Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  Though his guide had not specified their destination, Joe was immediately heartened by the fact that upon leaving the apartment building the man turned right and began walking south on rue du 29 Juillet. The street ended at the rue de Rivoli, on the other side of which was the sprawling Tuileries Garden on the north bank of the Seine. Joe reasoned that if they crossed the river, there was at least a chance they were headed for Invalides. His hunch was soon proved right, for his guide led him west along the Seine, then over the Pont de la Concorde. Once across the span the men turned right on the quai d’Orsay, and continued walking until the now familiar vista of the broad esplanade des Invalides opened before them. When the guide headed briskly off down the sidewalk bordering the rue du Marechal Galleni directly toward the golden dome, Joe hurried to keep pace, increasingly convinced that he was about to be reunited with Yvette.

  After passing through Invalides’ north gate behind what appeared to be an extended French family—and again without any interference from the German soldiers standing guard—Joe could hardly restrain himself from running across the Cour d’honneur, though he could do nothing about the broad smile that creased his face. He had a brief moment of panic when his escort stopped abruptly upon reaching the southeast corner of the Dôme church and for a moment seemed to be about to head directly out through the southern gate, but it quickly became apparent that the man was simply waiting for a group of uniformed Germans—tourists, Joe assumed, based on the guidebooks in which they seemed intensely interested—to move past. Once the Boche had strolled off toward the church entrance the guide turned left and walked nonchalantly toward the eastern gate. Joe followed, silently praying that the Frenchman would turn right before reaching the portal, and when the man did so Joe almost laughed aloud. By the time the young American turned the corner himself his guide was standing at the Morins’ door, speaking in a low voice with Georges and Denise. When they saw Joe they both smiled broadly, and as he reached the threshold Denise embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks.

  In response to Joe’s questioning glance into the apartment, Georges winked, tapped his battered wristwatch, and in English said simply, “work.” His meaning was clear: Yvette had not yet returned from the Crédit National. The news that he would have to wait a few more hours to hold the woman he loved didn’t bother Joe in the least, however; until that moment he hadn’t been sure he’d ever actually see her again. Despite the fact that he was in an enemy-occupied city in the middle of the greatest war the world had ever seen, Joe Cornwall was the happiest man on earth.

  Chapter 6

  HOME RUN

  FOR JOE CORNWALL AND YVETTE MORIN, THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE aviator’s surprise August 8 return to Invalides were filled with both happiness and a growing conviction that their earlier dreams of a postwar life together might actually come true. Their time apart had given each of them the opportunity to examine their feelings for one another, and they had independently come to the inescapable conclusion that they could and would overcome the challenges presented by their different backgrounds, cultures, and languages. During long conversations conducted with the help of a small French-English dictionary and a growing vocabulary of gestures, the couple began to plan in concrete terms for a future that just days before had seemed as unlikely as it was desirable. They even spoke half-jokingly of ultimately traveling together to Alaska to visit Joe’s mother.

  Both realized, of course, that their ultimate happiness was entirely dependent on the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of France. They were also equally aware that both of them still had important roles to play in achieving that longed-for victory, and that they were certain to be separated again—likely for years—before they could finally begin building a life together. Unfortunately, that next separation came far sooner than either would have wished.

  On Sunday, August 16, the Morins received word that on the following morning Joe would be leaving again. Whatever issues had prevented his departure for Spain on the previous attempt had apparently been resolved, for Georges and Denise were told that an escort would take their American guest directly to the Gare d’Austerlitz. There, Joe would presumably be handed off to a different escort for the onward rail journey to Toulouse and, ultimately, the Spanish border. The elder Morins broke the news of Joe’s coming departure to him and Yvette over dinner, after which all four of them repaired to the roof of the Dôme church to watch a final sunset together.

