They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France
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ALSO BY CHARLES GLASS
Syria Burning
The Deserters
Americans in Paris
The Tribes Triumphant
The Northern Front
Money for Old Rope
Tribes with Flags
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2018 by Charles Glass
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Illustration credits appear on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Glass, Charles, 1951– author.
Title: They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France / Charles Glass.
Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006208 (print) | LCCN 2018028496 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206177 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698168978 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Starr, George Reginald, 1904–1980. | Starr, John Ashford Renshaw, 1908–1966. | Great Britain. Special Operations Executive—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. | Spies—Great Britain—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France.
Classification: LCC D810.S8 (ebook) | LCC D810.S8 S744 2018 (print) | DDC 940.54/86410922—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006208
Version_1
To the grandchildren:
Leonora, Allegra, Eva, Zelda, Rose, Christian, Arthur, Iris, Felix, Harriet, Theo, Isaac, and Orlando
with love.
CONTENTS
Also by Charles Glass
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Characters
PROLOGUE
ONE AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER
TWO CALLED TO THE COLORS
THREE A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP
FOUR “I WAS A HUMAN BEING”
FIVE A CURSED DAY
SIX “IT LITERALLY RAINED CONTAINERS”
SEVEN ARRESTS AND ARRIVALS
EIGHT AVENUE BOCHE
NINE WORD OF HONOR
TEN SABOTAGE
ELEVEN JOHN’S COUSIN
TWELVE DAS REICH
THIRTEEN THE BATTLE OF CASTELNAU
FOURTEEN THE GERMANS RETREAT
FIFTEEN “I SAID ‘SHIT’ TO DE GAULLE”
SIXTEEN STARRS ON TRIAL
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Credits
Index
About the Author
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Lieutenant Claude Arnault: Code name “Néron”; demolition specialist sent by Special Operations Executive (SOE) to assist George Starr.
Serge Asher: Cover name “Serge Ravanel”; Resistance leader and regional commander of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI).
Vera Atkins: French Section (F-Section) intelligence officer under Maurice Buckmaster in London.
Georges Bégué: Radio operator and first agent that SOE infiltrated into France in May 1941.
Denise Bloch: Code names “Danielle” and “Catherine”; French Jewish résistante, courier of the DETECTIVE circuit and then of George Starr’s WHEELWRIGHT in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon.
Marcus Bloom: Code names “Urbain” and “Bishop”; SOE F-Section radio operator, arrived in southern France in November 1942 with George Starr, transmitted for Maurice Pertschuk of PRUNUS and for George Starr.
Jan Buchowski: Polish naval lieutenant and skipper of the Seadog, delivered George Starr to the French coast and took John Starr out.
Colonel Maurice Buckmaster: Chief of SOE’s F-Section.
Buresie: Former member of the Foreign Legion, George Starr’s bodyguard.
Peter Churchill: Code name “Raoul”; early SOE organizer in France.
Winston Churchill: British wartime prime minister, established SOE on July 16, 1940.
Yvonne Cormeau: Code name “Annette”; radio operator for George Starr’s WHEELWRIGHT circuit.
Hugh Dalton: Minister of economic warfare, to whom SOE reported.
Général Charles de Gaulle: Head of the Free French in London from 1940 to 1944.
Lieutenant Charles Duchalard: Code name “Denis”; French Canadian sabotage expert sent by SOE to assist Maurice Pertschuk and George Starr.
Pierre Duffoir: Code name “Félix”; courier for George Starr.
Maurice Maxime Léon Dupont: Code name “Yvan”; French soldier and WHEELWRIGHT circuit courier.
Colonel Léon Faye: Founder of the ALLIANCE network, captured by the Germans and held at avenue Foch.
Major Horace “Hod” Williams Fuller: Code name “Kansul”; American marine officer and commander of Jedburgh Team Bugatti, which parachuted into southwest France in June 1944 to work with George Starr.
Sergeant Fernand Gaucher: Code name “Gérard”; member of France’s 150th Infantry Regiment, which formed the core of the Réseau Victoire.
André Girard: French chief of CARTE circuit until 1943, when he was recalled to London.
Général Henri Giraud: French Army officer, captured in 1940 and escaped to lead Resistance networks, preferred by the Americans over Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free French forces.
Dr. Josef Goetz: Second in command of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) radio department in avenue Foch, initiated and ran the SD’s Funkspiel radio game in France with radio sets captured from SOE agents.
Philippe de Gunzbourg: Code names “Philibert” and “Edgar”; French Jewish aristocrat and landowner, operative of the homegrown Combat Resistance network before working for George Starr.
Captain George Donovan Jones: Radio operator for ACROBAT circuit in eastern France, captured by the Germans and imprisoned with Captain Brian Dominic Rafferty.
Corporal Alfred von Kapri: SD official at 84 avenue Foch.
