The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  Gilberte was slightly less enthusiastic when Rémy came to visit them at the end of the month. Although her first impressions of the secret agent were good – ‘stocky and of medium height, a round face, clear skin and eyes, with a direct, confident and courteous manner’290 – her confidence drained away when Rémy turned towards her and said: ‘My real name is Gilbert Renault.’ Despite this needless breach of security – the product of foolishness, overconfidence, or simply the desire to involve Gilberte – Rémy and Brossolette formed an immediate friendship, bridging the political gulf between them. As Rémy later wrote, ‘From the first moment, I was conquered by his live intelligence and the kind of inner flame with which he seemed to be lit’,291 while for Brossolette Rémy was ‘dynamic, enterprising. What he has set up is important, realistic, efficient and – who knows? – perhaps decisive.’292 Brossolette threw himself into his work, writing fortnightly reports, and even joining the Free French in a ceremony in his apartment on 1 December.293

  Moulin’s report had given London a general picture of Resistance activities in the Non-Occupied Zone; Brossolette’s regular correspondence now fleshed out the somewhat sketchy and out-of-date material they had received in October, and above all provided detailed accounts of what other groups were doing, particularly in the Occupied Zone. Up until this point, London had heard virtually nothing at first hand of how the French were reacting to the Occupation. Brossolette’s close knowledge of the work of Libération-Nord meant that London, dominated by right-wing officers, began to hear the views of left-wing résistants who were linked to the underground trade unions, and as a result had a closer understanding of the feelings of ordinary working-class French men and women.

  Brossolette’s meetings with Libération-Nord brought him into contact with another fragment of the growing Resistance kaleidoscope, the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM – Civil and Military Organization). The OCM was a small group that recruited from among the right-wing upper middle class – military officers, businessmen, engineers, lawyers and university professors – and was very different from all other Resistance groups at the time. Instead of producing an underground publication, the OCM concentrated on the ‘military’ part of its name, through practical action – escape lines for French military prisoners and Allied airmen, caching arms or transmitting intelligence to the Vichy ‘Deuxième Bureau’ (Intelligence).294 When it did eventually get round to setting out its positions, these were heavily influenced by the milieu of its founders, veering dangerously close to the anti-Semitism of Vichy’s ‘national revolution’ at a number of points.295 Once the contact with Brossolette provided the OCM with a direct link to London, they enthusiastically joined Rémy’s CND.296

  The bookshop on the Rue de la Pompe that Pierre Brossolette ran with his wife soon became a key meeting place for the Parisian Resistance. He would usher people into the cellar, where discussions could take place safely. It was at such a meeting, in February 1942, that Brossolette suggested to Christian Pineau that he should go to London to explain the state of the Resistance to the Free French. London was concerned that the wave of attacks being carried out by the Communist Party would weaken the Resistance in the Occupied Zone, he said. They wanted to persuade representatives of other Resistance organizations not to adopt this tactic. When Pineau heard he would soon be flown to London, he left Brossolette’s bookshop full of excitement, ‘almost choking on emotion and exaltation’.297 But Pineau’s comrades in Libération-Nord were less enthusiastic; some were worried that London might take control of ‘their’ movement, while others thought the whole thing was simply too dangerous.

  Not everyone was so negative. Pineau’s work with the Ministry of Supply took him into the Non-Occupied Zone, where he met André Philip, the Socialist ex-deputy who had corresponded with Pastor Brooks a few months earlier. Philip, whom de Gaulle admired despite their very different political traditions, saw that the trip could be turned to the advantage of the Resistance. He argued that Pineau should convince de Gaulle to produce a declaration of his political intentions; this could be a way of uniting the Resistance. This idea of putting pressure on de Gaulle soon caught on – Pineau’s trade unionist comrades in the Occupied Zone decided they wanted a clear statement from the Free French leader about the role he saw for the trade unions after the Liberation.298

