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

by Charles Glass

  George returned to Armagnac Battalion headquarters in Avéron-Bergelle at two o’clock in the morning. “Capt. Parisot was still waiting up for me,” he recalled. “We were friendly indeed and generally waited up for each other.” Parisot urged him to accept someone “to be always on tap when you want to go out and to act as your bodyguard.” George was unenthusiastic, but Parisot insisted, “Then you won’t have to come along to me every time you want to go out and ask me to detail somebody to go with you.” He proposed Buresie, whom George accepted, believing the muscular ex-Legionnaire “was a good fighting man to be relied on in an emergency.”

  Three days later in Avéron-Bergelle, George chanced upon the German prisoner he had captured on the road. “I spoke to him,” he said, “and that is when he told me that he would have treated me as I had treated him, had the positions been reversed.” The implication was that the maquisards had abused him, but George saw no marks of torture. “I never saw him again,” he said.

  In the following days, rumors reached George that Buresie had tortured the German. He made “discreet inquiries”:

  I found out the man had been tortured, and the Doctor DREYIS [Deyris] confirmed this. I had learnt that BURESIE . . . had suspended by one foot the Gestapo agent on a rope round a pulley. . . . I also learnt that another torture that might have been used on the Gestapo agent was to stick a knitting needle into the penis and heating the outside end with a flame. I had also heard that people had had their feet burnt.

  More followed. George recalled, “I was informed that the two Gestapo agents had been shot that evening and that [Serge] TAESCH had been wounded by a ricochet.” Parisot sent Taesch to his small château in Saint-Gô, where Jeanne Parisot oversaw his recovery and hid him from the Germans.

  Some of the French officers who had fought with him at the Battle of Castelnau gave George a watch. Having lost his own along with all his other belongings in Castelnau, he accepted. However, he said, “I recognised it as having seen it on the wrist of the Gestapo agent when I was interrogating. They did not say it belonged to the Gestapo man but simply asked me to accept it. I did so.” Refusal would have given offense. They also handed him a lady’s wristwatch for Yvonne Cormeau. They did not tell him whether it had been the Gestapo woman’s, and he did not ask.

  * * *

  • • •

  “At the beginning of July 1944,” Major Kieffer said, “it transpired (during the course of a radio deception plan) that a dropping operation was to take place south of Paris.” His radio department was expert at organizing parachutages and receiving weapons from SOE north of Paris. The south, however, was the responsibility of the Kommandos der Sicherheitspolizei und SD (KDS) rather than Kieffer’s bureau. The KDS asked Kieffer to assign his men to the operation “so that the reception lights and signals should be shown correctly.” He sent Sergeants Haug and Stork, along with a lieutenant.

  In the early hours of July 5, the SD men saw, rather than the supply containers they expected, the parachutes of twelve commandos from the 1st Regiment of Britain’s Special Air Services (SAS). The SAS unit was on a sabotage mission. The commandos wore full battle dress uniforms and SAS red berets. Descending onto the drop zone in a wheat field, they were as surprised as the Germans. Instead of a friendly Resistance reception, they faced a barrage of automatic weapons fire. “Suddenly it occurred to me that we had dropped into an ambush,” wrote Czech-born French commando Serge Vaculik. “The Germans were expecting us.” Vaculik had time to tie notes to carrier pigeons saying, “Hard luck! Germans were waiting for us. God help us.” The commandos fought back with Stens, but the Germans killed four of them, wounded three, and captured the rest. They took the wounded to Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière and delivered the uninjured prisoners to Major Kieffer for interrogation.

  Kieffer, with Alfred von Kapri interpreting, received the Britons in his office at avenue Foch. The men declined to answer his questions about their communications and links to the Resistance. One man, probably Vaculik as he was the team’s only French citizen, admitted he spoke French and would have been the group’s liaison to the maquis, if the maquis had been genuine. Kieffer, who had hopes of using the men for his Funkspiel, concluded that “they were not able to give the necessary details for carrying out a radio deception plan.” He ordered Erich Otto’s radio department to interrogate the men more thoroughly and sent a team to the hospital to debrief the wounded. “Not one was fit for interrogation,” he said.

