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

by Charles Glass

  While Norman was alone with John one evening, he educated him about the Funkspiel, which the SD’s radio section on the second floor was playing with SOE. It had begun with Marcus Bloom, who by this time languished in Fresnes Prison. Neither Norman nor John knew that Bloom had transmitted for George Starr. Norman said he, like Bloom, had refused to operate his radio for the Germans. Somehow, though, Goetz convinced London that the transmissions were genuine.

  Dr. Goetz recalled later that he revived the Funkspiel in Paris as soon as he returned from his failure with Bloom in Toulouse:

  When I came back from this there were two decoy transmissions in PARIS which I had to take over. One of these lasted only a short time; the other, much longer. Later a whole series of decoy transmissions followed of which some lasted a considerable time.

  Dr. Goetz made good use of Norman’s radio. Norman, like Bloom, had kept back his “security check” through which London authenticated all transmissions, disclosing only the “bluff” check. He assumed London would spot the absence of the “true” check. Goetz sent a test message. According to Norman, “Dr. Goetz was furious the day he received a message from London reminding him that he [Norman] had forgotten ‘his double security check.’” Goetz bellowed: “You have forgotten your double security check. Be more careful.” Goetz’s subsequent messages contained both security checks, ostensibly from Norman, requesting parachutages of supplies and agents to designated drop sites north of Paris. Norman blamed London for lethal incompetence.

  Norman also told John that Master Sergeant Placke ran a hoax Resistance circuit around Saint-Quentin, about one hundred miles north of Paris. Placke recruited unsuspecting French patriots and received supplies and agents that the SD ordered via the captured radio sets. “When STARR arrived at the Avenue Foch,” stated an SOE report, “the Germans had already started to work at least one circuit.” SOE was sending the Germans weapons, explosives, food, and other supplies. As Norman unfolded this terrible saga, John grew more desperate to inform SOE that it was playing the Germans’ game. But how could he tell them?

  NINE

  Word of Honor

  Our men were lonely in the field, that was inevitable.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  In the early fall of 1943, George Starr brought Yvonne Cormeau to the hotel in Montesquieu-Volvestre where Jeanne Robert and Maurice Rouneau were hiding. The four soon realized the town’s inhabitants were becoming suspicious. “On our walks,” wrote Rouneau, “the curtains twitched and we had the conviction that conversations and gossip about us were spreading.” They left the village to avoid denunciation and drove about forty miles west to Aventignan, a modest hamlet of simple stone houses with terra-cotta roofs and fewer than three hundred souls. “Thanks to the patriotism, to the devotion of these brave people to the cause of France,” Rouneau wrote of the villagers, “we had found a center of action.” However, he reflected, “Despite all the help and sympathy, we could not achieve the level of security we had during the previous ten months in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, where the villagers were used to our presence.”

  In Castelnau, their cover stories had passed without question: Robert was the schoolteacher, Rouneau her printer boyfriend, and George Gaston the Belgian, her family friend. Convinced that returning to Castelnau was more practical than starting again with new false identities in an area they did not know, Rouneau decided to find out what Fernand Gaucher had told the Gestapo about the village. He and Robert risked a reconnaissance trip by train through Toulouse to Auch and by bus to Condom, where they looked for a taxi. A local garage owner was willing to drive them to Castelnau, but he warned, “It’s forbidden now to hire a car without authorization.” Rouneau submitted an application at the Department of Bridges and Highways, and when the official there said permission would take several days, Rouneau presented documents from a former member of Parliament with the signature of Vichy’s minister of agriculture and supply. The papers authorized Rouneau to circulate without hindrance to buy materials for coffee production in Abyssinia. The pass was issued at once.

  While waiting in Condom for the garage owner to bring his taxi, Rouneau and Robert met a family from Castelnau. They told him no Germans had come and no one had been arrested. Gaucher had not betrayed them. Rouneau wrote, “Hilaire could return and reestablish his command post.”

