They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France

by Charles Glass

  The occupation set French against French as brutally as had the Revolution, Dickens’s age of wisdom and age of foolishness. The Armistice that France signed with Germany on June 22, 1940, partitioned the country along a Line of Demarcation into regions of direct German occupation in the north and an autonomous French regime in the south, the so-called Zone Libre, or Free Zone, with its capital at Vichy. The physical separation was only one of many factors dividing the French after their defeat. The others were political, ideological, and personal. Navigating the ambiguous political landscape would be as important to the Starr brothers’ survival and success as finding safe houses, caches for weapons, and locations for shortwave radio transmitters.

  “In the eyes of the French people,” wrote Olivier Wieviorka, one of the finest French historians of the Resistance, “the regime certainly enjoyed a strong legitimacy.” France’s Third Republic had voted itself out of existence on July 10, 1940, and handed power to the First World War “hero of Verdun,” the aged Maréchal Philippe Pétain. “Joining the resistance therefore amounted to stepping outside the law, a risk that Dutch, Belgian, and Norwegian citizens did not face, since their governments had taken exile in London,” wrote Wieviorka. The United States recognized the Pétain regime and appointed a senior naval officer, Admiral William D. Leahy, as its ambassador to Vichy. Many Frenchmen believed that fidelity to France demanded allegiance to the legal government. Patriots who responded to the appeal on July 18, 1940, from French general Charles de Gaulle in London “to listen to my voice and follow me” were rare. Indeed, most of France was unable to hear the general’s broadcast. The French Army convicted de Gaulle in absentia of treason and sentenced him to death. Vichy declared its underground opponents “terrorists,” subject to the death penalty.

  The French people thus fell into three categories: résistants, who fought the Nazis and the Vichy regime; collabos, who worked with Germany and Vichy; and the great majority, attentistes, who waited to see who would win. The obvious pool of potential résistants, more than 1.5 million of the nation’s young men with military experience, languished in German prisoner of war camps. SOE instead looked for support among the minority who had evaded capture or had not served in the army. Complicating matters were rivalries among the many Resistance movements. Some were loyal to de Gaulle. Others favored another French general named Henri Giraud, who escaped from a German prisoner of war camp to become America’s preferred leader over de Gaulle, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt detested. Many belonged to organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, which did not support resistance until Hitler attacked its Soviet sponsor in June 1941. There were also socialists, royalists, and Freemasons. Many factions stole weapons from one another, and they clashed violently over ideology, strategy, and territory.

  While British agents like George and John Starr learned how to kill, training schools could not teach them whom to trust. They had to understand the sentiments of the French and to rely on their feeling for human beings more than on anything in SOE’s instruction manuals. Their lives and the fate of the Resistance depended on it.

  ONE

  An Unexpected Encounter

  It was no use trying to do things by the book. There was no book.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  In late October 1942, autumn squalls and the impending Allied invasion of French North Africa, Operation Torch, confined ships in Britain’s Gibraltar naval base to port. The Royal Navy interrupted the moratorium on Thursday, October 29, for an operation of such high priority that it had to go ahead—regardless of storms and the threat of attack by German U-boats. At eight thirty that night, a small sailing craft called the Seadog cruised out of Gibraltar’s harbor with an unlikely assortment of British, French, and Italian passengers. Each of them, unknown to the crew and for the most part to one another, had an ordre de mission from London to spread throughout Adolf Hitler’s Fortress Europe and galvanize nascent networks of resistance. They looked like ordinary men and women in their French-made civilian clothes, but they were newly trained experts in the black arts of assassination, sabotage, armed and unarmed combat, explosives, safecracking, burglary, counterfeiting, and cryptography. All had officers’ commissions in the British armed forces, in the vain hope that the Germans would treat them according to the Geneva Conventions if they were captured. Half of them, their instructors had warned, were unlikely to return.

