by Matthew Cobb
On the other hand, Nazi repression was extremely effective: 814 hostages were executed in the year following October 1941, further weakening public support for an armed struggle that most people found bewildering.229 Waves of arrests, executions and deportations ripped the heart out of the Communist organization. For example, in the Non-Occupied Zone in the last six weeks of 1941 alone, 12,850 ‘Communists’ were arrested. In the final three months of 1941, 193 hostages were executed, including leading Communist deputy Gabriel Péri. Throughout the spring of 1942, more union and political leaders were executed, along with scores of hostages, while three major show trials led to fifty-two executions.230
In 1942 the PCF leader responsible for maintaining contact with the Gaullists discussed the impact of the Nazi execution policy with his Free French opposite number, and was candid about its effect: ‘as soon as the news is given out that five or ten of our men have been shot, we get fifty or a hundred new recruits.’231 While it is undoubtedly true that some young fighters were attracted to the Communist Party because of its ‘martyrs’, these figures are exaggerated. Until the middle of 1943 the armed wing of the Party was marked by an incredibly high turnover as the new recruits were killed. Because of lax security, overconfidence, foolhardy risk-taking and occasional bad luck, the young militants who were the first to be thrown into the fire had an incredibly short life expectancy. On average, a member of the Bataillons lived a mere seven months after taking up the armed struggle. Twenty of these brave young people survived three months or less.232 They knew the sacrifice they were making – one friend warned Maroussia Naïtchenko: ‘we have two months to live.’233
In 2003 Maroussia Naïtchenko, aged nearly eighty and one of the few survivors of the Bataillons de la Jeunesse, was shown the true balance sheet of the actions of her comrades. ‘All dead for that?’ was her aghast comment.234 Indeed. But that does not make their deaths any less courageous, nor their motivations any less noble. No matter how reckless they may seem in retrospect, and irrespective of the fact that they were cynically manipulated by their Stalinist leaders, these young people were some of the first in France to take decisive action against the Nazis.
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The Nazis’ spiral of repression also claimed the life of an aristocratic naval lieutenant, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, a committed Catholic and royalist. After a brilliant career, d’Estienne was declared a deserter when, in July 1940, he left his ship along with 300 sailors and made his way to London, where he joined Free French Intelligence as part of Colonel Passy’s BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action – Central office of intelligence and action). On 21 December he was taken to France by a group of Free French fishermen, together with his hand-picked radio operator. In a matter of days he set up an intelligence circuit, code-named NIMROD, and made his way to Paris, where he met Christian Pineau, to whom he was presented as ‘the official representative of General de Gaulle in Paris’.235 While d’Estienne was merely embarrassed by the title, Pineau was deeply disturbed by the ease with which security had been breached and unimpressed by the amateurishness of the operation. D’Estienne also met Germaine Tillion and planned to link up with Vildé and the rest of the Résistance group. But before the meeting could take place, d’Estienne was arrested on 21 January, after merely a month in Occupied France. Gaessler, his radio operator, had gone over to the Nazis a few days earlier. As well as winding up the NIMROD circuit, the Nazis used Gaessler to feed London fake information – French Intelligence in London was so pleased with his apparent work that he was promoted, and for six months they persistently ignored suggestions from Swiss and British Intelligence that he had been turned by the Nazis.
The two-week trial of d’Estienne and the other members of the NIMROD circuit took place in May 1941. In the previous weeks d’Estienne had been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi prison, together with Agnès Humbert of the Musée de l’Homme network. Relentlessly cheerful, and buoyed up by his resurgent Catholic faith, d’Estienne accepted entire responsibility for the activity of the circuit – much to the irritation of the judge. In delivering his verdict, the judge accepted that the accused were ‘men and women who proved themselves to be people of merit, who had a great strength of character and who acted only through the love of their country’,236 but emphasized that he had no choice but to sentence them to death or life imprisonment with hard labour. Yan Doornik, on hearing he was sentenced to death for spying and to imprisonment for recruiting young people to the British cause, asked: ‘Do I have to carry out my prison sentence before or after my execution?’237 After the sentences were passed – d’Estienne was also sentenced to death – the judge, deeply moved, shook hands with each of the accused.
