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

by Charles Glass

  A few days later, guards woke John at three in the morning. For the first time during his five weeks of confinement, he showered and shaved. The reason soon became evident. They were moving him.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Thursday night, August 16, 1943, as the Allies completed their conquest of Sicily, George Starr was expecting to receive twelve containers and two packages of weapons and other supplies. Louis Lévy and several of George’s other résistants watched a British plane fly over the Landes department about twenty miles northwest of Condom. The drop site was a field near the hamlet of Arx. The plane was about to jettison the cargo, when it suddenly fell from the sky and crashed. George recalled, “It was a Lancaster with a crew of mad Poles.” The plane was in fact a Halifax, which was too badly damaged to take off again. The reception team drove their trucks under the wings to siphon the valuable fuel. At the same time, the pilot prepared to blow up the aircraft rather than leave it for the Germans. “Some of the Polish crew were like schoolboys,” George said, “and they threw a life-raft out, curious to see if it really did work.” The men draining the gasoline heard the hiss of air from the life-raft and, thinking the plane was about to blow, fled. The rest of the reception committee and the Poles carried on, drinking a jeroboam of Armagnac to keep warm. “And after they blew up the plane,” George said, “they all went off in enemy territory in a convoy of trucks, the Poles singing their heads off in the middle of the night. It was a miracle that nobody got caught.”

  Maurice Rouneau had been on an operation in Miramont when the Poles crashed. Jeanne Robert told him about it when he arrived in Castelnau the next morning, adding that Louis Lévy needed him at once in Condom. Rouneau hurried to the town, where Lévy asked for identity cards, ration books, and civilian clothing so the Poles could escape to Spain. Rouneau put his résistants in Agen to work. Former colleagues at the printing factory forged documents, while other friends dipped into stocks of old clothes.

  George was reconnoitering routes to England for the Poles when a sudden crisis distracted him. The arms from the Poles’ plane had been hidden in the house of a résistant, and one weapon accidentally went off and killed his wife. Unable to explain her death to the authorities, George sent the résistant to Spain, an easier proposition for a Frenchman than for a crew of Poles who did not speak the language. Meanwhile, the police launched a manhunt for the woman’s killer.

  On Friday, August 20, 1943, Rouneau moved some of the arms to Maurice Jacob’s Château de la Clotte. He returned to Castelnau that evening. As he went into the schoolhouse, a car screeched to a stop outside. Fellow résistant Antoine Merchez jumped out and shouted, using one of Rouneau’s code names, “Quick, my old Albert. You have to come to Agen. Things are bad. Gérard has been arrested!” Gérard was Fernand Gaucher, George’s senior agent in the Gironde, whose wife and children lived in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Gaucher knew more about George, WHEELWRIGHT, and the Castelnau résistants than anyone the Germans had so far captured. Merchez told Rouneau that Hilaire, as he always called George, was waiting for him in Agen.

  Rouneau asked for time to pack his and Jeanne Robert’s belongings, but Merchez said that Hilaire wanted to see Rouneau alone. Rouneau refused to leave Robert behind. “I emptied Hilaire’s cupboard,” Rouneau wrote. “There was nothing compromising there except a journal with entries like ‘subsidy for a Resistance group,’ ‘expenses for trip to Lyon, to Toulouse, to Agen, to Montélimar, etc.’ I took the book with me.”

  As Rouneau went out to see Mayor Larribeau, Gaucher’s wife stopped him in the street. He explained he was leaving the hamlet and added that her husband might want her and the children to depart as well. “But what’s happening?” she asked. He lied, “Nothing extraordinary, but it’s probable he’ll quit the Gironde for some time and he would prefer to have you near him.” When she asked if it was serious, he lied again, “No. As soon as the storm passes, we’ll return.”

  Mayor Larribeau assured Rouneau, “It’s better this way, because if the Boches come here and can’t interrogate any of you, it will be easier for me to say I knew you as refugees and nothing more.” The two men shook hands, and Rouneau left with Robert in Merchez’s car.

