The couple’s first child, George Reginald Starr, was born on April 6, 1904, in London. The boy spent his earliest years on the Continent with Barnum & Bailey and then with Buffalo Bill’s troupe. He would later boast about his wartime exploits, “People say I got the cowboy and Indian stuff from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Up to a point, you need showmanship in a job like that.” One consequence of George’s Continental infancy was a lifelong phobia of heights, acquired when his parents took him at age two to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The family moved back to England after the elder George Starr became manager of the Crystal Palace exhibition center in south London. Alfred and Ethel’s second son, John Ashford Renshaw Starr, was born in Heaton Moor, Lancashire, on August 6, 1908. Alfred went to work for his father at the Crystal Palace for a few years until he found a job managing a factory in France.
George and John studied in France at the Lycée Vendôme and went on to board at Ardingly College. Although George finished before John started at the Sussex school, differences in their characters emerged during their education. Rugged older brother George was practical and excelled at the sciences, while John was a dreamer who loved painting and music. The family believed John was his mother’s favorite. Both boys became corporals in the school’s officer training corps, but only George became corps bugler.
George left school to work underground in the Shropshire coal mines, an apprenticeship that introduced him to hardworking men. “Those men, they were salt of the earth,” he said. “Those men made me a man.” Then came an engineering degree from the Royal School of Mines at London’s Imperial College and employment with Mavor & Coulson of Glasgow. The company sent him to install mining equipment in Britain, Tunisia, Belgium, and Spain, and on the side he provided intelligence to MI6. George at this time was briefly married to a French actress, a marriage that lasted only a year. It was in Spain that he met Pilar Canudos Ristol, a dark-eyed ingénue of undeniable beauty and self-confidence. Her father was the director of the local social club in Manresa, about forty miles from Barcelona, near the mine where George was working. They wed in 1934 and moved to Brussels. Two children, Georgina and Alfred, came soon afterward.
John studied art in London and Paris, where he made his living drawing advertising posters for Agence Yves Alexandre Publicité. Occasionally visiting his brother over the border in Belgium, he led the charmed life of a playboy in interwar Paris. He sported a close-cropped, full moustache, and his hobbies were fast cars, tennis, and fishing. He married a Frenchwoman named Michelle Vergetas from Rouen on June 30, 1934, and they settled into a flat in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Two years later, they had a baby girl and named her for John’s mother, Ethel.
While George was working in Brussels for Mavor & Coulson, General Francisco Franco led troops from Morocco into Spain to crush the Republic. The civil war bled Spain and brought fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in on Franco’s side, while the democracies of the West allowed Spain’s elected government to lose more and more territory. Pilar’s family sided with Franco. George recalled, “During the civil war, our house was like a fairground with people arriving from one side and staying with us and going back to the other side. Obviously, it was one-way traffic. There weren’t many Reds coming.”
In September 1938, after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler at Munich, George and John hastened to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. The RAF rejected them on the grounds that their father was an American citizen. Instead, George joined the British Army in Belgium, and John did the same in Paris.
Franco’s forces defeated the Republic in May 1939. George, who called the rightist victory “the liberation of Spain,” went there soon afterward. He carried his nine-month-old son, Alfred, on foot from France over the Pyrenees. They arrived just in time for Pilar’s father to see his grandson, and the old man died the next day.
George and his family were back in Brussels on September 2, 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany. “We heard Chamberlain tell us we were at war,” George said, “and we went out to play cricket.” Pilar took Georgina and Alfred, then aged two and one, back to her family in Manresa. When the static “phony war” produced no battles, she returned to George.
In Paris, the army delayed John’s enlistment. Michelle and baby daughter, Ethel, went to live with his parents in Newcastle-under-Lyme. In early 1940, the army posted John first to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment in Rouen before transferring him to the Field Security Police (FSP). With little for him to do in the FSP, he carried on with his work as a commercial artist.
The fighting war erupted on May 10, 1940, while George was working deep below the earth’s surface in a coal mine in Liège, Belgium. Luftwaffe aircraft bombed the city, a prelude to the blitzkrieg invasion of Belgium by the German Army, the Wehrmacht. “I had been on the night [shift] and came out at about half past four in the morning,” he recalled. “I was in the washroom, and all hell broke loose.” He rushed back to Brussels, where Pilar told him the British Embassy wanted him urgently. The embassy sent Pilar and the two children to Paris. From there, she took the children to her mother’s house in Manresa. George remained in Brussels at the British Embassy, which issued him a sergeant’s uniform to work with Phantom, a battlefield intelligence unit. The embassy staff evacuated, George said, “after showing me the direct line to Downing Street and left me in sole charge.” A British admiral knocked at the door and asked, “Where’s the embassy staff?” George answered, “You’re looking at it.” When the German Sixth Army overran Brussels on May 17, George blew up the radio and the rest of the embassy’s equipment before racing a truck westward through artillery barrages to Dunkirk. The retreat of British forces from France began the next day, and George boarded a ship across the Channel.