  THE MORNING OF MONDAY, AUGUST 17, BROUGHT SOMETHING OF A SURPRISE. Joe’s escort to the railway station turned out to be not one person, but three. Gabrielle Wiame, the English-speaking résistant whom the aviator knew only as “Marie,” was accompanied by both Maud Couvé and Germaine Mercier.1 And, in what was almost certainly not a surprise to Joe, Yvette also insisted on going with him and the others. “Marie” was apparently aware of the emotional bond between the young Frenchwoman and the American evader and reluctantly agreed. Joe then once again said a sad farewell to the elder Morins before walking out the door with the four women.

  In yet another unexpected development that morning, after leaving Invalides through the east gate “Marie” turned left and headed north toward the Seine, rather than striking off to the east and the Gare d’Austerlitz. Joe had assumed that he and his escorts would walk the roughly two and a half miles to the train station, given that all of his earlier forays through the city had been on foot. A few minutes later the reason for the detour became apparent, however, when “Marie” led the group down into a Métro station. At the bottom of the steps “Marie” motioned for the others to wait for her at a nearby kiosk, then started off toward the ticket booths. Joe watched her walk away, but noticed that before she reached her destination a thin young man in a shabby suit crossed her path and bumped into her. The man leaned close to “Marie,” uttering what might have been an apology, but what looked to Joe more like a terse warning—then disappeared into the crowd. As he did so, “Marie” abruptly turned and walked back toward where Joe, Yvette, and the others were standing. Instead of stopping, she passed by and with a slight nod of her head indicated that the others were to follow her back up the stairs and out of the station. Joe’s hunch that the poorly dressed young man had alerted “Marie” to some sort of danger was confirmed moments later, when after turning down a side street she stopped briefly to let her companions catch up. As they gathered around her she said the man who had bumped into her—a Turma-Vengeance lookout—had warned her the Métro station was alive with Gestapo men.2

  “Marie” acknowledged that the agents’ presence might have been part of a regular inspection of travelers’ papers, but added that she could not rule out the possibility that the Boche had been forewarned of some sort of resistance activity. Security protocols forbade an immediate return to Invalides, in case the Morins had been betrayed and were under surveillance, so “Marie” told Maud Couvé to go home and then instructed Germaine, Joe, and Yvette to spend a few hours walking around the city to ensure they were not being followed. They were then to go to Germaine’s apartment, she said, where she would meet them once she had further instructions to pass on. With that, she turned and hurried away.

  Though understandably upset at the thought that Georges and Denise might already be in the hands of the Germans, Yvette, Joe, and Germaine did as “Marie” had instructed. For the next two hours they walked the streets of the 6th arrondissement—east of Invalides and south of the Seine—strolling as casually as they could, Joe and Yvette holding hands. Having detected no tails, they eventually made their way to the Merciers’ apartment, where Germaine filled her husband in on the morning’s excitement. The four of them then settled in for what they assumed would be the imminent arrival of “Marie” and her new instructions.

  It turned out to be a somewhat longer wait than they had anticipated, however, for “Marie” did not appear at the Merciers’ apartment until the morning of Wednesday, August 19. Her only explanation for her two-day absence was a terse reference to “security proc
edures,” though her report that all was well with the elder Morins’ was welcome news for both Yvette and Joe. The couple’s spirits were further lifted when “Marie” told them that Joe could go back to Invalides “for a few more days” until the details of his next departure from Paris could be worked out. Having delivered her update, “Marie” left quickly.

  Almost immediately after the woman’s departure, Joe and Yvette made their way back to Invalides. While Georges and Denise were overjoyed to see them—they had assumed both had been arrested—they were also quick to voice their belief that “Marie” had in some way been responsible for the debacle at the Métro station. Nor were they alone in their distrust of her, they said, for other members of Turma-Vengeance had also begun to question the woman’s loyalty. These suspicions later proved to be totally unfounded, but given the Germans’ ongoing and often highly successful efforts to penetrate the French evasion networks, even the slightest uncertainty about a résistant’s devotion to the cause was enough to prompt an internal investigation.3 Until the probe into “Marie” was concluded, the elder Morins told Joe, someone else would help arrange his onward travel.