  Pineau made the journey to London with François Faure (‘Paco’), a forty-three-year-old businessman who was Rémy’s second-in-command. Paco was in contact with the Communist Party, who had given him a message for London. They were prepared to throw their weight behind the Free French, they claimed, as long as they could retain their freedom of action, and they received substantial quantities of weapons. For the communists, this was partly a way of testing the water with the Free French, and partly a response to Moscow’s growing interest in supporting de Gaulle, which was soon formalized by an agreement between de Gaulle and Molotov, signed in London in May 1942. Paco also brought with him a valuable piece of propaganda – the final testament of Gabriel Péri, the Communist deputy who had been executed as a hostage in December 1941. At the end of this document (Passy later described it as ‘a magnificent letter of farewell’),299 Péri wrote: ‘I should like my fellow-countrymen to know that I am dying so that France may live . . . In a few minutes I am going out to prepare a future that will be full of song.’ This moving letter became a key symbol of the Communist Party’s sacrifice and was used to great propaganda effect in both Britain and the USA.300 Péri’s poetic closing phrase – ‘des lendemains qui chantent’ – subsequently became a well-known expression.

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  Early in the morning of 26 March 1942 Pineau and Paco arrived at a farmhouse near the hamlet of Saint-Léger-de-Montbrillais, not far from Chinon. The farmer, René, took them into a high-beamed, smoke-blackened room where there was a long oak table covered with local produce – butter, pain de campagne, rillettes and a saucisson – the like of which Pineau had not seen for months. The meal was washed down with two bottles of Saumur – a rather young 1941 (‘drinkable’) and a 1934 vintage (‘excellent’). For Pineau, this was paradise:

  We ended the morning sitting in wicker chairs, set out in the farmyard. The weather was warm, almost hot. There was not a cloud in the sky. In sixteen or seventeen hours, we could find ourselves miraculously transported from this typically French scene to Britain. The war, the Resistance, seemed so far away.301

  Then it was time for lunch – meat, chicken, a 1921 red Champigny (‘very good’), goats’ cheese, crème au chocolat and, at around 5 p.m., a splitting headache. The solution? More Saumur – this time René’s prize 1904 vintage. Finally, after supper – somehow they found space for supper – they listened to the BBC and heard the ‘personal announcement’ that indicated that their plane would arrive that night. At 11 p.m., they went out into a field as the reception team spread out torches in the shape of an inverted L. When the plane arrived, the plan was that the team would flash the agreed code signal and then turn on all the torches; the plane was supposed to land along a line sketched out by the vertical stroke, and come to a halt at the horizontal line – this plan had been devised in October 1940, scribbled on a tablecloth in Oddenino’s restaurant in London, and was used until the end of the war.302

  As a full moon rose into the clear black sky, lighting up the field, the warmth of the day vanished and the night became freezing cold. Huddled under a blanket to keep warm, feeling drowsy due to the combined effects of food and alcohol, Pineau began to doze off. When the plane finally arrived, just after midnight, he was fast asleep. Pineau got a shock when he woke up – the aircraft had overshot the final set of lights and had got stuck in the mud. The French reception committee, helped by Pineau and the passenger from London (who turned out to be Rémy, returning after a brief visit), had to heave for fifteen minutes before the plane was freed and turned around, ready to return.303 Paco and Pineau jammed themselves into the narrow passenger cockpit, surrounded by reports from the CND circuit, t
he plane bumped along the field and then leaped towards the bright moon. They did not know it, but as they flew towards London, far below them on the coast of Brittany the raid on the Saint-Nazaire dry dock – Operation CHARIOT – was in full swing, as the explosive-laden HMS Campbeltown was rammed into the dock gates, the fruit of the work of both the CND and the Vildé group.

