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

by Charles Glass

  More visitors appeared during the day. Among them were the Spanish Republicans, with whom George came to an immediate understanding: “The arrangement was made then that I should provide as many arms as possible and they would execute any military orders that I might at any time transmit to them in order to carry out the orders of the High Command.” Their chief, Camilo, moved into the command post of his friend Hilaire. Frenchmen and Spaniards, Jews and dissident Germans, peasant farmers and young deserters from German forced labor camps, communists and conservatives, all converged on the hamlet. Castelnau as the preeminent maquis garrison in the Gers was becoming a military target.

  “The Germans tried to impose severer curfew and circulation restrictions, etc.,” George’s debrief stated, “but these were of no avail as after a short time if [German] patrols went out they were promptly ambushed by the F.F.I. and wiped out.”

  The German High Command put the Das Reich armored division on standby on June 7 to move north to Normandy. The division planned to transport its tanks and other tracked vehicles on purpose-built railroad flatcars. By rail, the vehicles and men could cover the five hundred miles to the front in three days. However, Tony Brooks’s railroad workers drained the lubricating oil from the flatcars’ axles and filled them with abrasive paste. This forced the division on June 8 to drive its tracked vehicles over asphalt roads. The SS’s Panzer IV tanks’ top speed was twenty-four miles an hour, much slower than the train. The drive wasted scarce fuel, damaged tanks, and shredded the roads. To avoid exposing massed armored vehicles to attack from Allied air forces and Resistance units, the column’s 1,400 vehicles traveled one hundred yards apart. On the first day of its trek north, the division stopped to rescue a Wehrmacht garrison in the town of Tulle that was under Resistance siege. Das Reich routed the maquisards and, in revenge for forty German dead, hanged ninety-nine civilians from street lamps and balconies.

  While the bulk of Das Reich proceeded north, elements of the division stayed in the southwest to deal with the maquis. George didn’t risk confronting them by attacking or holding German garrisons. That was, to him, the opposite of mobile guerrilla war. His ragged warriors ambushed traveling Das Reich units, but they did not linger. He described his tactics:

  Pick a bend in the road, round a bend. Drop a bloody tree right across the road and they’d come. They’d have to stop. Choose a nice place and just fire into them with everything you’ve got. Drop another tree behind them so they can’t go the other way. Give them ten minutes of hell, and then get the hell out of it.

  Weakened by George’s WHEELWRIGHT, Tony Brooks’s PIMENTO, and the communist FTP, Das Reich came under fire from Philippe de Gunzbourg’s fighters at a bridge over the River Dordogne. Gunzbourg had cut all the telephone lines out of Bergerac during the night of June 7 and made the Germans pay in lives for every mile of road they covered. “The region (Dordogne-Sud) became the center of a complete blockage,” wrote Gunzbourg, “where the enemy had to dig in, bury his tanks and call for reinforcements from Périgueux and from the Gironde.” Gunzbourg recalled that the Das Reich division “wanted to go to Agen from Montauban and to Normandy [but] found itself cut off by the positions occupied by the Resistance.”

  Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Gerd von Runstedt, commander of Germany’s forces in the west, issued an order to Das Reich’s commanding officer, General Heinz Lammerding: “For the reestablishment of order and security, the most energetic measures must be taken in order to frighten the inhabitants of this infested region, whom we have to make give up the taste for welcoming resistance groups and letting themselves be controlled by them. This will serve as a warning to the entire population.” Warnings came one after another in savage retribution against civilians wherever maquisards fired on Das Reich or captured its personnel. But the reprisals wasted time, further delaying the division’s march to Normandy.

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  On June 9, George’s region went quiet. Das Reich was preoccupied farther north with other maquis groups, and the decisive battle raged five hundred miles away in Normandy. “After the first two or three days of enthusiasm were over, the men became terribly bored,” recalled Anne-Marie Walters. “They had nothing to do all day: the Germans were scattered at great distances from Castelnau and expeditions were rare.”