  George in the meantime had moved from his usual Agen safe house, which was known to Gaucher, to the house of his courier Pierre Duffoir. Rouneau and Robert arrived there after dark. George saw Robert and said to Rouneau, “I said Albert only. Madame Delattre should have stayed in Castelnau.” Rouneau defended his lover: “She was in at least as much danger as the rest of us, so I decided she needed shelter as much as the rest of us. Understand?” According to Rouneau, George backed down, saying, “Okay. That’s fine.”

  Gaucher’s arrest threatened to blow their entire organization. The sad tale had begun that morning with a Message personnel from the BBC: “Jacqueline has a red and green dress.” It meant SOE was finally sending George a wireless operator. Gaucher assumed the operator would need a radio when she landed. “I found Gérard on Tuesday in La Réole,” George told Rouneau. “He had brought the radio that we received a few weeks ago. I was not pleased by that, because I had given him no instruction to do it. And I did not want the radio in La Réole. I ordered him to take it to Agen.” Rouneau remembered that he had seen Gaucher just before George did, and Gaucher had told him he was bringing a radio for the new operator. Rouneau “tried to dissuade him by saying Hilaire had not given him any instructions about this and, in addition, whether any radio was needed there.” He blamed himself for not having stopped Gaucher: “I gave my hand to my colleague and friend who went to his destiny.”

  That day at two o’clock, Gaucher left to store the radio at La Réole’s railroad depot until the train left for Agen at six o’clock. “He was on his way to the station,” George recounted, “and, because it was very hot, he was not wearing a jacket and so had no papers. I followed him at 100 meters.” George watched as gendarmes looking for black marketeers ordered Gaucher to open his briefcase. He refused, and they took him to their headquarters.

  “He thought he was doing the right thing,” George said, “but it was strictly against my orders.” Someone assured George that Gaucher would not talk, but he cut him short: “I might talk. Anybody could talk when they get a hold of you. A man that says he’s never going to talk, well, he’s a fool.” George dashed out on what he called his “Paul Revere ride” to warn everyone known to Gaucher to go into hiding. SOE’s report on the debacle stated that George ordered his operatives to “cease all activities until 15 Sept when the Chiefs were to meet him in Auch.”

  George plotted a jailbreak to spring Gaucher at night, when pro-Resistance guards were on duty. But Gaucher preempted him with a daylight escape attempt. Vichy police recaptured him and gave him to the Gestapo. “If he’d waited till dark,” George complained, “we would have had him out with no problem at all.”

  The Germans tortured Gaucher into providing some, though not all, information about his Resistance circuit. He gave the Germans their first eyewitness description of le patron: chestnut hair, five feet six inches tall, brown eyes, speaking French with a pronounced accent.

  Following Gaucher’s interrogation, the Germans arrested a journalist with the Resistance group Combat in Agen. They set up new roadblocks and raided Gunzbourg’s Château de Barsalou. While the Germans were there, Gunzbourg nonchalantly strolled into the house wearing gardening clothes and said, “Good afternoon.” He told them he was looking for something, gathered a few belongings, and disappeared. When the security detachment realized who he was, they chased him to Agen. Gunzbourg ran into the post office to mail a card to his wife. While his pursuers searched for him outside, he left by the back door.

  Gunzbourg rode a bicycle out of Agen, past the town of Condom, and through endless farmland for forty miles to the village of Vic-Fezensac. Marie-Louise Lac opened her door to see an old friend who looked, she recalled, “completely exhausted.” He
explained, “The Germans came to my house. They were all shaken up, taking everything they wanted and causing a lot of damage.” He remained in hiding at Madame Lac’s for three days, and sent his wife, their two children, and their nanny to safety in Switzerland. The Germans, as with George Starr, offered a large reward for his capture.

  An SOE after-action report on Gaucher’s arrest stated, “He was interrogated and beaten up as a result of which he gave away the AGEN HQ, the MARMANDE HQ and the location of arms depots. This resulted in the AGEN HQ being liquidated with about 15 arrests and the remainder of the personnel sent out of the country.” George, fearing that Gaucher had told the Germans about Castelnau, sent a résistant to evacuate Madame Gaucher and her children.

