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

by Charles Glass

  George Starr felt the time had come for him to do more. He sent Claude Arnault on May 13 to conduct another sabotage mission. The objective was the Lorraine-Dietrich factory, which produced parts for German planes and armored vehicles, at Bagnères-de-Bigorre near Lourdes. With three accomplices, André Coulom and two other men, Arnault broke into the Lorraine-Dietrich factory and planted charges in the machinery. When he detonated the explosives, shards of weapons-making equipment rocketed in every direction. “The only trouble was that we didn’t get away quickly enough and received a shower of broken glass on our heads,” he told Walters when she returned from Paris. The saboteurs made their getaway by train to Tarbes.

  Arnault’s first attack in Toulouse had cost one man in the factory his leg, but there were no casualties at the Lorraine-Dietrich plant. In comparison, RAF bombardments of factories in the area in April and May killed 67 civilians and seriously wounded 110 more. Sabotage was proving more effective than strategic bombing at destruction without killing and alienating civilians. The objective was to reduce Germany’s capacity to withstand the Allied invasion, whenever it came, without losing the support of the French population.

  SOE’s official historian, M.R.D. Foot, wrote that George’s accomplishments between January and May 1944 were among the finest F-Section could boast:

  In Gascony, WHEELWRIGHT flourished. Starr had several hidden Eurekas and reception committees well trained in their use. In five months, from 105 sorties, he received more than 1,200 containers, substantially more than PROSPER or SCIENTIST at their peaks.

  The Resistance in the southwest had bloodied the Germans, blown up armaments factories, and derailed trains. Its résistants were armed and committed, but they could not liberate the country on their own. That required the might of the United States and the British Empire. “To tell the truth,” reflected Raymond Escholier, “we thought of nothing but the landing.” But when? Resistance fighters asked. When?

  TWELVE

  Das Reich

  In almost every department of France our men waited—waited for the signal that the great day was at hand.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  At the end of May 1944, George Starr was struggling to hold his group together. Sabotaging the rails and destroying arms factories hurt the Germans but did not end the occupation. The invasion on which they staked their lives was delayed again and again. British and American amphibious and airborne units planned to assault the German forces in France on May 31, but bad weather made that impossible.

  “Underneath he was a person of great patience and determination,” Buckmaster wrote of George. But as May turned to June, George’s patience was running low. It was a trying time of indecision and frustration. George used all his skills as a diplomat, which were few, and as a commander, which were many, to retain his group’s loyalty.

  On the night of June 5, armed men in berets, peasant wool clothing, and heavy boots crowded as they often did into the Larribeaus’ farmhouse at the edge of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Beeswax candles and a wood fire lit the rustic kitchen, where George presided over an anxious conference of his chief lieutenants. The drinks were white wine and Armagnac, cigarettes the foul-smelling Baltos, and the talk of war. George had given up smoking and white wine, though that did not prevent the others from indulging themselves as they spent another night yearning for the long-promised invasion of France.

  Outside, a full moon cast the farmyard in cool blue shadow. Most of the village, with no electric light, was asleep. At a little before nine o’clock, the hour for the BBC’s Messages personnels, Yvonne Cormeau left the house alone. She walked to the barn, climbed up the hayloft ladder, and dug into the straw. Her wireless receiver lay in its familiar hiding hole. She assembled its four parts, hooked up the aerial, and put on her headphones. The radio sputtered static and German propaganda until she found the frequency of Radio Londres.

  The announcer greeted listeners with the familiar preamble “Les Français parlent aux Français,” “The French speak to the French.” Next came a litany of apparently meaningless phrases that made sense only to selected résistants. “That evening, 306 messages were sent out by the BBC,” wrote Buckmaster. And that night, for the very first time, “every single message was loaded with meaning.”

  “Wilma says yes” was code for destroying the Angoulême-Bordeaux railroad. “It’s hot in Suez” decreed the cutting of telephone and telegraph cables. “The dice are on the table” and other doggerel told operatives from Calais to Marseille to demolish, rampage, and kill in a wave of terrorist violence to disrupt and distract the German occupiers. At last, Yvonne Cormeau heard, “Il a une voix de fausset,” “He has a falsetto voice.”

  “I didn’t even bother to go down the ladder,” she said later, “but jumped down so as to tell everybody about it, because this was the culminating moment of our mission.” She ran across the yard to the house and repeated the BBC’s words, “Il a une voix de fausset.” George turned to his lieutenants. “It’s on,” he announced. The French partisans were skeptical, but le patron was not to be contradicted: “They land at dawn tomorrow. Now, get cracking.”

  “Cracking” entailed heading into the night on missions he had assigned them over the previous weeks: demolishing rail lines, sawing telephone poles, closing roads, and blowing bridges to cripple German communications. Above all, his guerrilla teams had to delay nearby German forces, especially the Panzers of the SS’s Das Reich armored division, from reaching the Normandy beaches. American, British, and Commonwealth troops were at that moment cruising toward shore as the cutting edge of Operation Neptune. More German troops tied down by the Resistance meant fewer Germans killing Allied soldiers. SOE signals chief Leo Marks wrote that “the Resistance was to act as Neptune’s trident by attacking enemy troops, disrupting communications and blocking reinforcements.” A Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) intelligence report noted that the Normandy landings “were synchronized with an appeal by General Eisenhower to the Forces Française de l’Intérieur (FFI), the French Forces of the Interior, to cease clandestine operations and come out into the open.”