  On Monday night, November 2, whitecaps lashed the Seadog’s wooden hull, hurling the flimsy craft from wave to soaring wave. Lightning flared in the night sky, and thunder rocked every timber. Belowdecks, a half-American, half-British passenger was plaguing the radio operator: where was his message from London? The man was thirty-eight-year-old Lieutenant George Reginald Starr, who seemed certain SOE would abort his mission. No one liked to argue with George. His wrestler’s physique made him appear larger than his five feet six inches. Dark chestnut hair, light brown eyes, ruddy complexion, and callused hands gave him the look of a miner, yet he spoke like a gentleman. He was both. After leaving a strict Anglican boys’ boarding school, Ardingly College in Sussex, at the age of sixteen, he had labored underground for years in the Shropshire coal mines to qualify as a mining engineer.

  That night, George sensed something amiss, and he wanted out. Anything but a coward, he was one of the last Britons to make it out of Belgium ahead of the invading Germans in May 1940. He had outpaced younger men during SOE’s elite commando course in the Scottish Highlands, and he overcame a lifelong fear of heights to make his first parachute jump. His queasy gut had nothing to do with fear or seasickness. “It was more than a hunch,” he said. “It saved me many, many times. If I’m going to do something and my stomach goes funny, then I don’t do it.” He asked the ship’s radioman again and again for a communiqué canceling the operation and ordering Seadog back to Gibraltar.

  The Seadog’s skipper, Polish naval lieutenant Jan Buchowski, had weathered worse storms in seven months of evading German and Italian warships in the western Mediterranean Sea. In the absence of orders for George Starr and the others to abandon their missions, he sailed on toward France. He and his crew were, in the words of a Polish army general, “too rough even for the Polish navy.” Buchowski detested the Germans, not only for occupying his country but also for murdering his entire family. His service with Britain’s Royal Navy started with the rescue of Polish soldiers from France during the German conquest of June 1940, and since April 1942 Buchowski had run a clandestine ferry between Britain’s Gibraltar colony and the French coast, delivering secret agents and tons of equipment to France and returning with agents at the ends of their assignments. Seadog was a 20-ton, 47-foot Mediterranean felucca, similar in shape to the classic lateen-rigged feluccas that plied the River Nile. Despite overcrowding and engines that were prone to break down, their disguise as a commercial trawler had so far spared them inspection by German, Italian, and Vichy French patrols. Passengers complained of the stench, residue of the ship’s prewar service as a sardine trawler. George, although longing to see France for the first time since Germany occupied it over two years before, did not regard the Seadog as an ideal mode of transport: “It turned every way but upside down. It was rough. You couldn’t stay there, the stern. I found a good place in the galley. I cooked myself bacon and eggs all the time.” His voracious appetite staved off nausea, but it did nothing for his anxiety.

  Everything in his baggage was Belgian or French, down to the razor and scraggly shaving brush. His old shoes were Belgian made, and a French tailor in London had sewn his wool suit. His communications equipment was concealed in cylindrical metal containers, along with explosives and supplies weighing 1,000 pounds. His wallet contained 100,000 French francs, equivalent to £500 or $2,500, and a forged identity card in the name of Serge Watremez. Watremez had been George’s classmate during his youth in the Loire Valley and he had faith that the family, if questioned, would vouch for him. George’s code name was “Hilaire.” Maki
ng sure that nothing British remained in his bags before departing Gibraltar, he had discarded a gold cigarette case that Colonel Buckmaster had given him. Most agents carried cyanide to swallow in the event of capture, but George had rejected the poison with the words “My family motto is live in hope.”

  George’s “Final Instructions,” dated October 12, 1942, ordered him to contact agent “Rodolphe” after his arrival in France: “Rodolphe is expecting you. He will see that you are safely installed, attend to the cashing of your first food coupons and give you all the necessary information as to local conditions.”

  “Rodolphe” was Henri Paul Sevenet, lieutenant to SOE’s VENTRILOQUIST circuit organizer, Baron Philippe de Vomécourt. SOE chiefs in London knew Vomécourt, who had served as the French liaison officer with the British Army in May 1940. After escaping in 1940 on the last ship to England from Cherbourg, he joined the newly formed SOE and returned to France. He recruited Henri Sevenet, his brother’s godson, in early 1941. Sevenet, whose personnel file described him as “an extremely courageous officer,” had fought in the regular army during the German invasion of France and escaped twice from German captivity, the second time with de Gaulle’s rival, Général Henri Giraud. The five-feet-ten-inch Frenchman’s Charlie Chaplin moustache and thick glasses gave him the look of a professor, but he was a ruthless clandestine operator whom the Gestapo was doing its best to apprehend.