  In the evening, Colonel Helmut Knochen, the SD commander in Paris, ordered Kieffer to keep the five healthy commandos at avenue Foch rather than send them to Fresnes. Kieffer’s cells were full, so he transferred them to another German security office nearby at 3 place des États-Unis. While Kieffer claimed afterward that he assigned Master Sergeant Stork to ensure the prisoners “were properly accommodated and fed,” interrogators drenched them in the baignoire and burned cigarettes into their skin. The men’s refusal to speak made it clear to Kieffer that “a radio deception plan or further interrogation reports could not be expected.”

  One of the wounded prisoners died in the hospital, while the other two recovered sufficiently for the Germans to move them to the place des États-Unis. Kieffer’s secretary said that Kieffer proposed “that they should be transferred to the Luftwaffe POW camp.” For the time being, however, they languished in handcuffs until Kieffer’s superior, Knochen, received orders from Berlin.

  Berlin was preoccupied with losses in both Russia and Normandy that pointed to certain defeat. Some Wehrmacht officers wanted to negotiate, despite the Allies’ “unconditional surrender” policy, to save Germany from annihilation. On July 20, Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg secreted a bomb in the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair, in East Prussia, while Adolf Hitler was conferring with military staff. Hearing an explosion as he left, Stauffenberg believed the Führer was dead. His Wehrmacht coconspirators purged the Nazi leadership. In Paris, anti-Hitler plotters took Helmut Knochen and other senior SD and Gestapo officers prisoner. Kieffer’s own arrest appeared imminent that night. “Kieffer was alone at 84 avenue Foch,” wrote Ernest Vogt, “and I was at home while this was taking place.”

  When news reached Paris that Hitler, though lightly wounded, had survived, the SD and Gestapo turned on their Wehrmacht captors and arrested them. On the top floor of avenue Foch, though, John Starr and the other SOE prisoners remained unaware of the drama that nearly set them free.

  * * *

  • • •

  One day before Stauffenberg’s putsch, twenty-four-year-old Serge Asher, who went by the cover name Serge Ravanel, went to Avéron-Bergelle to meet George Starr and Maurice Parisot. The dynamic Ravanel was one of the Resistance’s more intrepid leaders. Of mixed Jewish-Catholic-Protestant and Swiss background, he was on track to be an artillery officer when the Germans invaded in 1940. He joined the Resistance early, and in March 1943 the Germans captured him in Lyon. Berty Albrecht, who committed suicide at Fresnes Prison just before John Starr was interned there, extricated Ravanel from a prison hospital. He organized resistance and, despite his youth, became a colonel and regional commander of the FFI. “I actually met Ravanel in person on (approximately) the 19th of July,” George Starr said. “From the 19th of July Ravanel was living practically entirely at my HQ.” Like Philippe de Gunzbourg before him, Ravanel saw in George another “Lawrence of Arabia, a dyed-in-the wool Intelligence Service professional.” Ravanel appointed George his liaison to SOE.

  Toward the end of July, SOE affirmed its confidence in Major Starr by promoting him to lieutenant colonel. This achievement was unique for clandestine officers, and only two other F-Section field agents would attain that distinction. “Colonel Hilaire” was, at last, a real colonel.

  Meanwhile, the feud between George Starr and Anne-Marie Walters was escalating. On July 25, two days before George’s promotion, his Russian bodyguard, Buresie, arrested Walters. She wrote that he locked he
r all night in a makeshift jail with Milice prisoners. In the morning, guards dragged her to George. Le patron unleashed his anger, accusing her of indiscipline, love affairs, and spreading false rumors about his relationship with Yvonne Cormeau. Walters, who had just turned twenty-one and had served George for a year, resented the charges. George did not punish her, but she understood that their quarrel was compromising her position in the maquis.

