by Noreen Riols
A few years ago I met Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves’s daughter, and her story both moved and impressed me. Her father was a regular naval officer who, when France fell, left his wife and family and escaped to England, where he trained and returned to France to organize a Resistance réseau. He landed on the coast of Brittany, a dangerous operation, since the beaches and the sea were heavily mined, and there was also a ban stretching the length of the coast forbidding civilians from going within twenty-five kilometres of the shore. So, even when they landed, agents arriving by this route were not ‘home and dry’. On a pitch-black, moonless night the Royal Navy would bring the agent or agents as near to the coast as possible, where a fishing boat, usually manned by Breton sailors, would be waiting to take them ashore. The transfer in the dark was perilous and made more so because a sea which on that coast appeared to be as calm as a mill pond could suddenly erupt, causing violent waves to dash against the rocking fishing vessel, threatening to overturn it.
D’Estienne d’Orves landed safely one night and immediately set about organizing his réseau. But he was eventually captured, together with several of his men, and condemned to death.
On the night before his execution his wife somehow managed to get permission to visit her husband in his prison cell to say goodbye. ‘I was eight years old at the time,’ his daughter Rose, now a middle-aged married woman with a family of her own, told me, ‘and my mother took me with her.’ I was horrified.
‘Wasn’t it awful?’ I asked. She smiled.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘it wasn’t awful at all. We weren’t allowed to stay with my father for long, but we were able to say goodbye.’ She paused. ‘That evening I witnessed my father’s courage and his calm and composure confronted with what was inevitable. And I also witnessed the love my parents had for each other, and the dignity with which both my mother and my father faced this situation. I think it taught me something which has stayed with me ever since, something I shall never forget. And perhaps the memory of that evening gave me courage when I later faced difficult situations in my own life. The following morning my father was taken to the fortress at Mont-Valérien and shot.’ Mont-Valérien, where so many résistants were taken to be shot, stands on a hill in the shadow of a beautiful American cemetery where hundreds of US soldiers from the First World War lie beneath the impeccably kept white crosses. It is almost ironic.
Rose seems to have survived what can only be described as a traumatic experience for a little girl of eight. I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to take my daughter, or whether I would even have been able to face such a situation with dignity and courage.
Stéphane Hessel was a Jew born in Germany who emigrated to Paris with his parents when he was eight years old. In 1939, at the age of twenty-two, he became a naturalized French citizen. In 1941, agreeing with neither the armistice nor the Vichy government, he fled to England and joined General de Gaulle’s BCRA, the Free French intelligence service. He returned to France in March 1944 to organize communications in the run-up to D-Day but was arrested the following July by the Gestapo, having been denounced under torture by one of his fellow résistants. Given the ‘bath treatment’, he himself broke down and talked.
In early August, together with thirty-six other British agents, he was deported to Buchenwald. By October, twenty-seven of them had been executed. It was then that Yeo-Thomas, with the help of résistants working in the infirmary, devised his ingenious escape system. Unfortunately only three of the remaining prisoners were able to take part. Hessel was one of the lucky ones; Harry Peulevé was the other. They exchanged places with three prisoners who had died of typhus. But, like Yeo-Thomas, once on the other side of the barbed wire Hessel became separated from the others and, wandering alone in the forest, was recaptured. He said that when he was taken to the camp commandant, who told him that the penalty for escaping was death, he looked him in the eye and replied in his native language: ‘What would you have done in my place?’ The commandant, startled perhaps not only by the audacious question but also by being addressed in perfect German, finally agreed that he would have done the same. ‘And yet you are going to execute me for doing what you admit you would have done,’ Hessel challenged him.
This account is not reported in any official document so cannot be verified, but it was told to me by Maurice Southgate’s daughter, Patricia Génève, who heard it from Stéphane Hessel himself when they met and lunched together at a Buchenwald commemoration. The commandant did not order Hessel to be executed, he sent him to Dora, the extermination camp, from where he again made an unsuccessful attempt to escape and narrowly escaped his punishment, death by hanging, when he was despatched on the death march to Belsen. Escaping en route, he made his way to Hanover, where he joined up with the advancing Allied forces.
