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

by Charles Glass

  The investigation dragged into the new year. Mercier achieved a breakthrough on January 3, 1950, when he went to 84 avenue Foch in order, he wrote, “to reconstruct in its location the attempted escape made by Captain STARR accompanied by Colonel FAYE and ‘MADELEINE’ [Noor Inayat Khan].” The Germans had executed Khan on September 13, 1944, at Dachau and Faye in Sonnenberg on January 30, 1945. John was the escape’s only survivor, and Mercier needed more than his word for what happened. Mercier went to the former SD headquaters with John, Jean Overton Fuller, and his lawyer adjutant. As they drove into the broad expanse of the avenue Foch, John blurted, “Avenue Boche!”

  They rang the bell of number 84 and went inside. The fourth and fifth floors had become a separate maisonette, whose owner allowed them to make an inspection. There had been changes since the German departure, a new door where a wall had been, and a wall in the once familiar corridor between the guardroom and the lavatory. John described the old layout and guided the others through the scene of his drama. Mercier wrote, “Captain STARR showed us the room that served as his cell and also the cells that held Colonel FAYE and ‘MADELEINE’ and the clear skylights lighting the rooms and by which the three detainees left to meet one another on the roof.” The iron bars that John, Faye, and Khan had struggled to remove were gone. Jean Overton Fuller recalled:

  Starr took us into the guardroom. . . . Starr had become really alive now, even excited, darting here and there with great interest, in search of things he had known before as keen as a terrier sniffing holes. . . . Starr showed us the basin under which they had hidden the notes and the screwdriver, and we bent down and put our fingers into the crevice.

  The party went to 9-bis Square du Bois de Boulogne, the adjoining house where the would-be escapees had broken in and where the SD captured John and Khan. “Look!” said John. “They haven’t even put a new pane in the window we broke.” A strip of corrugated iron filled the hole where Faye had smashed the glass to enter the building. Mercier wrote, “The proprietress, Madame ESMERIAN, allowed us to go to the roof and Captain STARR showed us his route.” Fuller wrote four years afterward that Esmerian exclaimed:

  Why, it was you who broke into my house one night during the war! You were sitting with a young lady on a couch in the room on the first floor when I came down and saw you. I asked you if you were thieves, and then I saw the lady was crying and realised that you must be prisoners who had escaped from the Avenue Foch.

  Mercier, however, in his report dated the same day, stated that Madame Esmerian “did not recognize Captain STARR but did recall the arrest in her house of a man and a woman, then that another man (Colonel FAYE) went out of the building and had been shot by rifle fire.” While Fuller’s and Mercier’s recollections disagreed on whether Madame Esmerian recognized John, they concurred that the physical evidence supported John’s version of events.

  Mercier continued his inquiries, which included more meetings with John. He told John that he had asked Colonel Buckmaster for information about him. He had not received Buckmaster’s reply. John said, “I don’t think you will.”

  There was no formal court session in which John, as his brother had had in England, confronted his accusers. Under the French system, Mercier sifted the evidence, studied it, took his time, and recalled witnesses for additional testimony in order to arrive at a judgment. John had been waiting since December 13, 1948, when the tribunal indicted him, for exoneration or court-martial. On June 19, 1950, Captain Mercier finally issued his decision.

  Mercier’s office mailed it to John, who received it a week later, on June 27. The Ordonnance de Non-Lieu declared that “there is no case to pursue against the above named.”

  Jean Overton Fuller returned to Paris that day and called on Captain Mercier, who told her, “I do believe that Starr is a very good, very loyal and devoted Englishman. And he loves France too.” Though his name was cleared, suspicion among some colleagues that he had collaborated followed him for the rest of his life.

  Jean Overton Fuller later pursued SOE’s failures in a series of books. Vera Atkins wrote to her on July 17, 1954, “It is, of course, true that London made mistakes and in war mistakes involve the lives of men and women.” But Buckmaster never admitted that the SD’s Funkspiel succeeded in deceiving him, writing in his memoir, “We could not afford to risk our men being betrayed, and we severed contact with all wireless operators and section heads who seemed to us to be suspect.”

