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

by Charles Glass

  He justified his accord with Kieffer: “I thought it over and decided that if I refused I would never get a chance to escape again anyway, and that if I accepted there would still be a lot to learn, and that perhaps one day the opportunity to communicate my knowledge to London would arise.” His conviction that he could confide details of the Funkspiel to another prisoner, who might escape to London, was a gamble at best, self-deception at worst.

  “After the ‘Escape’ things began to change,” wrote John. “To the extent that when Ernest returned [from the hospital] he had no longer his office on the top floor. It was his office which had become the ‘Guard Room’ & the ‘guard room’ had become my cell where I was alone.” When Ernest Vogt recovered from his wounds in early January 1944, he took up his duties in a new office on the fourth floor, where SOE captives were brought to him for interrogation. Kieffer said that, with the rearrangement of rooms, “Bob himself was more closely guarded.” Upstairs, John humored the staff by drawing caricatures and postcards. His work on maps and organizations taught him more about SD counterespionage, but the knowledge was useless.

  A bizarre relationship developed between John and his captors. The Russian guards, who had beaten him badly when he was recaptured, became friendly again, while August Scherer’s widow, Ottilie, developed an attraction to him and tried to win him better treatment. Ernest Vogt wrote, “I knew that Millie Scherer fell in love with Starr, both have been surprised by a member of our service named [Second Lieutenant Stephan] Gutgsell when they kissed each other. Kieffer too knew it, because Gutgsell told him, and he told it to me.” The office cleaner, Holwedts, swore that Frau Scherer was John’s mistress. A report from another prisoner, who said that “STARR did not give anything away,” corroborated Vogt’s account, stating that a German woman “may have influenced the Gestapo to keep him there.” He said the woman’s name was “Odile,” and “[h]er husband [August Scherer] had been shot by one of our agents.”

  When Master Sergeant Josef Placke mentioned one of his favorite restaurants in Paris to John, it gave John an idea. SOE recorded:

  One day he said to the German, “Why don’t you take me out for a meal?” meaning the whole thing as a joke. To his surprise the idea was taken seriously. Placke checked with Kieffer, who had no objection. So, one evening, the Germans took Starr to the restaurant.

  As they left the building, Placke said to John, “I know you have given your parole to the Sturmbannführer, but I should be glad if you would give it again, for tonight to me personally.” John said his word to Kieffer was enough, and Placke did not insist. They arrived at the expensive restaurant, where the other diners did not appear to notice that one of the Germans’ guests was a captured British agent. Among Placke’s dining companions was a friend of Madame Balachowsky named Dr. Briault. Placke had turned Briault while interrogating him at Fresnes, although the doctor went on supplying intelligence to Madame Balachowsky for the British. Later, Dr. Briault told Madame Balachowsky about the dinner. Placke, he said, had boasted about running a bogus F-Section network north of Paris, ACROBAT, allegedly staffed by captured Canadian officers. It amused Placke that SOE was still parachuting supplies to the fictitious circuit. Madame Balachowsky passed Briault’s information to London.

  The Germans took John on a series of operations. Placke recalled that he “went out twice with BOB (or perhaps three times), once in Paris to take him to a restaurant, another time to Saint Quentin . . . following a message from London by radio, a message caught by our service, to find trace of two planes that had not returned to London at the end of their missions.” One of these outings involved identifying the bodies from a downed British aircraft, and on another excursion, Dr. Goetz asked John to select a field where British agents could land. Knowing that Goetz planned to trap another SOE team, John dismissed the better sites as useless. While inspecting terrain he knew would be ideal, he pointed to German troops marching along the road. He said that their barracks must be near, which would rule out the area for an RAF landing. Goetz took him to another field, which was uneven and near a German radio listening post. Assuming that RAF reconnaissance planes had logged the station already, he assured Goetz it was perfect.

