Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  13. E&E 98. Additional details are drawn from Turner’s obituary in the March 2013 issue of the Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society’s newsletter.

  14. Henriette was Henriette Nantier-Morin. As far as can be determined, she was not related to the Morins of Invalides. She and the Renaudins were members of Turma-Vengeance.

  15. Just three miles west of central Évreux, in July 1943 the base was home to Bf 109s and Fw 190s of the 1st Group (I. Gruppe) of Egon Mayer’s Jagdgeschwader 2. As of this writing the base hosts several French air force transport squadrons.

  16. The woman was Mme. Roger Moreau, who lived just a mile away in the village of Huest.

  17. It has proven impossible to determine the man’s identity.

  18. Watts needn’t have worried about the possibility of civilian casualties. The Fortress crashed into a section of railway line leading into the Louvres train station (just over two miles northwest of modern Charles de Gaulle Airport). The crash destroyed a signal hut and disrupted rail traffic on the line for several days, but no one on the ground was injured. The two Americans still aboard the Fortress when it hit the ground—waist gunners Staff Sergeants Lawrence Phillips and Burton Reppert—were already dead, killed by 20mm rounds before the bomber started its final plunge. The remains of the two airmen are buried at the city’s military cemetery, beneath a monument placed by the people of Louvres. The stele bears one of the twisted propeller blades recovered from the crash, as well as a small English-language plaque commemorating the airmen.The account of Watts’s postcrash activities is based on Escape and Evasion Report No. 92, hereafter cited as E&E 92.

  19. Several sources indicate that the young woman was Jacqueline Barron, and that her father, Pierre Barron, was the mayor of Louvres.

  20. The two other surviving members of Watts’s crew—navigator Second Lieutenant Allan Eastman and bombardier Second Lieutenant Richard Manning—also reached Paris, though under distinctly different circumstances. Both were wounded in the downing of their Fortress and were captured by the Germans. They were transported to Beaujon hospital in the French capital for treatment, after which they were sent to POW camp Stalag Luft VII A in Bavaria, where they spent the remainder of the war.

  21. SNCF stands for Société nationale des chemins de fer français. For more on the railwaymens’ role in the Resistance, see La SNCF sous l’Occupation Allemande, 1940–1944: Rapport Documentaire.

  22. Based upon the later reports of their arrival in Paris, Cornwall, Davitt, and Eastman were led from the Gare Saint-Lazare to the boulevard Haussmann, and from there past the Le Madeleine and on to the place de la Concorde.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Details on Schoegel’s life and resistance activities are drawn primarily from documents in his personal file in Container 1167 of Case Files Relating to French Citizens Proposed for Awards for Assisting American Airmen. Additional information is from the various escape and evasion reports that mention him, and from Demande d’Attestation d’Etat de Services, Mouvement de Résistance “Vengeance,” André Auguste Schoegel.

  2. Suzanne Schoegel survived her time in the camp, and was reunited with her husband in July 1945.

  3. The account of the dead child, and other details of the Morins’ daily life during the first year of the occupation, are drawn from Harding-Claerebout 2017.

  4. The younger Salomon, an engineer by training, would go on to serve in the Vengeance organization under the nom de guerre “Corentin.” He was arrested by German military police in the town of Ploërmel on February 26, 1944, and executed by firing squad on June 30, 1944. The elder Salomon was also arrested, on July 14, 1944, in Paris, and was deported to Buchenwald. He survived, and was liberated on April 11, 1945, by troops of the U.S. 6th Armored Division.

  5. Fonds Turma-Vengeance; and Vengeance: Histoire, op. cit.

  6. Details on the Morins’ resistance activities up to 1943 are drawn from Case Files Relating to French Citizens Proposed for Awards for Assisting American Airmen, Container 1118, Names Moreau-Morin.

  7. Though she hadn’t known it at the time she took the position, the bank’s personnel manager was the uncle of one of her childhood friends. Yvette was later able to recruit the man into Turma-Vengeance. The director of Crédit National at the time Yvette was hired was Wilfrid-Siegfried Baumgartner, a well-known and highly respected economist and financier. Although he was not Jewish (the family name is Alsatian), Baumgartner was arrested in 1943 after repeatedly resisting German attempts to transfer his bank’s holdings to Nazi-run institutions. He spent time in both Buchenwald and the Füssen-Plansee labor camp, but survived and enjoyed a long and successful postwar career until his death in 1978.

  8. Harding-Claerebout 2017.

  9. Information on Brown and Houghton and their time with the Morins is drawn from Escape & Evasion Reports Nos. 52 and 53, hereafter cited as E&E 52 and E&E 53.

