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

by Charles Glass

  Around Ravanel, leaders of the armed units constituted something like a soviet. The members of this council claimed to carry out the necessary purges with their own men, while the gendarmerie and the garde mobile were confined to remote barracks. . . . Furthermore, a Spanish “division” was forming in the region with the loudly publicized purpose of marching on Barcelona. To top it all, an English general known as “Colonel Hilary” and introduced into the Gers maquis by the British services, held several units under his command and took orders from London.

  The Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres (FAFL), the Free French Air Forces, sent two Hudson light bombers from Algiers to Toulouse in early September, part of the process of establishing de Gaulle’s provisional government in the region. The American-made aircraft had flown countless sorties over France, but these would be the first FAFL planes to land at Toulouse. Serge Ravanel sent Maurice Parisot and George Starr to welcome them at the Francazal military airfield near the city.

  On the night of September 6, George, Parisot, and their men formed an honor guard beside the runway. Two aircraft appeared in the heavens, and the maquisards snapped to attention. The first plane landed, and its crew received the Armagnacs’ salute. The second approached the tarmac. As it touched down, one of its twin engines jettisoned its propeller. The blade spun like a Catherine wheel. The honor guard dived and rolled out of the way. George recounted:

  I was as close to him [Parisot] as I am to you now, and the other bloke, in fact closer. It was the three of us talking, and I saw this bloody thing and I said, “Down!” and dropped like a bloody bullet. It took the bloody cap off my head, but it didn’t touch me. And it killed the other two standing bloody dead.

  “Parisot did not hear his men scream, ‘Get down!’” wrote Escholier. “As for Parisot, faithful to his tradition as a leader, he stayed up, the last of all, and it was then he was struck, standing up.” Parisot, his followers’ beloved Caillou, résistant before the first hour and one of the most respected maquis leaders, was cut to pieces. He and George had survived nearly three years of clandestine and open warfare at each other’s side. George, a stoic not known for tears, wept at the sight of his closest comrade dying in a senseless accident.

  Parisot’s funeral took place in Auch two days later. The somber mood was the opposite of what it had been in August, when Parisot, George, and their comrades liberated the town. Escholier wrote that George looked pale. Beside him stood Camilo and Parisot’s successor, Henri Monnet. The departmental chief of the FFI, Colonel Marcel Lesur, delivered the eulogy: “He was a leader of men. He possessed courage with self-control, nerve with clarity, marked with an exceptional zeal, it was his goodness, it was his magnificent brilliance which those who served him would not deny. And that is why my comrades see him as the pure face of the French Resistance.” Philippe de Gunzbourg said that Parisot was “the most durable, the most courageous, who did splendid work, the most remarkable person in the Gers.” George’s homage was no less heartfelt: “Captain Parisot was not only a brave soldier, but a good man for whom I had a great admiration.” His death was a loss for his friends, but also for France.

  Two days afterward, Camilo attended another ceremony, his wedding. The Spanish commander, who had told Anne-Marie Walters that no woman would marry someone like him with only one leg, wed Eva Odette Berrito, a young Spanish woman he had met while fighting in the Gers. There was no time for a honeymoon. The war was not over, and some of Camilo’s guérilleros were agitating to take their struggle to Spain against dictator Francisco Franco. Camilo refused. He would not rekindle the civil war in Spain, but he would battle the Germans until they were out of France. Then, he said, he would raise his family in the adopted country that he had fought for.

  George Starr, whose loyalties to Britain and France had not conflicted during the occupation, was clashing with Frenchmen everywhere after the liberation of Toulouse. In a city teeming with fifty thousand armed men at odds with one another, the absence of regular police and army made the reimposition of law seem a vain hope. Yet George and his men expelled the communists from the city hall, lowered their red flag, and handed the building to Charles de Gaulle’s representatives. They assisted in bringing order to districts where rival maquis bands vied for control and assumed legal powers, like fining wartime profiteers and punishing collaborators. George forced the maquisards to release prisoners he knew were blameless, “people who had been high-handedly arrested by the F.F.I. and other French people” and who were “absolutely innocent.” To him, that was simple justice. To de Gaulle’s men in Toulouse, it was British interference in their country’s affairs.