  The SD next asked John to help thwart an F-Section attempt to discover whether Placke’s ACROBAT network was genuine. It was ostensibly under two Canadian officers, Captains Frank Pickersgill, “Bertrand,” and radio operator John McAlister, “Valentin.” The SD had captured them when they parachuted onto a field ten miles north of Valencay on June 18, but their interrogators learned nothing from them and they were transported to concentration camps in Germany. The SD had been “playing” their radio since that time.

  F-Section, probably in response to Madame Balachowsky’s intelligence that Placke was bragging about running a fake circuit, was sending someone to fly over the parachutage terrain with an S-Phone to verify the Canadians’ voices. Dr. Goetz asked John to speak on the S-Phone for him, because the SD officers’ German accents would give them away. This crossed a line for John, who refused to offer genuine aid to the enemy. Nonetheless, he told Goetz he would consider doing it and needed time to think it over. Two weeks later, John announced his decision: no. It was too late for the SD to find someone else to speak English without a German accent. Placke took John to the site anyway. “He wanted to know the name of the officer who came to speak from the airplane,” John said. “That is why he gave me the S-Phone to listen to the conversation and identify the voice of the speaker . . . I claimed to the Germans not to know the aviator.”

  John lied. He knew the voice of Major Gerry Morel, who the previous May had verified George Starr’s identity by his prodigious profanity. Corporals Alfred von Kapri and Werner Ruehl spoke to Morel, but F-Section’s operations chief recognized German accents when he heard them. The plane turned around. When Morel reported back to London, SOE cut communications with the Germans’ Canadian circuit. However, Placke had others.

  John drew Christmas cards for staff at avenue Foch. The one for Kieffer had the date 1944 on the front. When the major opened it, a paper British soldier popped up and pointed a rifle straight at him. “Do you think so?” Kieffer asked. John nodded. The Allies had already taken North Africa, Sicily, and southern Italy. On the eastern front, the Wehrmacht was retreating from Ukraine. It was obvious even to a prisoner cut off from the world that the next battleground had to be France.

  On New Year’s Eve, Kieffer appeared in John’s workspace with a tray of whisky and vodka for him and radio operator John Young. He drank a toast with them, saying in English, “Good health!” He returned to his office, leaving them the alcohol.

  The SD accelerated its radio game in the new year. Dr. Goetz brought on three assistants for more support, remembering, “Each man had about three or four decoy transmissions on hand during the time when the majority of them were running.” SOE sent more supplies. Goetz recalled, “I was present when, on two occasions, materials were dropped by parachute. That must have been in January or February.”

  In the seven months since John’s arrest, his hair had grown down to his shoulders in the zazou style he had affected on his first mission to the south of France. To clean him up, the SD brought his old barber from Issy-les-Moulineaux to avenue Foch. The man, while clipping John’s hair, offered to smuggle a message out for him. Suspecting entrapment, John declined.

  * * *

  • • •

  Yvonne Cormeau moved from house to house in Gascony, often a hundred miles apart, to prevent the Germans from locking onto her radio waves. Then, noted an SOE report on WHEELWRIGHT, “Yvonne CORMEAU lived in, and worked from, Col. STARR’s house.” The Germans were searching for her and her radio, but failed to pinpoint her location, because, SOE noted, “STARR’s security section was invariably informed of the presence of any D/F [direction finding] car within 100 miles.” Her steady flow of requests to London assured that George was one of the best supplied SOE organizers in F
rance.

  The weapons, however, were of little use until the Allies invaded France. The invasion that failed to materialize in 1943 had to come, George believed, sometime in 1944. In preparation, Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon was becoming a fortress and mustering ground for maquisards from all over Gascony. George ordered his men to bring weapons from Miramont and Gabarret to Castelnau, and trucks delivered even more arms and explosives from Sainte-Maure-de-Peyriac and Condom. A French Resistance report, “Le Batallion de Castelnau,” reckoned, “This represented around fifteen tons of matériel.” George and Mayor Larribeau buried the weapons under beehives, in the ancient castle dungeon, and in secret storehouses throughout the village.