  At this time, all that George knew about Sevenet was his code name, “Rodolphe.” Could he be trusted? Was his organization secure? It had to be for George to achieve his objective: “Prepare a widespread underground organization ready to strike hard when we give the signal.”

  The other agents on Seadog were, like George, amateurs when it came to intelligence work. One was Lieutenant Marcus Reginald Bloom, a likable and flamboyant Jewish businessman from the north London suburb of Tottenham. The others were Australian Thomas Groome, Frenchman Alfred Maurice Schouten, Italian Giacomino Giovanni Sarfatti, and three women, Marie-Thérèse Le Chêne, Mary Katherine Herbert, and Odette Sansom.

  George took a dislike to Odette Sansom before the Seadog set sail. “I swear I had the surprise of my life,” he said of the journey from Glasgow. “I was put in charge of three bloody women.” Sansom was a beautiful young woman, whose long, shapely legs, bright brown eyes, and coquettish charm attracted most of the men she met. George, however, was not one of them. His antipathy may have grown on Seadog, where he and Odette spent long hours in the galley—George cooking and Odette cleaning.

  Sansom was born Odette Marie Céline Brailly in Amiens, northeastern France, on April 28, 1912. Her father died while serving as an army sergeant in the First World War. Plagued by ill health, Odette went blind at the age of seven for a few years, then suffered a bout of rheumatic fever. Her mother moved to the Normandy coast in 1925 to give her the benefit of sea air. In 1932, by then a healthy and attractive twenty-year-old with dark, wavy hair, Odette married Englishman Roy Sansom. They moved to London and had three daughters. Sansom joined the army in 1939 and, like Odette’s father, became a sergeant. While her husband was away on military service in October 1940, Odette fled the German bombardment of London with her mother and daughters to a tiny village in rural Somerset. There she heard a BBC broadcast in 1942 appealing for photographs, including holiday snapshots, of the French coast for intelligence purposes. Listeners were asked to write to “The Admiralty, London, S.W.1.”, but Odette sent her letter by mistake to “The War Office, London, W.” This led to an interview with an SOE F-Section recruiter, and then an assignment with SOE. She placed her daughters in a Catholic convent in Essex and trained in Scotland and southern England, but she suffered a concussion on her last practice parachute jump. To avoid injuring her again, SOE dispatched her on one of the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Lysander light aircraft to deposit her on a secret field in France. SOE was sending her as a courier to the DONKEYMAN circuit in Auxerre, Burgundy. Shortly after takeoff, her Lysander crashed in England, almost killing her. Determined to proceed, Sansom cruised from Glasgow to Gibraltar on the troopship that carried George.

  On the morning of November 3, the skies cleared and Seadog sailed northeast toward the Riviera resort of Cassis. The unusual topography between Cassis and the port city of Marseille made it ideal for clandestine operations. Fingers of land jutted into the sea, sheer limestone cliffs protected inland waterways from the wind, and pine forests obscured the view from the ridges. The French called the narrow bays calanques, the Corsican word for inlets. Buchowski’s preferred calanque, one of the three largest, was Port-Miou, where he had made previous drops. It lay two miles west of Cassis, far enough from town to avoid detection, yet within walking distance of safe houses and the train station. As Seadog neared Cassis, the crew switched the ensign from Spanish to French. The shore hove into view at nightfall.

  “Arriving at the position on 3 November at 2130 hrs,” Buchowski wrote in the ship’s log, “I transferred command to [Captain] Pohorecki and made my way via the dinghy together with two other people to the Port-Miou calanque. After an hour’s searching the shoreline, I found the agents, who had not been waiting at the position agreed, and we exchanged the correct signals.” The reception party’s leader, André Marsac of the CARTE resistance circuit, welcomed the Pole with a bottle of whisky.