  10. The three captured airmen—navigator Second Lieutenant Leonard J. Fink, engineer/top turret gunner Staff Sergeant Otho E. Masterson, and tail gunner Staff Sergeant Lee Lewis—spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp. In addition to Houghton and Brown, the men sent to Paris included pilot Second Lieutenant Joseph Rosio, copilot Second Lieutenant George W. Evans, and waist gunners Staff Sergeant John Kuberski and Staff Sergeant Anthony Cucinotta. The evasion experiences of the latter four—all of whom made it back to England—are detailed in, respectively, Escape & Evasion Reports Nos. 54, 55, 56, and 71. The Fortress’s bombardier, Second Lieutenant Sidney Casden, was assisted by the François-Shelburn escape line and was evacuated to England by boat in January 1944. His experience is detailed in Escape and Evasion Report No. 355.

  11. Dr. Mercier had served in Georges Morin’s regiment in World War I, and from the 1920s onward had been the Morins’ family physician and close friend. Yvette Morin thought of him as an “uncle,” and was close friends with the doctor’s wife. Indeed, it was apparently Yvette who brought Germaine Mercier into the Turma-Vengeance network, mainly as an escort for evaders moving around the city. Dr. Mercier, for his part, helped the network when he could, but as far as can be determined was never an official member.

  12. With the aid of the Bourgogne network, Brown and Houghton left Paris and arrived in Spain on July 14, the same day Joe Cornwall’s odyssey in France began.

  13. While it took Cornwall, Eastman, and other American evaders some time to put names to the various places, monuments, streets, and buildings they encountered in Paris, in the interests of clarity we will use the names from the outset.

  14. Several sources indicate that the woman was Francoise Vandevoorde. She and her husband, Maurice, were members of the Bourgogne network and often sheltered evaders in their home on avenue de la Republique in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-sur-Bois.

  15. As is often the case with escape and evasion reports—and with witness statements made to police and interviews recorded by reporters—accounts by different people who participated in the same events can differ widely. While most documents dealing with Turner and Davitt, including their E&E reports, agree that they stayed with Schoegel in Orly, at least one other states that they were housed by a woman named Marie Sauvage, an acquaintance of Schoegel’s. I have elected to follow the most commonly accepted accounts.

  16. The garden was referred to as the Cour de la Boulangerie on eighteenth-century diagrams of Invalides. In 1987 the Hospital Garden was replaced by the much larger and more formal Jardin de l’Abondance (Garden of Abundance), which was intended to be the counterpart to the Jardin de l’Intendant, installed in 1980 on the southwest corner of Invalides.

  17. Yvette’s stays with the Merciers piqued the interest of the concierge in the couple’s building, who seemed intensely interested in the young woman’s identity. Concerned that the concierge might be an informer, Dr. Mercier made a point of telling the woman that Yvette was his “niece from Bordeaux.” Harding-Claerebout 2017.

  18. Harding-Higgins 2017 and Harding-Lynch 2017. Harry Eastman’s awareness that he looked
like a harmless middle-aged Frenchman led him to do something that likely scared Germaine Mercier half to death. As the two were walking one afternoon along the northern end of the boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg—the street that marks the western boundary of Invalides—several off-duty German soldiers were playing volleyball on a narrow patch of lawn that lay between the street and the buildings that housed their barracks and various administrative offices. One of the players mis-hit the ball, which soared over the sturdy wrought iron fence separating Invalides from the wide boulevard and rolled to a stop at Harry’s feet. Without a second thought, he bent over, picked up the ball, and walked a few feet closer to the fence. As the ball-less Germans watched him expectantly, he took a beat, then nonchalantly tossed the ball over the fence. The soldier who caught the ball smiled and said “Merci,” at which point Harry gave the troops a cheerful wave and walked back to a visibly shaken Germaine. The remainder of their walk was uneventful.

  19. Harding-Claerebout 2017.

  20. While it is likely that first turn took the trio east on rue de Babylone, it is impossible to chart their subsequent course with any accuracy. “Marie” would have wanted to avoid streets that were home to German offices or French police stations, yet would have also wanted to follow routes that were fairly busy with other pedestrians.

  21. The reunion of the three friends is recounted in various levels of detail in each of their E&E reports.

  22. Maud Couvé was a Frenchwoman whose husband was serving in the Royal Air Force. Alice Brouard and her husband, John, were both British subjects, having been born in the Channel Islands. John Brouard was at that time still confined in an internment camp outside Paris, so after their own release from internment Alice and her elder daughter, Marguerite, had moved in with Maud. Alice’s second daughter, thirteen-year-old Christine, was living with her grandparents in Normandy. Details on the two women and their activities as helpers are drawn from Marguerite Brouard-Miller’s delightful unpublished 2002 memoir, The World War II Years of Marguerite, and from the author’s January 2017 interviews with her. Details on Davitt’s stay with the women are drawn from E&E 99.

  23. Mme. Melot was arrested by the Germans on November 13, 1943, and deported to Ravensbrück. She survived, and was liberated in April 1945. Dickson, the RNZAF pilot, had previously made it safely to Spain as part of the group that included Kee Harrison.

