployed to northern France. But his biggest triumph lay in a series of detailed reports to Berlin of a massive U.S. army, under the command of General George Patton, that was supposed to be training in England for an attack on the Pas de Calais. The army, of course, was fictitious, but the Germans unquestioningly accepted its existence. Even when the Allies did actually land at Normandy on June 6, 1944, Hitler continued to put his faith in Brutus, believing that the main assault would be at the Pas de Calais, thus keeping tens of thousands of German troops away from the real front.

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  ENSURING THE SUCCESS OF D-Day was only one of the major accomplishments of the army of European intelligence agents who worked for the Allies. Another was stopping Hitler from succeeding in his bold, last-ditch efforts to destroy London and prevent the D-Day armada from crossing the English Channel.

  Although the Führer was never able to develop an atomic bomb, he came up with a plan to mount an avalanche of devastating attacks on England with two new terror weapons devised by his scientists: long-range rockets and pilotless jet aircraft armed with bombs. Since 1936, the German military had been conducting tests on what came to be known as the V2 rockets and V1 “buzz bombs” at Peenemünde, the world’s largest missile experimentation center, on Germany’s Baltic coast.

  In mid-1943, Hitler gave top priority to the mass production of both weapons, pouring huge amounts of money into it and assigning thousands of slave laborers to the task. Calling the V2s and V1s “the new weapons that will change the face of the war,” he told his top military officials that by the end of 1943, London would be leveled, Britain forced to capitulate, and any planned invasion of the Continent rendered impossible. The attacks would begin on October 20, 1943, he declared. The V2 rocket would be the first to launch.

  Unfortunately for the German leader, his apocalyptic vision remained just that—a dream. V1s and V2s were indeed fired at London, creating considerable damage and loss of life. But they never came close to leveling the city, let alone stopping D-Day, thanks to reports from European agents that allowed the British to disrupt the weapons’ development and production. Thanks to those spies, “no one could say we had been caught by surprise,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs.

  The prime minister first received word in April 1943 of the Germans’ alarmingly rapid progress in developing the V1 and V2. His informant was Dr. Reginald Jones, a young physicist from Oxford who served as assistant director of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry and unofficially as Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare. Jones, in turn, received his intelligence from a wide array of European operatives, some of them forced laborers at Peenemünde. Although non-Germans were not allowed into the research labs or near the launch sites, the workers were cl
ose enough to observe weapons tests and the layout of the complex, including workshops, airfields, and factories.

  The first detailed information about Peenemünde came from two citizens of Luxembourg conscripted as construction workers there. Each smuggled out reports about the development of the V2, including a map of the locations where it was assembled and from which it was fired. More intelligence was supplied by Polish agents, one of whom worked for a crew that installed telephone lines at a Peenemünde research facility. He confirmed that test flights of the V1 were also being carried out. When the British requested a detailed map of the entire complex and surrounding areas, Polish intelligence replied that it was “a bit of a tall order.” A few weeks later, the map arrived in London.

  Of the many reports Reginald Jones received about Peenemünde, one was particularly notable. Obviously written not by a laborer but by someone close to high-ranking German officials, it contained a host of details about the V2 rocket: the identity of the military officers overseeing its trials, the sound it made (“as deafening as a Flying Fortress”), the weapon’s deficiencies, the location and description of its launching pads (“so sited that they can methodically destroy most of Britain’s large cities during the winter”). When Jones asked about the source of what he called “this extraordinary report,” all he learned at the time was that it came from “une jeune fille la plus remarquable de sa génération” (“the most remarkable girl of her generation”).