  Neither Vera Atkins nor Colonel Buckmaster thanked John Starr for exposing those mistakes.

  * * *

  • • •

  When George met Buckmaster in London, he demanded an answer to the question he had posed in his letter months earlier. Why had his brother been denied awards for his war service? Buckmaster answered, “You have quite enough decorations yourself to suffice for one family.”

  George never returned to southwest France, although veteran résistants invited him to attend commemorations and reunions. “You’ve got to think about it this way,” he said. “I didn’t liberate the southwest of France. The French did. Why should I go poking my nose in?” He died in Senlis, France, on September 2, 1980, aged seventy-four. John, after divorcing Michelle, married again and retired to Switzerland. He was eighty-eight years old when he died there in 1996.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the war, the people of Castelnau rebuilt their stone hamlet as it was before the SS demolished it. They renamed the central square place Roger Larribeau for the mayor who had befriended the foreigner called “Gaston le Belge” and sacrificed all he owned to liberate his country. On June 21, 2016, Jeanne Robert, by that time aged 102, attended the annual remembrance of the Battle of Castelnau in the village that had given her a home during the dark years of occupation. At the ceremony, the French government promoted her to Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She died fifteen months later, the last veteran of the Réseau Victoire, out of which George Starr created a legendary Resistance army that drove the German occupiers out of Gascony.

  At Madame Delattre’s old school, they were still teaching children the story of “Colonel Hilaire.”

  British prime minister Winston Churchill established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on July 6, 1940, to organize underground actions against the Axis powers from France to the Far East and, especially, “to set Europe ablaze.”

  Free French leader Charles de Gaulle escaped to London in 1940 and called on the French “to listen to my voice and follow me” in resistance to Nazi occupation.

  French head of state Maréchal Philippe Pétain met Adolph Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France, on October 24, 1940, to offer French “collaboration” with Germany. German interpreter Paul Schmidt stands between Hitler and Pétain, and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is behind Hitler to the right.

  George and John Starr volunteered in 1939 for the Royal Air Force, which rejected them because their father was American. They enlisted in the British Army and, due to their fluency in French, were recruited by SOE.

  Entrance to the Port-Miou calanque (inlet) near Cassis in southern France, where SOE felucca Seadog dropped George Starr and repatriated John Starr on the night of November 3, 1944.

  SOE French section intelligence officer Vera Atkins was devoted to her field agents, but she said of John Starr, “We feel he let the side down.”

  F-Section courier Odette Sansom arrived in France by sea on November 2, 1943, with George Starr, who disliked her and did not acknowledge her courage in resisting Nazi torture after her capture.

  Baron Philippe de Vomécourt, one of F-Section’s earliest French recruits, led the VENTRILOQUIST circuit. George Starr assisted his passage to Spain after a daring escape from German captivity in France on January 3, 1944.

  F-Section radio operator Captain Marcus Bloom, code names “Urbain” and “Bishop,” a
rrived in France by sea with George Starr. The affable north Londoner transmitted for Starr and Maurice Pertschuk. After his capture and torture, he refused to operate his radio for the Germans.

  Lieutenant Maurice Pertschuk, code name “Eugene,” was of Russian Jewish origin and grew up in England. From the age of twenty-one, he ran F-Section’s PRUNUS circuit in southwest France. Courier Denise Bloch said he “could easily pass as French, looks like an artist’s model.”

  Yvonne Cormeau, code name “Annette,” was George Starr’s radio operator. F-Section regarded her as one of its best transmitters or “pianists.”

  Yvonne Cormeau’s false identity cards enabled her to evade detection at German checkpoints while on missions for George Starr.

  On November 29, 1944, French colonel Henri Monnet, who had served with George Starr in the field, presented the Croix de Guerre to Starr and Yvonne Cormeau.