  This was one of the first flights by the RAF 161 Special Duties Squadron that had been formed about six weeks earlier to provide the Free French and British intelligence services, SOE and the Resistance with a regular air link with France. As the war went on, these flights – which could take place only around the full moon and if the weather was clear – became vital for both the activities of the Resistance and for morale. Gifts would often be exchanged – cigarettes, whisky and food from Britain, champagne, fine wine, perfume and even freshly cut flowers from France.304

  Like most of those trips, the flight that took Pineau across the Channel was made in a Lysander aircraft. These small single-engine planes, which could carry up to four people, were robustly designed so they could withstand harsh landings on bumpy fields, and so that they could take off and land in a very short distance. Unarmed, and flying dangerously slowly – a top speed of 180 mph – the Lysander was extremely vulnerable to attack, but flying at night provided safe cover and only three of these planes were shot down in over two hundred and twenty missions. The main dangers were from trees and high-tension electricity cables, and from cows and random pieces of farm machinery that were sometimes inadvertently left in the fields. The other problem was getting lost – with no navigator, and flying at night, getting to the landing site and back again was not easy (even by the light of the full moon).305

  Pineau’s pilot was Flying Officer Guy Lockhart, a dashing twenty-five-year-old who had been court-martialled from the RAF before the war for flying so low over an aerodrome that the commanding officer had to dive for cover. When war broke out, Lockhart rejoined the RAF, flying Spitfires. In July 1941 he was shot down near Paris but managed to get back to Britain via Marseilles and a march across the Pyrenees. A year later, on his way to pick up Pineau again, Lockhart’s Lysander got stuck in a ditch near Macon and had to be burned; a few days later he was exfiltrated via Narbonne.306 After a brief period with SOE in 1943, Lockhart rejoined the RAF.307 His luck eventually ran out in 1944, during a bombing raid over Friedrichshafen.

  Dodging German flak, Lockhart flew Pineau and Paco safely to Britain. At RAF Tangmere they were plied with whisky by the RAF personnel and then taken to Bignor Manor, an Elizabethan building on the South Downs. This house – owned by a member of MI6 – had recently become a staging post for French visitors brought over to nearby Tangmere; hundreds of Resistance members passed through during the war.308 The lady of the house, Mrs Barbara Bertram, was disappointed that Pineau and Paco, having gorged themselves earlier in the day, were unable to finish the slap-up meal she had prepared. ‘It’s the excitement,’ they explained politely.309 The next morning they were taken to London, where Pineau was given a false identity (‘Major Garnier’) and was told he had a private dinner with de Gaulle at the Connaught Hotel at 8 p.m.

  In the afternoon Pineau wandered the streets of London, windowshopping – he eventually bought some coloured soap – and was amazed at the pressing crowds, which he felt gave ‘an extraordinary expression of life and liberty’.310 A few hours before his meal with de Gaulle, Pineau had a meeting with Passy in the Duke Street headquarters of Free French Intelligence. The confrontation of a left-wing intellectual and a far-right militant should have produced fireworks. But instead, as with Brossolette and Rémy, it led to mutual admiration and a close working relationship.311 Tied by the magic of friendship, the two men were pushed even closer by the Resistance and the tasks it required.

  At the Connaught Hotel, Pineau was ushered into de Gaulle’s presence:

  Without saying a word, he led me to an armchair, gestured for me to sit down, pushed a box of cigarettes towards me, sat down in his chair and then, looking me straight in the eye, spoke his first words: ‘Now, tell me about France.’312

  For half an hour Pineau explained the situation in as much detail as he could, but de Gaulle seemed perplexed by the main reason for his visit: ‘When I mentioned that the Resistance wanted a sign from him, a message, a slight frown passed across his face. He was obviously quite surprised and had no conception of what I expected from him.’313 De Gaulle then spoke, but did not respond to any of the points that Pineau had raised, simply ignoring Pineau’s plea for some kind of declaration of his political intentions. Instead, the General talked about the internal politics of the Free French – about which Pineau knew nothing and cared less. De Gaulle also described his problems with the Allies, which for Pineau was a depressing revelation. De Gaulle made it quite plain that, for him, the Free French armed forces were the French Resistance. Pineau’s morale plummeted even further as de Gaulle failed to ask a single question about the Resistance, or even a single personal question: ‘Asking me if I’d had a good journey would have been trivial, but this journey was not like any other – at least for me; it might have merited some comment.’314 After the meal, which was washed down with a bottle of Bordeaux (‘excellent’), de Gaulle finally deigned to discuss the work of Libération-Nord and the other groups. Pineau suddenly realized what the problem was:

  . . . like Passy, he knew virtually nothing about the Resistance. His conception of ‘France’ was entirely military . . . He barely reacted to my descriptions of the dangers we faced, of the anxiety created by occupation and repression. It was obvious that, for him, every soldier doing his job risked his life, and that there was no difference between the dangers faced by a tank-driver in the North African desert or someone carrying illegal newspapers in the Occupied Zone.315

  In one sense, de Gaulle was right. Being killed is an occupational hazard for a soldier, as it was for members of the Resistance. But there was one major difference that the Free French could never understand: soldiers are conscripted, trained and act en masse, under orders. They are provided with weapons and equipment that can protect them, and if captured they are imprisoned. Resistance members were volunteers, isolated and often unarmed, living under the permanent tension of the threat of denunciation and discovery. Furthermore, they ran the risk not only that they might be killed, but also that they would be terribly tortured and, worse, that the same fate might befall their loved ones. From this point of view, the sacrifice made by members of the Resistance was greater than that of soldiers in the regular army.

  Throughout the war, Resistance members, worn out by the dreadful dangers they faced and frustrated by the lack of resources, eventually became infuriated by what they perceived to be the ignorance and indifference of the Free French leadership. Meanwhile, de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt and their respective political and military advisers became increasingly concerned about the potential threat the Resistance might pose to their plans for taking France into a post-war world. All sides therefore sought to dominate and channel the activity of the Resistance, in an attempt to keep its activities within what they considered to be appropriate limits. Claude Bourdet, a member of Combat, later tried to understand why things looked so different from either side of the Channel:

  No doubt it was difficult, from London, to understand the unexpected nature of the problems faced by the Resistance. We ourselves discovered the nature and scale of the task bit by bit, empirically. To have imagined it, without living it every day, would have required a wideranging political culture, to have studied the history of revolutions, to more or less understand the meaning of revolutionary action. This was not the case with de Gaulle, nor the men who surrounded him.316

  Pineau felt deflated. He was supposed to convince de Gaulle to take account of the views of the Resistance, but the Free French leader did not seem particularly interested in even hearing about the Resistance, never mind accommodating to it. Over the next few weeks de Gaulle and Pineau had several rounds of disc
ussions. On some issues, like the promise of a future health service, Pineau persuaded de Gaulle to move to the left – de Gaulle no doubt considered this to be an easy way of gaining support; promises were for the future. But right until the very end of Pineau’s stay in London, de Gaulle refused to budge over his conviction that the defunct Third Republic and the Vichy collaborators were as bad as each other. This was not merely an historical analysis; it had very real implications for the kind of France that de Gaulle wanted to emerge from the war. He would not countenance a return to the weak, party-dominated regime of the Third Republic, which he felt was directly responsible for the fall of France. Instead, he wanted a strong state, with a strong leader. This was more than enough to scare off many of the trade unionists and socialists in the Resistance who might otherwise support him. When Pineau pointed this out, de Gaulle brushed aside the issue in a way that showed he did not even understand what the problem was: ‘Tell those brave people that I will not betray them,’ he said, leaving Pineau feeling depressed and frustrated.317

  Pineau had been in London for nearly a month. As the moon waxed, it was time for him to return to France. As well as endless political discussions, Pineau had undertaken a series of training sessions with British officers, learning how to encode and decode radio messages, how to choose appropriate sites for landings and parachute drops and what to do in case of a security breach. It had not all been hard work, however: he had long drinking sessions with British officers over various Bordeaux vintages (Château Gruaud-Larose 1920 was the best, they decided), he went out with Free French secretaries and frequented various dives and jazz clubs, dancing with girls until the early morning. His enthusiasm for these distractions became notorious, and steps were taken to ensure that subsequent visitors from France kept a lower profile.