The Maquis had an arms depot at a nearby farm that was guarded around the clock, not just from the Germans, but from overzealous Frenchmen who might want to increase their own arsenal. Gabriel Eyraud, the young guard on night duty, assured Virginia every time she made a delivery that it would take an army of a hundred men to remove him from his post.
But it was the final destinations of these arms that was the most important to Virginia. As she had done with her men in the Cosne area, Virginia trained explosives crews and sent them on missions almost every night between July 27 and August 12. She had never been formally trained for sabotage, and quite frankly couldn’t imagine the need. Planning and organizing these operations was simply a question of using common sense. And the goal was always the same: harass and kill the Germans.
The men under Virginia’s command blew up the rail line between the towns of Langogne and Brassac in four places. At Chamalières, they blew up a rail bridge, driving the locomotive into the gulf below. A freight train was derailed in the tunnel at Monistrol d’Allier, and after the repair train and crew had gone into the tunnel to clear the wreckage, they blew up fifteen meters of track behind them. These trains, which all carried men and supplies, were rendered useless against the Allies. And the list went on and on.
One day just after Virginia had finished her daily radio sked, Lieutenant Bob stopped by with a story from the previous night’s sabotage activities. Several of his maquisards had gone out to lay explosives at the electrical transformer near Le Puy. They thought they’d have enough time to do their work and get away before the next team of guards came on duty. But the guards showed up early. The men were able to shove their pistols and explosives into their pockets and one of them happened to have a soccer ball with him. Why no one knew, but it appeared to have saved their lives.
They told the guards they were on their way to a practice. The guards never questioned that it was the wee hours of the morning. A game ensued, the guards against the men, and it looked as though the maquisards were going to get away without a problem—until a detonator fell out of one of the men’s pockets. A very helpful guard pointed out that he had dropped something. The man scooped it up and the game continued. The guards never bothered to check what it was, they were too interested in continuing the game, which they ultimately lost.
The story greatly amused Virginia. She would have loved to be a part of the sabotage strikes. But after the close call several months earlier with the drunken soldiers, London had told her she was too valuable to risk capture or death. They told her they she could plan the attacks, but not participate. One of those plans included attacking the area’s roadways. With rail transportation interrupted, German troops would have to march or be trucked to battlefields. So she trained her “boys” on the guerilla tactics she had learned in her SOE classes.
Armed with their new knowledge, she sent them after a group of nineteen miliciens whom they arrested, seizing the valuable documents the traitors carried. Another group of her men, bazookas blazing, attacked a truck carrying German soldiers and their accompanying tank on the Le Puy-Langeac road. Members of the Maquis trapped a German convoy between Chamelix and Pigeyre by blowing up bridges in front of and behind them. After five days of struggling, the Germans lost 150 men. The remaining 500 surrendered, preferring POW status to death.
The attacks that Virginia had coordinated were being mirrored all over the country. Resistance and Maquis groups, fueled with pent-up resentment from the German occupation, took up arms against the invaders. Their work tied down enemy forces, diverting them from the main battles with the Allies. And it hampered Nazi withdrawals.
But these attacks weren’t always without costs. A very somber Dédé came to visit Virginia one afternoon in late July to tell her about the ambush of a convoy of twelve trucks near Saint-Paulieu. The setup was sound—the maquisards tipped over a hay wagon in the middle of the road, which forced the convoy to stop. When the Germans dismounted from the trucks, the maquisards hidden in the woods hit them from all sides. But the Nazis were more heavily armed than others had been and Virginia’s group lost twenty men.
This was the sort of news Virginia never wanted to hear. She asked Dédé what had become of the Germans. He told her some were killed and the rest had been taken prisoner. They were being held in the woods and no decision had been made as to their fate. The maquisards had quite a list of suggestions, but they had wanted Dédé to ask Virginia’s opinion.