  Buchowski returned to the Seadog, where the waiting agents lowered themselves into the skiff. They rowed into the calanque, passing little jetties of fishing boats and pleasure craft. Almost a mile upstream, the Resistance reception committee was waiting on the bank. One by one, the agents disembarked from the bobbing rowboat.

  “We land, and someone gives me a hand up off the rocky shore,” George recalled. “It’s me own brother.”

  John Ashford Renshaw Starr gazed into the face of the man beside him on the rocks. It was his brother. Although both men were of short stature, John five feet five and George five feet six, they were physical opposites. John was slim and lithe, George stocky and well muscled. John was more handsome, with a fair complexion, light brown hair, and blue-gray eyes. George’s rough features contrasted with his brother’s delicate profile. John was the charmer, often a trait of second sons competing for parental affection. George was a man of action, not words. Yet both brothers were outstanding athletes, strong and dexterous, who shared a love of good food and wine. Their parents’ only children, they had been close all their lives. John had not seen George since he left England three months earlier, on August 27, to parachute into France. This chance meeting on a French waterway between agents “Hilaire” and “Emile,” John’s code name at the time, was the first either knew of the other’s presence in the country.

  “Are you going now?” George asked. John thrust something into his brother’s hand, saying, “Here’s my ration card. It might come in useful.” He jumped into the dinghy with five other men and rowed back to Seadog.

  “And that was all,” George recounted. “He got on the boat and went.”

  Lieutenant Buchowski recorded in the ship’s log: “0200 hrs the operation was completed. We moved away from the shore and set our course for the next operation point.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As the Seadog sailed to base with a galley short of food, John grew hungrier by the day. George mused years later that his younger brother reproached him, “It was your fault, because you’ve eaten too much.”

  Buchowski docked in Gibraltar on November 13, ten days after depositing one Starr brother and exfiltrating the other, and the next day John flew to England. His first meeting in London was with Colonel Buckmaster at his Orchard Court office in London’s Portman Square, near SOE headquarters. John gave Buck his view on F-Section’s networks in France’s so-called Free Zone: they were a mess. The group in which London placed its trust, CARTE, was little more than a fiction concocted by a Frenchman named André Girard. Girard was a veteran soldier and committed patriot, but there was little evidence
to support his contention that the hundred thousand soldiers of the Armistice Army that Germany had permitted Vichy to maintain for internal security would rise up at his command. Some of the agents John had met, and on whom his brother would have to rely, were doing more to dominate the circuit than to challenge the Germans.

  Although disenchanted with F-Section’s field operations, John volunteered to return to France and try again. Before sending him to Loch Morar in Scotland for refresher commando retraining, Buckmaster granted him a short leave to visit his family in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. Britain’s Official Secrets Act did not permit John to tell his mother and father that he had seen their other son in France, a difficult fact to conceal in a family as close as the Starrs.

  TWO

  Called to the Colors

  Most of our agents were ordinary men and women and it was their ability to maintain that appearance of ordinariness while performing extraordinary actions which most distinguish them.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  The Starrs descended from American pioneer stock, having left England for the New World, in George Starr’s words, “not on the Mayflower, but not long afterwards.” In 1635, the ship Hercules carried Dr. Comfort Starr, a surgeon and treasurer of Canterbury Cathedral, with his wife and children to Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dr. Starr donated land to build Harvard College and was laid to rest in its Old Burial Ground. His son, also named Comfort, was one of five signatories of Harvard’s Charter of 1650. Succeeding generations of Starrs gave America frontiersmen, soldiers, industrialists, physicians, and businessmen.

  In 1899, two and a half centuries after Comfort Starr settled in Massachusetts, his descendant George Oscar Starr sailed back to England as the manager of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. His son, Alfred Demarest Starr, accompanied him as the chief bookkeeper. In London, the five-feet-three-inch bookkeeper met the daughter of an engineer he commissioned to construct a metal safety curtain for performances in the Olympia auditorium. She was Ethel Jemima Renshaw, whose father’s firm went on to manufacture rolling stock for the train that carried the circus and its wild animals around Europe. Alfred and Ethel married on October 16, 1902, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Buffalo Bill Cody and the cowboy and Indian stars of his Wild West show were among the witnesses.