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

by Charles Glass

  On the evening of April 12, the Germans surrounded the Château d’Esquiré. They arrested Marcus Bloom and the other résistants hiding there. Bloom’s wife had left for Normandy and thus avoided capture with her husband. The Gestapo found Bloom’s radio, but they overlooked the 35 tons of armaments under the vegetable garden. SOE records stated that the Gestapo captured nine PRUNUS members, although Gunzbourg put the figure at fifteen. Bloom and another résistant were able to escape, and a report based on Bloom’s testimony recounted, “BLOOM and a Spaniard, whose Christian name is ROBERT, were arrested by the Gestapo and handcuffed together. While they were being led away, BLOOM made an agreed sign to the Spaniard, who threw himself between the legs of the Gestapo and they managed to escape.” The two prisoners ran for miles, crossing and recrossing a river to hide their tracks. When the Spaniard was too fatigued to carry on, the men traveled to the gendarmerie in a village near Toulouse that the SOE file called Marray, probably Muret. The Spaniard had heard that the gendarme captain there was sympathetic to de Gaulle.

  They reached the gendarmerie at five o’clock in the morning. The Gaullist captain was absent. A brigadier promised to help, but instead called the Gestapo, who rearrested them. An SOE report noted, “In BLOOM’s opinion both the Capitaine and the Brigadier were guilty.” Another SOE communiqué stated, “URBAIN [Bloom] was seen shortly after his arrest being escorted through TOULOUSE by Germans. His face was covered with blood.”

  Back at the Château d’Esquiré, the SD found Bloom’s radio, his documents, and a photograph of Pertschuk wearing a British Army uniform. No one was able to warn Pertschuk.

  In the evening, Antoinette de Gunzbourg met Pertschuk for dinner in a restaurant called Le Frégate in Toulouse. She discreetly passed him documents from her husband that were “particularly dangerous.” Gunzbourg recounted, “The Englishman and the Jewish woman had a good dinner and, twenty minutes after leaving Antoinette, at eleven in the evening, he fell into a trap at the Pills’ house.” The “Pills” were the family of Robert Vuillemot, who lived in Toulouse at 22 rue des Pyrénées.

  Armed agents of the German security services broke into Vuillemot’s house and held the family at gunpoint while waiting for others to arrive. Pertschuk’s courier wrote that a cactus plant in the window signaled when it was safe to enter the house. The Germans must have known, because the plant remained in place. Assured by the telltale cactus, Robert Vuillemot, who had not been at home, and Pertschuk went inside. The Gestapo grabbed Pertschuk, and though Vuillemot’s daughter Catherine explained his presence by claiming he was her fiancé, the Germans took everyone for interrogation.

  Tony Brooks, the young British agent in Lyon, later informed F-Section that the Gestapo had discovered Vuillemot’s name and address in the notebook of Roger Bardet. Although Bardet was a double agent, one of many to bedevil the Resistance throughout the war, some in the Resistance believed the traitor to have been Jacques Megglé. Megglé, who later worked for Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Lyon, had attended a meeting at 22 rue des Pyrenees.

  * * *

  • • •

  The day and night of April 12, 1943, seemed cursed and not only in France. In London, newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Jan Buchowski, the Seadog skipper who had carried George Starr to Port-Miou and taken John Starr out in November 1942, was on a well-earned leave. For his daring Mediterranean service, the free Polish exile government had awarded him the Cross of Gallantry and Golden Service Cross with Swords, and Britain the Distinguished Service Order. Late that night, Buchowski visited a flat in Pimlico belonging to the wife of a naval colleague. The colleague came home unannounced, saw Buchowski with his wife, and shot him dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three days after he was arrested, Maurice Pertschuk failed to appear for his regular Thursday rendezvous with Denise Bloch at the Café Riche in Toulouse. Bloch told SOE that she waited for him and “made enquiries of the proprietress [of the café], but was told that he had not been seen since Monday.” Her next stop was the house of one of Pertschuk’s friends, but she had also disappeared. Bloch drew the obvious conclusion and returned to Agen to inform George.