  Reinstalled in the familiar schoolhouse, WHEELWRIGHT’s activists resumed their clandestine work. The hamlet, however, was not free of dubious Frenchmen. Yvonne Cormeau recalled, “You never knew which man or woman was willing to give information to the Gestapo. Sometimes it was a personal vendetta between two families. Other times it was just for money, which was serious.” Jeanne Robert told Rouneau that one of the peasants, wary about people coming in and out of Castelnau, was spreading stories that her house was “a veritable nest of spies!” Neighbors told the man to mind his own business, but George feared he might go to the police. Rouneau went to Condom to meet gendarme captain Fernand Pagès. The gendarme promised to deal with the would-be informer, and to assure WHEELWRIGHT’s next parachutage by preventing the police from establishing checkpoints nearby. “I shook the hand warmly of this man, this soldier, who in fulfilling his unrewarding functions, wanted to continue serving the real France,” Rouneau wrote.

  When Rouneau returned from Condom, George was pacing the village square with the perpetual Balto burning between his lips. “Well?” he asked. They went inside. Rouneau told him what Captain Pagès had proposed. George had one hesitation: “Provided that the gendarmerie doesn’t come here now and burn me.”

  Pagès visited the gossiping peasant’s farm the next day to demand evidence for his accusations. The peasant backtracked. He did not know the people in the school and, anyway, he had been drinking. Pagès left to make an inquiry and returned two days later to confront the farmer:

  I know now what calumnies you have made against the teacher and her guests. Do you know who these men are? Okay, I’ll tell you. They are important controllers of supply. And these are men you call spies. You deserve a beating and to be put away. Do you know that, if she wanted, the teacher could send you to prison for defamation?

  “From that day,” Rouneau wrote, “we lived without fear of denunciation.”

  George was secure again in his hilltop redoubt with his comrades Roger and Alberta Larribeau, farmers Pino and Tina Novarini, and the faithful Jeanne Robert. He resumed recruiting agents, teaching youngsters to fire rifles and use dynamite, receiving arms drops, and augmenting an underground arsenal that became one of the largest in France. On September 15, as he had promised before he left Castelnau, he reactivated his sector. An SOE assessment noted that by that date “the security section reported that Gestapo activity had quieted down. The meeting between STARR and various heads took place at different times and places. They were given orders to build up their groups all over again.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Yvonne Cormeau established herself as one of SOE’s most adroit “pianists,” as SOE called its wireless operators. This did not prevent her from taking on other chores, including, in her words, “the ordinary work of finding out the fields that the people could put at our disposal and sending the latitude, longitude . . .” Thanks to Cormeau’s faultless Morse transmissions, George’s groups received from sixty to seventy containers by parachute at each full moon.

  Despite the successful arms drops, arrests in Agen and other centers of WHEELWRIGHT activity made the partisans wary of one another. In September, George went to Montréjeau to meet with resourceful Pierre Labayle, who was holding funds for him. When George arrived in the village, Rouneau and Robert were waiting to tell him that Labayle had just been arrested. “He did not flinch at the news,” Rouneau wrote, “but clenched his eternal cigarette more tightly between his lips.” George broke into Labayle’s office and took the money from the safe, and the three returned to Castelnau.

  Arrests continu
ed with the capture of Jean-Marcel Cazeneuve, a merchant in Agen’s boulevard de la République. The Gestapo took him to the Saint-Michel Prison in Toulouse, where they were already interrogating Fernand Gaucher, Maurice Jacob, and Paul Blasy. The Germans then arrested Louis Lévy in Marmande. As they drove the young partisan from Marmande to the Saint-Michel Prison, Philippe de Gunzbourg appeared alongside the truck on his bicycle. Louis threw a crumpled piece of paper at him. On it were the words “Guérin, rue Cassaignolles, Vic-Fezensac.” The address was Madame Lac’s, where he lived, and the name Guérin was the pseudonym she had typed onto his identity card. Marie-Louise Lac later wrote, “It is probable that without his presence of mind, you would not now be reading these ‘Memoires of My Resistance.’”

