Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  At the time of Joe’s arrival just before Christmas, the Santa Monica facility comprised three oceanfront resorts—the Del Mar Beach Club, the Edgewater Beach Club, and the Grand Hotel—as well as associated warehouses, parking lots, and vacant land later developed as additional recreation areas.16 The Santa Monica Redistribution Center’s purpose was the same as the facility in New Jersey—to evaluate the mental and physical status of personnel returning from overseas in order to determine whether they should be retained on active duty or discharged. While treatment was available for those recovering from wounds or psychic injuries, the emphasis for the majority of the service members was on rest and recreation. The latter came in a variety of forms—long days on the beach, arts and crafts classes, horse-riding lessons, dances, band recitals, and organized tours to Hollywood and other parts of California. The regimen was intended to reduce any symptoms of combat stress—what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder—and to make an individual’s transition back into stateside military life as easy as possible.

  Despite his longing to be with Yvette and his continuing anxieties about her safety and that of her parents, Joe managed to find some tranquility during his stay in Santa Monica. By the time he left the Redistribution Center on January 12, 1944, he had decided that the only way to get through the months and possibly years that would elapse before he and Yvette could be together would be to do just as he had done following his return to Rougham—focus on work in order to help the time pass more quickly. His return to duty would not happen immediately, however, for on his last day in Santa Monica he was given orders mandating a month’s home leave. The orders further directed that at the end of the four weeks he was to report to the 1178th Flexible Gunnery Training School at Buckingham Army Airfield near Fort Myers, Florida. There Joe would attend an instructor’s course, after which—in keeping with his assignment preference—he would join the 420th Army Air Forces Base Unit’s gunnery training cadre at March Field near San Bernardino, California. While Joe had been hoping for a posting to McChord Field in order to be close to his relatives, March was at least on the right coast.

  At the end of his home leave Joe reported as ordered to Buckingham Army Airfield, and it was while undergoing training there that he was surprised to receive a letter from Jeff Dickson’s wife, Louise. Though Major Nelson—one of Joe’s interviewers at 63 Brooke Street—hadn’t revealed it, he had known the Dicksons before the war. Nelson first heard the story of Jeff Dickson’s time aboard Salty’s Naturals while participating in Larry Templeton’s debriefing, and had promptly written to Louise Dickson—who at that point had only been told Jeff was missing in action, not that he was presumed dead. In what would appear to be both a clear security violation and a monumentally insensitive act, Nelson told her that though Templeton had not actually seen Jeff after the B-17 collided with the German fighter, the tail gunner was convinced that he and Joe Cornwall were the only survivors. Nelson also provided Louise with Templeton’s stateside address, and in late October 1943 she wrote to him, saying she “would be grateful if you would tell me what you know about my husband.”17 In his reply, Templeton said, “I really did not know what happened, but I do know that Joe Cornwall did get out and is back in England.”18

  That piece of information prompted Louise Dickson to write to Nelson asking how she could contact Joe, and the MIS-X officer responded with the APO address of the 94th Bomb Group. While Louise apparently wrote to Joe, he did not receive the letter before returning to the United States, and it was only after Nelson’s transfer from London to MIS-X’s headquarters at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in early March 1944 that he was able to provide Louise with Joe’s address in Florida. In her subsequent letter, Louise told Joe that she had still not been officially informed of her husband’s death, but had accepted the fact and wanted to hear Joe’s account of the loss of Salty’s Naturals. Joe responded that he would be happy to speak with her, and in a March 31, 1944, letter to him Louise said she was planning to be in Florida the first or second week in April and wanted to speak with him face to face.19 Joe agreed, and in their subsequent meeting he told her all he could about her husband’s final hours. It was obviously difficult for Louise to listen to Joe’s account, but she appreciated his willingness to speak with her and thanked him for helping to provide the details that no one else could give her.20

  Upon his May 4 completion of the training course in Florida Joe traveled back across the country to March Field, where for the next two months he immersed himself in work as a flexible gunnery instructor. The only break in his daily routine came on July 5, when he marked his twenty-ninth birthday by drinking a few solitary beers in the March Field sergeants club. He was feeling particularly melancholy, for the Allied landings in Normandy in June had not resulted in the swift liberation of Paris he’d been hoping for. It had been almost nine months since he’d said goodbye to Yvette, and the passage of time had done nothing to lessen his longing for her. Moreover, July 14 would mark the one-year anniversary of the downing of Salty’s Naturals, and the thought of the friends he’d lost that day still filled Joe with an ineffable sadness.

  When he returned to his room in the NCO barracks after work the next day he was surprised to find a large official envelope thumbtacked to his door. From the many APO postmarks and scribbled forwarding instructions scrawled across its front it was obvious the envelope had been following Joe for some time, and when he noticed that it had originated from Rougham he wondered idly if it contained some official form he’d forgotten to sign before returning to the States. When he opened it he realized it contained a second, smaller envelope, unmarked save for his name written in a delicate hand he at once recognized as Yvette’s. His heart racing, he carefully unsealed the envelope and pulled out a two-page letter written in French.