The war over, Hessel returned to Paris and, on the surface, suffered no ill effects from his experiences. He plunged into politics and went on to have a brilliant career, culminating in being nominated as French ambassador to the United Nations. Small and slightly built, his bright eyes always twinkling with amusement, in 2013, at almost ninety-six, he was still very active – lecturing, writing books, and much in demand as a public speaker – until the evening of 26 February when, his diary no doubt crammed full of scheduled lectures, and his mind full of articles half-written or waiting to be written, he went to bed – and never woke up. One of the ‘survivors’, he died as he had lived, bursting with life to the very end.
Maurice Southgate was with Hessel on that convoy to Buchenwald. One of F Section’s agents, he had been parachuted into France in January 1943 to organize the new Stationer réseau, from where he built up a network which stretched across the Limousin and as far south-west as Tarbes. He did sterling work attacking railway targets, power stations and aircraft factories, building up an army of 2,500 men. But the Gestapo were looking for him. He was eventually arrested on 1 May 1944, badly beaten up by his Gestapo interrogators and taken to avenue Foch, where the torture continued. When he arrived there, John Starr, a fellow agent who had apparently defected to the Germans, was in the hall and greeted him by name. Southgate must have felt betrayed. But he affected not to hear or to understand, and in spite of being tortured he never broke. He, too, was then sent to join the convoy.
Southgate had had a traumatic time before joining SOE, having served with the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) at the beginning of the war. Evacuated from St Nazaire at the time of Dunkirk, the ship on which he was sailing, the Lancastria, was sunk by air attack with a loss of over 3,000 lives. But Southgate was a strong swimmer and managed to stay afloat until he was picked up by another vessel and brought back to England.
When Yeo-Thomas had to choose the prisoners who would be ‘allowed’ to escape, was he aware of what Southgate had gone through? I certainly thought he should have been a candidate for the group, possibly more so than Stéphane Hessel, who was younger, unmarried and had had so little time between his arrival in France and his arrest to prove his worth. I couldn’t help wondering how Yeo-Thomas made his choice. Admittedly, it was a very difficult decision to make. There were nine agents from the original convoy still alive: six of them had to be left behind. One might almost say six had to be sacrificed. Did they draw straws? I knew Yeo-Thomas; he was a very kind, fair-minded man. Why he chose Hessel and left Maurice Southgate to face almost certain death baffled me for a long time. And I couldn’t help wondering what Southgate’s feelings must have been when Yeo-Thomas, his compatriot and comrade-in-arms, chose a BCRA agent and not him to be one of the escape team. The entire group had been under threat of execution since their arrival, and those remaining would be even more vulnerable once news of the escape broke.
Then I met Patricia Génève, Maurice Southgate’s daughter, and I saw the whole picture in a different light. She and her brother have since become friends of mine and have told me that they knew virtually nothing about their father’s wartime activities. He refused to talk about them or give his ch
ildren any indication of what he had done. That is not unusual: many agents were reluctant to share their experiences and by doing so relive the clandestine role they had played. From what Patricia told me at the time I had the impression that her father was remote, almost withdrawn at times, and could be very taciturn. And I asked myself: was it unresolved anger or bitterness at what he must have felt to be the unjust choice Yeo-Thomas had made? Then Patricia and her husband, Marc, who has taken a great interest in his father-in-law’s wartime activities, enlightened me.
‘It was Papa’s choice,’ Patricia said. When talking with Hessel she had discovered a lot she didn’t know about her father. Hessel told her that on arriving at Buchenwald, Southgate had discovered a group of Polish prisoners to whom he had taught English in London before being infiltrated into France and he immediately gravitated towards them. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he had apparently told the other members of the group, ‘I can manage. You look after yourselves.’ The Poles had hidden him and kept him safe when the others were executed. So there was no question of his being part of Yeo-Thomas’s escape plan.