  Louis’ brother, Théo, rushed to Castelnau to tell George about his brother’s arrest. The younger Lévy insisted on taking Louis’ place and using his code name, Christophe. George agreed and made Théo his liaison to Philippe de Gunzbourg. Together, with Yvonne Cormeau, they began an operation to exfiltrate the seven Polish airmen who had crashed near Arx on August 16.

  George sent Théo Lévy and Cormeau to the men’s safe house in Fourcès, from which they took the men to the border. A smuggler warned that reaching Spain was nearly impossible at that time. Germans patrolled the road night and day, and the most direct footpath was teeming with ferocious tracker dogs. “So,” recalled Cormeau, “you had to go through the snow on a snowy night so that your traces were quickly covered, and you had to go from bush to bush.” Evading the hazards, the Polish fliers made it to Spain and returned to England for further missions over occupied Europe.

  Meanwhile, at the crash site near Arx where the burned hulk of the Poles’ plane lay in the snow, Vichy officials ordered foreign prison inmates to collect the munitions that the Resistance had left behind. They turned the matériel over to the Milice française. The Milice was Vichy’s version of the Gestapo, established on January 30, 1943, under the operational command of a World War I veteran and fascist demagogue named Joseph Darnand. The paramilitary group presented a more insidious threat than the Gestapo, because its French miliciens knew the country better than the Germans and could discern a Belgian accent from one like George Starr’s. Fanatically anti-Resistance and anti-Semitic, they employed traditional weapons of repression: tapping telephones, housebreaking, extortion, torture, and murder. Their brown shirts, blue jackets, and berets became part of the French scene, but many worked in plainclothes to infiltrate Resistance networks. Yvonne Cormeau said these “French traitors” were “worse than the Gestapo.”

  The Polish crew’s crash and the frequent arms drops put the Milice and the Germans on high alert. They deployed on roads and hilltops in the Gers, Landes, and Lot-et-Garonne to watch for parachutages at each full moon. “These movements were such as to obstruct us, and the reception teams were in great danger,” wrote Rouneau. George changed tactics, instructing London to make the drops on moonless nights. Instead of navigating by landmarks, the RAF crews homed in on George’s Eureka radio beacons. This delighted Rouneau: “It was amusing to hear during the full moon the buzz of German motorcycles racing along the roads to try to suppress the flagrant crimes of the ‘terrorists’ who received their arms from the sky.”

  On September 24, George confirmed that Castelnau was secure. He wrote to London that he had

  received news from an eyewitness that on being tortured by the Gestapo, E [code letter for Fernand Gaucher, “Gérard”] told them, “Vous pouvez me faire ce que vous voulez, je dirais jamais rien, et je vous emmerde tous” [“You can do what you want to me, but I will never tell you anything, and I shit on all of you”]. With all the information we have now it is absolutely clear that E has been splendid and has acted as an officer and a gentleman. A true patriot.

  George sent Gaucher’s wife and two children, aged nine and five, “about 500 kilometers from here where they are lodged in a friendly house.”

  The Gestapo hunted down more of George’s associates, capturing a member of the Agen parachutage reception committee. An SOE report on the arrest noted, “During his subsequent interrogation he gave away the names of the whole AGEN reception committee. As a result of this nine men were shot and four others tortured.”

  Perhaps as a response to the arrests, on September 25, George dispatched a report to London concerning Maurice Rouneau: “As regards this man, it is quite true that he gives a very good impression to everybody, but believe me when I say that if you send him back to France for us you will have trouble.” Rouneau was still in France, but the warning not to send him back indicated that George intended to exile him, just as he had Henri Sevenet. In the dispatch, George listed Rouneau’s “faults”: “too fond of women,” problems with money, too much drinking, “loves to give orders,” and “no idea of security.” He also blamed Rouneau for several of the arrests that had taken place. He concluded the condemnation, “If you send him back to France you will never stop him from going to Paris to see his wife and kids who are watched by the Gestapo or from going to C. to brag to his pals or from visiting his mistress at D.”

  While recommending that SOE keep Rouneau out of France, he did admit Rouneau was “full of courage” and “above all a soldier and an excellent soldier in a fight,” but concluded: “If you should decide to send him back to France, suggest that he should be sent as an instructor to somebody that can hold him and make him follow instructions to the latter [sic].”

