SOE approved his work, as evidenced by his promotion from second lieutenant to lieutenant on September 1. At the end of the month, he asked London to send a doll to his daughter, Ethel, for her sixth birthday. The message came back, “Doll sent.”
John, by now disillusioned, complained to Churchill that he was wasting his time. The CARTE circuit barely existed, and the résistants did not need a food expert. He had not come to France for an easy life, but to wage a struggle against the Nazis. It was time to leave. Churchill later recalled, “London let him down by not authorising payments.” Churchill asked John to take reports on CARTE to London and arranged for his passage to Gibraltar. Then, at Port-Miou early on the morning of November 4, John chanced upon his brother. He would tell London what was happening in France, but there was no time to warn George.
* * *
• • •
After John left the Port-Miou calanque, résistants carried George Starr’s supply containers to a secret cache near Marseille. The thousand pounds of explosives and equipment included an S-Phone and a Eureka homing device. S-Phones enabled direct voice communication with aircraft or ships along a straight beam that was difficult for the Germans to monitor. Unlike shortwave transmitters sending dots and dashes of Morse code, S-Phones allowed an agent’s voice to be recognized and verified. The Eureka was a device that transmitted an invisible beacon to an aircraft’s Rebecca receiver for pilots to follow to drop zones in any weather. George’s equipment did not include a shortwave wireless transmitter. This radio device, packed into a small suitcase, was standard issue for all F-Section teams and the only means for maintaining regular contact with London and ordering airdrops of supplies. F-Section expected the DETECTIVE circuit to provide him a radio when he went to Lyon.
George and his fellow agents followed André Marsac from the shore uphill through a dense forest of umbrella pines to a safe house in Cassis. They slept for three hours. “We had at six in the morning to go to the station,” George recalled. The railway cashier, like George, was barely awake. Forgetting his training and revealing what everyone called his atrocious French accent, he asked for a ticket to Cannes. But he pronounced it like Caen, a city at the opposite end of France in Normandy. George recalled the man’s response: “You don’t want to go there. That’s in the Occupied Zone. You want to go to Cannes [pronounced Cahn].”
In Cannes, Peter Churchill met the agents at a beauty parlor run by a résistante. The men from the Seadog moved into the Villa Isabelle, where John Starr had spent his first week the previous August acquiring a suntan, and the three female agents stayed at the Villa Augusta. Together, the new arrivals discussed with Churchill how to reach their destinations in the south or the German-occupied north. George, however, was not going anywhere. Remembering his feeling of unease during the trip over, he took Churchill aside and asked about the setup in Lyon at the northern fringe of the Unoccupied Zone. Churchill said a source in Marseille might have information and he could arrange for George to meet him, but he asked George to take Odette Sansom along. Churchill explained, “I want her to get into the swim of things and make some contacts for me.”
On November 6, George and Sansom boarded a train for a 120-mile journey west to Marseille. In the train station, she claimed, a German soldier scrutinized her identity papers but allowed her to pass. At six o’clock that evening, she met with Marsac in a café near the terminal. However, he had forgotten to bring Churchill’s documents. Marsac took her to his apartment, but the nightly curfew was in force by the time he found the papers. For her safety, she said, Marsac lodged her in a brothel whose private rooms the Germans did not check closely.
George told a different story of their trip to Marseille. Unlike Sansom, he saw no Germans at the station, which accorded with the fact that Marseille was in the Vichy-ruled Unoccupied Zone. After they arrived, George searched out a hotel for the night. At the hotel reception desk, one story above the ground floor, he requested separate rooms. The receptionists gazed at the attractive young woman beside him, and George repeated, “Two rooms.” Sansom’s room was near the lobby and George’s on the third floor at the rear. When they met downstairs to go out to dinner, she demanded to know why they had separate rooms. “Look, chum,” he replied, “even in France brothers and sisters don’t share a room to my knowledge.”
