A million Frenchmen were mobilized and sent east to defend the Maginot Line; Arnaldo Binelli, as a Swiss national, was not at risk of being conscripted. Perhaps both he and Hélène were among the optimists who still believed that appeasement would save France from Hitler’s attention. Perhaps, as apprehension sent the Riviera into a decline, with shops closing every week and the abrupt cancellation of the first Cannes Film Festival, the couple were simply bored, pining for the vitality of the city. Life was desolate on the hillside above Beaulieu sur Mer when many of their neighbours had closed up their houses for the winter and when the weather grew too severe for their daily bicycle rides and strolls on the deserted shore.
For whatever reason, in the icy January of 1940, Hélène and Arnaldo packed most of their possessions from the Villa des Agaves on to a trailer, hitched it to the back of Hélène’s great Hispano-Suiza, and headed north for Paris. They were there, five months later, when Hitler’s troops marched into the city.
13
AND WHAT DID YOU DO DURING THE WAR, MADEMOISELLE?
Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux* dans la plaine?
Ami, entends-tu le bruit sourd d’un pays qu’on enchaîne?
MAURICE DRUON
Pusillanimous though Marshal Pétain’s pursuit of an armistice seemed in the terrible June of 1940, there was no realistic alternative. The army, gallantly attempting to defend the heart of France after its retreat from Paris, could never have withstood the devastating efficiency of Germany’s blitzkrieg attacks, a form of warfare for which the armed forces had been completely unprepared. Almost a hundred thousand lives, both military and civilian, had already been lost; occupation, so long as the rules were obeyed, offered no further immediate threats.
For the prudent northerners who had already packed their bags and moved southwards, the zone governed by Pétain and his subordinate Pierre Laval from Vichy offered a substantial if morally threadbare umbrella. For the remaining 25 million who now found themselves prisoners in a gigantic German state, which was being subsidized by France to the tune, by 1942, of a staggering 500 million francs a day, there might seem to have been only two options, to collaborate or to resist. Between these dramatic alternatives, however, lay a muddy and uncharted land of compromise; few were able to refrain from making some concessions in order to survive as food and fuel became scarce, and transport almost impossible.
In Paris, the swastika-emblazoned flag of the occupiers hung above eerily quiet streets. The most familiar sounds of the city by 1941 were those of Hélène’s country childhood, the whirr of bicycle wheels and the clatter of wooden-soled shoes (leather had been requisitioned for German use). Each morning, with the precise steps of mechanical dolls, the troops of the occupiers marched along the Champs-Elysées towards L’Etoile. Every day, the press and the wireless projected the same triumphant message: the war had already been won here in France. For the rest of Europe, it was only a matter of time.
For Ettore Bugatti, a blossoming love affair with a beautiful young fashion model, Geneviève Delcuze, brought consolation, but he had lost his brilliant heir and was bitterly conscious that he himself had been the chief bar to his son’s happiness. Among the papers opened after Jean’s death was a love letter to the Mexican dancer Reva Reyes which he had written in 1938, after Ettore had successfully opposed their marriage plans. The letter disclosed Jean’s arrangements to make Reva, together with his siblings, his principal heir.
Death on the eve of the German invasion spared Carlo Bugatti, the patriarch of this extraordinary family, from the humiliation which now faced his son. The newly established factory at Bordeaux was swiftly placed under German control and was, as such, bombed by the RAF in November 1940. At Molsheim, Ettore was obliged to accept a compulsory purchase of the Bugatti workshops by the German firm of Trippelwerke, a manufacturer of torpedoes for use by submarines. The splendid Molsheim chateau and the little Hostellerie du Pur Sang were abandoned, while the winter garden, which had housed some of Rembrandt Bugatti’s finest bronzes, fell into ruins.