  Rouneau and Jeanne Robert took refuge on Saturday, August 21, with a prominent rugby player and résistant at his Château de la Peyre. The place gave them, in Rouneau’s words, “total hospitality and relative security.” At five o’clock on the evening of their arrival, a weary George rode up on his bicycle. “This big empty house depresses me,” he said. “I want to go back to [Maurice] Jacob at [Château de] la Clotte and spend the evening with him.” Rouneau advised against it, reminding him that German roadblocks were everywhere.

  A violent storm the next day shook the house. George and the others were eating, when an apparition on bicycle emerged from the mist. The man, an assistant of Maurice Jacob, related a tale as if from the Ancient Mariner: A detachment of German security personnel had raided the Château de la Clotte the previous evening. They arrested Maurice Jacob’s wife and young son, as well as the wife of Jacob’s associate, Paul Blasy. They “then went direct to the places where the arms were hidden and uncovered all of them.” Jacob and Blasy, who were walking back from the forest, surrendered when they saw their families under arrest. The Germans seized hundreds of Tommy guns, thousands of cartridges, scores of antitank rifles, and other vital equipment that George had carefully buried in Jacob’s garden over the previous three months. Only empty containers remained. Security personnel imprisoned the Jacob and Blasy families in Agen.

  “Merde!” George muttered, forgetting his usual decorum around Jeanne Robert. Rouneau reflected, “All the fruit of long and patient work was dead.”

  George decided they all had to leave. Rouneau gathered his pistols and ammunition, but he abandoned a stock of 7.65mm cartridges as too heavy to carry. “I had a large quantity of false identity cards, kept a dozen and destroyed the rest,” he wrote. “And then I consigned Hilaire’s account book to the flames.”

  The Gestapo dragnet forced George to miss the reception of the new radio operator that SOE had promised in May. George appointed a résistant named Marius Bouchou, a farmer who owned the field where she would drop, and four other men to oversee the arrival. All he knew about the W/T was her code name, “Annette.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On Sunday evening, August 22, 1943, F-Section intelligence officer Vera Atkins reported to the RAF’s Tempsford air base in Bedfordshire to bid farewell to agent Annette, thirty-one-year-old Flight Officer Yvonne Cormeau.

  Born in Shanghai as Beatrice Yvonne Biesterfield to a Belgian father and Scottish mother, Cormeau grew up speaking English in Britain and French in Belgium. She and her husband, Charles Edouard Cormeau, whom she married in 1937, lived in Brussels, where Cormeau had given birth to a daughter named Yvette. At the outbreak of the war, her husband enlisted in Britain’s Rifle Brigade and was wounded during the German invasion. The family fled to London, where Cormeau became pregnant with another child. During the Blitz, a Luftwaffe bomb demolished their house. Cormeau, saved by a cast-iron bathtub that fell on top of her, woke in a hospital bed to learn that her two-year-old daughter was unharmed but her husband and unborn baby were dead. She enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in November 1941 and joined SOE three months later. She later explained, “I was willing to do whatever I could. This was something my husband would have liked to do. And, as he was no longer there to do it, I thought it was time for me to do it.”

  Cormeau, like George, declined the standard SOE cyanide pill, though her reasons were more practical: “I admitted to Colonel Buckmaster that I did not take it with me because, if it had been found on me at any cursory search, that would have been signing my own death warrant too.” In her pocket, instead, was a silver powder compact from Buckmaster that she could pawn when she needed money.

  At the air base, Atkins handed her an envelope for Hilaire, and Cormeau boarded the Halifax bomber. She wore a regulation jumpsuit over a demure black curtain skirt and silk blouse. Her ankles were bandaged for protection against a rough landing, because she felt simple black shoes would be less conspicuous than paratrooper boots. Strapped to her back was a black handbag with a .22 revolver inside.