Noor Inayat Khan: Code name “Madeleine”; SOE radio operator in Paris, captured by the Germans and held at avenue Foch.
Sturmbannführer SS Major Hans Josef Kieffer: German SD counterespionage chief in Paris, employed the imprisoned John Starr to draw maps for the Germans at avenue Foch.
Colonel Helmut Knochen: Paris commander of the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) and the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO; security police).
Pierre Labayle: Montréjeau brewer and SOE résistant with PRUNUS circuit.
Roger Larribeau: Mayor of Castelnau, Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, early résistant and confidant of George Starr.
Louis and Théo Lévy: German Jewish exile brothers, early members of the Resistance, worked undercover for George Starr. Théo ran George Starr’s inte
lligence branch, and both brothers conducted operations disguised as German soldiers. Théo later adopted his brother’s code name, “Christophe.”
Captain F. Lofts: Staff officer of SOE Group B Special Training School (STS) in Beaulieu, Hampshire.
Leo Marks: SOE signals chief and author of Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s Story, 1941–1945.
Pierre Martin: Résistant who betrayed John Starr to the SS and Gestapo.
Alfred and Henry Newton: Prewar circus performers, John Starr’s classmates at SOE training school, and agents in occupied France.
Major Gilbert Norman: Code name “Archambaud”; PHYSICIAN circuit radio operator, imprisoned with John Starr.
Tomás Guerrero Ortega: Code name “Camilo”; exiled Spanish Republican army officer, chief of Groupe Espanol de Résistance dans le Gers, the 35th Spanish Brigade of Guerrillas, who were armed by George Starr.
Second Lieutenant Erich Otto: SD radio department chief in Paris.
Captain Claude Joseph Maurice Parisot: Code name “Caillou” (Stone); organizer of résistants under the Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (ORA), cofounder of the Armagnac Battalion, George Starr’s closest friend in the Resistance.
Lieutenant Dennis Parsons: Code name “Pierrot”; radio operator sent by SOE to assist George Starr.
Maurice Pertschuk: Code name “Eugène”; Anglo French F-Section operative, organizer of SOE PRUNUS circuit.
Maréchal Philippe Pétain: World War I French Army marshal, head of the French state in Vichy from 1940 to 1944.
Master Sergeant Josef Placke: SD organizer of hoax Resistance circuit north of Paris.
Maurice Poncelet: Painter and résistant under Captain Maurice Parisot.
Captain Adolphe Rabinovitch: Code name “Arnaud”; F-Section radio operator for Peter Churchill’s SPINDLE circuit and for George Starr.
Captain Brian Dominic Rafferty: SOE organizer for ACROBAT circuit in eastern France, captured by the Germans and imprisoned with Captain George Donovan Jones and John Starr.
Jeanne Robert: Schoolmistress in Castelnau, Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, also known as Madame Delattre, Maurice Rouneau’s lover and cofounder of the Victoire network.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: President of the United States from 1933 to 1945, presided over the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American wartime intelligence organization trained by SOE.
Maurice Henri Rouneau: Cover name “Captain Martin Rendier,” code name “Albert”; Belgian résistant, cofounder of the Réseau Victoire resistance group, brought George Starr to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon near Agen.
Diana Rowden: Code name “Paulette”; courier for John Starr, later captured by the Germans along with John Young.
Odette Sansom: SOE courier for the DONKEYMAN circuit, arrived in France by sea with George Starr in November 1942.
Paul Sarrette: French Army officer, Resistance deputy to Henri Sevenet.
Henri Paul Sevenet: Code name “Rodolphe”; French Army officer during the German invasion of France, later SOE agent and lieutenant to Baron Philippe de Vomécourt, SOE’s VENTRILOQUIST circuit organizer.
Maurice Southgate: Code name “Hector”; George and John Starr’s childhood friend, Royal Air Force pilot, and SOE organizer in occupied France.
George Reginald Starr: Code name “Hilaire”; British Army lieutenant, dispatched to France by SOE in 1942, organizer of SOE WHEELWRIGHT circuit in Gascony.
John Ashford Renshaw Starr: Code name “Emile,” later “Bob”; younger brother of George Starr, sent by SOE to France in 1942 and 1943.
Second Lieutenant Ernest Vogt: SD interpreter and interrogator at 84 avenue Foch.
Philippe de Vomécourt: French liaison officer with the British Army in 1940, SOE F-Section VENTRILOQUIST circuit organizer.
Anne-Marie Walters: Code name “Colette”; courier sent by SOE to assist George Starr.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanley H. C. Woolrych: Commandant of SOE’s Special Training School (STS) at Beaulieu, Hampshire.
Lieutenant John Young: Code name “Gabriel”; radio operator for the ACROBAT circuit in eastern France, captured by the Germans with Diana Rowden.