W. F. Bradley published the first biography of Ettore shortly after the war, in 1948. Having met the car designer at a time when he was a devoted husband, Bradley chose not to reveal that Bugatti, when he returned to Paris in the late autumn of 1940, had left his ailing wife and eighteen-year-old son, Roland, at a house near Bordeaux while he began a new life with Geneviève Delcuze. Neither did Bradley choose to say more about the Molsheim works than that Ettore had left them at the recommendation of the Air Ministry and had subsequently been forced to sell to the occupiers. In fact, Ettore, viewed as a natural ally by Germany because of his Italian birth, had been paid the considerable sum of 150 million francs, enough to recoup what he had lost in acquiring the gigantic Château d’Ermenonville north of Paris shortly before the war, and to finance the production of new designs being produced by his trimmed-down works team in Paris.1 There had been a time when Ettore had contemplated turning his new chateau into a base for the factory; now, serving as a hostel for Russian refugees during the war years, Ermenonville also became a safe hiding-place for the vast collection of antique carriages formerly kept at Molsheim, and for Ettore’s Bugatti Royale. However well-disposed the Germans might have been towards an Italian-born car-maker, it is unlikely that they would have allowed him to keep such a princely car for his personal use. Sacha Guitry, it is true, managed to hang on to his Hispano-Suiza, but Guitry was willing to do almost anything, short of treachery, to keep in with the Germans.
Ettore, while he was ready to make use of some valuable connections to protect Lébé, his older daughter, from being sent to work for the occupiers in Germany, was no collaborator. He was fully aware that, between 1943 and 1944, several members of his staff and three of his best drivers were working actively for the Resistance. Bradley, drawing on private information given to him by the Bugatti family and staff, stated that Ettore provided them with a meeting place at his first wartime home on Avenue Hoche, and that he provided forged passes and identity cards. These, in the years when a man could be shot for entering the unoccupied zone without an Ausweis, or official pass, were invaluable to the men who were ready to risk their lives in Resistance work.
Robert Benoist, the man who finally led the operations in which the Bugatti workforce were most closely involved, was forty-six when the Occupation began. ‘He had the most striking face,’ wrote another former Bugatti works driver, René Dreyfus, ‘the profile of an eagle, with sharp features, piercing eyes. Through his face, you could see something beautiful, his honesty, his nobility, his class. He was a true chevalier.’2
Benoist was serving as an armaments officer when the Germans entered Paris, having been refused permission to fly – he had been an outstanding airman in the 1914–18 war – because of his age. He was at Le Bourget airfield, away from his unit, when news came through that Paris had fallen. Struggling to find a way through the fleeing and terrified crowds, Benoist was arrested by an armed convoy moving towards the south-west. Using his professional skills, the prisoner waited for an opportune moment to swerve away from his captors and into a minor road before putting his foot down on the throttle of his sports Bugatti and driving at full tilt through the abandoned country lanes. Reaching an isolated farm which belonged to a friend, Benoist hid his own car and borrowed an old machine in which to rejoin his unit. Subsequent events show that he was contacted by a fellow Bugatti driver, Charles Grover (‘Williams’), who had rejoined the British Army at the outbreak of war to drive for the Signal Corps.
A bilingual upbringing and his knowledge of France made Grover a natural choice for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who trained their men in many different skills, including industrial sabotage, before providing them with detailed missions and dropping them back into France. On 31 May 1942 Grover was parachuted into occupied territory near Le Mans – a familiar landscape to a racing driver – with orders to form a new Resistance network under the codename Operation Chestnut. Making his way to Paris, he linked up with h
is fellow Bugatti drivers Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille. Use was made of Ettore’s offices as a cover while the three men began the sensitive task of recruitment; their own wives were among the first to join. A young radio operator reached them from England in March the following year; over the next three months Operation Chestnut built up an impressive supply of arms and equipment at Benoist’s secluded family chateau in the forest of Rambouillet, just south-west of Paris.