  Tony Brooks had also scheduled a meeting with Pertschuk in the Trouffe de Quercy restaurant to give him a radio set. He later stated:

  And when I went in, a woman who had served us, who was the boss of this black market restaurant, very small one, came up to me and she said, “Are you looking for your friend?” . . . whom we call Jean-Louis Barrault because he looked like the French film actor. And I said, “Yes, I was just looking for him. Funny chap.” I said like that, terribly casually. And she said, “Well he’s been arrested. You knew he was a British intelligence officer?” And I said, “Good heavens, no, I didn’t.” And I walked out and left.

  The capture of Pertschuk and Bloom was the end of PRUNUS. George lost his funding and his radio contact with London, and was in danger of losing his life if Pertschuk or Bloom cracked under torture. Although the Germans subjected the two men to weeks of sadistic ill treatment, neither revealed anything of importance.

  The head of PRUNUS’s escape network, Dr. Fernand Hanon, told SOE that the Germans had found a large cache of Pertschuk’s papers in a bathroom. These documents, although there was no corroboration of Hanon’s claim, would have implicated George and the other WHEELWRIGHT activists in the Gers. Rouneau called this time heures d’angoisse à Castelnau, hours of anguish at Castelnau, when they all feared capture.

  To notify London about the arrests, George found Peter Churchill, his and his brother John’s contact in Cannes, and asked for the loan of wireless operator Adolphe Rabinovitch. Rabinovitch, after repairing Bloom’s radio set four months previously, had moved with Churchill and Odette Sansom from the south of France to an Alpine hideaway astride the Swiss border. From a safe house a few miles from Churchill’s base, he transmitted messages and ran a courier service to Switzerland for Churchill’s SPINDLE circuit. Churchill gave him George’s communiqué about the arrest of Pertschuk, Bloom, and the others to send to London. To his surprise, SOE replied, “Mind your own business. We know what we are doing.” London assured Rabinovitch that, contrary to his message about Bloom’s arrest, Bloom’s radio was transmitting as usual and the RAF planned to deliver the supplies he was requesting.

  Someone was operating the radio, but it wasn’t Marcus Bloom.

  SIX

  “It Literally Rained Containers”

  We could never have functioned at all had it not been for the brave and unflinching support which the ordinary French civilians rendered to us.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  Bloom’s radio gave the Nazis’ Sicherheitsdienst counterintelligence service the chance to replicate in France the success its rivals in the Abwehr, military intelligence, had achieved in Holland. Major Hermann Josef Giskes of Abwehr Section IIIF, counterespionage for Holland, Belgium, and the Forbidden Zone of northern France, had operated SOE radios since the arrest of Dutch SOE agent Huub Lauwers on March 6, 1942. His messages deceived SOE and convinced it to parachute weapons and personnel to the Abwehr in Holland. By the end of 1942, Giskes controlled fourteen SOE radio transmitters and had received three thousand Bren guns. The project, over which he gloated in his postwar memoir, London Calling North Pole, functioned under the name Englandspiel, “England game.” Leo Marks, SOE’s signals chief, called Giskes “SOE’s most regular penfriend.”

  The SD counterespionage chief in Paris, Sturmbannführer (SS Major) Hans Josef Kieffer, dispatched his radio expert, Dr. Josef Goetz, to interrogate Bloom in Toulouse. Goetz, a former schoolteacher, was nominally the interpreter for radio department chief Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) Erich Otto but, in fact, he ran the service. On his arrival in Toulouse, he used Bloom’s radio to initiate the SD’s own Funkspiel, radio game, in France. Tony Brooks recalled, “Goetz, the famous German playback man from Paris, came down to Toulouse and tried to force UR
BAIN [Bloom] to play back his radio set, but he refused and, although terribly badly smashed about, never cooperated in any way with the Germans.” Dr. Goetz had Bloom’s codes, but not his “security checks,” usually a redundant letter inserted at regular intervals in each transmission. SOE’s security check system was designed to ensure London that the enemy was not operating its radios. Leo Marks wrote that these included a “bluff” check, which the operator was “allowed to disclose to the enemy and a ‘true’ check which was supposed to be known only to London.” In addition, each operator had his or her own style of tapping the Morse keys that alert listeners in London recognized.