  While laying the ground for defense of his headquarters, George remained closer to Yvonne Cormeau than to Anne-Marie Walters. Raymond Escholier, who knew and admired both women, thought that each was the “living contrast” of the other. He wrote of Yvonne Cormeau that “the rougher maquisards speak of her like a madonna” and that all Gascony called Walters “the true sister of the maquisards.” To Philippe de Gunzbourg, Cormeau was “a woman of high culture.”

  On one of her many cycling expeditions, covering up to fifty miles a day, Cormeau strained a muscle. A doctor confined her to bed in the Larribeau house, where she and George were living at the time. She later told her SOE debriefer that “there was little danger of being D/F’ed when she was staying with Hilaire in March as the house was in a very small village, they knew the operator’s cover story (that of refugee) and they were accustomed to her presence in the village, and they knew she had been ill and in hospital.” She concealed her radio transmitter deep under bundles of straw at the top of the Larribeaus’ barn.

  George and Cormeau often bicycled together, and Cormeau later admitted that “this was against all their security training,” but “it was unlikely that this would have led to difficulties as they usually travelled as brother and sister.” One day, while cycling through a small village, they rested beside a house that was also, as in Castelnau, the school and the town hall. A wanted poster tacked to its shutters offered a reward for the capture of a man and a woman, and they were speechless to see that the images were of themselves. To Cormeau, the drawings were all too accurate: “The only thing that they couldn’t give was the very piercing look of the grey eyes of Hilaire.” The couple split up without a word, fearing they would be overheard. George sent a local courier to tell her to remain where she was until it was safe to move. Four days later, she bicycled to another safe house.

  The danger of capture increased as George’s network grew throughout the region. A leading résistant near Castelnau said that the Germans called George “the invisible man,” whom they were exerting strenuous efforts to find. Cormeau was equally vulnerable. She learned that the Gestapo knew an Englishwoman was operating a clandestine radio in the Gers, and a Spanish communist, who had been turned by the Germans, told the Gestapo that the woman lived in a village called Castelnau. Luckily for her, there were eight villages in the region whose names began with “Castelnau.” She said the reason the Gestapo did not seek her in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon was that it had no water or electricity: “And in their methodic way, they decided that no Englishwoman would live in such primitive conditions.”

  * * *

  • • •

  George Starr’s French followers grew more restive in the new year. When would the Allies land? They could not play at Resistance forever. Yvonne Cormeau observed their gloom with sympathy, noting that early 1944 was “a very, very hard period then, simply because the people were beginning to lose confidence. Enemy propaganda was very strong. It was said, ‘Oh, the English will fight to the last Frenchman.’” In February, Cormeau sent an urgent communiqué to London, “Could you give us a sign that something is going to happen?” London responded in March by sending messages over the BBC to different groups in the southwest, telling them, in Cormeau’s words, “to down tools and join whatever headquarters had been allocated to them. This put in a lot of courage . . . Unfortunately, this was a bit early, but it did encourage them.”

  March proved to be a good period for George after months of foul weather, ill health, and false hope. On March 11, London sent him a second radio operator, Lieutenant Dennis Parsons. Maurice Parisot received the young British officer, and the artist Maurice Poncelet gave him a radio from an earlier parachutage. Code-named “Pierrot,” Parsons was, in Escholier’s words, a “most pleasant boy. Physically, one hundred per cent English. Morally too, as well. As to his accent, it was imperceptible, it was more Swiss Roman than English.” Like Anne-Marie Walters, Parsons had studied in Geneva before the war.

  London promoted George to the rank of major ten days after Parsons’s arrival. It also ordered fresh operations, raising Resistance morale at least as much as it damaged the Germans’. The first mission was to sabotage the Poudrerie Nationale de Toulouse, the National Gunpowder Factory, south of Toulouse on the River Garonne. The plant, established under royal warrant by King François I in 1536, had turned out tons of powder for use against the Germans in the First World War. Since November 1942, when the Germans occupied Vichy’s Free Zone, the well-protected works had produced explosives for the country’s enemy. London warned George that if he did not destroy the factory, the RAF would. “We didn’t want them to do that,” he said. “Too near the city.” The factory employed six thousand workers, many of whom would die in a daylight raid by the RAF.