  On July 31, George ordered Anne-Marie Walters back to England. The woman irritated him, but, more important, he wanted someone who had worked in the field to present his situation report to SOE and answer any questions. In his view, her mission was crucial:

  I wanted London to have a Frenchman’s point of view and this is a paraphrase of a report which I asked Col. [Henri] Monnet to write. When I gave it to Colette [Walters], I impressed on her that it was urgent and must be delivered to Col. Buckmaster. I told her this was a chance for her to show what she is worth. I told her that it must be delivered and that she must be there to explain that it was a Frenchman’s point of view and also to give her own impressions (she travelled a lot and would collect impressions).

  Walters confided in Hod Fuller that she preferred to remain in France. Sympathetic to the young woman’s plea, he asked, “Do you think you could go to Algiers on a mission for us? I have a long report to send to H.Q. and Bouboule [Martial Sigaud, a member of Fuller’s team] has too much work to pass it on by radio.” She needed London’s permission to proceed to Algiers, and Buckmaster later said that “permission was given from H.Q. London, but not by my section, so far as I know.” She sewed Fuller’s report into her shoulder pads with the one from George. As she readied to depart, Camilo and six of his Spaniards kissed her good-bye. She cried over the friends she would miss.

  “She did not forgive Hilaire for tearing her away from the battle and her dear Armagnacs,” wrote Escholier, who respected both George and Walters. Within hours of her departure for Spain, George transmitted his Message Number 48 to F-Section:

  Have had to send Colette [Walters] back because she is undisciplined in spite of my efforts to train her since arrival. Most indiscreet. Very man-mad, also disobedient in personal matters. She constitutes a danger to security, not only her own but of everyone. On the other hand she does not lack courage, never hesitated to go on any mission. Totally unsuitable for commission. She should never be sent back to France to work for our organization.

  Spanish guides led Walters and some American airmen on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain. From Barcelona, she flew to Algeria with Fuller’s report rather than follow George’s orders to proceed to London and advocate his cause. When she met Fuller’s commanding officer, Major F. N. Marten, at OSS headquarters in Algiers, he offered to send her back to France to liaise with his Jedburgh teams. “I was to help rounding up the Jeds which I could easily do in the S.W. and help in their debriefing,” wrote Walters. SOE, however, recalled her to London. George’s Message Number 48 had by then prejudiced F-Section against her. In London, she defended herself and accused George of overseeing the torture of miliciens and suspected collaborators.

  On August 3, an informer told the Germans that the “terrorists” had hidden machine guns in a village about three miles west of Maurice Parisot’s house. A German column searched the cemetery, only to learn that maquisards had already made off with the weapons. The furious Germans seized five hostages. The same informer produced more precious intelligence: the chief of the Resistance, Maurice Parisot, lived nearby in Saint-Gô.

  A force of forty-eight German officers and men boarded cars and trucks and sped to the village. Parisot had been away since D-Day, and Jeanne Parisot was in Auch on a mission for her husband. The Parisots’ twenty-year-old Polish housekeeper, Josépha Mikolajazyck, saw the troops coming and ran inside to move Serge Taesch, still recuperating from his foot wound, to the attic of the house next door. She returned to the Parisot château, where a German officer declared in pidgin French, “Ici, maquis . . . Monsieur Parisot, chef de maquis . . . Ici, réunion maquis.” He had orders to arrest Jeanne Parisot and Serge Taesch, indicating that the informer knew arrangements in the house. The other people they found were the Parisots’ nine-year-old daughter, Françoise, and a family friend named Yvonne Collin. Some of the Germans interrogated Françoise, Yvonne, and Josépha, while others ransacked the house. They seized hidden parachutes, family papers, and photographs.

  “They set fire to the house with incendiary grenades in the attic and scattered gasoline in all the rooms,” Jeanne Parisot told Escholier. “They used the wool harvest for kindling.”

  A messenger raced to Parisot’s headquarters a mere eight miles away. “My husband knew I was not there that day, but he did not know the time of my return and had every reason to believe our little daughter was in the house,” Jeanne Parisot said. “Not a muscle in his face flinched. . . . He continued dictating his orders calmly and only when he finished did he decide to pay attention . . . to this small incident.” Parisot’s 1,400 men could have saved the house from 48 Germans. Remembering the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, he allowed it, with the family treasures, to burn to ash.