  “We took off on a beautiful sunset in England,” she reminisced years later. The moon was half full, bright enough to see the ground but also for German shore batteries to spot the plane. The pilot flew in silence over the English Channel and deep into occupied France. Cormeau’s recollection of the journey contains none of the bravado usually associated with secret agents: “I was given a nice hot drink by the dispatcher. And then I saw he opened the hole in the floor of the fuselage, so it told me that we were soon going to do something.” The dispatcher attached her silk cord to a rail and told her to be ready. A red light turned to green, and the dispatcher gave a signal. Then, she said, “I had to slide through the hole.”

  Her parachute snapped open, and she floated three hundred feet onto French soil. Containers and packages of weapons, ammunition, and radio equipment followed her down. The drop zone, seventy-five miles north of Castelnau, was a field outside the hamlet of Saint-Antoine-du-Queyret near Bordeaux’s famed Saint-Émilion vineyards. “I could have put out my hand and picked some of the grapes,” she remembered. Her subsequent F-Section debrief noted, “The landing was perfect although the ground was an extremely difficult one, being a strip of grass just beside a house, and blocked at one end by a high cyprus [sic] tree, the grass strip being not more than 100 yards in width.” Her landing was not quite perfect: a falling canister grazed her leg, and she lost a shoe. She cut a patch of her white silk parachute to keep as a souvenir. The reception committee took her to Bouchou’s farmhouse. Thirty-two members of the local Resistance circuit, who had come from a dance to “see what the new arrival was like,” greeted her in the kitchen. The report continued:

  It was the first operation that had taken place in the area, and no-one had the slightest idea what to do. Everyone turned out to assist in bringing in the containers, and all this equipment (13 containers and four packages in all) was brought into the farm kitchen, together with the parachutes.

  Later that night, one of the résistants bicycled with her five miles to a safe house in the village of Pujols.

  The same evening, Antoine Merchez drove George, Rouneau, and Robert from the Château de la Peyre to Layrac, a village about five miles from Agen. There, they boarded a train to Auch. En route, a gendarme checked the passengers’ identity cards. Robert’s was genuine, but the men’s were counterfeit. Robert smiled at the gendarme, whom she knew, and he ignored the forgeries. When they reached Auch, Rouneau wondered, “From Auch, where could we go? No idea. We were going into the unknown.” Rouneau telephoned Montréjeau brewer and résistant Pierre Labayle for help. At four in the afternoon, Labayle met the group and took them about thirty-five miles north to a clothing merchant named Marius Sorbé in the village of Seissan. They remained with him while Labayle sought longer-term quarters.

  “At dinner,” Rouneau recalled, “Hilaire astonished us with his prodigious memory.” A dog came into the house, and George said, “I know that dog.” The others were skeptical, but he insisted, “I know that dog.” He said its owner was “a large, young blond woman, elegant, who wears shoes with flat heels.” Sorbé said, “That’s right. They came here to her parents’ a few days
ago.” George explained, “I saw them on the train between Agen and Toulouse last February.” At that moment, a woman fitting George’s description walked into the house looking for her pet.

  Labayle returned after dinner to take them to a small village, Montesquieu-Volvestre, about fifty miles southeast through sparsely populated countryside. They were about to leave when a mounted police patrol set up a checkpoint outside. “Merde!” George blurted. They waited, but the police did not budge. Unable to delay, they ventured out. One of the policemen ordered them to stop, but they scrambled into Labayle’s car and drove off. Twenty miles down the highway, a car filled with Luftwaffe field police pulled alongside. A gunfight seemed imminent, but the Germans overtook them without stopping. It transpired that they were searching for the eight-man crew of an Allied aircraft that had come down in the area.

  Labayle drove them along deserted roads to Montesquieu-Volvestre, a village of timber and brick houses on the banks of the River Garonne. George, Rouneau, and Robert moved into rooms that Labayle had rented in the best hotel. At dinner, the hotel proprietor asked why they were there. Rouneau concocted a story about buying timber to make charcoal. Due to wartime shortages and German requisitioning, the French used charcoal not only to cook but to run their cars. The proprietor responded by regaling Rouneau with technical details about local forests and qualities of wood. As Rouneau’s boredom grew, George pressed a napkin to his lips to contain his laughter.