  Pilar Canudos Ristol—from Manresa, near Barcelona in Spain—wed George Starr in 1934 and worked for SOE in Spain. She did not know her husband was just over the border in the French Pyrenees.

  Yvonne Cormeau brought this photograph of Alfred, Pilar, and Georgina Starr to George Starr in France in August 1943. “She was given a letter and photographs of the children,” George recalled. “Of course, you’re supposed not to look at them, but being a bloody woman, she bloody looked.” Cormeau did not tell her SOE handlers that she and her late husband had known Starr in Brussels.

  Anne-Marie Walters, code name “Colette,” parachuted into occupied France in January 1944 at the age of twenty to become George Starr’s courier. She would later accuse him of committing war crimes.

  Philippe de Gunzbourg, a French Jewish aristocrat, code names “Philibert” and “Edgar,” became one of George Starr’s closest comrades. A colleague wrote that he was “a Frenchman, although due to his bearing, he was sometimes taken for an Englishman.” Gunzbourg admired George Starr as “a great leader of the caliber of Lawrence [of Arabia].”

  A French Jewish résistante, Denise Bloch, left, worked closely with George Starr as his first courier. Paul Sarrette, right, deputy to Henri Paul Sevenet of the F-Section’s VENTRILOQUIST circuit, helped to save Bloch from capture by the Gestapo and later accused her of being George Starr’s mistress.

  Captain Adolphe Rabinovitch, an Egyptian-Russian-Jewish SOE radio operator for Peter Churchill’s SPINDLE circuit, transmitted messages for George Starr and evaded capture on his first mission to France. When Germans captured him at the start of his second mission and took him to 84 avenue Foch, he complained to John Starr about SOE negligence.

  At age twenty-eight, squadron officer Diana Rowden parachuted into occupied France on June 16, 1943, to work as courier for John Starr. She saw John Starr again when they were both imprisoned at 84 avenue Foch.

  In August 1944, George Starr celebrated the liberation of Agen, the city where he had begun his secret mission in southwest France in November 1942. He is seen here with a cigarette, although he claimed to have given up smoking before D-Day.

  This notice from 1941 reads: “The head of the German Military Administration in France warns that any person who offers help and assistance to a member of an English aircrew who has escaped, or any person who attempts to encourage his escape and help him in any way, will be brought immediately before a German court martial and will be punished with the death penalty.”

  Mayor Roger Larribeau of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon provided George Starr with identity cards that permitted him to travel anywhere. Starr wore a moustache, which was easier to shave off than to grow when he needed to change his appearance. He said, “If somebody’s used to a little dark man that wears a beret, and he’s got a moustache and he always wears a brown suit, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for a clean-shaven man wearing glasses and wearing a gray suit.”

  Group photograph in Agen, 1944, of the Judex Mission to provide assistance to the French who had suffered for their support of SOE resistance. Yvonne Cormeau is in the front row, center, and George Starr, also in uniform, is fourth on her left.

  Colonel George Starr—in the front row with his German shepherd, Lassie, at the Villa Hügel, near Essen—reorganized the German coal industry at the end of the war. Yvonne Cormeau, his wartime radio operator, sits to his left and, in her daughter Yvette Pitt’s words, “was responsible for running the domestic side of the house.”

  Founders of the Réseau Victoire, Victory Network, in April 1942, the French nucleus of George Starr’s WHEELWRIGHT circuit in southwest France. From left to right: Pierre Duffoir, who carried messages for Starr as far as Switzerland; his daughter, Josette; his wife, Paulette Duffoir, who worked ceaselessly for the Resistance; Gyl Al Carty; Maurice Rouneau, who introduced Starr to the network; and Rouneau’s future wife, Jeanne Robert. Robert housed and fed Starr in her school in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon.

  Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon—George Starr’s underground headquarters from 1942 to 1944—following its destruction by the German Army on June 21, 1944. Yvonne Cormeau wrote on the back of the photograph, “(Castelnau) main street after fighting June ’44. Ruins of [Mayor Roger] Larribeau’s house on right.”