  That someone turned out to be a tall, slender, and balding man who arrived at Invalides the next day, August 20.4 Introduced to the American aviator simply as “Gotha,” he was, in fact, a former Polish army officer named Andrzej Wyssogota-Zakrzewski. He’d learned the evasion trade helping fellow Polish soldiers flee from France into Spain in 1940 and 1941, and had managed to escape from German captivity several times. He ultimately founded and headed an evasion network known as Visigoth-Lorraine, but also worked closely with Turma-Vengeance, Bourgogne, Comète, and others. His careful examination of Joe’s false papers on that first visit to Invalides seemed to reinforce the possibility that “Marie” was not entirely trustworthy, for though she had pronounced the documents to be fine when she looked at them, “Gotha” immediately denounced them as being “no good.” He took the papers with him when he left, saying that he would return with usable ones in a few days.5

  Not knowing how long it would take for new documents to be prepared, Joe and Yvette agreed that they would make the most of whatever time they were able to spend together. Since the Morins were not hosting other evaders at that point, Yvette was able to briefly reclaim her bedroom, and Joe slept on the couch in the downstairs living area. The first two days after their return to Invalides they ate a spare breakfast with Georges and Denise, after which Yvette walked to work at the Crédit National. Joe spent the day with the couple he’d begun to refer to as Mama and Pop, playing cards, practicing his few words of French, and occasionally strolling the grounds of Invalides or nearby streets with them or Germaine Mercier. Upon Yvette’s return each afternoon she and Joe would repair to their favorite aerie—the roof of the Dôme church—and spend the hours until dark talking of the future.

  The first weekend after the couple’s brief sojourn at the Mercier’s apartment brought an unexpected reunion. Just before noon on Saturday, August 21, Maud Couvé arrived at Invalides accompanied by Harry Eastman and Dick Davitt. The two gunners had been told that their departure from Paris was imminent, and they had lobbied Maud for the chance to see Joe a final time before beginning what was almost certain to be a challenging journey over the Pyrenees into Spain. The Gunner Trio shared a modest lunch with the Morins, Maud, and Germaine Mercier, during which Harry and Dick promised that whichever of them reached England first would brief the 94th Bomb Group’s intelligence personnel on the events of July 14. They would also pass on the news that Joe had survived the downing of Salty’s Naturals and was in the care of a resistance organization, they said, so that the terse telegram his family had undoubtedly already received notifying them that he was “missing in action” could be amended to include his current status.

  With the end of the meal it was time for Harry and Dick to return with Maud to the apartment on rue de Madrid. Both aviators told Joe they hoped to see him soon in England, and after a final round of handshakes—and hugs for the Morins and Germaine—the two men followed Maud out the door. Joe watched them go with mixed emotions; while he hoped that their journey back to England would go smoothly and quickly, he fervently wished that his own “home run” might be delayed a little while longer.

  Just when and how Joe would leave the City of Light—and the route he would follow to reach England—were not, of course, his decisions to make. The timing and method of the gunner’s home run would be determined by the network that was sheltering him, as it would be for all the 94th Bomb Group airmen who had survived July 14 over Le Bourget and had managed to thus far avoid capture.

  And though Joe didn’t know it, all of his fellow Bastille Day evaders would leave Paris to begin their journeys back to England well before he had to say his final goodbyes to the City of Light and to the woman he loved.

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1943 THERE WERE ESSENTIALLY ONLY TWO WAYS TO GET a downed Allied aviator out of France—by sea, or on foot.

