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

by Charles Glass

  While waiting near Saint-Gô for one of George’s weapons drops, Théo Lévy met a painter named Maurice Poncelet. Poncelet asked him, “Why no arms for Caillou?” Lévy had no idea who Caillou was. Poncelet said Caillou, Captain Parisot, commanded the largest force in the southwest. Lévy, one of the few men George trusted to meet him in Castelnau, promised to ask le patron about supplies for Parisot. A few nights later at another arms drop, Poncelet demanded an answer. Lévy explained his boss distrusted people he didn’t know. But Poncelet persisted, and Lévy said he would ask again. “The arms must not serve political ends,” Lévy added. “No one can use them, except against the Boche.” Poncelet assured Lévy that there was “no better Frenchman than Caillou.”

  That evening, Lévy told George about Parisot and the captain’s sterling reputation. George said, “So be it. We can parachute him some arms. But I don’t want to see him.” Escholier wrote that the religious Parisot had been praying that weapons “would fall from the sky . . . And, in effect, they did.” The RAF dropped its first consignment to Parisot’s men near Saint-Gô on the night of April 9.

  Without warning le patron, Lévy brought Parisot to meet George six days later in his Condom safe house, a building with three exits that belonged to a fellow résistant. After introducing Parisot to George, Lévy vanished rather than risk his chief’s anger. “It took me a long time to make up my mind that Parisot was okay,” George recalled. “By the grace of God, there was an immediate spark. We were two men with the same idea.” George instructed London to send more arms to Parisot, and the RAF dropped as many as three loads a night to him.

  Parisot had made Panjas a center of resistance in large part because of its priest, Abbé Laurent Talès. The fierce Basque cleric rejected all compromise with the occupier, declaring from the pulpit, “Freedom of thought overrides borders, and the diktat of a Führer will never change that.” Parishioners likened Abbé Talès to the Basque pili-pili hot peppers that he left to dry on his window shutters. George found in him a kindred spirit:

  The abbé was a jovial old boy, ready to fight anybody or anything so long as he was German. He was taken prisoner and escaped in Poland and escaped again, and got this living in Panjas. He was the complete and utter spirit of the Resistance. He carried a .45 revolver under his soutane. A patriot to the core. A good Christian and a good man. He was wonderful. Tell a good story, take a good drink, fight like hell, pray like hell. He was a Friar Tuck.

  Abbé Talès had no qualms about hiding tons of SOE weaponry and explosives under the altar of the Eglise de Saint-Laurent. He named one Resistance unit the Groupe de Saint Laurent and declared, “We will be the guardians of the church’s treasures. And to save all that remains, we will, if necessary, burn at the stake as Saint Lawrence did to save our land.” George had more confidence in him than in the local priest from the nearby village of Blaziert, Abbé Boë, who, he said, “talked too much.” Abbé Boë’s loyalty was never in doubt, only his discretion. His sermons condemning the Germans were known for their vehemence and excessive length. Escholier referred to Boë as “the classic poilu [“hairy,” a First World War French Army enlisted man] type in a greenish cassock.” One woman who knew him recalled, “He tore about the countryside on a bicycle, his soutane flying in the wind and his bare feet in the dirtiest pair of worn-out old sabots.” George’s renegade band had two Friar Tucks, but, since Denise Bloch’s departure, no Maid Marian.

  * * *

  • • •

  The flow of weapons for George’s outlaws came to an abrupt halt in June, when a traitor informed on Rabinovitch. An internal SOE memo stated, “He was eventually considered to be so badly compromised that he was instructed to return to England. He reluctantly acquiesced, leaving France in June 1943.” Rabinovitch escaped with a fellow F-Section agent to Spain, where Spanish authorities interned them until the British negotiated their repatriation to England.

  George contacted London, by means that his file left unspecified, to declare: “All means of communications now cut.” The same message requested a radio operator, one million francs, and the return of Denise Bloch and Maurice Dupont.