  In Gascony, thousands did. As if by instinct, résistants were flocking to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Yvonne Cormeau remembered “terrific rejoicing”:

  They came up during the night; and we had been up all the time also, cleaning up what weapons we had. We didn’t have many, but still quite a bunch, and they had been hidden under the beehives. We thought the bees would be good and protect them. And this was of course out of doors, so we had first of all put a lot of soft soap on them so that they would not rust. . . . Well, we had to get hold of the man himself, the beekeeper, to move his little hives a bit. We got all the stuff out, took it into the kitchen and spent the night cleaning these weapons.

  “No arms were supplied before D-Day,” George recalled. Now he supplied them in abundance, transforming underground résistants into guerrillas. Most were willing to risk their lives, but George urged caution to keep casualties to a minimum. SOE’s model of the guerrilla leader, T. E. Lawrence, had written, “Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership.” Allied intelligence put total Resistance strength in the southwest at 4,500 men. Of these, only 2,500 had arms. Commanding irregulars, many of whom joined at the last minute, from disparate political creeds required a high caliber of leadership.

  “Alone, two men kept their nerve,” wrote Raymond Escholier, “Hilaire in Castelnau, Parisot in Saint-Gô.” Captain Maurice Parisot, his wife, Jeanne, and Armagnac distiller Abel Sempé had also heard the BBC. They went straight to the town of Panjas, which Parisot and Abbé Laurent Talès had provisioned with stocks of food and six tons of SOE mortars, machine guns, rifles, ammunition, and bombs for the five hundred or so men assembling there. Like George’s units, they launched assaults on roads, rails, fuel depots, telegraphs, and telephones throughout the long night.

 
Across fields and woodlands for miles around Panjas and Castelnau, Armagnac and WHEELWRIGHT fighters savaged Wehrmacht communications. North of the River Garonne, Philippe de Gunzbourg’s maquisards blew bridges and blocked roads with felled trees and booby traps. Résistants in George’s region alone rendered more than nine hundred sections of railway inoperable. Resistance sympathizers in the Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT) smashed the exchanges and left them for the Germans to repair. Railway laborers, always the most pro-Resistance of France’s trade unionists, destroyed the right-hand cylinders of their locomotives, smashed the points at junctions, and knocked out the signal lights. Tony Brooks’s PIMENTO circuit stopped trains between Marseille and Lyon. The successful operations justified two years of hiding, acquiring weapons, learning to use them, and risking slow death in concentration camps.

  For George Starr, the night of June 5 was an epiphany. Emerging at last from his long guerre des ombres, war of shadows, Gaston the Belgian collaborator declared himself as “Colonel” Hilaire, military commander in the FFI. “My role changed completely on D-Day,” he said, “and I came into the open and could fight.” In Escholier’s words, “The supposed refugee from the north threw off his mask and was revealed as a war chief.” When two peasants from another village rode by on bicycles, George heard one warn the other that Gaston the Belgian was a traitor working with the Germans. His disguise had served him well.

  “Now Hilaire’s organising genius was seen to its fullest advantage,” wrote Buckmaster. “The disposition of his arms dumps was such that each village knew where it could arm itself and had qualified leaders to control and direct its effort.” The destruction of the telephone and telegraph lines achieved an unstated objective: German reliance on their radios permitted the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to monitor the extra wireless traffic and break the German field codes. It was a service to Allied victory of which the résistants who made it possible remained ignorant during the war. The Germans’ other option was to send written orders by hand. This had drawbacks, as George remarked: “They sent out motorcycle dispatch riders, but they didn’t get very far. We didn’t shoot them, unless they resisted and we had to.” He claimed that his men did not stretch thin wire to decapitate the motorcyclists, “nothing naughty like that. Perhaps they were shot. I gave instructions not to, but . . .”

  George blocked the main north-south and east-west highways, he said, “in spite of seven crack German divisions, including Das Reich, and other S.S. troops in the area, who were attacking with double the number of men and the most elaborate modern equipment as well as planes and tanks.”

  George restored Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon’s historic role as a fortress from which medieval lords once dominated the plain below. He strengthened the hamlet’s defenses, established forward outposts, and put French former military officers in command of different sections of fighters. Commandant Prost, a career officer since 1932 who had received several parachutages for George near Fourcès, directed the line of fire. Artillery captain Robert Bloch took charge of arms and ammunition. Captain Henry Solal commanded the antitank unit. Solal was a fortunate appointment, a seasoned veteran of the First World War and of colonial conflicts in Africa who, in Escholier’s view, was “erudite, intelligent, artistic.” Dr. Jean Deyris, who had treated Anne-Marie Walters, commanded the medical corps. German-speaking Théo Lévy became head of George’s Deuxième Bureau, intelligence.