  The undated missive began “Mon cher Joe,” and with the help of a small French-English dictionary he’d bought in a used book shop in Santa Monica he spent the next few hours laboriously translating the body of the letter. Yvette had written it on behalf of herself—whom she referred to as Mickey—and three other network members whom Joe obviously knew, Roger, Bob, and Paul.21 It was obvious that Yvette had penned it not long after Joe’s departure from Paris, for one of the first lines read, “We were very glad to hear that you arrived across the Channel. No need to tell you the pleasure that news brought us.” It was also apparent that Yvette had been aware that Joe would likely not be the only person to read her words, for though warm and caring in tone the letter contained no protestations of love or yearning. “We are gathered tonight at Mama’s,” it said simply, “to reminisce about the good and bad memories that brought us together.… Life is still the same here, and we hope for the arrival of our American and English friends.… Don’t forget your promise to joyously celebrate the peace to come, the liberation of our dear country, in the company of all your Parisian comrades who are not forgetting you.”22

  Though Joe was disappointed that the letter had not been of a more personal nature, he was nonetheless delighted to have a long-awaited and tangible connection to Yvette. She had held the paper in her hands, and the fact that she had been safe and thinking of him when she wrote it helped ease the ache of missing her. The missive’s arrival, he admitted to himself, was the best belated birthday gift he could have hoped for.

  What Joe did not know, however, was that by the time he read the letter Yvette and her parents were already in the hands of the Gestapo.

  FOLLOWING JOE’S DEPARTURE FROM PARIS IN MID-OCTOBER 1943 THE Morins had continued their work with Turma-Vengeance and their liaisons with the Bourgogne, Shelburn, and de Larminat organizations. The family home remained a key meeting place for senior leaders of those and other networks, as well as a central “post office” where important messages between resistance members and among the various groups were received and passed on. The Morins also oversaw the storage of weapons, equipment, and false documents in various places around Invalides.

  Yvette and her
parents continued to aid Allied aviators passing through Paris, primarily by escorting the men between safe houses and to and from the city’s various train and Métro stations. While several of the evaders spent a few hours at Invalides—some even enjoying a meal of roasted rabbit—none stayed overnight. The leaders of Turma-Vengeance and the other networks had come to see the complex as a vital logistics and administrative hub, and believed that housing non-French-speaking Allied airmen there was an unnecessary risk. There were, after all, many other locations in the city where evaders could be safely and discreetly lodged—places that, unlike Invalides, did not routinely play host to hordes of German military tourists.

  The decision to stop boarding Allied servicemen with the Morins did not affect the aid and shelter the family provided to resistance members. In the weeks and months following Joe’s return to England the family hosted several French “guests” for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks.

  Among the first visitors was Paul Durin, a member of the Paris metropolitan fire service. When war broke out in 1939 Durin was a sergeant working in the fire station on rue du Vieux Colombier, less than a mile east of Invalides in the 6th arrondissement. Called up for army service, he took part in the fighting that followed the Germans’ May 1940 invasion of France. After the armistice Durin went into hiding, and by August 1941 he was the head of a resistance organization composed primarily of still-serving firefighters. He also became a member of Turma-Vengeance, and by mid-1943 was among the network’s senior leaders. He was briefly detained by French police late in 1943, but was released and immediately returned to his resistance activities. In early January 1944 both he and his wife, Cécile, were almost snared by the Germans, and at that point the couple moved in with the Morins. They stayed for just over three weeks before moving on to another safe house, but returned frequently to Invalides for network meetings.23

  Another of the Morins’ French “guests” was more than familiar with his hosts and with Invalides. In 1940 the family had for several weeks sheltered a teenaged refractor—the term used to describe those seeking to avoid forced labor in Germany—named Michel Bourgeois, who was attempting to flee to England. He ultimately succeeded, and in late February 1944 the now twenty-two-year-old agent of de Gaulle’s BCRA returned to France bearing the nom de guerre “Maxime” and accompanied by his radio operator, thirty-five-year-old Martin Mary (“Jacques”).24 The pair had been sent to aid in the establishment of aircraft landing fields and parachute drop zones—apparently in preparation for the eventual Allied invasion of Europe—in cooperation with Georges Broussine’s Burgundy network. After moving into Paris from the countryside the duo spent nearly six weeks with the Morins, and during that time “Jacques” put his considerable radio skills to work on behalf of Turma-Vengeance and some of the other réseaux. He did not broadcast from Invalides, however, but from varying locations in the city in order to prevent the transmitter’s discovery by German radio-direction-finding efforts.

  Those operations—which used multiple receivers to pinpoint the source of clandestine transmissions through triangulation—were an important part of the Germans’ increasingly effective antiresistance activities in the greater Paris region. That covert war was carried out by the Abwehr and the Gestapo, though the two organizations had dissimilar objectives and different ways of attaining them.

