Bergerac and Castelnau demonstrated that mustering large numbers of guerrillas in one place exposed them to attack and jeopardized civilians whose lives they could not protect. The Resistance was not a regular army. As a mobile guerrilla force, however, its achievements were growing.
* * *
• • •
“Prisoners captured from the Second [SS] Panzer Division described its march north as one made through a practically hostile territory,” reported the New York Times on June 23, 1944, “in which patrols constantly . . . had to be diverted to deal with the Maquis in central France. . . . These Maquis attacks and the sabotage of railways are reported to have been partly responsible, as well as the Allied air attacks, for the arrival of Field Marshal Gen. Erwin Rommel’s armored divisions at the front in bits and pieces.” The next day the New York Times published General Eisenhower’s praise for the Resistance that “has increased both in size and in the scope of its activities. . . . The French were playing effectively their part in the war of liberation.” The newspaper commented, “This lurking, powerful and secret foe is an ever-present danger to the Germans and its continuous exasperating work another threat to their morale as well as to their military operations.” An internal SHAEF report stated that “FFI have fought exceedingly well with inadequate armament.”
On June 24, three days after the destruction of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, an exhausted and depleted Das Reich 2nd SS Panzer Division staggered into Normandy. This was eighteen days after the Operation Neptune landings, too late to repel the invasion. Maquisards from George’s, Gunzbourg’s, Brooks’s, and the other circuits had bought Eisenhower a crucial two-week respite from Das Reich’s attentions. Moreover, the division was so weak that it had to regroup and replace the equipment, ammunition, and personnel lost on the perilous journey before it could fight again. A shadow of what it had been, Das Reich would go into battle as a reduced force alongside other SS and Wehrmacht units that slowed, but could not prevent, the Allied advance through Normandy’s dense and overgrown hedgerows.
“The extra fortnight’s delay imposed on what should have been a three-day journey may well have been of decisive importance for the successful securing of the Normandy bridgehead,” wrote M.R.D. Foot in his authorized history of the SOE in France. “Affairs in the bridgehead went so badly for the allies in the first few days that the arrival of one more first-class fully equipped armoured division might easily have rolled some part of the still tenuous allied front right back on to the beaches and sent the whole of ‘Neptune’ awry.”
On June 28, German units advanced from east and west toward the safe house where Yvonne Cormeau was transmitting George’s messages. As they neared her position, George appeared in his open-top Simca and told her to get in. The pair sped south for a few miles until a German armored personnel carrier blocked the road. A sergeant and his troops ordered the pair out of the car and into a ditch. Cormeau recalled:
With two soldiers in between us, both had a pistol, one in my back, one in Hilaire’s back, we were back-to-back and these two were back-to-back too and therefore if the man’s elbow, I gathered, had moved or something like that, the other who had felt his elbow on his body, on his back, would have shot Hilaire. . . .
The sergeant got on the radio to ask what he should do with a “tobacco inspector” and a “district nurse” he had detained. The radio crackled, but there was no answer. While they waited, Cormeau said, she sweated so much that flies stuck to her skin. “I couldn’t move,” she said, “because, if we’d moved, they would have shot immediately.” The wait went on and on. An indistinct noise came from the Germans’ radio. The sergeant walked toward them and said, “Achtung!” He ordered the two soldiers to move aside. Cormeau thought their execution was imminent. To her surprise, the sergeant told her and George to get back into their car. But their worries were not over. The sergeant saw her suitcase and asked to look inside. She opened it, exposing her radio transmitter. He asked what it was, and she replied, “Radio.” In German, radio can mean “X-ray.” “So, we got out very fast,” she said. “The engine was already running.”