  Even without the full security checks, Goetz’s first transmissions from Bloom’s radio fooled SOE and made it doubt George’s report that Bloom and Pertschuk were prisoners. An internal SOE report admitted that “London refused to believe this and said they were still in contact with EUGENE [Pertschuk] through his wireless telegrapher. In fact, the Germans were playing him back and as a result a number of landing grounds were blown.”

  Subsequent messages aroused London’s suspicions, and in line with procedure, SOE asked Bloom personal questions that only he could answer. One concerned “the Green pub,” the Manchester Arms in Baker Street. When Goetz failed to respond, London understood that their wireless operator was a captive. Goetz admitted, “The decoy transmission went on for about four weeks but had no practical value.” His deception had failed, but there would be others.

  * * *

  • • •

  In March 1943, John Starr and Peter Churchill met in London. John, freshly promoted to captain, confided to his old comrade that he was “anxious to get out again into the field.” SOE at last gave him an assignment: to organize the ACROBAT circuit in eastern France, far from his brother in the southwest. The region was an important SOE base, covering the Alps, Burgundy, and much of the French border with Germany. More densely populated than George’s Gascon hills, it had a greater concentration of German troops and security agents. Despite the added dangers, John enjoyed an advantage George lacked when he arrived: a radio operator with a working wireless set. The W/T was thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant John Young, code name “Gabriel,” a native of Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England.

  At the end of April, John Young and John Starr, whose code name SOE had changed from “Emile” to “Bob,” boarded a Halifax bomber at RAF Tempsford. When they reached their drop zone in the Alps, the pilot saw no Resistance lights on the ground and returned to England. Two weeks later, on May 15, they tried again. German antiaircraft blasted an engine of their RAF Halifax bomber, forcing the pilot to jettison his surplus cargo to limp home. A third attempt took place on May 19. The pilot guided his Halifax over the English Channel and past the German coastal defenses. The plane circled over pine forests near Blye in the Jura department of the French Alps, until a triangle of light marking a Resistance drop zone appeared in a clearing at an altitude of about 1,600 feet. The crew opened the hatch, and the two agents leaped into the dark night.

  Unlike his first parachutage into France, John landed without entangling his parachute in the trees and received help from local résistants. The Frenchmen disposed of the parachutes and loaded fifteen crates of weapons, supplies, and a radio transmitter onto a truck to take to a churchyard in the mountains. Young asked why the SOE organizer, Irish-born British captain Brian Dominic Rafferty, was not there to meet them. The résistants did not know, but one of them told Young his Geordie accent would give him away and to stay quiet. That night, John and Young went with the Frenchmen to a safe house to wait for Rafferty.

  Giving up on Rafferty after two days, the two newly arrived agents proceeded two hundred miles west to Clermont-Ferrand, with its famed automobile factories. There, SOE comrades put them up in the apartment of a French family named Neraud. John was carrying 300,000 francs and secret radio codes for Rafferty’s radio operator, Captain George Donovan Jones. While waiting for Jones, John contacted the childhood friend he had recommended to SOE recruiters, RAF Flight Lieutenant Maurice Southgate. Southgate, code name “Hector,” had parachuted into France to a reception arranged by George Starr four months earlier, on January 21, 1943. Buckmaster regarded Southgate, chief of F-Section’s STATIONER circuit, as one of his best organizers. Southgate informed John the Nerauds’ flat was insecure, because too many agents gathered there. Rafferty and Jones, Southgate explained, “made frequent use of the place and MICHEL [Rafferty] used to go there four times a week, seeing five people each time.”