The occupiers had, in 1940, seemed friendly and eager to be accepted. ‘Ils sont corrects’ was the grudging catchphrase of the first few months as the German soldiers offered their respects to the tomb of the unknown soldier, paid their bills and obeyed their own orders to be off Paris’s darkened streets at the curfew hour. By 1941, however, the mood had hardened; the assassination in October of a German officer at Nantes, where Hélène had once played at leading her Roman troops in a Lenten fête, was swiftly countered by the execution of twenty-two hostages, followed by the killing of fifty more at Bordeaux. The first acts of armed subversion by the Resistance were followed by the arbitrary arrest that December of 700 Jewish Parisians and the execution of a further group of hostages at Mont-Valérien, not far from the city. The following year, 1942, mass deportation commenced; in June 13,000 Jewish Parisians, including a large number of women and 4,000 children, were rounded up and held like cattle before being deported. The transit camp where they were held was the indoor Vélodrome d’Hiver, the popular sports centre where Hemingway had cheered on six-day cyclists in the twenties. In Vichy, meanwhile, 40,000 more victims were handed over to the enemy. Later, it was discovered that René Bousquet, head of the Vichy police, had been in charge of arresting the families confined at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where many died of exhaustion and dehydration before they could be put on the trains.
In 1943 growing fears of an Allied invasion led to an intensive German crackdown on the Resistance. In June, seven networks were infiltrated; among them was Operation Chestnut. At the end of July, their radio operator was captured and tortured until he revealed the least incriminating name, that of Robert Benoist’s brother. Maurice Benoist, unfortunately, knew enough to disclose the site of the hidden arms cache to the Nazi Security Service: it is not clear whether it was the German police or the equally brutal French Milice who promptly made their way to the Benoist chateau at Auffargis, where they arrested Charles Grover. Imprisoned and then transported, he is thought to have been executed at Sachsenhausen in March 1945, although one writer suggested that he was able to buy his freedom and to continue working undercover for MI6.3 (The fact that a parcel of his clothes was despatched to his brother in England in March 1945 from Sachsenhausen suggests that this was not the case.)
Robert Benoist, captured in Paris three days after Grover’s arrest, made a hair-raising escape, first from a German car and then from a friend’s house on Avenue Hoche – it may well have been the Bugatti residence – by climbing out and over a roof. Rescued by a British RAF plane and taken to England, he was back in France in the autumn of 1943 and at work with Jean-Pierre Wimille on a new sabotage mission called Operation Clergyman. The objectives this time were the destruction of two large electricity pylons at Ile Héron above the Loire, the destabilization of a railway line used by German troops and the preparation of an effective interference group ready for D-Day in the Nantes area.
The danger to a Resistance fighter of being caught cannot be overstated. A radio operator was the only means of communication by which coded plans could be made to receive arms and ammunition for the sabotage operations, but the Germans had become increasingly successful in capturing the radio operators and issuing misleading signals. If the message was successfully transmitted, there still remained the problem of the drop itself. The location was indicated by the flashing of an agreed morse letter with torches, but it was always possible that the torches would be seen by the enemy and the drops still had to be transported to a safe place and hidden before daylight. M. R. D. Foot, in his exemplary study of the SOE’s work in France, has noted that Benoist was able, in a single night and with the help of only two men, to receive and conceal seventeen heavy containers. He was also, by virtue of his courage and his remarkable qualities as a leader, able to rally some two thousand Resistance fighters from his own area in the Rambouillet forest and to begin preparing them for action.4 Sainte-Mesme was nearby; it would be pleasing to think that Hélène Delangle’s brother Henri was one of Benoist’s intrepid followers.
Benoist had made many remarkable escapes; in June 1944 his luck ran out. Arrested while visiting his dying mother, he was taken to the notorious prison at Fresnes on the outskirts of Paris. Ettore Bugatti’s secretary, Stella Tayssedre, and her husband, were taken at the same time, but the police were convinced that many more were involved in the conspiracy. Tortured, Benoist refused to yield more than his own name (he was identified in his papers as ‘Daniel Perdridge’ with the field name ‘Lionel’). ‘Never confess’, he scratched defiantly on the wall of his cell at Fresnes, and added his true initials for identification.5 Stella Tayssedre was five months’ pregnant when she was rescued on the verge of transportation by a group of Red Cross workers at Compiègne station north of Paris. Her husband, together with Benoist, was transported to Germany. On 6 September thirty-six officers, including Robert Benoist, were hanged with piano wire in an underground cell at Buchenwald. The type of wire used suggests a grim joke; radio operators working with the Resistance were always referred to as ‘pianists’ in SOE directives.