‘Professor Foot wrote that your father came back a broken man, which would not be surprising considering what he had suffered. And you say your father could be remote, almost withdrawn,’ I queried. ‘Do you think he was suffering the after-effects of all he had gone through during the war?’
‘Not at all,’ Patricia smiled. ‘He may have been “broken” when he returned, but he had certainly recovered by the time my brother and I were born. He wasn’t really remote, just naturally reserved, like all Englishmen. As far as we could see, there were no unpleasant after-effects. When the war ended, he went home to his wife and picked up their life where he had left it in 1939. My parents were married in 1937, but because of the war they had to wait ten years before they had children, so when I arrived in 1947 and then my brother was born shortly afterwards, he was immensely proud and took a great interest in us. It was always Papa who plaited my hair every morning before I left for school. And when our daughter was born he and she were inseparable. He took her everywhere with him. No, Papa seemed to be a very happy, contented family man.’
‘If you don’t think he suffered any consequences from his wartime activities, why do you think he was reluctant to talk to you about them?’
‘I may be wrong,’ Patricia’s husband interrupted, ‘but I have the feeling that my father-in-law was still working “behind the scenes”. He had connections with the British embassy and was responsible for gathering the names and keeping in touch with British nationals living over here whom he should inform and arrange for their evacuation if ever there were another crisis. This was during the “Cold War” period.’
It seemed to be a plausible answer. There is no official verification of this, but if it were the case that Southgate had never really abandoned his wartime training, then he wouldn’t be the only member of SOE to do so!
I only met Maurice Southgate once, at a lunch party here in Paris in the mid-1970s, well after the end of the war. He seemed normal enough, charming in fact, without any outward signs of psychological damage.
Without making comparisons or wishing to be critical or judgemental, but remembering the traumas some people had lived through and survived, one cannot help wondering whether, as far as Suzanne Deboué and Mlle Fontaine are concerned, wallowing in what can only be described as their self-imposed misery and refusing to face up to reality was really a luxury they indulged in and may even have enjoyed. Had they perhaps lacked what we used to call good old-fashioned ‘guts’, and should they have been told that, even though knocked down by life’s blows, they needed to ‘pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start all over again?
We can only conclude that some survive, and some do not.
Chapter 14
SOE was not a large organization, and recruitment was mainly by word of mouth, therefore it could pick and choose those it accepted for training. Perhaps that was its strength. Unlike de Gaulle, SOE was not interested in a prospective agent’s present or former political opinions. The general was terrified of a communist takeover in France once hostilities ended, and refused to consider any candidate who had, or had ever had, communist leanings. SOE looked for qualities in a candidate such as intelligence, discretion, determination. To them, these were what mattered. Their political opinions, past or present, were of no interest. When recruiting future agents they also needed to be sure that they had not volunteered for the ‘wrong reasons’ – to escape from an unhappy marriage, a broken relationship or perhaps from a desire to commit suicide as honourably as possible. This was the case of George Millar.
George returned to England after serving in the Middle East to find that the wife he adored had left him for a naval officer. In despair, he volunteered for SOE. But during the long training he met and fell in love with the woman he later married, and no longer wished to ‘honourably’ end his life: he now had a reason to live! He could have turned back, changed his mind, refused to leave: but he didn’t. He was parachuted, in uniform, into France after D-Day as a member of a ‘Jed’ team, to help the resistance and to stir up trouble. He managed to do it very well and survived. At one time he lived for several hours – or was it days, I can’t remember – in a sewer! I believe Michel de Bourbon-Parme, a descendant of one of the last kings of France, was part of George’s team. Michel was incredibly handsome. I thought he was twenty-two but apparently he was a hardened veteran of nineteen. He’d put up his age and volunteered at sixteen, there being no way the authorities could check his age, since his birth would have been registered in France.
