Some wondered if everything would have gone so wrong during Operation Lüttich if Peiper had been with them.
‘If Peiper had been there this would not have happened!’ a staff commander remarked. Despite being pulled back from the front, and the near destruction of his regiment, Peiper’s fame as a commander of genius lived on.
Peiper was luckier than many of his comrades and managed to flee the enemy advance, eventually recovering in an Upper Bavarian hospital, near his family home. Physically and mentally wrecked, he could only sit and watch as the Allies pushed deep into northern France.
33
London, Normandy and Paris, August 1944
IN LONDON, GARBO was drafting a letter to Kühlenthal insisting that FUSAG was still an imminent threat to the Pas-de-Calais, while explaining away the fact that General Patton was now obviously commanding forces in northern France. As ever, Kühlenthal accepted his agent’s information at face value.
Meanwhile, on the night of 31 July to 1 August, Pujol’s compatriots in the 2nd Armoured Division finally reached Normandy, disembarking in choppy waters at Utah beach: Spanish soldiers in a French unit wearing US Army uniforms and driving American tanks. For many in La Nueve, including Lieutenant Amado Granell, it was an emotional moment, and they cried as they bent down to pick up handfuls of sand from the beach. In their minds the conquest of France would be just the beginning. Once the Nazis had been pushed back over the Rhine, Franco’s days in Madrid would be numbered. There would be another Allied landing soon, they were certain, this time on the Spanish coast.
Numbering some 150 men with Shermans, half-tracks and jeeps, these soldiers were here not only to liberate French soil; they had an ideological hatred of the enemy and scores to settle from their own Civil War. Some were anarchists, others Trotskyites; a handful were communists. Some, like Granell, were simply soldiers who had fought – and lost – on the Republican side.
Many in the French 2nd Armoured Division considered them unruly, a difficult bunch to handle. General Leclerc had put Captain Dronne, a Spanish speaker, in charge of them; he managed to keep them under control, more or less. But they were good fighters, among the best in Leclerc’s force, so they were often at the vanguard of the action, sometimes as much as 15 kilometres ahead of the rest of the division.
They arrived in time for the collapse of the German 7th Army in the Falaise Gap. Here, in the small town of Écouché, they found themselves surrounded by fleeing remnants of the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH and the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The Germans were broken and defeated, yet pockets were still resisting. Knowing that the enemy was made up of members of the SS only made the soldiers of La Nueve fight even harder. They suffered seventeen casualties on 16 August, but the enemy was now on the run, heading westwards towards Paris, chased by the Allies. What would happen in the City of Light itself, though? Would the Germans put up a fight? The city might be destroyed, yet it held the key to the whole country. Whoever was in control of the capital was effectively in control of France.
General de Gaulle wanted the Allies to march in and take Paris as quickly as possible. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, however, was more cautious. He wanted to engage the Germans first to the north of the city and defeat them before entering the potential bloodbath that a battle for Paris might turn out to be. Besides, there was a race on for Berlin against the Soviets. A diversion to empty Paris of Germans could prove costly.
Nonetheless, the French decided to move in the direction of Paris anyway: on 19 August resistance fighters in the city had started an uprising. It was imperative to reach them and bring an end to Nazi rule. Further to the east, in Warsaw, an uprising by the Polish resistance was being mercilessly quashed by the Germans as the Red Army halted in its tracks and refused to move in on the city in support. The same thing could not be allowed to happen in Paris.
After the rapid collapse of the Germans in the wake of the Allied breakout from Normandy, it was time to take advantage of the situation.
Early in the morning of 23 August La Nueve started rolling eastwards. Eisenhower had finally given in to de Gaulle’s pressure, and Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division had permission to strike on Paris. The French forces were not alone, however: the US 4th Infantry Division were also marching towards the capital. There was a competition to be the first to arrive. By midday on 24 August Spanish soldiers reached the Parisian suburb of Antony. The road into Paris, where the resistance fighters were struggling to take the city with little more than handguns, appeared to be clear.