  The report reached London on November 13, six weeks after George wrote it. In the meantime, he decided to deal with Rouneau his own way.

  * * *

  • • •

  Also in September 1943, the SD brought Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom to 84 avenue Foch. The couple’s arrests the previous April had crippled the SPINDLE circuit in Haute-Savoie. Since then, they had undergone rigorous interrogation. Their bluff that Churchill was related to Britain’s prime minister won him immunity from torture, but that did not spare Sansom from merciless brutality at Fresnes Prison. Lovers by this time, they told the Germans they were married. As Churchill entered the SD portals, he noticed that a “tall man of maybe forty, in a dark lounge suit, looked up at me out of a grey intelligent face. His high forehead and protruding ears gave him an intellectual aspect, but his cold eyes gave me the shivers.” This was Ernest Vogt, who questioned Churchill in his usual friendly manner. Afterward, he asked John Starr whether the agent was really a nephew of Britain’s prime minister. John played along, answering, “Certainly.” Vogt then asked if Sansom and Churchill were man and wife. “Of course,” John said. “They’re a very well-known couple in English society.” Vogt interrogated Churchill without breaking him during two short stays at avenue Foch. The SD later sent Churchill and Sansom to Berlin and on to a series of concentration camps.

  Prisoners who gave their word of honor not to escape from avenue Foch enjoyed a certain freedom of movement on the fifth floor. They went to the bathroom unaccompanied, an arrangement that Ernest Vogt said “freed the Russian guard from having to stand beside the lavatory open door.” Asking agents for their parole d’honneur had been Vogt’s idea. The British writer Jean Overton Fuller, who interviewed him after the war, rendered his rationale in blank verse:

  I suggested to Kieffer we offer

  selected English prisoners a measure

  of freedom from surveillance on

  their Word of Honour

  not to attempt to escape, he said,

  “We should have them all climbing out

  of the windows!” I said, “Not

  the English. I would not offer

  it to the French.”

  The SD did not ask John for his parole, but his relaxed pose in the guardroom made new prisoners suspicious of him.

  The next F-Section agents that the SS brought to 84 avenue Foch were the brothers Alfred and Henry Newton. John recognized the former circus and music hall performers from SOE trai
ning school. After they parachuted into France with wireless operator Brian Stonehouse on June 30, 1942, an informer betrayed them. The Germans arrested the Newtons in Lyon on April 4, 1943, and the Gestapo chief in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, tortured them before dispatching them to Fresnes Prison. On the brothers’ arrival at avenue Foch, they were surprised to see the comfort in which John was living. The SD interrogated them for a few days before sending them to Buchenwald concentration camp.

  Officials at avenue Foch did not require John to inform on other prisoners. Vogt recalled, “BOB always declared to me that he would never become an agent or informer of our Dienststelle [department] and on no account would he denounce anyone else.” John instead passed the time in the guardroom drawing maps, charts, and tables for Major Kieffer, as well as greeting cards for other Germans to send to their families. For a joke, he made some unflattering caricatures of Kieffer. When the major saw them, he did not take offense. He laughed.

  Kieffer commissioned John to paint his portrait as a present for his wife in Karlsruhe. John had no canvas, brushes, or oil paints, but he offered to retrieve all he needed from his flat in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Kieffer let him go on his word of honor as a British officer not to attempt an escape during the excursion.

  One cold morning, Ernest Vogt and two SS guards drove John through Paris’s mostly deserted streets. They stopped just beyond the 15th arrondissement, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, at a massive apartment building. “The Gestapo’s behind me,” John warned the concierge, who was about to greet him with affection. While John gathered his brushes, paints, and canvas, Vogt confiscated his household radio. The SS men began stealing pans and other things from the kitchen. John said, “The wireless is fair game. But my wife is coming back here to live in a few months, when the Allies have returned to France, and she will need her frying pans and saucepans. I want them put back.” Vogt ordered the men to return everything, but he kept the radio.