  No day passed without combat between the Resistance and Germans. United Press reported on August 8:

  In southwestern France near Bayonne, one group of patriots attacked a German munitions train moving toward Normandy front, the [SHAEF] communiqué said. Twenty-two cars were blown up and the explosion set off forty-seven others standing in the station. North of Toulouse in southern France, FFI units attacked a German column, killing seventy-two officers and men and wounding fifty-four others. Two vehicles were captured and nine were destroyed.

  George, Parisot, and the Armagnac Battalion seized every opportunity to harass the Germans. The next battle came on August 12, when Parisot attacked units of the Edelweiss Division who were withdrawing from Aire-sur-l’Adour. George recalled, “The attack was most successful, liberating the town with scarcely any damage, inflicting losses on the enemy who finally retreated to Mont de Marsan, and only losing four of our men.”

  Parisot’s courier notified George about the Aire-sur-l’Adour victory. George sent his friend a return message from their headquarters:

  You are there. You see better than I do.

  After breaking off, go into Aire and see if there is materiel worth taking.

  If you need anything, send me word.

  Bonne chance et merde.

  Hilaire.

  Starr’s sign-off echoed SOE’s friendly valediction to agents departing for France, “Merde alors.”

  Youthful FFI leader Serge Ravanel went from group to group throughout southwestern France to unify rival Resistance groups. His charm and intelligence convinced most of them that it was better to fight the Germans than one another, however opposed their postwar visions for France. He returned to George and Parisot in Avéron-Bergelle on August 14. They discussed their next major objective: Toulouse, the most important metropolis in the Midi-Pyrénées. Liberating the city required seizing the towns and villages surrounding it. Working out of George and Parisot’s headquarters, Ravanel devised their strategy.

  SHAEF, however, assigned the résistants in the south a more important mission: to support Operation Dragoon, the landing of American and French forces on the beaches of the Riviera. At last, the Allied war that began in Normandy on June 6 was coming to the south. The southern Resistance was a vital component of the campaign. By the time the French and Americans hit the Côte d’Azur at dawn on August 15, Resistance attacks had severely weakened their German opponents. The Allies moved inland, while the Resistance assaulted the Germans to speed the advance of American general Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army from the Mediterranean up the Rhône Valley. It became one of the fastest Allied offensives of the war, with logistics units struggling to keep up with the infantry.

  A U.S. Army study of the Resistance observed, “They made the occupation of FRANCE a continual hell for the
Germans.” Eisenhower again thanked the native guerrillas for saving his soldiers’ lives. The Allies moved north and east, but the southwest was not part of their battle plan. The résistants there were left to face the Germans on their own.

  The Armagnac Battalion moved slowly, step by step, toward Toulouse. It conquered nearby towns and took possession of others after the Germans evacuated. When it entered Montréjeau, about sixty miles west of Toulouse, the inhabitants turned out for an ecstatic welcome. Women kissed the partisans, and musicians played patriotic tunes. There were the inevitable speeches, including one in American-accented French by Colonel Hod Fuller: “Je ne suis pas un orateur. Je suis un soldat. J’ai une dette de reconnaissance envers la France qui a aidé la libération de mon pays.” While Fuller was acknowledging America’s debt to the Marquis de Lafayette during the War of Independence, a German unit drove into town. Fortunately for the celebrants, it bypassed the main square on its way to Tarbes without firing a shot.

  Local gendarmes informed George that the German garrison in the departmental capital of the Gers, Auch, was abandoning the town. The Wehrmacht column departed on August 19, and the Armagnac Battalion moved in. During George’s many missions there before D-Day, he had avoided suspicious eyes and kept to the shadows. At last, he donned his British officer’s uniform and drove straight into town at the head of a column of victorious Armagnacs. While the populace acclaimed the ragtag fighters riding Abel Sempé’s motley vehicles, one woman spotted George’s uniform. She handed him a basket of tea and marmalade that she had saved since 1940 to give to the first British soldier she saw. A little later, a young Frenchman asked him, “Tell me, old man, you don’t know where the commander hangs out?” George answered in French with his strong British accent, “No. You’ll have to look for him.” George and Parisot established their headquarters in Auch’s gendarmerie.