But now, just when the prize appeared to be in sight, La Nueve received orders to hold back and support other units on the outskirts of the city.
Reluctantly they turned around to head to La Croix de Berny, where a German 88mm artillery weapon was causing havoc. Before long, La Nueve dealt with it and the gun was put out of action.
At this point Leclerc himself arrived, and spoke to Granell and Dronne.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘Mon général, I’m following the order to pull back,’ Dronne replied.
‘No, Dronne. Head straight for Paris, enter Paris. Don’t allow yourself to be held up. Take whichever route you want. Tell the Parisians and the Resistance not to lose hope, that tomorrow morning the whole division will be with them.’
Leclerc was adamant: they had to move in to support the resistance fighters. Hitler had given orders to destroy the city in the event of an Allied attack: they had to move before it was too late. And they had to reach central Paris before the Americans. La Nueve should leave at once.
And so the Spanish Republican troops, with Captain Dronne at their head, pushed into Paris itself. At first, Parisians hid in fear at the sound of their tanks, thinking that they might be Germans. Once they saw their uniforms, however, they emerged on to the streets again with the cry that ‘the Americans’ had come. Only on looking closer did they realise that these were men of the Free French forces come to liberate them. Few realised that they were actually Spanish.
By 2045 that evening, pushing through the cheering crowds, La Nueve reached the Porte d’Italie. Beyond lay central Paris itself. Yet the path through was not easy: Granell and Dronne had little idea how much German opposition there might be. And then there were barricades along most of the streets, thrown up by the French resistance to hamper any movement of German troops.
The armoured column of La Nueve started zigzagging its way through the streets. At one point they decided to split into two sections: one under Granell, the other under Dronne, each taking slightly different routes to the Hôtel de Ville.
Granell diverted away from the avenue d’Italie, striking west before reaching the rue Nationale and heading up once again towards the Seine. Dodging the German positions, he then reached the boulevard de l’Hôpital, at the end of which he crossed to the Right Bank by the pont d’Austerlitz. Here his column turned left and moved along the river bank before finally, without firing a shot, at 2122 he reached the Hôtel de Ville.
Granell, a Spaniard from the small Mediterranean town of Burriana, was the first Allied soldier to reach the heart of Paris. Soon his tanks and cars were surrounded by euphoric members of the resistance, who had taken the Hôtel de Ville from the Germans a few days earlier.
Granell’s first act was to send a message to Dronne, saying that they had made it.
‘Send reinforcements,’ he called.
Word quickly spread of what had happened, and soon the bells of Notre Dame were ringing over the city, followed by those of other churches. Hearing them, one of the German defenders still in the city wrote in his diary: ‘I have just heard the bells of my own funeral.’
Granell himself described the scene:
‘It was very moving and emotional to hear the bells of Notre-Dame. Fighting hadn’t hardened us completely. There was shouting, cheering and songs – particularly La Marseillaise – accompanying the sound of the bells. We all had tears in our eyes and a lump
in our throats. I tried to sing La Marseillaise with the others, but I couldn’t . . . Explosions, people firing into the air . . . all that excitement was freedom itself, victory. I couldn’t even blink for fear that I would really start crying. Our senses felt shorn of all impulse. The lines from the Rubén Darío poem had come alive: “Even the most beautiful woman smiles at the most ferocious conqueror.” The ferociousness of the conquerors had been washed away by the emotion of the moment.’
In the jubilant scenes that followed, the president of the resistance committee, Georges Bidault, had his photo taken with a smiling, if tired-looking, Granell. On the next day it was on the front page of the newspaper Libération, with the headline: ‘Ils sont arrivés!’
On 25 August, when the rest of Leclerc’s forces and the US 4th Infantry arrived, Paris was effectively cleared of the occupiers. In the afternoon, after a brief battle outside his headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice – again involving La Nueve – the German military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, officially signed the German surrender in the billiard room of the Prefecture of Police.
Paris was delirious with joy, and the warm August evening soon turned spontaneously into one of the greatest celebration parties in history. Exhausted French, Spanish and American liberators who had fought their way to the capital through the bloody fields of Normandy were now embraced by the city’s populace. Everywhere they went, men and women – but particularly women – threw themselves at them, wanting to kiss and touch the brave men who had ended the Nazi terror in their city.
As the evening wore on, the celebrations became more intense, more intimate, in what Simone de Beauvoir later called the débauche de la fraternité. Few soldiers slept alone that night. Either bivouacked in the Bois de Vincennes or in the gardens behind Notre-Dame, the Spaniards of La Nueve, the Frenchmen of the 2nd Armoured and the Americans of the 4th Infantry were mostly in the passionate embraces of Parisian girls and women keen to show their gratitude as warmly as they could.
In two and a half months the war had taken a decisive turn in favour of the Allies. Now it was only a question of time before Germany was defeated. In London, reading more complimentary reports from Kühlenthal congratulating the Arabal network for the quality of its intelligence, Pujol and Harris could be satisfied that their story-telling and lies had helped win the battle for France.
PART NINE
‘Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all to see life as it is and not as it should be.’
Cervantes
34
London and Madrid, August 1944–May 1945
WHILE SPANISH, FRENCH and American soldiers enjoyed the fruits of victory in Paris in late August, Juan Pujol continued his Garbo deception in London, although at a reduced pace. As far as the Germans were concerned, he was keeping a low profile after his arrest in Bethnal Green. In fact he was still working with Harris to perpetuate the threat to the Pas-de-Calais. Even as Paris was falling into Allied hands, the German 15th Army was still based firmly in the northern corner of France, waiting for the promised second wave of the invasion to come.
The Allies had swept out of Normandy and were hurriedly conquering much of the rest of the country; General Patton was now clearly in charge of the US 3rd Army, which was pushing deep into France and had nothing to do with the fictitious FUSAG supposedly based in Dover.
Yet still the Germans believed that FUSAG existed and was an imminent threat. MI5 concluded that Hitler now had ‘an almost mystic confidence’ in his Spanish spy.
On 31 August Garbo finally broke the news to them. Owing to the success of the Normandy campaign, the Allies had decided to dismantle FUSAG and cancel the planned strike over the narrowest stretch of the Channel. The German 15th Army had been successfully tricked into sitting on its hands while much of France fell to the Allies.
The deception of Fortitude was complete, and was more successful than anyone could have imagined.
‘Just keep the [German] Fifteenth Army out of my hair for the first two days,’ General Eisenhower had asked the deception planners in London before the start of the invasion. ‘That’s all I ask.’
In the end, through deception and double-cross, the threat had been kept at bay for almost three months.
‘Prior to D Day,’ Harris wrote, ‘the unofficial estimate of our probable success in holding the enemy from reinforcing the Cherbourg battle front [Normandy invasion beaches] was, that if it could afterwards be proved that we had been instrumental in causing one Division to hesitate 48 hours before proceeding to oppose our landing in the Cherbourg peninsula, we would have been well repaid for the energies expended in organising this deception . . . Our success was infinitely greater than we had dared to hope . . . The climax was reached when, with the use of entirely notional forces we continued to maintain the threat to the Pas de Calais area until Allied Forces had by-passed it and annihilated the forces which we had been instrumental in persuading the Germans to retain there until after the Normandy battle had been won.’
The Allies were cock-a-hoop. Many in the late summer of 1944, with the collapse of the German resistance in much of France, thought that the war itself might be over very shortly. In the end the enemy put up a fightback, and victory could not be celebrated until May of the following year, but for the deception teams of SHAEF, the London Controlling Section and MI5 it was a moment of triumph.
Pujol himself would receive an award for his efforts. After the Iron Cross granted by none other than Hitler himself, Harris worked behind the scenes to ensure that the British did not fail to decorate their Spanish hero in equal measure.
Before they did so, however, there was another final threat to Pujol’s secret to deal with.
As Pujol was announcing to the Germans the end of FUSAG, in Madrid a Spanish spy with close ties to the German secret service was approaching the British Embassy offering to sell some highly valuable information. Roberto Buénaga was an associate of the Dirección General de Seguridad – Franco’s equivalent of MI5 or the FBI – and he put himself in touch with Section V’s man in the capital at the time, Jack Ivens.
For the right amount of money, Buénaga told Ivens, the British could have the name of the head of the Germans’ best spy ring in London.
Ivens had been with Bristow and Philby back in early 1942, when news first reached Section V about Arabel. It was clear to him that Buénaga’s information about the ‘Nazi’ spy was good, that he knew the name and even the address of Juan Pujol.
Something needed to be done. Pujol might have taken something of a back seat in the Garbo operation by this time – as far as Kühlenthal was concerned his deputy, Pedro, Agent 3, was doing more of the work, meaning that Harris himself, an MI5 officer, now had a direct line of communication with his German counterpart. Yet the whole network could still be blown, endangering lives and closing any chance of perpetrating any future deception plans.
The problem was that if the British did nothing with Buénaga’s information and the Germans found out that he had betrayed them, it would be obvious that Garbo was a double agent. But if they agreed to do a deal with Buénaga, Kühlenthal would be forced shut Garbo down as a German spy on the assumption that the British had now rumbled him.
After so many years of dealing with threats of this kind, it must have come almost as second nature to hand things over to Pujol to sort out. His solution, as elegant as ever, was to turn the problem into one for the Germans. He had, he told Kühlenthal, learned through his sub-agent J(1) – the courier working the civilian flight route out of Lisbon – that someone was moving in secret circles offering to sell information about the Germans’ spy ring in Britain. And he named the person as Roberto Buénaga.
As a result, he – Garbo – was now going into hiding in Wales with Stanley, Agent 7, who could keep him safe for the time being.
Kühlenthal fell for it yet again. He congratulated Garbo on discovering the threat, and on his quick action in response. Pedro was now fully in charge of the Garbo netwo
rk, having occasional contact with his chief – Garbo – from his Welsh hideout.
Pujol was, of course, still in London all this time. The Buénaga threat remained until the end of the war, yet he was successfully stalled, the British never accepting his offer to sell his information, the Germans believing that their spy network was safe and that its chief had managed to find a secure hiding place.
Towards Christmas of 1944 Pujol finally received official recognition of his services from the British. At midday on 21 December he was presented with the MBE. It was a private, secret moment. No mention of his name appeared in the London Gazette, yet the ceremony was presided over by the head of MI5 himself, Sir David Petrie, who made a speech in praise of the little Spaniard who had done so much to help the Allied cause. Among those present were Harris, Tar Robertson, John Masterman and Guy Liddell.
Afterwards the small group went for lunch at the Savoy. At one point, and perhaps bolstered by a few glasses of wine, Harris started beating the table with his hand, calling out Pujol’s name. Within moments the others were doing the same, and Pujol stood up to make a speech of his own, thanking them for his medal.
‘Garbo responded to the toast in halting but not too bad English,’ Liddell wrote in his diary. ‘I think he was extremely pleased.’
This was followed the next day by a second celebration – one to which wives and ladies were invited. Liddell was present again at a dinner at the Dorchester along with Sarah Bishop, Harris, Harris’s wife, Hilda, Pujol and perhaps more importantly, Araceli. For one night at least, it seems, the tensions of the past months and years were forgotten in the splendour of the moment. It was what Araceli had always dreamed of back when they were struggling in Madrid and Lisbon – mixing in high circles, the dream of a glamorous and more comfortable life. And in the magnificent surroundings of one of the best – and then relatively modern – hotels in London, she shined.
The Spy with 29 Names Page 24