The humane thing to do would be to keep them corralled until the Allies arrive, whenever that may be. But she wasn’t running a POW camp, and she didn’t much care about being humane after what she’d seen and heard during the past four years. She told Dédé she thought the Nazis’ fate should be left up to the men who had watched their families suffer and their friends die.
Virginia felt badly about the deaths of these patriots. They had been energetic, courageous young men with the attitude that they were bulletproof. Over the course of her stay on the Yssingeaux Plateau, she had heard many of them talking about how glorious it was to die for one’s country. The fact of the matter is, Virginia thought, dying is still dying, regardless of the crusade. What matters more is how effectively one has lived.
It had been over two months since Mrs, Hall had received the letter from Mrs. Norris about Virginia. News from the front arriving in Baltimore was that the Germans were not rolling over in front of the Allies and that fierce battles were being waged in France. Knowing her daring daughter so well, Mrs. Hall’s intuition told her that Virginia was somewhere in the melee. She wrote another letter to Mrs. Norris asking for news. On August 23, Mrs. Norris replied: “Virginia is doing a spectacular, man-sized job, and her progress is rapid and sure. You have every reason to be proud of her.”
It wasn’t exactly an assurance that Virginia wasn’t in harm’s way, but it did assuage Mrs. Hall’s fears somewhat to know that at least her daughter was alive and well.
Four thousand miles away, Virginia had her hands full. Had she known about Mrs. Norris’s proclamation that her progress was “rapid and sure,” she would have contradicted these words. It seemed as though every facet of her operation were fraught with controversy. Excluding those close to Virginia, the leaders of the various Maquis groups were constantly arguing among themselves about who should answer to whom. The number of Resistance and Maquis groups was as overwhelming as the number of political parties in France. As in politics, each had their own agenda. And all of them were suspicious of the Communists.
Francs-tireurs et partisans was what the Communists called themselves and the numbers were formidable, which was what the rest of the Resistance feared. To many, the thought of a postwar Communist France was almost as great a nightmare to them as the one they were living. Virginia’s opinion was that the whole lot of them should forgo their political leanings and fight as a united front. It was a maddening waste of everyone’s time and energies. There would be plenty of time to sort it all out once they had driven out the Nazis.
Then there was the issue concerning the Yssingeaux Plateau’s JEDBURGH team, or more accurately, the lack thereof. These teams, most often referred to as JEDS, had taken their name from the small town of Jedburgh on the Scottish border. There the Scots had conducted guerrilla warfare against English invaders in the twelfth century. The idea for the JEDS was a joint one of the OSS and the SOE. Each three-man team would include an American, a Brit, and a Frenchman, but very few had this equitable mix.
The JED teams were to provide a general staff for the Resistance groups, encouraging organization. They were also to provide communication links between the FFI command and Supreme Allied Headquarters, always working in the best interest of the Allies’ strategy. With limited training, most of them departed from Great Britain. A handful of them, though, arrived in France from Algiers, which had been in Allied hands since the success of Operation TORCH more than a year earlier.
Virginia’s group of Maquis had become very large, b
y this time swelling to numbers nearing fifteen hundred. She could have used the additional organizational assistance, particularly since she had understood that one of the JED team members would be French. There were still some maquisards who were defiant of her authority because she was a woman and not French. Headquarters in London had promised her a team, but as the days ticked by in August, no arrival date was mentioned. It wasn’t until the end of the month that she got word that JED team, code-named JEREMY, would be departing from Algiers and arriving on the Yssingeaux Plateau the night of August 25.
Virginia, Lieutenant Bob, Dédé, and Maurice Lebrat made up the welcoming committee for them. The first parachute they saw open belonged to Captain Geoffrey Hallowes, a member of the Gordon Highlanders and the team’s ranking officer. His arrival was as chaotic as it was comical. He got hung up in a tree at the edge of the landing field and when Virginia went to check on him, she discovered he was wearing a kilt with nothing beneath it and cursing loudly. She told him to quiet down and that she’d send someone over to help him.
She went back to the center of the field just in time to see the second man, British Sergeant Roger Leney, and the group’s wireless radio man, bounce off a tree on his way down and land face-first in a gully. Only the third member, French Lieutenant Henri Charles Guise, floated gently to earth and disposed of his parachute before seeing about his team members. Maurice aided Leney, who had banged up his knee and was in a great deal of pain. Virginia and the other men went back to see about Hallowes. By this time he had swung himself over to a tree and was busy cutting the cords of the parachute.
When they reunited on the edge of the field Virginia welcomed them and led the way through a small woods to a road and then to the door of the baker whose barn she had used when she’d first arrived. They were the first Allied arrivals on the Yssingeaux Plateau, she explained, and that called for a celebration. The baker hauled out several bottles of brandy and for the next hour, they toasted every subject they could think of. Then the JED team was loaded into the circuit’s black Citroën—the same one that was used to haul Virginia around on her first trip—and took off with no lights at breakneck speed. The three newcomers were terrified, which in turn gave Virginia a good laugh. Big tough men, coming to her aid in occupied France, afraid of a little speed in the dark. They arrived at her Salvation Army house and settled in as her first houseguests.
Lunch the next day was at Mme Lebrat’s. When she served the first dish of deviled eggs, Sergeant Leney was aghast, saying in England he hadn’t seen two eggs together on the same plate in years. That meal and all of those that followed were festivals of food compared to what these men had been enduring across the channel.
The war had taken an incredible turn in the Allies’ favor during the month of August. They had begun by bombing southern France in July to “soften” it up just as they had done before the Normandy invasion. Then in the early morning hours of August 15, 396 planes of the Provisional Troop Carrier Air Division dropped more than five thousand American and British paratroopers along the Mediterranean coast. At dawn, while the paratroopers were involved in intense fighting, heavy and medium bombers and fighterbombers swept over the invasion area and destroyed underwater obstacles, beach defenses, and coastal guns.
Next the American Seventh Army hit the beaches, joined by fifty thousand members of the Maquis. In a matter of a few hours, they had gained a wide beachhead and driven eight miles inland. Cannes and Nice fell, and then Marseille on August 28.
The previous month, the American army had streamed southward to recapture Brittany. When they ran into resistance at port cities like Saint- Malo and Brest, they left them to be harassed by small, but strong, forces from the sea, rather than expending resources to regain them. The cities became isolated outposts, their massive supply garrisons useless to the German army.
Large bodies of the American forces were also thrusting eastward into the heart of France. They freed town after town to the ecstatic screams of the long-oppressed citizens. The forces fanned out in every direction, and the French competed with one another to be among the first to feed and house their liberators.
Parisians knew the Allies were coming. The news had been spreading via SOE and OSS agents and Resistance members since the beginning of August. Enterprising black marketers began selling seats along the probable route of the liberators’ entry into the city. The City of Lights was finally going to witness the rout of their invidious captors. Allied flags flew and people dared to sing the “Marseillaise,” whose rousing melody hadn’t been heard for more than four years.
The German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had only recently arrived. He had been ordered by Hitler never to surrender the city to the Allies or the Resistance. Rather, Hitler had raged from his headquarters, von Choltitz was to burn Paris to the ground if he was unable to hold it. For his defenses, he had at his disposal more than ten thousand regular troops, forty-nine heavy tanks, and a number of flamethrowers. Just outside the city limits, sixty-nine bombers were ready to drop their payload on Allied forces at his command.
But unbeknownst to von Choltitz or the Allies, the Paris Resistance was putting the finishing touches on its plan for the city to liberate itself. At noon on August 15, a police strike commenced. All but three hundred of the city’s twenty thousand officers went off duty. The strikers returned during the night three days later, dressed in civilian clothes and armed. They stormed the Préfecture, Paris police headquarters, on the Ile-de-la-Cité in the middle of the Seine.
Shortly afterward, vehicles of all sorts streamed into the city. Tiny sports cars, stolen German staff cars, ancient taxis, trucks, and ambulances were all loaded with armed Resistance members. They attacked the German strongholds all over Paris in a scene reminiscent of the French Revolution of 1789. Their weapon of choice was the bottle grenade, made from emptied wine bottles and an incredible cache of gasoline that had been secreted away in anticipation of this day. Mixing the fuel with sulfuric acid, the Resistance hurled their homemade weapons at the Nazis with blazing revenge.
Following Hitler’s orders, von Choltitz had his men lay charges for the destruction of Paris’s monuments and bridges. But he had no stomach to obliterate one of the world’s most beautiful cities. From his headquarters in the Hôtel Meurice, he silently implored the Allies to hurry. Surrendering was far more preferable to the odious task Hitler had charged him with. At 9:30 AM on August 23, General de Gaulle’s troops entered the city, fighting their way to its heart. The Americans entered on the twenty-fifth and by noon the tricolore was once again flying over the Eiffel Tower.
Von Choltitz knew that he was powerless to stop the Allies. Fighting was ensuing in the Luxembourg Gardens, in front of Les Invalides, which houses Napoleon’s tomb, around the Louvre museum, and the Notre-Dame cathedral. Shortly after 1:00 PM, he surrendered and Paris was once again free.
17
Death of the Wolf
August 26, 1944, was a glorious summer day. As dawn broke over the mountains and ridges of the Yssingeaux Plateau, it cast a yellow light on the lavender-colored rocks of the landscape. First on Virginia’s agenda was to help JEREMY’S radio operator, Sergeant Leney, notify London that they were safe. The other two JED team members, Captains Hallowes and Guise, went to Le Puy, twenty-five miles away, to familiarize themselves with the German strength there. Two members of Lieutenant Bob’s Maquis accompanied them.
When they returned to Le Chambon two hours later, Virginia witnessed the most phenomenal sight she had seen yet in the war. Hallowes and one of the maquisards climbed out of the car in the company of Le Puy’s German commandant. Hallowes said he wanted to surrender the city. Virginia was incredulous, thinking he meant the entire General Staff. Hallowes told her the General Staff was nowhere to be found, but that the commandant had a sizable number of officers and enlisted men he was surrendering.
A number of these new prisoners were Russian Tartars who had been conscripted i
nto the German army and trained as executioners for terror raids on civilian communities. Hallowes said they had learned that the Nazi command had even discussed a possible massacre in Le Chambon. Now the Tartars were offering to change sides, claiming they’d been forced into the German army.
Captain Guise and the other maquisard were holding the rest of the Nazi officers at their headquarters, Hallowes told Virginia. They had contacted the Maquis in Le Puy for additional help in guarding them. His plan was to put the Germans in the barracks just outside of Le Puy until the Allied forces arrived. And he was impressed with the town’s Resistance forces.
Virginia cautioned him about singing the praises of Le Puy’s Resistance too quickly, as most of them were majors. Hallowes didn’t understand so Virginia explained. They were called “majors” because they were major pains in the ass. Most of them hadn’t so much as breathed a word of Resistance since the debacle of 1940. Now that the Allies had made good on their promises, these people were taking their uniforms out of mothballs and claiming they had been part of the Resistance all along.
It was a situation repeating itself all over France. Suddenly the Resistance ranks were swelling to ten times what they had been, and the growth was timed to coincide with the Allies’ sweep across the country. Some of these people had actually been overt collaborators. The rest had collaborated in the sense that they had stood by and done nothing as their country was ravaged and their fellow citizens were beaten and killed.
The French were dealing with their traitors without mercy. Those men whose collaboration had been witnessed were being handled by the Maquis, mostly in the form of executions. In addition, the Maquis, along with the townsfolk, spat upon, stoned, and sometimes tarred and feathered the female collaborators. Even moving to another locale where their actions might not have been known was useless, as all of them were publicly sheared of their hair. Their bald heads were a visible testament of their treacherous activities, one that begged for mistreatment by all who had fought against the Nazis, rather than lie down with them.
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