  Philippe de Gunzbourg wrote that some maquis groups, particularly the communists, were attempting to conquer and control territory, as at Tulle: “The tactic of grouping, protecting and defending did not work,” he wrote, calling the policy “weak and bad.” The Resistance’s basic strategy of destroying German infrastructure and ambushing units on their way to Normandy was working. Yet General Eisenhower’s SHAEF reduced parachutages to the guerrillas. Gunzbourg feared that the Allied command was losing faith in the Resistance. In fact, it was trying to save French civilians from German retribution. General Pierre Koenig, commander of the FFI, ordered his representatives in France, the Délégués Militaires de Region (Regional Military Delegates) to reduce their attacks:

  CURRENTLY IMPOSSIBLE PREDICT NORMAL SUPPLY WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION YOU LIMIT TO A SIMMER ALL GUERRILLA ACTION STOP WHEN POSSIBLE BREAK CONTACT EVERYWHERE WHILE WAITING FOR PHASE OF REORGANIZATION STOP.

  Koenig’s order of June 10 arrived too late to save the civilians of Oradour-sur-Glane, which the SS visited that day. The ancient village lay 160 miles north of Montauban on Das Reich’s route to Normandy. Unlike Tulle, where Resistance forces had attacked the German garrison, Oradour-sur-Glane had witnessed no violence. Yet German frustration with the hidden enemy that was killing, wounding, and capturing its men found an outlet in Oradour. The 3rd Company, 1st Battalion of Das Reich’s 4th Regiment, Der Führer, entered the village from the south at about two in the afternoon. It closed the roads and ordered the mayor to assemble the population. The Germans locked the women and children in the Saint-Martin Church. Outside, they slaughtered the men with machine guns. The SS then turned on the 400 women and children in the sanctuary, raking the interior with automatic weapons fire, lobbing hand grenades, and setting the church alight. A few villagers who had escaped to the fields heard their relatives’ screams. Only one woman, Marguerite Rouffranche, survived the inferno that turned the church to ashes. The death toll was 642 men, women, and children, almost the entire population. At nightfall, the Germans looted and destroyed every building except one that they used as a command post.

  In Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, no one knew about the events farther north. The morning of June 10 had dawned clear and warm enough for George to put the top down on his Simca and drive to the Castagnos farm. Anne-Marie Walters watched the car crawling up the road and smiled at the “sight of a pointed head sticking through in the most comic fashion.” The passenger was Flight Sergeant Leslie Brown, whom George introduced as a “New Zealand pilot who has just joined us. He was shot down a month or so ago and has been moving from maquis to maquis. Now he will stay with us for awhile.” Brown had been on the run since April 12, when German antiaircraft fire caught his Stirling heavy bomber over Anzex, about forty miles north of Castelnau. After hiding with various Resistance groups, he turned up at George’s door. Rather than escape to Spain, the twenty-six-year-old New Zealander, whom the French called l’anglais, the Englishman, volunteered to stay and fight. George tasked him with instructing young maquisards in the use of weapons, although Brown spoke no French and had no infantry training.

  George was weary, confessing to Walters: “I haven’t had a single night’s sleep since the maquis was started.” He told her to come to Castelnau “to help with washing up and other fatigues ‘proper for women.’” She obeyed the order with misgivings.

  I began to see the change that would take place in my life; he had his “staff” now, mostly young French officers who had been hiding for the past months and working with the Resistance. I would no longer be a confidante, he was too busy. And I was a woman, and not supposed to understand “military strateg
y.”

  George turned to counterespionage. His agents discovered a Frenchman with a gold medal awarded by Adolf Hitler “for exceptional services to the Führer.” That was sufficient for his execution. A more complicated case involved two suspected spies, a German woman and her Polish husband, living near Castelnau on the road to La Romieu. During the night, George sent an anti-Nazi German refugee, whom Escholier called “Hans,” to investigate. Hans, dressed in a German uniform, and two French officers reached the house in total darkness. He knocked on the door and announced himself as Oberst (Colonel) Rheinhardt. The woman said, “Come in. It’s not good to be outside in this country. There are maquis everywhere around here. Very near us, in Castelnau, there is a formidable camp commanded by an English colonel.” Hans entered the unlighted house and raised his Colt pistol. A struggle ensued that left the couple lying in blood on the floor. The three agents left. When they returned in the morning, only the man’s body remained. The German woman had feigned her death and fled. Hans went out to track her down.