  George assigned the task to his new lieutenant, Claude Arnault. The only way for the young French officer to disable the factory was by infiltrating it at night, when no employees would be harmed. Arnault took a train to Toulouse with Anne-Marie Walters and gendarme captain Raymond Cosculuella, who had helped the escapees from Eysses, and four explosives-filled suitcases. When they arrived, police and Gestapo agents at the station’s exit seized Cosculuella. Walters and Arnault got through with three of the cases. They went to a safe house, where Cosculuella joined them in the evening. His police inspector’s badge had dissuaded the Germans from searching his suitcase, and they released him with an apology.

  A communist engineer at the factory provided Arnault with the facility’s blueprints and a visiting engineer’s pass. The two men smuggled explosives into the plant over the following week. The next stage fell to Arnault, who snuck alone at night, as Anne-Marie Walters recounted, into “a building 500 ft. long entirely lit and guarded by 10 men.” He fixed fifteen charges, timed to blow after two hours, before proceeding to another building. As he was placing another fifteen devices, the bombs next door exploded. “The 2-hrs. pencils went off after 45 minutes,” Walters said. Arnault nevertheless stayed to complete his work in the second building, while, Walters said, “the Boches were running madly after ‘all’ the saboteurs and guarding all exits.”

  Arnault fled, cutting through a barbed-wire fence and sliding down an embankment to a railway bridge. “The fools were only guarding the road bridge, next to the railway one; so I crawled along the tracks and got away,” he told Walters. “From the opposite bank of the river I watched the last charges going up: it was so beautiful, Minou.”

  A Vichy police file for March 28, 1944, recorded “a series of explosions, thought to number 31 in the factory, between 0315 and 0730. The explosives were placed on the very powerful electric motors which served the grinding machines used to mix the gunpowder. Thirty out of 31 motors were destroyed.” The factory was out of business for six weeks.

  Soon afterward, the Germans captured Captain Raymond Cosculuella in Agen. Walters learned about it from George when they chanced upon each other on the road to Agen, he in his Simca with its bug-eye headlights and she on her bicycle. George said the Gestapo broke into a meeting above a restaurant in Agen: “Cyprien [Albert Cambon] jumped up, grabbed his gun and fired; he killed one of the Gestapo men and wounded another, but he received fifteen bullets in the chest and died immediately. Lépine [Cosculuella] was taken away manacled.�
�� George warned her to avoid Agen, and she reminded him that Cosculuella had a photograph of Claude Arnault for a false driving license. This gave the Gestapo the likeness of another SOE agent for their collection. The Gestapo tortured Cosculuella, who revealed nothing, before dispatching him to a concentration camp in Germany.

  * * *

  • • •

  By early spring of 1944, the SD counterespionage headquarters at 84 avenue Foch was accommodating a parade of captured agents. One was a résistant named Pierre Brossolette, whom they brought to the fifth-floor guardroom on the morning of March 22, 1944. A socialist militant who had escaped to London, he had worked with Charles de Gaulle since April 1942. He not only wrote and presented radio speeches for de Gaulle, he was one of the few people from whom de Gaulle accepted criticism. Brossolette parachuted into the field in 1943. The SD captured him in Rennes and interrogated him for three days under torture that included the baignoire, a form of waterboarding, and expert beatings. As he sat on a bench in the guardroom at avenue Foch, he noticed an open window. It took him a second to run at it and jump.

  Ernest Vogt was working in his office below when he heard a noise and saw Brossolette falling. He sprinted downstairs and out to the street, where the Frenchman was lying in blood. His bones were shattered, but he was breathing. “Don’t move,” Vogt said. The SD took him to the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, where he died. Vogt believed that Brossolette intended to escape rather than to kill himself. From then on, guards locked the windows.