  * * *

  • • •

  George grew impatient with matters that diverted him from his primary objective of preparing for D-Day. One was the sabotage expert, Lieutenant Charles Duchalard, who had complained to SOE that George and Rouneau gave him no support. Duchalard spent a third of the 100,000 francs London had given him for George on his own travels to Marseille and elsewhere, and Rouneau went to investigate. After questioning some of Duchalard’s colleagues, he concluded that he had become a “burden . . . indiscrete [sic]” and in touch with “inappropriate people.”

  Rouneau traveled south to confer with George. Agreeing with Rouneau’s assessment, George sent his courier to the SOE station in Berne with a message requesting that Duchalard “not remain long in the region.” London settled the affair by ordering Duchalard back to England. Rouneau met the Canadian near the lower Pyrenean village of Luc-Harmeau, lectured him on security breaches, and told him that London wanted him out of France. Rouneau sent Duchalard “to a place where we would take control of him,” Mazères-de-Neste, where the family of a résistant gave him a room until George arranged his passage back to England.

  * * *

  • • •

  Events outside France were bringing the country’s liberation closer. On May 12, the Allies completed their conquest of North Africa, capturing 250,000 German, Italian, and other Axis soldiers. Allied shipping through the Suez Canal was secure, and the Germans had lost their chance to turn the Mediterranean into an Axis lake.

  The Allies’ next step had to be the invasion of Europe. Military commanders led Buckmaster to believe that meant his fiefdom in France. “In the middle of 1943,” he wrote, “we had a top secret message telling us that D-Day might be closer than we thought. This message had been tied up with international politics on a level far above our knowledge and we, of course, had acted on it without question.”

  Believing the French offensive was imminent, Buckmaster ordered George to prepare aircraft landing strips in the southwest. The clearings had to be large enough for cargo aircraft to deliver thousands of Allied soldiers, tanks, jeeps, weapons, and other supplies on D-Day. It was a massive undertaking and a morale booster for the résistants. George organized the operation in the Gers, while Gunzbourg and his men chopped trees north of the River Garonne to receive “troops, machines for transporting light tanks, jeeps, a large quantity of light arms” at the start of the invasion. They worked on plans to destroy telephone installations and roads as well as to provide intelligence and “aides and guides” to the invading Allies.

  When the landing fields were ready, Gunzbourg wrote, Allied headquarters “decided not to use these landing sites . . . This created difficulties for those who had made promises in good faith. The right-wing Resistance as well as the left-wing fell hard on Hilaire’s organization and sought to stir up public opinion against it by pretending that the action had begun too soon, that all this was a trap, etc. . . . Naturally, after a few days, these sites were abandoned.”

  The Americans had argued all along for a cross-Channel landing in France. The British, with bitter memories of trench warfare in France during the First World War, resisted. Prime Minister Churchill had made the case at the Casablanca Conference for invading Italy first, but American senior officers, including Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, believed Italy would rob resources from the main objective of taking the war to Germany through France. In May, however, at a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in Washington, the leaders confirmed they would invade Italy and put off the French landings until May 1, 1944. That date became one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.

  The premature D-Day planning led to a change in direction for F-Section’s field organizers. Until then, SOE had answered to the minister of economic warfare with
a mission to cripple Germany’s economic infrastructure and war-making capacity. It now acquired a second master, the Allied military command, whose objective was to have the Resistance sever German communications and distract German troops when the United States and Britain invaded Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

  By July 1943, SOE noted, George’s WHEELWRIGHT had organized “28 teams for railway destruction and a military group of 1,200 men for guerrilla activity.” Its area of operations extended, George said, to “South Dordogne, Lot-et-Garonne, Gers, Landes Libre, Gironde Libre, Haute-Pyrenees, Bas-Pyrenees Libre, half of Haut Garonne and part of Tarn-et-Garonne,” in effect, most of southwestern France. WHEELWRIGHT’s main priority was to amass weapons for the guerrillas to use when the Allies invaded. More weapons stores, more volunteers, and a wider area of operations meant more dangers, at a time when the Germans were becoming more efficient at infiltrating SOE’s Resistance circuits.