  The first entailed getting the evader to the coast of either Normandy or Brittany and putting him aboard a vessel. This was usually a fishing trawler or some other type of small commercial craft, though occasionally Royal Navy motor torpedo boats would make the dash across from England to pick up larger groups of evaders.6 Evacuation across the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay was inherently dangerous no matter what type of conveyance was employed, however, given that both bodies of water were patrolled day and night by German ships and aircraft. Indeed, only one of the 94th Bomb Group airmen shot down on Bastille Day made his home run by sea. Second Lieutenant John Bieger, Floyd Watts’s copilot, was among nineteen Allied personnel evacuated from France aboard the fishing trawler Suzanne-Renne in October 1943.7

  The second and by far the most common way for evaders to leave Occupied France was to walk over the border into a neutral country. Although Switzerland may have seemed an obvious choice, in practice most French evasion networks preferred to avoid the alpine nation. Its frontier with France was heavily guarded by German, Italian, and French collaborationist troops and border police, and the Swiss themselves had erected fences and other barriers in order to prevent an influx of refugees. Moreover, to avoid antagonizing Germany, Switzerland almost always interned Allied military personnel who did manage to make it across the border. Those men who avoided internment then faced a final hurdle on the road back to England: Switzerland is landlocked and at that time was surrounded either by Axis or Axis-occupied nations, and the only viable way for an evader to leave was by air. While some high-value personnel were able to do so with the help of Allied diplomatic missions or espionage organizations such as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, such treatment was not the norm for “average” evaders.8

  Of necessity, then, Spain was the usual destination for evaders attempting to reach England, despite the fact that it, too, had several drawbacks.

  The first of these was that, like the Swiss frontier, France’s border with Spain was heavily patrolled by German and collaborationist soldiers and police. The train station in Toulouse—the main southwest terminus of rail lines emanating from Paris—was the target of frequent sweeps by Gestapo agents and military police units. The smaller stations closer to the border—in Perpignan, Tarbes, Pau, and Bayonne—were also closely watched, as were the few roads that snaked through passes in the towering Pyrenees, the three-hundred-mile mountain range spanning the entire length of the French-Spanish border.

  Soaring in places to more than 11,000 feet, the Pyrenees themselves were the greatest obstacles evaders had to overcome to reach the relative safety of Spain. The rugged valleys that are the only natural corridors through the mountains are blanketed with deep snow in winter and crisscrossed by wildly rushing streams of meltwater in the summer. Daytime temperatures can range from far below zero to well over one hundred degrees depending on the season, and the smuggler’s routes most often followed by the local guides leading evaders were extremely daunting, even for very fit young men.


  Nor was simply surviving the journey through the mountains the only challenge evaders faced. Despite Spain’s official neutrality the nation’s dictator, General Francisco Franco, was so pro-Axis that he had sent Spanish troops to fight alongside the Germans in their battle against the Soviets on the Eastern Front.9 Many Spaniards shared their despotic leader’s fondness for fascism, and evaders who managed to make it into Spain could never be sure what sort of reception they might receive. Indeed, the Spanish government’s official policy regarding Allied military personnel who ended up in Spain was to arrest and intern them for the duration of the war, with their internment to be spent in prison.

  Such hazards notwithstanding, Spain had much to recommend it as an escape route from Occupied France. Although the border was well patrolled, it would have required thousands of troops to seal it completely—men who were not available because they were busy fighting in Russia and elsewhere.10 Local resistance groups on the French side of the mountains kept careful track of the movements of the German and collaborationist units that were on border-guard duty, and sympathetic Spaniards and Basques south of the mountains—people who in many cases were related to their compatriots to the north—paid equally close attention to the movements of Spanish troops and police. By coordinating information from both sides of the border, the networks substantially reduced the possibility that the evaders would be intercepted. Many networks also sought to increase the chances of a successful border crossing by funneling the aviators and their guides through neutral Andorra, a tiny principality sandwiched between France and Spain in the eastern Pyrenees. Historically a center of north-south smuggling because of its location, Andorra had some of the finest mountain guides in Europe—many of whom did heroic service leading parties of Allied personnel into Spain.