As the German invaders spread from Holland and Belgium to northern France, John stayed behind with the FSP. His unit gathered frontline intelligence for commanders who, amid the Wehrmacht’s lightning conquest, had no chance to use it. The Germans overran the FSP in the town of Nantes, and John seized a motorcycle for a mad race to the Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire in time for the last ship to England.
The defeat of Belgium and France left the Starr family divided. Pilar and her two children were in Spain. Michelle and her daughter were living with Alfred and Ethel in the north of England. The brothers made it to London, having lost their homes and livelihoods on the Continent. They determined to get both back.
* * *
• • •
The army granted Sergeant George Starr home leave after his evacuation from Dunkirk. He arrived at his parents’ house in Newcastle-under-Lyme on June 17, 1940. The new head of the French government, Maréchal Philippe Pétain, was speaking on the radio to announce his country’s capitulation to Germany and to request an armistice. It was a heartrending moment for France’s friends to hear the eighty-four-year-old newly appointed head of France’s government say, “I spoke last night with the enemy and asked him if he is ready to seek with us, soldier to soldier, after the honorable fight, the means to put an end to the hostilities.” George recalled his father’s reaction:
I remember him sitting there listening to it, and he turned to me. There were tears running down his eyes. And he said to me, “You know, they’ll never forgive us. They’ll never forgive us for this, the French.” I said, “What do you mean us?” I used to pull his leg a bit about being an American.
Alfred Starr applied for British nationality and volunteered for civil defense work. His hope was that his native country would rescue France and Britain as it had in 1917. In 1940, that prospect was unlikely.
George reported for duty in London, where his unit, Phantom, became General Headquarters Liaison Regiment. His first assignment involved overseeing carrier pigeons in a loft beside St. James’s Park. The birds took messages to and from France, a measure of the
dearth of British intelligence in German-occupied Europe. Serving with Sergeant Starr were the actor David Niven, Sir Jakie Astor, and Hugh Fraser, brother of famed commando officer Lord Lovat.
The army posted John to the FSP training base in Winchester, where he employed his artist’s skills drawing war propaganda posters and, unofficially, portraits of senior officers. It was there that the new and secret government organization, SOE, approached him, as it did others with military experience and language skills, to infiltrate occupied Europe and attack the Germans from the rear.
John trained at SOE’s irregular warfare school at Wanborough Manor, Surrey, in early 1941. His classmates included the brothers Alfred and Henry Newton, entertainers who had learned French touring the Continent like the Starr family. Theirs was a vigorous course of physical exercise, martial arts, secret codes, and bomb making. Students took commando training at Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands and advanced instruction in the dark arts at Beaulieu, the Montagu family estate in Hampshire’s New Forest. His superiors awarded John top marks and a second lieutenant’s commission.
Lieutenant John Starr recommended two other French speakers to SOE: his brother and a childhood friend named Maurice Southgate, who had joined the RAF in Paris on the day war was declared in September 1939. The Starr and Southgate families had been close for years. “His father and mother were very, very old friends of my father and mother,” recalled George. “I used to call his father uncle.” Southgate was born in 1913 in Paris, where as an adult he managed an upholstery factory. Like John Starr, Southgate was evacuated from Saint-Nazaire in June 1940. His escape, however, was not as fortunate as John’s. German dive bombers sank his ship, Lancastria, with the loss of more than 3,000 troops and sailors. Southgate managed to swim until another vessel rescued him and brought him with 2,446 other survivors to England. Since then, he had been flying RAF bombing raids over occupied France.
George received orders to report to room 304 of the Hotel Victoria on Northumberland Avenue near Trafalgar Square. “I go in there,” he said, “dirty old room with a broken-down table and a couple of broken-down chairs and an officer sitting behind the table.” The officer, who did not give his name, was Captain Selwyn Jepson. His interviews determined who qualified for clandestine service in occupied France. Jepson, himself a fluent French speaker, asked George, as he had John a few months earlier, whether he spoke the language. George answered in the affirmative, and Jepson told him, “You’re going back to France, you are.” George looked doubtful and, demonstrating the caution that would characterize his subsequent military career, he set a condition: he would work anywhere except Vendôme or the Belgian frontier, where old acquaintances might recognize him.
While waiting for his SOE assignment, George continued to work with the carrier pigeons in St. James’s Park. In July 1942, the War Office promoted him from sergeant to second lieutenant and issued him vouchers for an officer’s uniform. Back at the Liaison Regiment barracks, Sir Jakie Astor saw the new uniform and said, “I see you’re an officer and a gentleman.” George answered, “I may be an officer, but I’ve always been a gentleman.”
The following Monday morning, SOE training began. Buckmaster described the course, listing “[t]he use of codes, unarmed combat, fieldcraft, shooting, sabotage (which included the use of explosive and the knowledge of where to use it to inflict the maximum damage on specified targets), methods of contact, psychological tests” as components of the curriculum. SOE tried to teach the veteran coal miner to handle dynamite, but, George said, “I taught the instructors in England a lot about explosives.” George graduated to commando training at Loch Morar, where among other skills he learned to sail. Despite his acrophobia, he was forced to parachute from an aircraft near Manchester. In Cardiff, Wales, he practiced surveillance with such determination that the police detained him on suspicion of espionage.