  SEVEN

  Arrests and Arrivals

  War is no exact science.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  John Starr returned to Burgundy from his in-laws’ in Normandy in time for a rendezvous with fellow SOE agent Harry Rée. A former secondary-school language teacher, Rée had parachuted into eastern France the previous April, and his handiwork with explosives was making him one of SOE’s most accomplished saboteurs. Rée introduced John to a résistant from Dole named Pierre Martin. “He was a cheerful ex-garage keeper, very energetic, who managed to get things done,” Rée said. Martin seemed an ideal candidate to assist John. He had a car and fuel to keep it running. Rée later admitted, “I should have been suspicious by all this of course.” He added that he “told BOB [John Starr] that he had grounds for suspecting Martin, but BOB was unwilling to believe evil of MARTIN, who had done extremely good work for the organisation in providing transport for material.” John, however, later insisted that he also had begun to doubt Martin, “as it appeared to him that MARTIN was accomplishing his tasks with rather too much facility.”

  Martin drove John and radio operator Young to a new hideout a few hours from Clermont-Ferrand in a medieval château above Saint-Amour-Bellevue. While John roamed the countryside in search of recruits, parachute drop sites, and targets for sabotage, Young stayed out of sight in Saint-Amour to prevent his accent from giving him away.

  On June 16, F-Section sent John a new courier. Squadron Officer Diana Rowden, code name “Paulette,” landed in a Lysander light aircraft near Le Mans in western France with two other female agents. Twenty-eight-year-old Rowden was the daughter of a British Army officer. She had grown up in southern France, spoke the language without an accent, and had survived combat as a Red Cross volunteer during the German invasion of 1940. Her arrival completed John’s standard SOE team of organizer, radio operator, and courier.

  John’s efforts in the Jura and Burgundy mirrored his brother’s in the Gers: establishing cells, arranging parachutages, and, one report noted, conducting a sabotage operation “near DIJON.” Rowden carried messages for John’s circuit, ACROBAT, as far as Marseille and Paris, and Young radioed messages from Saint-Amour. John extended ACROBAT’s reach over a large swath of the Jura and Burgundy. The volunteers he armed and trained were, like George’s in Gascony, standing by for deployment during the Allied invasion of France.

  However, neither John nor George knew that Allied commanders had postponed the French invasion in favor of taking Sicily from Germany’s vulnerable ally, Mussolini’s Italy. At 4:45 on the morning of July 10, 1943, what was until D-Day the largest amphibious invasion force in history hit the Sicilian shore. More than 117,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers under the command of U.S. Army general Dwight Eisenhower landed on the beaches and moved inland. The campaign, however, was anything but a pushover. The Germans reinforced the Italians and mounted a vigorous defense. The Allies pushed them back, but most of the German and Italian forces were evading destruction or capture by retreating intact to the Italian mainland. One military analyst noted that “Operation Husky was a valuable proving ground where shortcomings in leadership, doctrine, training, equipment and command and control were revealed.” The Allies had to learn from mistakes in Sicily, if the much larger invasion of France were to succeed.

  On July 18, John and Martin met for lunch in Dijon. They left Dijon for a short drive of about thirty miles to Dole, but as Martin’s truck rolled into the Burgundian countryside, a roadblock appeared. Schutzstaffel (SS) troops ordered them out of the truck, demanded their identity cards, and asked why they were carrying 35,000 francs. Agents of the SS security department, the Sicherheitsdienst, took custody of the two men, handcuffed them together, and drove them back to their headquarters in Dijon. Then a curious thing happened. At headquarters, the SD men let John overhear them asking about Martin on the telephone. They returned and told him that local police confirmed Martin’s identity and the Frenchman was free to leave. But John’s papers stated he lived in Paris and “it was impossible for them to ’phone to Paris and that I should have to go to prison . . .” John reported, “I realised that MARTIN had given me away through the stupidity of the S.D. interrogators.” Recognizing the deception for what it was, he asked for permission to smoke, since “all my notes and messages for home were burnt in a cigarette, which I kept for that purpose.”