  Just as important to George were the civilians, whose lives would be disrupted by war. He liaised with the heads of the butchers’ and bakers’ cooperatives, as well as government officials he knew to be pro-Resistance. They provided him with the means “for feeding not only the troops, but also the civilian population, one of my goals being that the civilian population should not suffer, because a Maquis cannot exist without the sympathy of the general population.”

  As the sun rose on D-Day, George raced out in his Simca to alert the followers who had yet to learn their war had begun. Reaching the Castagnos family’s farm near Condom at eight o’clock, he shouted up to Anne-Marie Walters’s bedroom window, “Haven’t you heard? They’ve landed in Normandy.”

  Walters did not go downstairs, she wrote, “I ran downstairs.” She and George tuned into the BBC to hear the national anthems of Britain, the United States, and France. Walters dashed into the vineyards to tell Henri and Odilla Castagnos and their son, André. The family rushed to the house, where neighbors joined their celebration. “Everybody kissed everybody else and wiped away the furtive tears of emotion,” Walters wrote.

  George asked her to wait at the farm for instructions, having previously warned her that the German Feldgendarmerie in Condom were seeking “a fair-haired woman who lived in the neighborhood.” As he returned to Castelnau, boys from the surrounding towns and villages joined the great adventure. “The young men of Condom,” Walters wrote, “rolled their fathers’ old army kit and a few warm clothes in a blanket and started up to the maquis.” Many, however, were “disappointed to see that the Allies were not going to land in the southwest right away.”

  Commandant Prost established a network of small posts to protect the routes into Castelnau and, during the night, dispatched patrols to cut all telegraph and telephone lines between Condom and neighboring villages. Solal praised the volunteers “assigned to blow the bridges, notably the Montrabeau-Losse-Condom. Mission accomplished without casualties.” In one of his many detailed accounts of the war in the Gers, he added that the men who sabotaged the Germans all night “arrived at 8 in the morning in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon and immediately occupied the village. At nine, the tricolor flag was raised at the mairie [town hall].”

  “The first job was getting out arms and equipping the men, forming them into sections, companies, feeding them and making arrangements,” George said, “and preparing various immediate expeditions to carry out the destruction order received from London.” His sappers escalated operations throughout D-Day, reporting back on the demolition of rail lines, telegraph wires cut, and roads denied to German vehicles. “Large numbers of [German] troops had then to be deployed to ensure the safety of communications,” wrote Buckmaster. “And every man used for this purpose was one man less fighting the invading troops on the beachhead.”

  Resistance fighters in the north provided the Allies with intelligence on German fortifications and troop placements. When the forces came up from the beaches, the Frenchmen acted as guides and interpreters. They helped them find food, shelter, and people they could trust. Normandy was demonstrating the value of the Resistance.

  The résistants in the south were no less effective, but the requirements were different. There were no Allied soldiers to help. Instead, the southern Resistance hobbled the Germans and thwarted their attempts to send reinforcements north. All they needed to keep fighting were supplies and encouragement from on high. George was with his maquisards on the evening of D-Day, when General Charles de Gaulle came on the radio from London to exhort his people:

  The supreme battle has been joined. It is, of course, the battle of France and the battle for France. For the sons of France, wherever they are, whatever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means at their disposal.

  To some, de Gaulle’s speech validated their underground war. Others saw it as the general’s attempt to co-opt a Resistance that was anything but united in support of him. George was one of only a few SOE organizers to gather under his command disparate factions—pro–de Gaulle, anti–de Gaulle, communist, socialist, royalist, and foreigners—into a cohesive force. He armed, fed, clothed, and commanded them without regard to their political loyalties. One objective bound them, for the moment: expelling the occupier.

  An hour before sunrise on the seventh, Théo Lévy raced into Castelnau on his motorcycle. Behind the young Jewish partisan rumbled a convoy of about two hundred men he had armed with weapons from thirty
-six containers that landed during the night. Lévy told Escholier, “In the little square, Hilaire in a canadienne with a submachine gun in his bandolier, a Colt in his belt, received them with a big smile.”

  One résistant recalled seeing George “always in espadrilles, threadbare trousers and shirtsleeves or a pullover.” Commandant Prost criticized his peasant attire as inappropriate for a commander and advised him to wear a British officer’s uniform. This amused George, who ignored him.

  Castelnau grew like a Klondike town in the Gold Rush. Every house became an armory. Family kitchens served as mess halls. Barns became barracks. The twelfth-century stone chapel was converted into a prison for enemies that the maquisards were capturing. Among them were members of the Milice, whom the résistants hated more than they did the Germans.

  George gave refuge on the night of June 7 to a unit of the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). He regretted it in the morning, when Mayor Larribeau told him “that these men of the FTP had broken into the prison (which was in the church), had knocked the prisoners about and had put them on their lorry to take them away no doubt to do away with them.”

  George remonstrated with the FTP chief, who relented and gave back the prisoners. “This incident caused somewhat of an upheaval amongst my own Maquis and I had to address them,” George recalled. He explained to men thirsting for vengeance that “it was not up to us to administer rough justice, that was for the French courts later.”