George looked unbelievably English, one couldn’t mistake him for anything else, with his blond hair, blue eyes and fresh complexion so, before he left, his hair was dyed black. But when he returned it had grown and now half was golden and half black – he looked like a two-flavoured blancmange! After the war George wrote a highly successful book entitled Maquis, recounting his experiences as a ‘Jed’. I typed the first rough draft, about a dozen pages, which he later worked on and expanded into his bestseller.
Some did inevitably ‘slip through the net’. Perhaps Cecily Lefort was another one of them. An Englishwoman, she was married to a French doctor who, when France fell, despite her protests, insisted that she leave for England. But she was desperate to return to France and be reunited with her husband. She joined SOE and, after having trained as a radio operator under the codename ‘Alice’, was sent to work for Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey réseau in the Drôme, far from Paris, where her husband had his consulting rooms. In June 1943, just as the Prosper group was about to explode, she and Noor Inayat-Khan arrived by Lysander at one of Déricourt’s chosen landing grounds outside Paris.
Was ‘Alice’ another one of Déricourt’s victims? She may have been trailed, as Noor was trailed, from the time she arrived all the way down to Marseilles, her first stop before joining her réseau in the Drôme. ‘Roger’ said later that, after a very short time, he realized she was quite unsuitable for the work and, had it been possible, he would have had her sent back. According to him, she was very frightened and apprehensive about her mission, nervy, pessimistic, convinced from the start that she would not survive. Had she had some premonition, or perhaps a warning? She may well have contacted her husband before making her way south. We don’t know with whom, if with anyone, she had been in touch in Paris. Sadly her fears ended by being justified: she was arrested three months after her arrival in France, tortured and finally executed at Ravensbrück.
How had she slipped through the net? I don’t know. I do know that Buck often trusted his intuition, his ‘feeling’ about a student’s capabilities, even when the instructors from the various schools they had attended gave an adverse report. Perhaps that was the case with Cecily Lefort. On the other hand, the reports sent back to him about Francis Cammaerts were far from reassuring. He was described as pleasant, hard-working, having an easy contact with the other students on the course, but
totally lacking in the initiative and the necessary leadership qualities required of an agent. But, in spite of this, Buck backed him, and he left for the field. Full marks for Buck’s intuition. Cammaerts returned from France covered in glory. He was one of F Section’s finest agents.
Chapter 15
As already mentioned, the head of MI6 and his close associates disapproved of SOE. They didn’t care for our guerrilla tactics. They resented this ‘upstart’ army composed of amateurs who behaved in a nasty noisy ungentlemanly fashion – making bangs, killing Germans – and they did everything in their power to frustrate and hinder SOE’s efforts, sadly, themselves often resorting to ‘ungentlemanly schemes’ in order to achieve their goal. In this, they were ably assisted by General de Gaulle, head of the BCRA. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked that MI6 and General de Gaulle’s joint hatred of SOE was stronger that their hatred of the Abwehr (the German intelligence unit). And Winston Churchill was reported to have said that, of all the crosses he had to bear during the war, the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of the Free French) was the heaviest.
In this tangled web of tensions, antagonisms and rivalries, one might almost say SOE’s problem was that it did not belong to the Ministry of Defence, or the ‘War Box’, as it was then known. So, as we were not their responsibility, they did nothing to help us. We were the responsibility of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, not under the control of the British Military Intelligence Service, and answerable only to Winston Churchill. The Foreign Office could perhaps have helped or protected us, but unfortunately MI6 was an important player in their hierarchy, and MI6, disliking us so intensely, refused to cooperate in any way. They saw SOE as an upstart army seeking to usurp them. But they were wrong. SOE had no desire to usurp them. We were fighting a very different war from them, a war far removed from the velvet-glove policy of bona fide espionage.