  Captain Jones arrived in Clermont-Ferrand three days later. John knew him by his training name, “Guy,” from their SOE course in Britain. He recalled that the captain “was English, about 5’6” in height, aged 32 (then), fair hair, thin on top, and was blind in one eye.” John gave him the 300,000 francs and new radio codes. After lunch together in a black market restaurant, John took a train two hundred miles back to the Jura in order to acquaint himself with other members of his circuit. One of the Frenchmen from his reception committee met him at the station with grave news: the Germans had captured Brian Rafferty while he was on his way to John’s parachutage. The Irishman was under interrogation in Dijon’s prison.

  Lacking a courier to run errands, John risked another lengthy train trip back to Clermont-Ferrand to warn Jones. When he neared the apartment, he stopped. Already suspecting the flat’s security, he tiptoed upstairs, rang the bell, and ran down again. From a distance, he watched to see who would open the door: Madame Neraud or a German officer. Madame Neraud peered out. John went upstairs to find her and her daughter in tears. They said that an SD radio detector van had homed in on Jones’s wavelength at a safe house outside the city. Jones was now in prison with Rafferty. An SOE report noted, “ISIDORE [Jones] transmitted for many circuits, and, as already stated, too many times from the same house.” John found 100,000 of the 300,000 francs he had given Jones, sharing it with the Nerauds to take into hiding. The radio codes, however, were missing.

  It was time for John to make his getaway. He crept through Clermont-Ferrand’s dark, deserted streets to the rail station. While he waited for the first train to anywhere, French gendarmes demanded to see his papers. These passed muster. Then they asked him to open his attaché case. John said:

  In the case the police found a wad of 100 and some odd 1,000 francs, which I had recovered from Guy’s [Jones’s] letterbox. The police said I should have to accompany them and explain. I broke through the queue, which was waiting for tickets, and ran outside the station and returned immediately through the next door. The police apparently ran after me into the streets.

  He jumped onto the footboard of a moving train and rode it to the next station, where he climbed inside. Via a succession of trains, he went back to his first safe house in the mountains, where Young was waiting for him. Young encoded and transmitted John’s message that the Germans had arrested Captains Rafferty and Jones. Someone was betraying British agents to the Germans, making John’s second mission to France even more perilous than the first.

  * * *

  • • •

  George Starr’s troubles in the southwest differed from his brother’s, but they were just as threatening. In the final days of April 1943, his mission was on the verge of collapse. Only five months before, he recalled, “I’d arrived with a suitcase full of clothes and money, nothing else, except an S-Phone for talking to planes.” Now, his clothing was ragged, his money spent, and his S-Phone uncertain. No organizer could build a Resistance network without communications, funds, and supplies. As he pondered whether to admit failure and go home, the strain affected his health. “You’re doing too much,” a local doctor told him. Directed to cut out white wine, George explained, “They [the Gascons] wash their teeth in it. They drink it all the time, the wine. Then he says cut out the white wine completely . . . And I’ve never drunk white wine since. Well, barely.” His psoriasis grew worse: “And the skin goes all white and dead,
dead nerves.” He summarized the diagnosis: “Eating too well, drinking too well, sweaty ass on a bicycle.”

  When he was not cycling, George took buses and trains to meet agents in Condom, Agen, and Toulouse, as well as farther afield in Lyon. Using public transport had its dangers. He remembered an incident on a bus, when, once again, his sixth sense protected him. After he boarded the bus through the rear door, another passenger began talking about Pétain. George didn’t like the sound of him and got off at the next stop. “When it got to Agen,” George heard later, “everybody got out and had to show their credentials. Good thing I wasn’t there. I had to walk back to Castelnau.”

  George bicycled to Condom on shopping expeditions with Jeanne Robert, who spoke for him lest his accent betray him. While pedaling along the country roads, the pair sang. “Then, yes,” she admitted, “some dirty songs.” One was a folk tune, “Les filles de Camaret”:

  Les filles de Camaret se disent toutes vierges

  [The girls of Camaret say they’re all virgins]

  Mais quand elles sont dans mon lit

  [But when they’re in my bed]

  Elles préfèrent tenir mon vis

  [They’d rather hold my screw]

  Qu’un cierge.

  [Than a candle.]