After dinner, they walked through the city with its beautiful Old Port glimmering in the darkness before returning to the hotel. In George’s account, Sansom was wearing “one of these organdy blouses that were damn near transparent, and it buttoned all the way down the back.” He claimed that she led him to her room and asked, “Aren’t you coming in to undo my blouse for me?” He snapped, “You buttoned it up. You can unbutton it, chum.” When he called at her room for breakfast, she told him to come in. “There she was,” he said. “She hadn’t got the blouse on or anything. She said, ‘Won’t you help me to get dressed?’ I said, ‘Look, chum. You’ve got the wrong man.’ And I walked out.”
George was as prudent as he was prudish. Although Pilar Starr lived just over the Spanish border with their daughter and son and Odette’s husband was serving in the British Army, his focus was on security. Affairs between agents opened them to pressure if they were captured, with one liable to say anything to save the other.
More important for George than Odette, though, was his rendezvous with Peter Churchill’s Marseille contact. The source confirmed the “hunch” that had plagued George on the Seadog: Vichy police had penetrated the circuit to which George had been assigned in Lyon. Five days before George left Gibraltar, on October 24, police captured its British radio operator, Brian Stonehouse, and Blanche Charlet, a French courier trained by SOE in Britain. “Lyon was blown sky high, and everybody was on the run,” George said. “The Germans were waiting for me with a password and everything else.” His queasy stomach had saved his life.
George and Sansom returned to Cannes on the coastal train via Toulon, passing for local French travelers to deceive suspicious French gendarmes. George remembered their arrival:
And we got out of the train at around ten at night, and she went through the side gate like you do into this courtyard. Peter Churchill was waiting for her. She threw herself in his arms and [made] all sorts of advances. God, she was a dreadful lady.
On November 8, American and British forces invaded French Morocco and Algeria in Operation Torch. When the senior French commander in Algeria agreed to an armistice with the Allies, the Germans responded by occupying southern France. They awarded their Italian allies the island of Corsica and the southeastern Mediterranean coast, including Cannes. George was there when the Italians arrived on November 11: “I remember one morning we woke up and the Italians had landed and marched into Cannes. I watched them through the window. We were on the main road. The Italians were in lorries, playing mandolins.”
After the parade, George and three other agents left the Villa Isabelle for lunch at a small restaurant down the coast. “There were four of us, and we were having a meal. A great car came driving up. An Italian officer, little bloke, dressed up, medals all over him, came in to have a meal with his chauffeur.” The Italians were too busy celebrating their unopposed victory to notice the British saboteurs in their midst.
As CARTE circuit chief, André Girard was gathering the names, addresses, and other details of more than two hundred potential Resistance sympathizers to help SOE recruit operatives. He gave the list to Marsac to deliver, but on the train from Marseille to Paris, Marsac fell asleep. When he woke, the case containing the list was gone. Buckmaster lamented later that “massive arrests followed.” SOE, dissatisfied with Girard’s record, would recall him to London in February 1943. Girard, who felt the British had betrayed him, ended his short Resistance career by immigrating to the United States.
Henri Sevenet, the “Rodolphe” in George’s orders, traveled to Marseille searching for a wireless operator to replace the captured Brian Stonehouse. Le
arning that his new deputy, agent “Hilaire,” had arrived in France, Sevenet found George in Cannes on November 12 and offered him an alternative to the blown Lyon operation. Dedicated but unarmed résistants in the town of Agen in southwest France needed an organizer, trainer, and arms supplier. Agen was in the heart of Gascony, a sparsely populated region of hills, rivers, and forests bordering Spain’s Pyrenees to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The Gascons were known as much for their belligerence as for their fine Armagnac brandy and foie gras. It may have been a good omen that the Gothic church in Agen was named for Saint Hilaire. Two days later, George left for the remote Gascon countryside.
“That’s where it all started,” George would recall. “My empire in the southwest, as they say.”
THREE
A Beautiful Friendship
Hilaire typifies the sort of person who was best suited to our work. He appeared on the surface a man of the most unassuming character and you would certainly pass him without a second glance; this was something we were not unwilling to have the Germans do to our men.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER
Henri Sevenet took George Starr from the Italian Zone over more than four hundred miles of territory that the Wehrmacht was occupying. They traversed Toulouse, the “pink city” on the River Garonne and capital of the Midi-Pyrénées region, and stopped in the medieval town of Agen. Sevenet gave George dinner in a restaurant on Boulevard Carnot, where he usually ate on his own. Before they finished, a Belgian-born résistant named Maurice Henri Rouneau joined them. Rouneau, who went by the cover name Captain Martin Rendier, did not sit down at first. He was wary of the stranger whom Sevenet introduced only as “Hilaire.” The Belgian journalist-turned-printer had reason to suspect those he did not know. Having spied before the war for French intelligence on German agents operating in northern France, he was arrested soon after the invasion for publishing anti-Nazi tracts. A French court in Arras convicted him of sedition. He escaped from jail and had been in hiding ever since.
George and Rouneau had little in common. Rouneau was tall and slim, while George was short and stocky. Raymond Escholier, a Gascon historian who knew them both, observed a “curious contrast” between them. In the extravagant language characteristic of his region, he wrote that Rouneau “with a large nose, deep and calm eyes, with his sober gestures” was the opposite of George, “the foreigner, short, all steel, clean shaved, with a look like water, water that runs deep.” Yet Escholier felt both men “sought silence and shadows.”
Rouneau remembered George’s “profound gaze that examined everything, hard, but not worried.” His description, while contradicting Escholier’s account of the “clean shaved” British agent, reflected the profound impression George made on everyone he met: “With his hair so brown and abundant, his lip graced with a moustache like Clark Gable’s, he made one think more of a Balkan who had escaped from his arid native mountains than of a son of Albion.”
The meeting at the restaurant in Agen between Rouneau and George was to have profound consequences for both men, as well as for the Resistance. When Sevenet called George “un ami très sûr,” Rouneau relaxed and sat at the table. He later wrote about the meeting to a fellow résistant, remembering, “Henri Sevenet asked me to help Hilaire, to house him and to assure his security, and I did.” His help extended to placing George in a safe house that belonged to a colleague from his printing factory, Madame Hélène Falbet. Her flat was on a narrow street of two- and three-story gray stone buildings around the corner from the city hall. George stayed for eight nights, rarely venturing into streets patrolled by German troops and only with Rouneau. On November 22, Rouneau and George bicycled seventy miles along rough country tracks toward a hamlet where Rouneau’s girlfriend lived. George, unaccustomed to cycling, strained up the hills. “How many times did he ask me, ‘Is it still far?’” Rouneau wrote. At nightfall, they reached the ancient stone settlement of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon.
Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, perched on a hill about twenty-five miles south of Agen, had barely three hundred inhabitants. Life for its small farmers and artisans had not changed in at least a century. As if to emphasize its desolation, locals called it “Castelnau-des-Loups,” Castelnau of the Wolves. Water came from a well, and electricity had yet to reach this isolated corner of rural Gascony. Castelnau boasted a stone castle from which it took its name. Its only other notable buildings were a small twelfth-century church, the chapel of Abrin, and a two-story school that doubled as the mairie, or municipal town hall. Its square dwellings of Gascon limestone nestled on either side of a road between Condom on the River Baïse in the west and tiny La Romieu, with its ancient Benedictine abbey, in the east. The road was poorly paved, increasing the hamlet’s isolation. The beautiful setting five hundred feet above sea level afforded a magnificent view of forested land around a river called Le Grand Auvignon. The Gascon food was hearty and more plentiful than in the towns, where Vichy enforced strict rationing. There were geese and ducks, as well as eggs, to eat. Wine and Armagnac never ran short. Best of all, the nearest Germans were far away in Agen.
Castelnau’s only light shone from the stars that guided Rouneau and George through the darkness to a farmhouse at the hamlet’s edge. Rouneau knocked at the door. It opened, and the two men slipped inside. Rouneau introduced George to the mayor of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, Roger Larribeau. “Age 47,” stated an SOE report on Larribeau, “height about 1.75 [meters] [five feet nine inches]; dark brown hair; medium build, rather thin; farmer, and mayor of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon.” The British agent and the French mayor became instant friends. “I cannot tell you what a feeling we had for each other, Hilaire and me,” Larribeau later confided to Raymond Escholier. For his part, George saw Larribeau as a colorful, enthusiastic rebel from his farmer’s boots up to the beret that he never took off.
Larribeau sent someone to the school to bring Rouneau’s girlfriend, an attractive twenty-eight-year-old widow named Jeanne Robert. Robert, the village schoolmistress, ran to the Larribeau house. The mayor was waiting outside for her. “We have a visitor,” he said. She recalled:
So I went in, and he introduced Colonel Hilaire. And then I saw him. He noticed my look, and we looked at each other for I don’t know how long. And I had the impression he was undressing me, inspecting me with a look that was very impressive. And then, when he’d had enough, he smiled, and I smiled back.
George remembered his introduction to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, recounting, “On my first day in the village, I met the mayor and everybody else. I was a refugee from the north. As the schoolteacher came from Lille, I was accepted as a friend of her friends. No question of any problems.” In Castelnau, George was discovering a hamlet with a wide field of fire in all directions, level farmland on the plain below for parachute drops, and, most of all, inhabitants who were loyal résistants.
“I moved in there,” George boasted later, “and the spider began spinning his web.”
The web was already half spun when he arrived, all due to a past incident when a German soldier had attempted to rape Jeanne Robert. The Germans had occupied her home region of the Pas-de-Calais in northern France in June 1940 and subjected it to German military control from Belgium. No one could enter or leave that Forbidden Zone without permission. Surveillance was stricter and German troops more numerous than in the rest of occupied France. Robert’s husband had died in 1937, eighteen months after their wedding, and, as the widowed Madame Delattre, she taught school in a hamlet called Bucquoy amid dull farmland about fifty miles from her parents’ village of Hasnon. Living with her were a twenty-year-old colleague, Loulou, and Loulou’s sixteen-year-old brother, Fernand.
One evening in late 1940, two burly German privates and a noncommissioned officer entered the house uninvited, demanding food. Robert remembered the noncom as a gentleman, but the other two were crude. They drank wine while she fried eggs and potatoes. She put the plates in front of them and said, �
��Stay here. We are going to sleep.” She, Loulou, and Fernand shared a room that night, and they bolted the door from inside. As they lay together on the only bed, one of the soldiers bashed the door open with his shoulder. He pounced on Loulou and tore at her nightdress. The second private jabbed his rifle into Robert and pressed his body against hers. “I screamed,” she remembered. “I called the noncommissioned officer to plead with him. And he said, ‘Get out!’ They obeyed him and left.”
In the morning, villagers pretended they had not heard her screams. Robert, refusing to accept fear and silence as the norm, sought out her cousin Léon Degand. He was a First World War veteran with a lifelong hatred of the Germans, or as he called them, les Boches. As the French railways’ chief clerk in Lille, Degand was helping Allied soldiers stranded after the June 1940 British retreat from Dunkirk. With his connivance, they hid in boxcars and mail wagons traveling south to the Unoccupied Zone. “I began searching for clothing for soldiers in hiding,” Robert recalled. “There were English soldiers, French soldiers, obviously in uniform, hiding out, who wanted to leave.” Her mother, a seamstress, assisted her. “But my father, not at all,” she said. “I had no trust in him, because he was in the war of 1914 to 1918 and for him Pétain was a god.” Aiding Allied troops to evade capture was a dangerous enterprise. The penalty was death.
Jeanne Robert met Maurice Rouneau just after his escape from jail. “He arrived at my parents’ house,” Robert recalled, “because he knew my mother.” Robert gave refuge to Rouneau, ten years her senior, and they became lovers. He was estranged from his French wife, Madeleine, in Bertincourt, about twenty miles west. Rouneau aided Robert with the escaping soldiers, until someone denounced him to the Germans. He fled to the Lower Pyrenees in the Unoccupied Zone on March 21, resuming his work as a printer at the Imprimerie Collet in the town of Pau.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 4