Over the next three months the Vichy state mobilized to save d’Estienne, whom they apparently considered to be one of their own – he was, after all, an officer and a fervent Catholic royalist. But the shot fired by Fabien at Barbès-Rochechouart scuppered attempts to get d’Estienne’s sentence commuted. On 24 August, faced with the changing security situation in France, Hitler personally decided to reject d’Estienne’s plea for clemency, and the forty-year-old father of four was executed five days later. Through the bloody tide of executions, the death of d’Estienne d’Orves struck a chord which was amplified in 1943, when the Stalinist poet, Aragon, wrote an extremely influential poem, ‘La rose et le reseda’ (‘The rose and the mignonette’), which showed the links between the execution of two very different Resistance martyrs – d’Estienne and Guy Moquet (‘he who believed in heaven, and he who did not’).
D’Estienne’s enthusiastically amateurish mission – ill-prepared, overly ambitious and poorly supported – was a catastrophe. Like the Resistance, the Free French secret services accepted that losses were inevitable. But sacrifices had to be avoided wherever possible, and where they did occur they had to be worthwhile. So far, that had not been the case. In its first year the embryonic Resistance lost many militants at the hands of the Nazis and in return achieved very little. Some French honour had been saved, but the tiny groups remained isolated, dispersed and without any real influence.
To be anything other than a footnote in history, the Resistance had to change: it had to unite around a programme of action, become better armed and coordinate with intelligence and sabotage operations run from London. On 25 October, as France reeled with horror at the wave of hostage executions, the man who was to play a decisive role in carrying out this change walked into General de Gaulle’s office in Carlton Gardens off the Mall, in the heart of London. He was the one-time prefect from Chartres, who in June 1940 had preferred suicide to dishonour. His name was Jean Moulin.
4
London Calling
Jean Moulin’s arrival in London changed everything. He brought with him one of the most precious wartime commodities: information. Moulin had first-hand knowledge of the situation in France, and he provided London with its first detailed description of the Resistance. At this stage of the war very few people made it from France to Britain. In the whole of 1940 and 1941, only six people were brought out of France by the RAF, all of whom were military personnel and only two of whom were French.238 If ordinary people wanted to join the Free French, they had to make their own way. At the same time as Moulin left France, five young teenagers on a seaside holiday in the Pas-de-Calais hatched a hare-brained scheme to cross the Channel in two abandoned canoes. Jean-Pierre Lavoix, who was only seventeen years old at the time, recalled:
In a carefully worked-out plan, we helped our parents pack as we were due to return home the next day. In the evening, we pretended to be very tired, and went up to bed as soon as it was dark. A few minutes later, we crept across the terrace, picked up our canoes in the courtyard, and climbed over the dunes and down to the sea.239
As they paddled through the dark, the swell got up and the boys were all terribly seasick. They were also terribly lost. For over a day they drifted in the Channel, reaching the English coast in the middle of the night, where they
were arrested by the Home Guard and then interrogated by the Intelligence Service. Once their story had been verified, the five lads became overnight celebrities, fêted as examples of French courage and fighting spirit. They were eventually presented to Winston Churchill and his wife in the garden of 10 Downing Street. The press photos show five very smart young men in shorts, grinning and toasting Mrs Churchill and her husband, who is as pleased as Punch.