  As a military intelligence service the Abwehr was ultimately subordinate to the high command of the German armed forces, and was organized into three main abteilungen, or departments. In Paris, the Abwehr was headquartered in the commandeered Hôtel Lutetia on boulevard Raspail, from which its Abteilung III-F worked to search out Allied agents and penetrate resistance groups. The goal was to gain information and, if possible, take control of the networks, their radios, and their members in order to co-opt incoming operatives while also feeding false information to their controllers in Britain. While Abwehr agents were certainly not averse to using violence, intimidation, or coercion to attain their goals, they were generally loath to “roll up” a hostile network while it was still producing actionable intelligence.

  The Gestapo in Paris, on the other hand, was headquartered in various buildings along avenue Foch—and normally acted with a far simpler and decidedly more brutal mandate than did the Abwehr.25 Under the terms of Adolf Hitler’s 1941 Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”) decree, the Gestapo was directed to locate and eliminate anyone guilty of committing offenses against the Reich, whether within Germany or in the occupied territories. After their arrest and once all usable information had been extracted from them through torture, offenders were to be “disappeared”—either executed outright or sent to concentration camps to be gassed or worked to death—with no information regarding their whereabouts or ultimate fate provided to their relatives.

  By late 1943 German efforts to use collaborators and “turned” résistants to penetrate the Paris-based networks had begun to bear fruit, with the number of arrests steadily increasing. Among those taken was Dr. Victor Dupont, one of the three founders of Turma-Vengeance, who was captured at the Gare de Montparnasse on October 9.26 A month and a half later, on November 25, Andrzej Wyssogota-Zakrzewski—the man Joe Cornwall knew as “Gotha”—was arrested aboard a train in southern France as he was shepherding a group of evaders toward the Spanish border.27 Another victim was Mme. Madeleine Melot, the Bourgogne member and friend of Gabrielle Wiame who had hosted the impromptu luncheon for Joe, Harry Eastman, and Dick Davitt on July 30. The elderly widow was seized at her home on rue Larrey, thrown into the back seat of a black Citroën Traction Avant—the elegant yet sinister roadster favored by the Gestapo in France—and driven away.28

  With the advent of the new year, other résistants with whom the Morins had interacted also disappeared into the night and fog. Germaine Bajpai and Fernande Onimus, cochiefs of the Comète safe-house system, were both arrested on the night of January 17–18, 1944, and on May 14 Paul and Cécile Durin were swept up in what resistance members called a souriciere (mousetrap). The fireman and his wife had been on their way to deliver some documents to a safe house—which had been secretly taken over by the Germans—when they were surrounded by leather-coated Gestapo agents and quickly hustled into the back of a waiting truck.29

  The Durins’ sudden arrest was certainly painful for the Morins on a personal level, but it was also a stark reminder that Gestapo and Abwehr penetration of the various networks operating in the capital was both extensive and highly effective. Yvette and her parents became even more cautious in their dealings with other network members, especially with the more recent recruits, and it was this increased vigilance that in late June led to their realization that two members of Turma-Vengeance were working with the Germans.

  The pair, Spanish- or possibly Moroccan-born brothers who used the family name Dérida, had joined the group in early 1944.30 They worked primarily as couriers, delivering messages among the network’s various “post offices,” including the one operated by the Morins. Yvette still performed occasional “postal duty” for Turma-Vengeance, despite having become the secretary to Jean Delore (“Jean de la Lune”), the head of the Darius network, after leaving her job at the Crédit National in mid-March.

  On Saturday, June 24, one of the Dérida brothers appeared at the Morins’ door, saying that he had an urgent message for Jean. Something about the man’s behavior made both Yvette and her father suspicious, and though they accepted the sealed envelope he proffered, Yvette pointedly told the courier that she would not be seeing Jean for several days. The man nonetheless returned on Monday the twenty-sixth, asking if Yvette had conveyed the message. When she replied that she hadn’t, the courier said that he needed to take back the original envelope because some important detail had been left out of the message it contained. He then handed Yvette a different, heavily sealed envelope, saying that it was extremely important that she carry it forward as soon as possible. When asked if the second message was also intended for “Jean de la Lune” the man de
murred, saying only that it was urgent and needed to move quickly.

  Dérida’s continuing odd behavior prompted Yvette and Georges to devise a simple security check. Yvette would indeed set out on foot carrying the envelope, but instead of transporting it to the usual next “mail box” in the chain—a nurse at the nearby Hôpital Necker—she would walk in the opposite direction. As she aimlessly strolled the streets of Paris she would check for any sign that she was under surveillance, peering into reflective shop windows, glancing nonchalantly around her before crossing a street, and occasionally turning down narrow alleys that would make a “tail” instantly obvious.

  Yvette set out on the morning of Thursday, June 29, the envelope bearing the second message tucked into a zippered compartment in her purse. She had anticipated that it might take some time to spot any followers, assuming that they would likely be experienced Gestapo or Milice agents, but when she stopped to look into a shop window barely twenty minutes after leaving Invalides she was astonished to see one of the Déridas a block behind her. Peering closer at the scene reflected in the glass, Yvette was astounded to also see the man’s brother, the same distance back but on the other side of the street. For the men to undertake the surveillance themselves was a foolish lapse in basic clandestine practice, and Yvette found herself hoping that the Déridas were equally inept at whatever other duties they might be undertaking for the Germans.