The quiet and deeply religious Jean-Pierre Wimille had been more fortunate. In the summer of 1944 he had been arrested with his wife, the former ski champion Cri-Cri de la Fressange, at one of Benoist’s family homes, together with Denise Bloch, the ‘pianist’ for Operation Clergyman. While his wife and Bloch were being held, Wimille escaped by dodging between cars parked in the driveway and out to a stream where, by submerging himself and breathing through a straw, he held out until the search had been abandoned. Denise Bloch was eventually executed at Ravensbrück; Madame Wimille made a last-minute escape from deportation when a cousin, who was at the Gare de l’Est with a Red Cross van, lent her a white coat and smuggled her out as one of the medical charity’s workforce. She was at the Bois de Boulogne, on 9 September 1945, to see her husband triumph in the race they had just named the Coupe des Prisonniers, and to watch Ettore Bugatti arrive in the great Bugatti Royale he had retrieved from its hiding-place at Ermenonville. This was a day for honouring heroes; the first race of the day was named the Coupe Robert Benoist.
Not all racing drivers behaved so courageously. Louis Chiron spent his war years in neutral Switzerland with his friend Rudi Caracciola and with Alice Hoffman, the clever and strongwilled woman they had once shared and whom Caracciola had married in 1937. Another Bugatti driver, René Dreyfus, was safely in America when Germany invaded France. Dreyfus was a courageous man who had signed up in the autumn of 1939 to help defend the Maginot Line; Delahaye’s generous American patron, Lucy Schell, may have been instrumental in saving his life. The name Dreyfus was evidently Jewish, and René had rashly neglected to toast his German hosts or their country on his last racing visit to the Nürburgring in 1939. It seems likely that Lucy Schell was concerned for his safety when she insisted that he should be chosen to represent Delahaye at Indianapolis in 1940; Dreyfus fought for his newly adopted country as a GI and went on to become, with his brother, the owner-manager of a successful New York restaurant.
Among the women, Anne Itier did voluntary work for the Ministry of War while the younger Simone des Forest drove lorries for the Red Cross in the Vichy-governed area where she had grown up, and where she still lives. Violette Morris was not so virtuous.
The Amazonian woman who had competed against Hellé Nice at Montlhéry in the early thirties had supported the Nazi Party since her invitation to the 1936 Olympic Games at Berlin. Shortly afterwards, she became a secret agent, supplying detailed plans of the Maginot Line defences, together with other pieces of va
luable military information. Back in Paris during the occupation, Morris was given the job of infiltrating Resistance networks;* her success rate made her elimination a priority for the French section of the SOE. Despite the fact that her home, a barge docked on the Point du Jour quay, was well-known, Morris managed to evade capture until 1944. On 26 April she was driving a long-bodied black Citroën of the kind always used by gangsters and Germans in 1940s films, when five Resistance fighters stopped the vehicle and opened fire. She died at the wheel, shot to shreds by sub-machine-gun fire. Not surprisingly, Morris’s name seldom features in French histories of the early women racing drivers.
And what, meanwhile, of Hellé Nice? ‘I have never been in any trouble, civil or military,’ she said in her own defence after the war. Did she want to convey only that she had escaped accusation? It is not necessary to imagine that she betrayed some Jewish neighbours or that she became a spy; her collaboration, if she was guilty of it, might only have taken the pragmatic form of being on good terms with the occupiers. She liked enjoying herself; it is not necessary to suppose that she would have turned down an invitation because it came from a German.
She would not have been alone. ‘Whatever their outlook, during these years, the French have all more or less been to bed with Germany, and whatever quarrels there were, the memory is sweet’, was the brazen declaration made by Robert Brasillach, wartime editor of the repellently anti-Semitic and pro-German Je Suis Partout.6 The journal was renamed Je Chie Partout (I shit everywhere) by patriots during the Occupation and, derisively, Je Suis Parti when it vanished from sight after the Liberation. Brasillach was executed as a collaborator in 1945. Yet there may have been a grain of truth in his assertion. In the early years of the war, many people believed that Hitler was going to win; in Paris, it seemed an appalling certainty.
The Bugatti Queen Page 18