Moulin’s journey to London was slightly less perilous – he travelled by train from the Free Zone, through Spain and Portugal, and then by RAF plane to London – but it was incredibly drawn out.240 Moulin had been making preparations for nearly a year, beginning about three months after the fall of France, just before Vichy suspended him for being politically unreliable in November 1940. First, he got the Chartres administration to make him an identity card in the name of Professor Joseph Mercier. Then, using Mercier’s ID, he was able first to get a passport, and finally a visa for the USA. A number of his political friends, including his pre-war boss, Pierre Cot, and the maverick left-winger Louis Dolivet, had recently moved to North America, and in December 1940 Moulin planned to join them.241 But even with the passport and visa, Moulin still needed to get into Portugal, from where he intended to board a ship to America. Waiting for the necessary paperwork kept him hanging around in France for another nine months. He used that time to travel around the country, trying to discover as much as possible about the Resistance.
At some point Moulin changed his mind about leaving for the USA and decided instead to go to London, although he was still unsure whether he should work with de Gaulle or with British Intelligence. When he left France, Moulin carried with him a report on the state of the Resistance, much of which was based on hearsay – he was not able to meet any of the groups in the Occupied Zone and had to rely on information from some of his pre-war friends.242 Surprisingly, none of them appears to have heard of – far less had any contact with – the Vildé group or even Christian Pineau’s Northern Zone newspaper, Libération. Moulin had better luck in the Non-Occupied Zone, where he met Henri Frenay through an American priest, the Reverend Howard L. Brooks.243
Brooks had arrived in France in May 1941 to work for the US Protestant refugee charity, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). But Brooks had also been commissioned by Cot and Dolivet to set up a ‘communication service’ that would inform the French population about the war, ‘plans for a democratic world order, American determination to defeat Hitler, and . . . about the efforts of the Free Frenchmen’.244 Dolivet had contacted the Free French and British Intelligence, inviting them to support Brooks’ work,245 but de Gaulle’s enthusiastic reply came too late, while the head of MI6, ‘C’ (Sir Stewart Menzies), was concerned about Dolivet’s politics and decreed that none of his agents should have anything to do with the left-wing French man.246
Brooks was in France for only three months, from May to August 1941. During this time he travelled throughout the Non-Occupied Zone and spent much of his time in Marseilles, where he worked in Varian Fry’s Centre Américain de Secours (American Relief Centre). Fry helped thousands of refugees, including intellectuals and artists such as André Breton, Heinrich Mann and Marc Chagall, to escape to the US.247 While in France, Brooks was unable to set up his ‘communication service’ because British Intelligence refused to forward any of his telegrams to Dolivet. When Brooks returned to the US, he wrote an eyewitness account of the situation in France, Prisoners of Hope, which helped popularize the French Resistance among the US public. Brooks’ book contains excerpts from underground newspapers and heavily disguised descriptions of various Resistance members. Frenay appears as ‘Michael Curtiss’, a dark-haired French intellectual and author, whom Brooks says he had met in the US before the war.248 Every detail is false, but Brooks’ descriptions of Frenay’s energy and his huge network of contacts (‘he knew practically everyone in France who had anything to do with opposition to the Germans’)249 all ring true. Moulin makes a minor appearance under the guise of ‘Émile Baron’, a man who was intending to go to London. According to Brooks, he organized the meeting between the two future Resistance leaders, because Moulin ‘would undoubtedly be useful as a courier’.250
During their discussion, Moulin took copious notes while Frenay explained the history and activity of his movement and described two underground newspapers from the Non-Occupied Zone that Moulin had not heard of (Emmanuel d’Astier’s Libération, and Liberté, produced by a group of Christian Democrats around a professor at Montpellier University, François de Menthon). Above all, Frenay emphasized that they desperately needed regular contact with London. At the end, Moulin made a promise to Frenay: ‘I intend to depart as soon as I can. If all goes well, I shall arrive in England towards the end of the summer. I shall faithfully deliver your proposals – that I promise you . . . I shall have no trouble in being your advocate.’251