PROLOGUE
Courage was their common badge.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER, They Fought Alone: The True Story of SOE’s Agents in Wartime France
The German occupation of France, as Dickens wrote of the French Revolution, was the best and the worst of times. The defeat of the French Army in June 1940 challenged Frenchmen and -women to choose between courage and cowardice, rebellion and compliance, freedom and slavery. The worst collaborated with their occupier to enjoy the rewards that power afforded. The best and bravest resisted, turning for support to the ancient enemy, England. The British sent arms and, just as important, men and women to organize disparate French ranks into effective forces.
As far as the public knew, the organization providing the resources for resistance, Special Operations Executive (SOE), did not exist. And until July 16, 1940, it didn’t. Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, created it, as has often been quoted, to “set Europe ablaze.” SOE was something new for Britain, with its vast experience of counterinsurgency in the empire. When Germany seized most of the European continent, the British backed the kind of rebels they suppressed in their colonies. SOE’s models were Lawrence of Arabia, organizer of Arab irregulars against the Ottoman Turks in Syria, and the Irish Republican Army that had expelled the British from southern Ireland twenty years earlier.
SOE’s London headquarters at 64 Baker Street bore the innocuous name Inter-Services Research Bureau. Staff signed the Official Secrets Act that prohibited disclosure of their activities, even to their families. The organization, which reported to the minister of economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, became a rival of the older spy agency known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. MI6 resented the intrusion of amateurs onto its turf despite the clear demarcation of objectives: MI6 gathering intelligence in secret, SOE conducting violent operations behind Axis lines. MI6’s method was “hush-hush,” while SOE went for “boom-boom.”
Every country under Axis rule, from the Far East to France, came under a “section” of SOE that recruited, trained, and armed local populations to oppose occupation. The chief of SOE’s French Section (F-Section), Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, was an astute commander and a good judge of personnel. He had studied at Britain’s elite Eton College and was about to enter Oxford University when his father’s sudden bankruptcy interrupted his education. He moved to France and mastered the language so well that he wrote as a journalist for the French newspaper Le Matin. Later, as assistant manager of the Ford Motor Company in Paris, he studied the country’s road and rail networks, information that later would serve him well. Buck, as friends and associates called him, enlisted in the army at the outbreak of war, did basic training in England, and returned to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force to deter a German invasion. When the blitzkrieg invasion came, he retreated with his comrades from Dunkirk to England in June 1940 and took command of F-Section in March 1941, at the age of thirty-one. One of his operatives wrote that he was a “tall man, with a gentle, slightly self-deprecatory manner and eyes which, later in his life, suggested he had seen nearly everything. . . . [He] worked on average some eighteen hours a day.” His primary concern, wrote SOE signals chief Leo Marks, “was for the safety of the agent.”
The first agent that SOE smuggled into France was radio operator Georges Bégué in May 1941, less than a year after Britain evacuated its armed forces and intelligence assets from the Continent. More infiltrations, of men and women, followed by parachute, submarine, sailboat, and Westland Lysander light aircraft that landed on occupied soil at great risk. The typical SOE team consisted of an organizer, a radio operator (W/T for wireless telegrapher), and a courier. Wireless telegra
phers tapped out letters in Morse code to maintain links with London, while couriers carried messages on bicycles, buses, trains, and cars from organizers to field agents. Couriers were often women, whom the Germans scrutinized less than military-age men. A French intelligence inspector had doubts about the arrangement: “Only the English could have sent their agents out in teams of three, consisting of two men and a girl, without taking account of the fact that it raised a question of which should be the friend of the girl.” The three-member teams ran regional circuits, named for professions that were capitalized in internal communications: BUTLER, FIREMAN, AUTHOR, and so on. The circuits, or networks, recruited Frenchmen and -women to conduct sabotage against the Nazis and, more important, prepare to attack the Germans from the rear when the Allies invaded France.
Among those dispatched in secret to France were the brothers George and John Starr, whose American father and grandfather had resettled the family in the mother country before the First World War. Theirs would be a lonely struggle, cut off from the wives and children they loved, deprived of the comradeship of a regular military unit, and on their own behind enemy lines, far from sources of supply. If captured, F-Section would not be able to protect them from inevitable torture and probable execution. The title of Buckmaster’s memoir, They Fought Alone, encapsulates George and John Starr’s experiences in occupied France. Borrowing his title for this book is both an homage to Buckmaster and acknowledgment of the Starr brothers’ bravery under the most adverse conditions. It adds poignancy to John’s discovery of facts that undermined Buckmaster’s glowing portrayal of his section’s wartime achievements.
France teemed with traitors, informers, collaborators, and opportunists liable to betray them. Some Frenchmen cooperated with the Germans out of loyalty to their idea of a France cleansed of the corruption that led to the defeat of 1940. Others curried favor with the occupier in the hope of advancement. Many used the occupation to settle old scores. The Starr brothers could rely on only a handful of men and women whose patriotism or stubbornness made them risk savage torture, summary execution, or slow, humiliating, and anonymous death in concentration camps.