John, who had completed the same course three and a half months earlier, gave his brother tips that SOE felt he should have kept to himself. Lance Sergeant Ree wrote in George’s training report on July 7, 1942, “He brought his brother to the Rendezvous at Euston [station]. The conducting officer expressed his disapproval and he went away.” On July 21, Sergeant Ree added that John had provided George “with plenty of material” about training. Ree cautioned George about “the danger of giving away to other students, information about the course and the organisation which he had had from his brother.” To Ree, George was “a self-confident know-all,” but also, he admitted, “quite reliable.”
Lieutenant John Starr turned thirty-four on August 6, 1942. F-Section considered him ready for deployment in France, where his mission was to buy and store food supplies in the south to feed Resistance bands. Colonel Buckmaster, who usually met agents for a final briefing before sending them into the field, offered this advice: “If you are arrested, try to last out forty-eight hours.” Two days would give his colleagues time to evade arrest, but SOE could not determine which of its personnel could withstand forty-eight hours of pain. Captured agents would have to discover that for themselves.
Under the full moon of August 28, 1942, a Halifax heavy bomber of RAF 138 Squadron flew John from Tempsford Airfield in Bedfordshire across the English Channel. His would be a “blind jump,” with no one to receive and assist him on the ground. Patches of farmland around the Rhône Valley town of Valence in Vichy’s Unoccupied Zone appeared below, and John dropped from the plane. As he descended, wind blew him over a farmhouse. He narrowly avoided crashing into it by maneuvering into a forest. His parachute caught some high tree branches, and he dangled until he cut himself free and fell to the ground. The cylinder of supplies that followed him down proved too heavy to carry any distance, so he buried it with his parachute under a haystack. Then came a five-mile walk to Valence, where he took trains another two hundred miles south, first to Marseille and then to the Mediterranean resort of Cannes. In the Cannes station, where Vichy police were inspecting passengers, John attached himself to a large family in order to walk out undetected.
His destination was the Baron Henri Ravel de Malval’s sumptuous Villa Isabelle in the Route de Fréjus on Cannes’ western outskirts, where he would be met by one of SOE’s first organizers in France, Peter Churchill. Churchill had worked with Malval early in the war, while Malval was serving as the French military attaché in London. When he returned to France as a rare résistant of “the first hour,” he lent Churchill the villa as his base in the south of France.
Thirty-three-year-old Captain Churchill, code name “Raoul,” was an experienced operative on his third mission. His résumé was impressive: star athlete, fluent in five languages, and graduate in modern languages from Cambridge University. Buckmaster’s admiration was unconcealed: “Churchill was here, there and everywhere—testing methods of introducing our men into France, recruiting new agents and encouraging existing ones—in short, doing the work of ten men.” With his round, horn-rimmed glasses and slim physique, Churchill could pass for an innocuous accountant, a useful cover for a secret agent. He was not, as some colleagues presumed, related to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
When John arrived, no one met him at the villa. He waited in the garden for hours until, at midnight, Churchill and another F-Section officer, Nicholas Bodington, appeared at the gates. “What the hell are you doing here?” Churchill asked. He and Bodington had gone to the station to meet him, but John’s deft evasion of the police had deceived the two Britons as well.
For the next week, John sunbathed by the villa’s swimming pool to replace his telltale London pallor with a healthy southern tan. When his color was right, CARTE circuit chief André Girard moved him to another safe house in the nearby coastal village of Antibes. The landlady there seemed anything but safe when she introduced him to her neighbors: “He’s an Englishman. He came by parachute.” His hosts shared their rations with him, although they had little to spare. When he mentioned that he had concealed food in a container near
Valence, they took him there by train to retrieve it, only to dig up the canister and see English labels on the food tins. That, as John would learn, was only one of SOE’s many obvious errors.
After John arrived in Antibes, he sensed that his new location was not secure. There was a bench opposite where he was staying, and John began to see the same man there every day, watching the house. A police officer, a gendarme, who somehow knew that John was a British agent, warned him that his place was about to be raided. John told his hosts, who sent their British-branded food away in a truck, and moved to the Plage de la Garoupe, made famous in the 1920s by F. Scott Fitzgerald, beside Cap d’Antibes. Like Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” John hid in plain sight, erecting an easel on the beach promenade and painting seascapes. A loud pink shirt, bright yellow scarf, espadrilles, and unkempt hair marked him as a zazou. The beatniks of their era, zazous were countercultural youths with a passion for American jazz.
The rest of the time, he carried out his orders to negotiate the purchase of large quantities of wheat, chocolate, dried bananas, and a flock of sheep to store for Resistance fighters. In Marseille, underworld figures gave him French francs to finance his operations in exchange for pounds sterling that SOE deposited in their London accounts. A French Resistance report observed that, while he made contacts to obtain provisions in “significant quantities,” his role as adviser made it impossible for him to purchase the goods. However, the report concluded, “He accomplished this mission with great diplomacy and much tact.”
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 3