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Moulin’s train arrived in Lisbon on 12 September and he found a room on the fourth floor of a small hotel.252 Two days later he went to the British embassy and asked to be taken to London. As proof of his real identity, he carried his prefect’s card, hidden in several pieces, some behind the face of his travel clock, others in the handle of his suitcase. Moulin’s first contact in Lisbon was with an ‘assistant’ to the British Military Attaché – in fact a member of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).253 SOE was a new secret military organization that had been created in a mad hurry after the fall of France; Churchill said its mission was to ‘set Europe ablaze’ through clandestine guerrilla activity. Although the origins of SOE lay in the British Intelligence community, MI6 and MI5 looked down on the new unit, considering it to be amateurish and a potential competitor, and throughout the war there was a continuous tension between SOE and the Intelligence organizations. This was aggravated as SOE began to recruit people in Occupied Europe. Moulin was exactly the kind of person they were looking for – intelligent, daring, highly knowledgeable about French society, and well connected to important people in French government and politics. But despite his potential importance to the British, Moulin had to hang around in Lisbon for over a month, repeatedly fobbed off with excuses about no transport being available. In fact the British were checking him out, although this was not done with any great urgency – an enquiry sent from Lisbon to MI5 on 15 October was eventually answered six weeks later with their usual laconic response in such circumstances: ‘nothing known against’.254
Finally, on 19 October, Moulin was taken to Britain by an RAF flying boat.255 After having been interrogated and debriefed for a couple of days at the MI5 London Reception Centre in the Royal Patriotic School in Wandsworth – the counter-intelligence control point for all immigrants – Moulin was next seen by Major Eric Piquet-Wicks of SOE. Piquet-Wicks had to try to convince Moulin that he should work for the British – one of Moulin’s earlier interrogators had noted that ‘SOE is interested by this man’.256 But as Piquet-Wicks later recalled, Moulin would have none of it – for the time being:
‘Do not let us waste time,’ Moulin told me politely. ‘I will see the General and his Services, for that is why I have come. I will also see the French Section [of SOE], and then I will know what I have to do.’257
The next day Moulin and de Gaulle met in the Free French headquarters at the end of Carlton Gardens.258 By the time Moulin walked out of the front door he had decided to throw in his lot with the Free French. However, he was still not entirely won over by de Gaulle’s leadership. Like many résistants, Moulin was suspicious of de Gaulle’s political intentions, and of the right-wingers and ex-fascists who dominated the Free French.259 When Moulin returned to France in the new year he confided his doubts about de Gaulle to François de Menthon: ‘In his heart, what does he think about the Republic? I can’t say. I know his official positions, but is he really a democrat? I don’t know.’ In a letter to Pierre Cot, Moulin implied that his support for de Gaulle was largely tactical: ‘For the moment, we must be with de Gaulle
. Afterwards, we’ll see.’260 He obviously said the same thing to his SOE interrogators, who summarized his view as follows: ‘The matter of whether de Gaulle stayed or went could be settled afterwards.’261
Moulin’s influence on the Free French and on the British view of the situation in France was immediate and long-lasting. His report on the Resistance, written while he was in Lisbon, had the precision and clarity typical of a high-ranking French civil servant. Pointedly addressed ‘to the British authorities and General de Gaulle’, it took as its starting point the fact that the Resistance supported ‘the British cause and that of General de Gaulle’.262 This emphasis on de Gaulle was a great surprise to the British – for over a year relations between the Free French and the British government had steadily worsened, and in the summer of 1941 they had reached breaking point. After the Free French were excluded from the peace treaty following the Allied victory in Vichy-controlled Syria, de Gaulle publicly accused the British of having a ‘war-time deal’ with Hitler to exploit France.263 In response, Churchill claimed that de Gaulle had ‘gone off his head’, banned him from broadcasting on the BBC, issued secret instructions to stop him from leaving the country and even backed a half-hearted plot to oust him.264 Moulin’s arrival, and the news he brought, put a stop to this manoeuvring as the British realized they could not afford to do without de Gaulle – for the time being, at least.
Moulin called his report ‘an SOS to London’. In it he described the scattered action of the small Resistance groups and warned what would happen if support was not forthcoming from London:
If no organization imposes upon them some sort of discipline, some orders, some plan of action, if no organization provides them with arms, two things will happen:
