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

by Charles Glass

  Three months later, in June, it was Robert’s turn to be denounced. “I was hunted by the Gestapo,” she said. “They were waiting for me at the exit of the school.” Thanks to the warning of a fellow teacher who spotted a Gestapo car, Robert left through a back exit and bicycled out of the village. Her faithful cousin Léon Degand smuggled her onto a train bound for Paris. Another train took her to Orthez, a checkpoint between the Occupied and Unoccupied zones. “At Orthez,” she remembered, “an old German let me cross the Line of Demarcation.”

  She stopped in Castétis, a village a few minutes southeast of Orthez, where another teacher who had fled from the north gave her a room. Robert applied to teach in a school in Pau to be near Rouneau, but there were no vacancies. She went to Auch, the departmental capital of the Gers, and tried again. A school inspector, himself a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine, told her about an opening in Barbotan-les-Thermes. However, the teacher’s quarters there were in a hotel that housed German soldiers. Then he mentioned a small hamlet in an isolated corner of the Gers, Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. “But the place there is completely destitute,” he warned. “There is no water, no electricity.” She accepted at once. He said, “I repeat. No water. No electricity.”

  The teachers’ residence in Castelnau’s schoolhouse had a kitchen on the ground floor and bedrooms upstairs. Robert taught twenty-seven children of all ages. “I had such gentle students!” she wrote, and years later she recalled, “Everyone was very kind to me.” Villagers called her Madame Delattre with the respect due a teacher and a widow. A shepherd gave her a heavy quilt to keep warm at night. A horse dealer offered her the use of his telephone, one of two in the hamlet. Robert came to know the families through their children and to distinguish the Pétainists from potential résistants. The preeminent patriot turned out to be Mayor Larribeau, who had five children, aged between nine and twenty, and who did not hide his anti-Nazi and socialist beliefs.

  Meanwhile, Maurice Rouneau was forging identity documents and ration cards for the résistants he was recruiting. As more volunteers joined him, he moved in October 1941 from Pau to Agen to work in a larger print factory twenty-five miles closer to Robert. Agen, with a population of about thirty thousand and as the capital of the Lot-et-Garonne department, offered greater scope for underground activity. The River Garonne flowed through the medieval town, famed for plums and the sixteenth-century sorcerer Nostradamus. Agen lay at the center of communications in the southwest: the Canal du Midi took barges to the Mediterranean, and a highway linked Agen ninety miles northwest to Bordeaux and the same distance southeast to Toulouse. The Germans established military and security bases in Agen, where England’s Plantagenet kings had ruled in the Middle Ages.

  An intelligence report noted that Rouneau took “most of his meals in a small restaurant there, frequented particularly by N.C.O.s of the 150 Regiment d’Infanterie,” part of Vichy’s 100,000-man Armistice Army. “He discovered that their opinions for the most part were the same as his.” A group of noncommissioned officers at its Agen headquarters had already formed a secret cell, based on their membership in a Freemasons’ lodge called Victoire. Pétain, as part of his antirepublican “New Order,” had banned Freemasonry on August 27, 1940. Rouneau befriended one of their leaders, twenty-five-year-old Staff Sergeant Pierre Wallerand. Jeanne Robert called Wallerand, a native of Picardy in the north, “the soul of that clandestine military action.”

  On April 12, 1942, Rouneau and Wallerand ate a sumptuous Easter Sunday lunch in Jeanne Robert’s kitchen at the school in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. By the time they finished, they had founded a Resistance network, the Réseau Victoire. They invited Roger and Alberta Larribeau to join. The couple accepted at once, the mayor declaring, “My house, my buildings, myself, all is at your disposal. Act as you think right. Ground for parachute drops are here and my friend Pino [Novarini] has the best.”

  Rouneau and Wallerand spent the night at the mayor’s house, discussing until dawn their plans and hopes for the new network. Larribeau recruited his neighbors, Joseph and Argentina Novarini, known to everyone as Pino and Tina. As Larribeau had said, their farm on the flatlands below the village provided ideal ground for parachutages, parachute drops, of supplies and agents. A report on the Resistance in Castelnau stated that the Larribeaus and Novarinis “jumped with both feet into their clandestine organization.”

  Rouneau recruited civilians, while Wallerand concentrated on soldiers. Among the first Rouneau enrolled was the former divisional chief of the Prefecture of the Upper Rhine, Alsatian refugee Maurice Jacob. Vichy had made Jacob the director of its Service des Réfugiés et Expulsés, responsible for settling refugees like himself from the Occupied Zone. Many Vichy officials used their positions to aid the Resistance in secret. Wallerand enlisted the support of his 150th Infantry Regiment comrade Adjutant (Sergeant) Fernand Gaucher. Gaucher, code name “Gérard,” spread the recruitment drive north of the Gers into the South Dordogne department.

  Volunteers, however, were few. Most Resistance networks at this time numbered no more than a hundred men and women. Rising up against the occupation seemed futile while the Nazis dominated Europe, and France’s own government collaborated with them. Although the United States had entered the war on Britain’s side in December 1941, the Allies were losing on all fronts. General Douglas MacArthur retreated from the Philippines in March 1942, abandoning more than twenty thousand American and Filipino soldiers to their fate on the Bataan Peninsula. The Japanese consolidated their hold in Southeast Asia, conquering the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, moving into Burma, and threatening British India. The Axis was expanding, not retreating. The Allies, apart from bombing Germans cities and staging occasional commando raids against German ports, were not shaking Hitler’s dominance. The German Navy laid siege to the British-held island of Malta to expel the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean Sea. To join the underground Resistance while Allied prospects remained dim required more than courage. It took faith.

  Those with sufficient trust to join Victoire were mainly refugees with firsthand experience of direct German rule in Alsace, Lorraine and other annexed areas. These exiles found in the Gascon hills fertile terrain for resistance. The region’s history was rich in war and rebellion. The Gers, at the center of Gascony, boasted 146 castles, relics of a past when rival nobles battled for suzerainty. The stone fortifications had evolved into villages called castelnaus, like Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Gascony resisted the English in the Hundred Years’ War between 1337 and 1453, and its soldiers had fought for and against their French overlords. French literature romanticized the swaggering and courageous, though impoverished, Gascon swordsmen. Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was a classic Gascon noble, with a flaming feather, his panache, concealing the hole in his threadbare hat. Another was Alexandre Dumas’s musketeer d’Artagnan. Dumas wrote,

  “Among ourselves, we say ‘Proud as a Scotsman,’” murmured Buckingham.

  “And us, we say ‘Proud as a Gascon,’” d’Artagnan replied. “The Gascons are the Scotsmen of France.”

  In the First World War, the two French commanders who defeated the Germans at the River Marne, Marshals Joseph Gallieni and Ferdinand Foch, were Gascons.

  The Gascon Resistance in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon needed Britain, almost the sole provider of weapons to Frenchmen and -women willing to fight the Germans. George Starr needed a base. Victoire’s partisans gave him an ideal nucleus on which to build a network that SOE dubbed WHEELWRIGHT. Jeanne Robert appreciated the significance of his presence: “We knew that he was and would be our chief and that we and our network, the Victoire network, had passed to the command of SOE.” He promised them weapons, explosives, military training, and, most of all, an invasion by Allied armies who would help them to liberate their country. By the chance assignment of Robert to teach in Castelnau, Victoire and George found each other. It was, as the American hero of a wartime Hollywood movie said, “the beginning of a beautiful
friendship.”

  FOUR

  “I Was a Human Being”

  Hilaire built up his series of Réseaux with the patience of a genuine strategist, never bothering about any fireworks, reserving his best and final effect for the days when it would best serve the cause to which we were all devoted—the extirpation of the German forces in France.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  George Starr spent his first night in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon at Mayor Larribeau’s house and his second in a guest bedroom at Jeanne Robert’s school. “I feel good here,” he told her that Wednesday morning, November 24, 1942. “I’d like to stay.” Robert described her guest’s behavior as impeccable: “There was the men’s laundry and ironing, and I had a class of twenty-seven students as well. In the evenings, I had to prepare the lessons for the next day. And Colonel Hilaire said to me, ‘If you need me to do anything, just ask.’” He cooked, washed dishes, and shined shoes until they glistened. George became her “real companion,” who, despite a reputation for creative profanity, rarely uttered a vulgar word in her presence.

  Maurice Rouneau also remembered George doing household chores and being “a perfect comrade.” Raymond Escholier noted, “No one was more unobtrusive than Hilaire. Not only did he reveal an aptitude for his work, he turned his hand to hoeing and tending the vines, the Armagnac vines whose purple one day produces its dark gold liqueur.” George mingled as an equal with the peasants as he had with coal miners in his prewar career. “We’d go to bed like the French peasants,” he said, “to bed with the animals and up with them.” Rouneau observed that George fit into village life: “He was a man who gave himself to everything, who adapted to any environment. In Castelnau, we saw him alternately as a man of the world . . . [and] a peasant.”

  George’s bushy moustache made him look like a local, but it served another function. “You can shave it off in five minutes,” he said. “If somebody’s used to a little dark man that wears a beret, and he’s got a moustache and he always wears a brown suit, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for a clean-shaven man wearing glasses and wearing a gray suit.” Like most men in the village, he dangled a cigarette from his lips, always a cheap French-made Balto with its advertised goût americain. However, in a hamlet where strangers aroused suspicion, George’s English-accented French was no help. “We said he came from Belgium,” Robert explained, “that he was a friend of my parents, an engineer who was bored up north, the life being difficult, and that he found a comfortable place and came to stay there. This worked like a letter in the post.” They called him Gaston, nickname Tonton, although the underground militants promoted the lieutenant to “Colonel” Hilaire or le patron. No one knew his real name.

  Gaston the Belgian feigned pro-German sympathies: “I had deliberately given the impression that I was [a collaborator], saying the Germans were all right, supporting Pétain and the New Order, not overdoing it, just allowing them to get that impression.” This insulated him from accusation by pro-Vichy Frenchmen, a common occurrence under occupation.

  “In this little village he could live in perfect security,” noted an SOE report. “I never locked anything,” George said. “I don’t think we could have locked it anyway.”

  A week before George’s arrival, SOE had promised to send Henri Sevenet a consignment of arms and other supplies. George’s first task therefore was to prepare for the expected parachutage on the night of November 24 with a reception committee of eight. “All these eight people knew each other, have done since childhood,” he said. “You can’t penetrate, because you’re not one of them.” The team comprised George, Mayor Larribeau, Maurice Rouneau, Pino and Tina Novarini, Jeanne Robert, and, from the 150th Infantry Regiment, Sergeants Pierre Wallerand and Maurice Maxime Léon Dupont. They met at the Novarini farmhouse, lit the drop site with flashlights, and drank Armagnac to warm themselves against the bitter cold. At dawn, though, they went home empty-handed. Bad English weather had stopped the plane from taking off, but the RAF would try again.

  The next night, the moon was on the wane and the temperature below freezing. Pino Novarini set an enormous log ablaze in his field, a beacon no plane could miss. Rouneau recalled that Pino then went inside and “set on the table a decanter of white wine from his own harvest and the inevitable bottle of Armagnac.” George amused them by telling stories. “From time to time, a man would get up and go out to listen to the night sounds,” Rouneau wrote. They thought they heard an engine purring in the sky, but each time it was a false alarm.

  The reception committee kept watch at the Novarinis’ for several nights without result. On November 27, night four of their vigil, the clock struck midnight. Rouneau remembered, “White wine, Armagnac, stories, time was passing, when, all of a sudden, at one o’clock in the morning, a loud noise interrupted our conversation.” The résistants held their breath. An engine rumbled in the night sky, growing louder as it came closer. Everyone dashed outside.

  George, dressed in a fleece-lined canadienne jacket with the S-Phone strapped to his chest, positioned himself against a hedge. A triangle of two red lights along the base with a white lamp at the apex enclosed a target zone of about a hundred square yards. Rouneau ran to the top of the field, ready to shine his flashlight skyward. The others sheltered in a pine grove. One minute, two minutes passed. George called out, “There it is!”

  Rouneau spotted an aircraft cruising into a moonlit gap in the clouds and flashed the letter R in Morse code, short-long-short. The plane circled and swooped to about three hundred feet. It was poised for a perfect drop when, suddenly, it banked upward and flew away. George called the pilot on the S-Phone, commanding him to release the desperately needed weapons and explosives. The pilot did not respond.

  A few minutes later, the engine roared again. The plane approached as if to release its cargo, but it flew off. The only sound in its wake was George’s enraged voice bellowing into the S-Phone. Apparently taunting George’s team, the plane reappeared and made yet another approach. Rouneau flashed the Morse R. George shouted at the pilot to release the cargo. Robert heard George crying out, “Putain, putain, putain. What are they doing?” Rouneau recalled him entreating, “Answer me, you bastard! Good God, answer me!” There was no answer. No parachutes, no containers, no weapons. Despite George’s curses and Rouneau’s signal, the plane vanished into the clouds. It did not return.

  From five miles away in the town of Condom came the shrill blare of an air-raid siren. The Germans had also seen the plane.

  One hour and twenty minutes from the moment George’s reception committee heard the engines, the six men and two women went home. “That was the first disappointment,” George said. The fault was not his, but the S-Phone’s, either his or the one on the plane. A disconsolate George strode to Mayor Larribeau’s house. Rouneau recalled the next morning in Castelnau:

  Hilaire went out slowly from Larribeau’s, a cigarette between his lips, crossing the village in small steps, and came to me in the school where I had gone before him. He was again a stranger to the people of Castelnau. Apart from a modest “Bonjour,” he didn’t take the chance of speaking with the villagers.

  George knew that the aircraft’s motors must have alerted the inhabitants, not all of whom were sympathetic to the Resistance. At that time, he told his SOE handlers, “the population as a whole was neutral, neither for one side nor the other, they only wanted to be left in peace.” British planes dropping weapons disturbed that peace and risked German reprisals. Yet luck was on George’s side. Jeanne Robert went out to sample village opinion. The first person she encountered told her that six planes had flown over during the night. No, said another, twelve. A third insisted there had been twenty-four, in three groups of eight. No one mentioned a lone British plane. A pro-Vichy youth, who feigned omniscience about military matters, told Robert, “They were German planes on their way to drop mines in front of the port of Toulon!” That became the accepted version, wh
ich Robert did not contradict.

  Adding to George’s woes, the S-Phone batteries died. Rouneau bicycled across five miles of rocky rural trails to charge them in Condom, which had the electricity that Castelnau lacked. He returned them to George that afternoon in the hope the S-Phone would work next time.

  On the same evening as the failed arms drop, November 27, the Germans demobilized Vichy’s Armistice Army because most of the French Army in Algeria and Morocco had gone over to the invading Allies. German forces seized the French troops’ weapons, including those of the 150th Infantry Regiment in Agen. Rouneau went to Agen on November 29 to find what remained of the 150th’s Victoire cell. He soon realized, “That put an end to the military organization of Victoire, from which only the best members continued the struggle.” The moving force in Victoire, Sergeant Pierre Wallerand, was leaving France for London to train with the British Army. Others were following his lead. When Rouneau returned to Castelnau with the bad news, Robert gave him worse. Vichy gendarmes were searching the nearby village of La Romieu for a man “who said he was a refugee from the North, but was in reality an Allied agent who was communicating by radio with London.” Rouneau told her not to inform George, whose lack of a radio meant the police might have been seeking someone else.

  George saw an advantage in the dissolution of the 150th Infantry Regiment: its men were no longer tied to Vichy’s military command. “And then, of course, they became full Resistance,” he said. Some hid their weapons for future use against the Germans and dispersed them among peasants around the village of Manciet, about an hour southwest of Castelnau.