  John Starr and Michelle Vergetas shortly after their June 30, 1934, wedding in France. The couple moved into a flat in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, while John worked as a commericial artist for Agence Yves Alexandre Publicité.

  Lieutenant John Starr at the British Army’s Field Security Police base in Winchester, England, in 1940, following his escape from France in June. John, who was drawing propaganda posters for the army, accepted an invitation from SOE for an interview that led to his becoming agent “Emile.”

  John Starr drew this floor plan of the Sicherheitsdeinst (SD) bureau at 84 avenue Foch, where he was imprisoned from September 1943 to August 1944.

  Noor Inayat Khan, code name “Madeleine,” was a radio operator for F-Section in Paris. Major Kieffer recalled, “We were pursuing her for months.” Following her capture, she was interrogated at 84 avenue Foch and escaped from the building with John Starr and French officer Léon Faye.

  Hans Josef Kieffer, counterespionage chief of the Nazi SD in Paris at 84 avenue Foch. John Starr testified that Kieffer treated him and other captured SOE agents humanely.

  German occupation forces paraded from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris along avenue Foch, known as “avenue Boche” due to the number of German security services occupying its luxurious mansions.

  General Charles de Gaulle arriving in Toulouse on September 16, 1944, to cement his support in the city. On this drive from the airport, a subordinate told him that George Starr was questioning his authority. De Gaulle responded, “And you didn’t arrest him on the spot?”

  Poster telling the people of Toulouse, “The enemy in flight has abandoned the city. . . . Toulouse is liberated.”

  In August 1944, the Wehrmacht abandoned Auch, capital of the Gers department. George Starr and Maurice Parisot’s Armagnac Battalion secured the town.

  As George Starr and Yvonne Cormeau drove into liberated Toulouse on August 21, 1944, an American officer lamented there was no American flag beside the French and British standards on their car. Cormeau pulled the patch from his uniform and put it on the windshield. They drove forward displaying the three Allied flags.

  Serge Ravanel, Resistance leader in southwest France, met his chief, Charles de Gaulle, in Toulouse a month after he helped to liberate the city. De Gaulle, rather than offer congratulations, insulted the young man.

  The officers and men of the Armagnac Brigade assembled in Auch for the funeral of their commander, Captain Maurice Parisot. Spanish commander “Camilo” is first in the front row with his crutch; George Starr is third to his left.


  Memorial plaque to the men and women of SOE who trained at Beaulieu, the Montagu family estate in Hampshire that SOE used in secrecy throughout the war.

  Memorial to the fighters and civilians who fell in the Battle of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon on June 21, 1944.

  Telegram from F-Section intelligence officer Vera Atkins to Michelle Starr informing her of John Starr’s return from the German concentration camps.

  Letter from Lieutenant Colonel George Starr in Germany to his daughter, Georgina, on the day the Second World War ended.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  On completion of my previous Second World War book, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II, I decided to write about combatants who fought in darkness, away from comrades, on their own behind enemy lines, living by their wits. My friend Colonel Tim Spicer, a Falklands War veteran who served in Britain’s Scots Guards Regiment, suggested I look at the career of the late Anthony Brooks. In 1942 at the age of twenty, Brooks became the youngest agent that SOE F-Section sent into occupied France. His career, mentioned in these pages, was spectacular even by SOE standards for the ingenuity and success of his sabotage operations and his survival of Gestapo interrogation to return to the field. I researched Brooks’s eventful life in France and during the postwar era with British intelligence. This led me to historian Mark Seaman, who had worked on SOE at the Foreign Office and the Imperial War Museum. When we met, Seaman informed me that he was completing his own biography of Brooks. Seaman had exclusive access to Brooks’s personal papers to add to his professional acquaintance with SOE lore. He mitigated my dejection by asking whether I had heard of the Starr brothers. That was the genesis of this book, for which I thank Tim Spicer and Mark Seaman.