  Later that morning, George assigned a local Resistance chief to sabotage the railroad bridge near Astaffort village. Using more than forty pounds of plastic explosives, the chief and his men blew up the line that carried ammunition from the arsenal at Tarbes to German troops in Agen.

  Hans meanwhile captured the German woman, bound her hands with rope, and brought her to George’s headquarters. The room was resplendent with captured war trophies, including Milice armbands and photographs of Vichy’s Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism who had fought for Germany on the Russian front. George sat as judge in the ad hoc trial. Escholier wrote:

  The German woman arrived at the HQ. She was a strong blond woman with eyes the color of Vergissmeinnicht [forget-me-not]. As she had struggled step by step against her kidnappers, she was completely disheveled. Neither pretty nor gracious, yet the terror and the anger rendered her beautiful. Her look was harrowing.

  The woman claimed to be French from Lorraine, to hate the Germans, and to be working for the Resistance. One of George’s men tested her, saying, “We are miliciens. We are all volunteers against Bolshevism. We are the Germans’ friends. Don’t be alarmed.” She relaxed for an instant, a mistake that amounted to a confession. She struggled to wrench the rope off her wrists, but, a moment later, yielded to the inevitable. “Blindfold me, Monsieur Officer,” she said. George did not speak. Escholier wrote, “In truth, this inflexible man was looking above all for a way to soften the end of this painful meeting, the end of the life of this spy.”

  George offered the woman some water. She was not thirsty. He ordered the men to bring her coffee. Again, she refused to drink. George sipped the coffee to show it was not poisoned. She still declined. A doctor injected her with a sedative. When she was comatose, a “specialist team” took her away.

  “I don’t think anyone in high places could hold these two summary executions against Hilaire,” Escholier wrote. “For the rest, one must recognize that in Gascony Hilaire’s justice was swift. It always struck a severe blow and was never accompanied by torture sessions.” Executions were taking place all over France as miliciens and résistants fought one another in a fratricidal bloodbath. Miliciens slaughtered captured maquisards, and ordinary Frenchmen and -women exacted revenge by murdering suspected collaborators and humiliating women accused of sexual relations with Germans by shaving their heads and stripping them naked in public. Maurice Buckmaster observed, “Hatred and violence burst through the length of France as the Maquisards, indeed nearly the whole population, rose to pay off the score of four years of barbarism, terrorism and tyranny.” SOE-armed résistants took part, as Buckmaster admitted: “Germans were shot and their bodies floated down the canals.”

  The momentary lull in the Gers allowed George to accelerate training of the Castelnau battalion’s six hundred or so fighters. Some of the older men were veterans of the Great War, but youngsters without combat experience took a crash course in Sten and Bren guns, grenades, ambushes, and skirmish lines. Ammunition shortages, however, made target practice impossible. New Zealand flight sergeant Brown became a favorite with his young pupils, despite the lack of a common language. George’s only battle-scarred contingent was the Spanish detachment under one-legged Commander Camilo. With three years’ experience battling Franco’s army, the Spaniards needed no lessons in guerrilla warfare. And they had a powerful motive: vengeance on the Nazis for turning their republic into a military dictatorship.

  A French officer, Captain Georges Monnet, christened George’s ragtag band of French peasants, Spanish guérilleros, German dissidents, and refugees from much of Europe “the Colonel’s Hollywood Brigade.” George loved the name. Escholier wrote that Hollywood’s “biggest star” was the Spaniard Camilo. Le Section Hollywood turned out for its first formal parade on June 12 in Castelnau to salute Maurice Poncelet. Poncelet had just escaped, with George’s and Maurice Parisot’s help, from a Milice prison where he had been tortured. Escholier remembered that the Hollywood Brigade’s “rough men, bearded, dressed in rags, but handsome under the burning sun, filled with emotion, rendered this military honor.” Poncelet met George for the first time when le patron received the artist in his room at Larribeau’s house. Poncelet was surprised to see “Colonel Hilaire” in shirtsleeves: “A machine gun, a rifle, a dagger and some grenades surrounded photographs of his children.”