  London had more missions for George. The first was to commandeer one of two new Heinkel He-177A-5 bombers that the Luftwaffe had left behind at Toulouse’s Blagnac Airfield. The British and French both wanted to study the revolutionary jet engine technology, but the French were denying access to their British allies. George’s maquisards were happy to help the British who had helped them. They descended on the airbase and daubed “Prise de Guerre” on one of the aircraft. George turned it over to the RAF’s chief test pilot, Wing Commander Roland Falk, who flew the war prize to Farnborough in England. The Gaullists were furious, again resenting British perfidy on their soil.

  In mid-September, de Gaulle descended on southern France. His objective was to establish his provisional government in defiance of both the Americans, who planned to impose an American Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), and French résistants, who were organizing a new, leftist order. On his arrival in Toulouse on the morning of September 16, his Commissaire de la République, a socialist-leaning résistant named Pierre Bertaux, met him at the airport. Their conversation during the drive into town turned to the ranking British officer in Toulouse, Lieutenant Colonel George Starr.

  Bertaux claimed to de Gaulle that George had told him, “I am Colonel ‘Hilaire,’ I have 700 men under arms, I have in my pocket an order signed by Churchill and de Gaulle and, in this bloody mess, I bang the table and say, ‘Here it is I who commands.’” De Gaulle is said to have responded, “And you didn’t arrest him on the spot?” Bertaux couldn’t arrest a man who commanded 700 armed men. De Gaulle asked, “You haven’t, at any rate, invited him to lunch with me?” Bertaux admitted he had, because George had fought in de Gaulle’s name. De Gaulle told him to cancel George’s invitation. He would grant the English colonel a tête-à-tête after the lunch.

  When George arrived at the Prefecture for the banquet, an officer informed him he was not welcome and told him to wait for the end of lunch. George’s anger grew with every passing minute in the prefect’s office. At last, de Gaulle came in. Without shaking George’s hand, he called him a mercenary and ordered him to leave the country. George responded in French, “Je suis un militaire britannique en opération. J’ai un commandement à exercer. Je ne le quitterai que sur ordre de mes supérieurs à Londres. Je vous emmerde. Vous êtes le chef d’un gouvernement provisoire que les Alliés n’ont pas reconnu!” (“I am a British soldier on duty. I have a command to exercise. I will not leave except on the order of my superiors in London. I shit on you. You are head of a provisional government that the Allies have not recognized!”) George stormed out in a fury. The men in the antechamber heard George grumble as he passed, “I said ‘shit’ to de Gaulle.” French historian of the liberation Robert Aron wrote that de Gaulle told Pierre Bertaux, “You will give him twenty-four hours to leave French territory. If he stays, you will arrest him.”

  De Gaulle’s memoirs did not mention the argument. All the general wrote was “Lastly ‘Colonel Hilary.’ Within two hours he had been sent to Lyons, and from there immediately returned to England.” That was false. George did not leave “within two hours.” He returned to the Niel Barracks, where Yvonne Cormeau observed that he was “very, very upset. He was called a mercenary and that upset him above all.” He dictated a message for her to encode and transmit to London, telling SOE of the
encounter and requesting instructions. They also drafted “a letter in French for the General to explain that we had to obey the orders and we were awaiting the reply of the telegram I’d sent and would be excused if we could not get away within the twenty-four-hour limit. We never heard another thing. We stayed for over forty-eight.”

  George was not the only victim of de Gaulle’s tongue. When Serge Ravanel reported to the general in his colonel’s uniform, de Gaulle said, “Ah, it’s Second Lieutenant Asher.” De Gaulle questioned Ravanel’s right to wear the Liberation Cross that his own provisional government had awarded the young officer. Ravanel, who had spent two years fighting in occupied territory while the general lived in London, had admired de Gaulle as a hero. Some said that after de Gaulle insulted him, he went outside and cried.