That night, Philippe de Gunzbourg and Anne-Marie Walters greeted the first Jedburgh team to parachute into southwest France. The Jedburghs, three- or four-man units sent to assist and direct Resistance forces, landed in military uniform to avoid being shot as spies. SOE and the Special Operations (SO) section of America’s wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), together ran the Jedburghs. Each team, with names like Team Frederick, Team George I, or Team Archibald, usually had one American, one British, and one French member. Flying into Dordogne-Sud from Algeria that night was Team Bugatti, commanded by thirty-six-year-old U.S. Marine Corps Major Horace “Hod” Williams Fuller, code name “Kansul.” Harvard-educated Fuller had joined the French Army before America entered the war and in May 1940 fought the Germans. He returned to the United States, enlisted in the Marine Corps prior to Pearl Harbor, and landed at Guadalcanal with the First Marine Division in August 1942. Wounded and returned to the United States, he volunteered for the OSS rather than sit out the war behind a desk. OSS made Fuller the only Marine officer in the new Jedburgh units. The other members of Team Bugatti were two French officers, Captain Guy de la Roche du Rouzet and Lieutenant Marcel Guillemont.
When the Jeds landed, Walters and Gunzbourg took them to a farmhouse to await instructions from George Starr. Walters advised Fuller to change out of his Marine uniform into civilian clothes. Otherwise, informers would report the presence of an American officer to the Germans. Fuller, despite the risk of execution as a spy if captured, heeded her advice. George sent for Fuller a few days later. Walters wrote, “I brought KANSUL to HILAIRE who wanted to try and explain the various political entanglements of the region to him. From then on I continued liaison with them, mainly on bicycle.” On July 4, Fuller “discussed the work with Hilaire . . . and Hilaire handed over the southern sector (Pyrenees).” Fuller and his Jedburgh colleagues worked with Philippe de Gunzbourg’s maquisards to mount “many ambushes against the Germans leaving Tarbes and other towns in the region.” They also captured a courier carrying Gestapo messages from Luchon to Toulouse, and their patrols sealed the Spanish border against fleeing German war criminals.
Walters thought “KANSUL’s Jedburgh team was a terrific morale lifter on their arrival; they were immediately very popular and were backed by everyone in the 4th region, but the supplies they were promised and which they asked for were never sent and bit by bit disappointment followed enthusiasm.” George was more cynical: “I sent him there [north of the River Garonne] to get him out of my bloody hair.”
George took his Castelnau battalion forty miles west of Castelnau to the tiny farming village of Lannemaignan. German artillery and Luftwaffe bombers attacked them there on July 2. The battalion retreated through heavily wooded country for about ten miles to Panjas, where George and Parisot merged their forces into a single new Bataillon Armagnac. Parisot became overall commander, and George was his adviser. “After D-Day, I didn’t give orders. I made suggestions,” George said.
The strength of the unified Armagnac Battalion, or Demi-Brigade Armagnac, was about 1,900 men. Escholier called them “a real society of nations. English, New Zealanders, American flyers, some Belgians, many Spaniards, a Dane, some anti-Nazi Germans, some Portuguese, some Poles, a Czech, some Italians, some Russians—and above all the French.” The Panjas pastor, Abbé Laurent Talès, circulated among the men, filling their glasses with wine and blessing their enterprise. Parisot based them in his new headquarters in the village of Avéron-Bergelle.
Although no longer le patron, George did not avoid combat. He felt he had to fight:
One of the chief reasons I lived with the Maquis and went into battle with them was the insidious propaganda which had been going on for a very long while to the effect that the British were making the French all sorts of promises to get them to rise up and the
n in the usual British manner would leave them high and dry. That is why, the Maquis knowing I was a British officer, I was always in view especially when there was action or trouble.
George was sleeping no more than an hour a night. It was a grueling ordeal for a soldier who three months before had turned forty. “He was becoming a little queer, the Patron,” Walters wrote, “he went whole weeks without sleeping, and he took his maquis more seriously than a general his army group.”
Lack of ammunition, however, was crippling the Armagnac Battalion’s operations. The previous month of steady combat had exhausted their SOE supplies. George pleaded for more parachutages, but SHAEF ignored him. The RAF and AAF were concentrating their air power on support for Allied troops in the north. Complaints about lack of logistical support for the Resistance made their way into the press. “The men of the Maquis have every right to draw on Allied munition dumps and supply stores,” raged London’s Observer on June 25, “and the allies have every advantage to gain from establishing the closest possible liaison with the fighters of the French Forces of the Interior who have so generously and unsparingly offered themselves to the common cause.”
Despite the supply shortage, London ordered George to attack SS and motorized Wehrmacht units entering his domain from the south. Exasperated, he told Yvonne Cormeau, “Take this message. ‘Your message number and so on . . . I have taken good note, and I have given orders to the men under my command to manufacture bows and arrows. As soon as this is completed, we will attack and destroy these fucking divisions.’ Send that!”
Cormeau refused. George shouted, “You bloody well send it!” She sent it, and the next night, George recalled, “there were bloody planes all over the bloody place. They bloody smothered us.”
George’s bow and arrow message jolted London into dispatching almost daily parachutages of weapons, ammunition, clothes, and food. One shipment contained four suitcases with six pairs of silk pajamas. “I just sat back and roared with laughter,” George said. “I hadn’t been in a bed for weeks. And [they sent] the same for Mrs. C. [Yvonne Cormeau], including a pair of pink bedroom mules with swansdown, marked, ‘Maquis—for the use of.’”
In addition to the silk pajamas, SOE sent George a major’s battle dress uniform. True to form, he did not wear it.
Weapons and clothes were arriving, but vehicles needed fuel. The Armagnac Battalion turned to an appropriate source, the Armagnac distillery that Abel Sempé had founded in 1934. Abel Sempé and another captain had previously “borrowed” the uniforms of George’s Wehrmacht prisoners to infiltrate a German supply depot and steal 25,000 liters of gasoline. Now, Sempé mixed one part gasoline with nine parts 100-proof alcohol to run the cars. It worked, more or less. “The cars weren’t much good,” George remembered. “They were very difficult to start up. They ran them on pure alcohol, 90% alcohol. Once you started it up, you didn’t shut it off.”
The reconstituted Armagnac Battalion roared out in vehicles fueled with Sempé’s concoction and in lightning combat captured fifteen miliciens. The maquisards took them back to Panjas and imprisoned them in a barn. The miliciens’ handling in Panjas differed from George’s treatment of captives in Castelnau. Anne-Marie Walters, daughter of a League of Nations diplomat, was incensed:
It was also quite wrong in my opinion to lower ourselves to the standards of the Gestapo by torturing miliciens and collaborators to make them reveal the whereabouts of their colleagues—some were beaten until the blood spurted all over the walls, others were horribly burnt; one man’s feet were held in the fire 20 minutes and his legs slowly burnt off to the knee; other tortures were too horrible to mention. A good number of people were also shot.
The French were taking revenge on the French, but by any standard the practices constituted war crimes. While the war raged, however, no one sought to bring the culprits to justice.
FOURTEEN
The Germans Retreat
Hilaire’s network totally dislocated, contained and destroyed the German troops stationed in the south-west of France.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER
On July 3, scouts reconnoitering hilly terrain about four miles north of Panjas spotted 1,000 German troops advancing on a hamlet called Estang. They dashed back to tell Maurice Parisot, who left for Estang with George Starr and four companies totaling 1,200 men. Two companies hid in a pine grove where the road turned and laid their ambush. The other two took up positions to attack the Germans if they retreated. The Armagnacs outnumbered the Germans, but the Boches had better arms and more combat experience. The German column moved toward Estang. As it closed on Parisot’s position, his two forward companies opened up with Sten and Bren guns. The Wehrmacht regulars fought back and jumped into a ditch on the other side of the road. The two forces exchanged fire until evening. George reported, “Towards 19.00 hours the Germans retired to the North, intending to return to Mont-de-Marsan and fell into an ambush of [the other two] companies who held them the whole night.” At the approach of dawn, the front fell silent.
Morning light found the Germans surrounded. The Armagnacs poured more fire into their position. The Germans sent out distress signals, bringing Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes over the battlefield. Focke-Wulf Condor and Dormier bombers followed, strafing and bombarding the Armagnacs. With no antiaircraft guns to protect themselves, the Armagnacs abandoned most of their trucks and cars and fled on foot. “We retreated without too great a loss and reformed at Maupas,” George said. “Our losses were four men and the enemy approximately 150.”
The “Battle of Estang,” as the maquisards called it, was not the classic ambush that George had taught: “Give them ten minutes of hell, and then get the hell out of it.” Instead, the irregulars fought all night and left themselves open to aerial attack. The Germans’ revenge was swift: they executed nine civilians from Estang.
A few days later, the maquis sabotaged cables carrying electricity to Toulouse, which housed the notorious Saint-Michel Prison, important arms factories, and Germany’s largest garrison in the region. The Wehrmacht was fortifying the city’s defenses, and outlying units were pouring into Toulouse for their last stand in Gascony.
On France’s national day, July 14, the Armagnac Battalion assembled about fifty miles west of Castelnau in the small village of Hontanx. George and Parisot staged a review of their forces. The now battle-scarred maquisards, in mismatched clothes and with an array of old and new weaponry, formed on the village square like a regular army. As Parisot addressed the men, a motorcyclist roared into the village, walked straight to his commander, and saluted. In a low voice that George overheard, the man told Parisot, “There are about 4,000 of the Das Reich Division approaching and they appear to be sweeping the countryside.” Parisot calmly finished his speech, dismissed the men, and convened his officers in the temporary command post to question the dispatch rider. The man confirmed that he had seen Panzers emblazoned with Das Reich’s distinctive, jagged Wolfsangel (wolf trap) insignia. There was no doubt. Das Reich was coming for them.
Combat with this remainder of the 2nd SS Panzer Division threatened the Armagnac Battalion’s annihilation. “Capt. Parisot decided that our only hope was to lie low, keep an eye on the Germans and refuse battle at all costs,” George said. “I suggested that a volunteer should be asked for to carry orders to the Maquis at Gabarret and to Gabriel’s [Cantal’s] Maquis that they should prepare mines and an ambush on the roads behind the column knowing that the column was likely to return on the same route.” The Armagnacs secreted themselves beside the road and kept the Germans under close observation. The Panzers advanced, their huge cannons shining in the sunlight. George watched, dreading the assault. As the German column came within range, it stopped. George watched it, knowing its armory could wipe out his Armagnacs in a few minutes.
Suddenly, the massive Panzers stopped in the middle of the road. Their officers scanned the route ahead. Without warning, the tanks turned and rumbled off in
the opposite direction. George called it “a miracle.”
George feared that the German garrison in Tarbes would come from the south to “squash us between themselves and Das Reich.” He organized a reconnaissance to the southwest. Parisot, worried for George’s safety, made him attach two Bren guns to his car, one pointed forward and the other back. He also sent two escorts for protection. One of them, named Buresie, was a huge Russian with previous service in the French Foreign Legion, which did not inquire into the past of its volunteers. They scouted the countryside until eight that night, when George realized that his fears of an attack from Tarbes “were unfounded.”
As they returned to Hontanx, a Citroën car sped toward them. Buresie aimed the forward Bren and asked George for permission to fire. George ordered him to wait. The car sped away, and George pursued it until it plunged into a ravine. The driver was “a typical German” male, aged about fifty, and the passenger a pregnant woman in her early twenties. The man made no attempt to reach for the revolver on his seat. “What bad luck,” he said to the woman, “we’ve fallen into the hands of the Maquis.” The couple had almost made good their escape to Spain. A quick search turned up badges showing that they belonged to the Gestapo. George took them to his command post.
The German refused to answer George’s questions. Buresie led him away and brought in the woman. When she too said nothing, George told Buresie to lock her in a cell. “Don’t give me to the French,” she pleaded. “You are a British officer and a gentleman, spare my unborn child.” The young woman broke down in tears. George, dressed as a maquisard, hadn’t revealed himself to be a British officer, and replied to the woman, “You are mistaken for once. I am not a British officer and a gentleman.” If the woman escaped or was rescued, George wanted to prevent her from revealing who and where he was.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 22