  Later, John would write, “I was sold by a French double agent to the Sicherheitsdienst (‘Gestapo’) as a resistant and ‘terroristen.’ He led me into a prearranged roadblock guarded by SS and Gestapo agents.”

  A police van took John to a Wehrmacht prison in Dijon. As it passed through the ancient gates into the courtyard, John seized a chance to signal to Young and Diana Rowden that Martin had betrayed him. SOE recorded that, when the vehicle stopped, John “got out, pretended to be stiff with sitting, and then, catching his captors unprepared, took to his heels and ran at top speed down the yard and out through the gates.” The SS men fired. A bullet pierced his left thigh. He ran, trailing blood, into a side street. The SS shot again, wounding his left foot. “I continued to run into the next road right,” he said, “which was again a cul-de-sac, and finally entered the third turning right, and was about to turn left again, when through loss of blood my strength gave way. I was recaptured.” He hoped that neighbors who saw him and heard the shooting would alert the Resistance, so Young and Rowden could avoid his fate and keep the ACROBAT circuit alive. It appeared to work, because a short time later the BBC broadcast to France, “Bob, contagious illness at the hospital, don’t contact him.”

  The SS dragged him, with blood spurting from both wounds, into the prison. “One bullet went through my left thigh from buttocks to knee,” he wrote. “I was thrown into a cell in solitary confinement.” A prison doctor fixed a rough dressing and left him shackled to a wooden pallet. Two hours later, interrogators entered the cell.

  They demanded to know who he was and who worked for him. He did not reply. The more he held out, the more they beat him. For three days without respite, they kicked him and threw him against the walls. The doctor reopened his thigh wound, intensifying the pain. He insisted that he was a French businessman, but the Germans repeated their questions about his courier and radio operator. He abandoned his cover story for what he called “his reserve cover story,” which explained that “he had lived in France previous to the war (which was true), that he had been left behind when the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force] evacuated (untrue), and had consequently taken to civilian life again.”

  The Germans did not believe him, saying they had heard the same tale from other British prisoners. Then, John recalled, “I admitted everything that was known to them through Martin, which enabled me with little difficulty to hold back the part which was known only to myself.” The admissions did not stop the torture.

  On his fifth day of imprisonment, the SS drove him to a security office for more rigorous interrogation. He recalled that “when my answers were not ‘satisfactory’ as often, my wounded
thigh was beaten up untill [sic] it was just a huge mass of pus and bruises.” One day, John’s interrogators left him alone in the interrogation room with an open dossier on the desk. He suspected they wanted him to see the file, which contained a list of SOE schools in Britain, along with the names of senior staff. The Germans had penetrated SOE’s apparatus, but how? When the interrogators returned, they demanded descriptions of his instructors. He complied, saying that one was “about five feet nine inches, thin and dark.” He said the same of the next, and the next. All his teachers were “about five feet nine inches, thin and dark.” The interrogators gave up for the evening and returned him to his cell in the prison.

  The next morning, he was taken back to security headquarters. The Germans showed him photographs of Captains Rafferty and Jones, who had been captured earlier that summer. They asked for the men’s real names, which John refused to give. This provoked more torture of his infected thigh. The interrogators sent him again to the prison, where a doctor and several warders came into his cell during the night. They ripped off his trousers and held him down, while the doctor forced a long steel rod into his wound. The spike came out the other side of his thigh, and he fainted.

  The Germans kept him in solitary confinement on bread and water, unable to wash, shave, or change his blood-drenched trousers. There was no toilet paper. His infected wound left him with a high fever. Yet his obstinacy served a purpose: it bought time for his comrades to disappear.

  Not every German approved the mistreatment. “The governor of the prison was a Wehrmacht officer (Oberleutenant),” noted an SOE report. “He used to come to see STARR practically every day, giving him first of all a military salute, then shaking hands.” One night, a Wehrmacht medical officer changed John’s bandages and told him about the progress of the war in Sicily, where most of the German and Italian forces were retreating across the Strait of Messina.