  The next day, de Gaulle went to Bordeaux and abused the famed F-Section organizer Roger Landes, code name “Aristide,” as he had George and Ravanel. Rather than thank Landes for liberating Bordeaux, the general banished him. When another SOE agent, Peter Lake, went to the town of Sainte, north of Bordeaux, to meet de Gaulle, the general ordered him out of the country. The purging of British agents from French soil presaged their erasure from the Gaullist version of Resistance history.

  George was in no hurry to leave France while important business in the southwest remained unfinished. “Hilaire decided then it was about time,” said Yvonne Cormeau, “as we had some money left, to go back on our tracks if there was anyone we should help of the people who had helped us.” They went to the Bouchou family farm at Saint-Antoine-du-Queyret near Bordeaux, where Cormeau had parachuted into France in August 1943. The Bouchous’ daughters, aged fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen, were living in poverty with their grandmother. The Germans had deported their mother and father to concentration camps. “And therefore we were glad that we could give them some money to feed them,” said Cormeau. “They’d been on their own since September ’43.”

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  • • •

  On September 25, George Starr and Yvonne Cormeau flew from Bordeaux to England, where Cormeau was reunited with her young daughter, Yvette. But George’s homecoming was bitter. Having survived constant danger and privation since November 1942, all he wanted was to see Pilar and the children. But they were stuck in Spain, where the Franco regime was denying them exit visas. George was underweight and tired. He had lost friends in France, most recently the closest, Maurice Parisot. The leader of Free France had insulted him. Most painful of all, he did not know whether his younger brother was alive or dead.

  Colonel Maurice Buckmaster gave George a hero’s welcome at Orchard Court and asked him to write a report on his work in France. George recalled the conversation: “And I said, me? I don’t write reports.” His compromise was to answer questions from SOE debriefing officers. Major Bourne-Patterson wrote in the first official account of F-Section’s work, “Hilaire himself, unfortunately for posterity, is a most unvocal person and his own reports on his activities are of the briefest. (He indeed once expressed to the writer the view that, once an action was over, it was not worth reporting on.)” Buckmaster recommended him to British counterintelligence, MI5, for further clandestine work.

  Although George’s deeds remained a secret from the public, his reputation earned him the esteem of SOE staff. Colleagues at Beaulieu, the Group B Special Training School (STS) in Hampshire, invited their star alumnus to dinner a month after his return. George went there on the night of October 30 in low spirits: “I was very tired, suffering rather from exhaustion and very worried about my wife and children because I had been told that morning that Franco was causing trouble as she was suspected of being a British agent.”

  It was good to see friends from his training course in 1941, but most of the officers were new to him. “I arrived at the mess about 8 P.M. and was met by Major Follis who acted as my host there and I went into the mess and we had drinks,” George wrote. Peter Follis, a famously handsome actor in civilian life, taught the art of disguise. (Follis had said to F-Section’s Noreen Riols, “Forget the false beards, they’re too obvious. Instead dye your hair, change your hair parting, wear glasses and put a pebble in your shoe as that will give you a limp.”) Follis asked George about his brother and his “cousin,” undoubtedly Maurice Southgate. If they were alive, George said, they were in concentration camps. Follis wondered whether the Germans had tortured them. “I said I did not know but it was most likely,” George wrote, “because I know from hearsay what the Gestapo did to anybody they caught.” He remembered Follis saying, “You must have been damn lucky to have lasted so long without any trouble.”

  The camp commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley H. C. Woolrych, entered the room. A short, balding officer in his midfifties, Woolrych had been the chief instructor during George’s term at Beaulieu. He had a drink with George and, like Follis, raised the subject of torture. Beaulieu’s curriculum included techniques for surviving interrogation. George, who knew more about Gestapo methods than the teachers, answered that the most common practices were hanging prisoners upside down by the feet and inserting red-hot needles into the urethra. Woolrych asked if the Resistance also employed torture. George replied, “Well, they don’t have to invent anything. They just copy the Gestapo.”