  On June 13, George and Cormeau returned to Castelnau at dawn from an all-night meeting in Condom with the town’s subprefect, gendarmerie captain, and police commissioner. After stopping at Mayor Larribeau’s house to discover whether any messages had arrived in his absence, he went to Jeanne Robert’s former school. Camilo, two other Spaniards, and a Frenchman were inside beating a man they had just captured. “The prisoner was literally gushing blood out of his nose,” George recalled. After scolding Camilo and his men for illegal and immoral behavior, he asked Dr. Deyris to give the prisoner first aid and to put him with the other prisoners in the church. George swore that Camilo did not torture any prisoner after that.

  Later that day, the deceptive calm in the Gers ended when a Milice detachment from Agen ambushed one of George’s French patrols near the village of Astaffort. Among the cornered résistants was André Castagnos, the teenage son of Anne-Marie Walters’s hosts, Henri and Odilla Castagnos. About 150 miliciens ambushed André’s detachment at the foot of a hill. “Meanwhile, at the top of the same hill, the first party was approaching in full fighting order,” Walters recounted. “The miliciens ordered André and his friends to stand in a line, shoulder to shoulder, while they took cover behind them.” The other résistants, seeing their friends in front of the enemy, fired over their heads. The miliciens panicked and shot their ten hostages in the back at point-blank range.

  Nine of the maquisards died instantly. André, severely wounded in the right lung, lay bleeding for eight hours before someone took him to the nearest hospital in Lectoure. Physicians feared the Germans would find the young “terrorist” and punish the hospital staff, but a Spanish nun refused to leave his side until Dr. Deyris and his parents took him to a hospital in Condom. Surgeons there saved his life, making him, in Anne-Marie Walters’s words, “the only survivor of a massacre organised by Frenchmen against Frenchmen.”

  While the Battle of Astaffort was raging, six of Camilo’s guérilleros were battling a sixty-five-strong German detachment ten miles to the north near Agen. The Spaniards took cover behind an old stone tower and kept the Germans at bay for an hour and a half. When they exhausted their ammunition, the Germans rounded them up and murdered them. A bicycle messenger brought word of the killings to Castelnau. Camilo raced to the scene in his dilapidated Renault with the top down, followed by two trucks filled with his compatriots. The Germans had gone, but the bodies, some mutilated and all blood drenched, lay where they had fallen. Camilo carried them back to the village.

  Castelnau staged its first military funeral. The French comp
anies lined one side of the square, while the Spanish stood to attention on the other. A wooden cart bore the bodies of the six fallen Spaniards into the plaza. Seeing her comrades’ naked and bloody corpses, one with a bloody stump where a foot had been, Walters recalled, “I couldn’t help tears running down my cheeks.” The men presented arms and remained immobile while Camilo delivered his eulogy. Although unable to understand Spanish, Walters sensed “that he spoke of hate, revenge and honour. His face, his gestures and his tone were more eloquent than words.”

  During this time, Walters’s relationship with George Starr was deteriorating. Escholier wrote that George suspected Walters was having an affair with Claude Arnault. Angry at her late return from her mission to Gunzbourg and Arnault, he dismissed her as his liaison to Gunzbourg. This upset Walters, who longed to see Arnault again. Her replacement was Maguy Merchez, daughter of Antoine Merchez, the Belgian résistant in Agen. Walters asked Maguy to take a letter to her lover. Maguy hesitated, but Walters insisted and, Escholier wrote, “Reluctantly, Maggie [Maguy] finished by agreeing, then, at the last moment, she didn’t have the courage to take the letter and confided in Annette [Yvonne Cormeau], the agent most devoted to Hilaire.”

  Cormeau showed George the letter, which Escholier quoted: “Everything is going badly in Castelnau. Terrible food supplies . . . Hilaire is an odious being.” George swore in Gascon slang and told Cormeau to bring Walters to him. “A rather violent discussion erupted between Colette [Walters] and her chief,” wrote Escholier. “She would never forgive him for violating the secrecy of her correspondence. Hilaire ignored it. He had other worries. The country was infested with spies, with disguised Boches and collaborators with the enemy.” Walters remained in Castelnau, grudgingly doing work “proper for women.” She and George avoided each other.