  When Woolrych asked George whether he had experience with the Gestapo, George mentioned the male and female Gestapo agents he and his Russian bodyguard, Buresie, had captured in July. He believed the couple had been tortured, but he had not witnessed it. Major Follis then remarked on George’s unusual wristwatch, which George said had belonged to the Gestapo man. The officers made their way to dinner, and Woolrych asked George to deliver a lecture afterward. “This was the first I knew that I was to give a formal talk,” George said. “I had of course prepared nothing.” He asked what he should discuss. Woolrych suggested his work in France, his circuit, and the torture of the Gestapo man and woman. “I did not think torture had any bearing on the work and wanted to confirm that he really meant that.” He did. George and his fourteen fellow officers then sat down to eat.

  “After dinner we went back into the mess and the first person I saw was Captain Harris,” George said. “We began to chat. While we were talking, Captain Harris said, ‘We must stop chatting. You must go over to the Colonel who is getting fidgety.’” Starr approached Colonel Woolrych, who said, “There is a lady present. Will her presence embarrass you? Shall I ask her to go?” The lady was Lieutenant Violet Dundas of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). George did not want her to leave, but he assumed that Colonel Woolrych mentioned her because the torture of the Gestapo couple might upset a woman.

  George, who had regaled his résistants with stories around Jeanne Robert’s kitchen table, disliked giving formal talks. He spoke anyway about his arrival at Port-Miou in November 1942, his WHEELWRIGHT circuit in Gascony, recruiting volunteers, parachutages, avoiding capture, betrayals, fallen comrades, and post-D-Day combat. As he concluded, he discussed the Gestapo couple: “I said that I believed that the man had been tortured, and I described the torture of hanging by the leg. I didn’t repeat the torture of the heated pin, because of the lady’s presence.”

  The talk lasted, according to Colonel Woolrych, “a couple of hours,” after which batmen served drinks. George recalled that “the atmosphere was informal and friendly. . . . I was bombarded with questions right and left.” He did not notice that one officer, Captain F. Lofts, left early. Lofts explained, “After the talk, I was disgusted by the incident with regard to the woman. This was what made me leave the mess. I felt I wanted to hear no more.” When the evening drew to a close at eleven o’clock, Major Follis showed George to his room.

  In the morning, George met Colonel Woolrych and some of the staff for breakfast in the officers’ mess. Woolrych was “very cordial” and asked George’s opinion of the training at Beaulieu, especially which courses had helped him most in the field. Although Normandy, Paris, and the south of Fra
nce had been liberated, SOE was still sending agents to unliberated areas of the Continent. Feedback from an experienced operative like George was invaluable. After breakfast, they went to Major Follis’s office, where Woolrych, Follis, and Major H. S. Hunt “were very friendly and said they would be very pleased to see me any time I liked to go down.” At nine thirty, a car took George to London.

  After George’s departure, Beaulieu was anything but friendly to him. “As a consequence of this talk,” Captain F. W. Rhodes said, “I went to see Major Hunt, then assistant chief instructor, and told him I felt Colonel Starr’s actions were despicable in so far as the torturing was concerned.” Rhodes was not alone. Captain Lofts said, “On the following afternoon at 1830 hours, I saw Colonel Woolrych and Major Hunt in the lounge. I expressed the opinion I held—this was one of disgust at the story of the woman in particular. . . . I think I said to Colonel Woolrych that I thought it was a horrible story and such a story would never bear exposure.” Lofts said that he and other officers discussed the tale for days. But, he said, “a few days after the talk Maj. Hunt . . . instructed us that the Commanding Officer Colonel Woolrych did not want the matter to be the subject of further discussion.”

  Colonel Woolrych, urged by his staff, referred George’s speech to higher authority. “Two days later I wrote a report, dated 1 November,” Woolrych stated, “addressed to Air Commodore [Archibald “Archie” Robert] Boyle [head of SOE Intelligence and Security Directorate], with reference to what Colonel Starr had said.” Woolrych continued:

  In it I said we were all impressed by the fact that Colonel Starr had done a magnificent job in the field for which he deserved every possible credit, but that his mission did appear to have been tainted by a streak of sadism in view of what he had told us. I narrated the incident about the Gestapo man and woman and said that it had caused a certain consternation among some of my officers, two of whom had approached me in the matter.