  24. In his E&E report Joe simply identifies the location as “a place where Capt. [Kee] Harrison later stayed.” Harrison only sheltered at two locations during his time in Paris: the first was the home of Jean and Laure de Traz on rue de Miromesnil, where he lodged from July 20 to August 8, and the second was with Mme. Rospape, from August 8 to August 17. Joe never stayed with the de Trazes, which leaves Mme. Rospape’s apartment as the only logical location for his sojourn after leaving rue de Madrid. Harrison arrived at rue du 29 Juillet on Sunday the eighth, which was the day after Joe left to return to Invalides. E&E 91 and E&E 125.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Some sources have indicated that the “Germaine” Joe Cornwall refers to in his E&E 125 as being part of his escort to Gare d’Austerlitz on August 17 was Germaine Bajpai, the elegant and very attractive forty-seven-year-old chief of the Comète network’s chain of safe houses. This is unlikely, in that Mme. Bajpai was careful never to use her real name when dealing with evaders, instead going by the code names “Francoise” or “Madame Haurfoin” (unlike Maud Couvé, who tended to tell evaders her real name rather than giving them her nom de guerre, “Margie”). Since in his E&E report Cornwall says that Yvette Morin also accompanied him to the train station that day, it is logical to assume that the “Germaine” he refers to was Mme. Mercier, whom he already knew through the Morins.

  2. E&E 125.

  3. No evidence survives to explain the suspicions the Morins and others in Turma-Vengeance briefly harbored against Gabrielle Wiame, though it may have stemmed from the fact that her husband, Charles, was a policeman. After the war both the Wiames were widely lauded for their work with several evasion networks, and Gabrielle was credited with aiding more than one hundred evaders. She was ultimately awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm.

  4. E&E 125.

  5. Ibid.

  6. While submarines were often used to put spies, saboteurs, and other covert operatives ashore in Occupied France, such vessels were considered far too valuable to the Allied war effort to be risked just to retrieve evaders and therefore almost never did so.

  7. In the week following his landing just northwest of Paris, Bieger walked almost two hundred miles south. After finally being found by résistants he spent time in a camp in the mountains before being moved to Lyon. On October 1 he was escorted to Paris, where he was turned over to Jean-Claude Camors, head of a network known as BCRA-Camors (BCRA was Charles de Gaulle’s London-based organization). On October 2 he was moved to Brittany. Bieger’s story is detailed in Escape and Evasion Report No. 133, and in the March 8, 2012, edition of the U.S. Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society newsletter.

  8. Despite its purposely innocuous-sounding name, the OSS was the United States’ primary interservice intelligence and covert-action organization for much of the latter part of World War II. Created in the summer of 1942 under the leadership of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the organization operated in both the Pacific and European theaters, conducting espionage and sabotage missions, organizing and training local guerrilla groups, and orchestrating the sort of propaganda and misinformation campaigns that are now referred to as “information warfare.” The OSS’s chief of operations in Switzerland was the professorial Allen W. Dulles, who later became head of the postwar Central Intelligence Agency, itself an outgrowth of the wartime OSS.

  9. Known as the División Azul (Blue Division) and designated by the Germans as the 250. Infanterie-Division, the unit consisted of some sixteen thousand officers and men. The division distinguished itself in action against the Soviets, but political pressure from the Allied governments forced Franco to recall the unit to Spain in the fall of 1943. Most of the several thousand men who chose to ignore the order were absorbed into regular German units and the Waffen-SS, though some were massed into the regimental-size Legión Azul (Blue Legion). Spanish pilots also served Nazi Germany, flying fighters in action against the Soviets.

  10. Many of the routes through the mountains had been pioneered by Spanish Republicans seeking to flee Spain following the victory of Franco’s fascist forces in the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War. The flow of people reversed following the 1939 outbreak of war in Europe, with troops of the defeated armies, Jews, and general refugees streaming south.

  11. Headed by Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Abwehr was primarily responsible for gathering intelligence on the organization, equipment, and effectiveness of Germany’s military opponents. The organization also had a counterintelligence branch, which among other tasks was charged with penetrating foreign intelligence agencies and groups. As part of that latter mission the Abwehr sought to penetrate Britain’s SIS and SOE, as well as anti-German resistance movements in the occupied countries, and turn their members into witting or unwitting assets. This often brought the Abwehr into direct competition with the Gestapo, whose primary purpose was to eliminate résistants rather than turn them into double agents.

  12. Created in 1939, MI9 was officially Section 9 of Britain’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Its mission was to facilitate the escape of Commonwealth prisoners of war from Axis captivity, to support existing evasion organizations, and create and support new ones, and to produce and distribute items that would aid escapers and evaders. MIS-X was organized within the U.S. War Department in October 1942 to undertake the same operations for American military personnel as MI9 did for Commonwealth service members. MIS-X was modeled on MI9, and the two organizations cooperated closely.

  13. Two members of the 94th Bomb Group who managed to make it to Paris were unable to complete their home runs. Staff Sergeants Richard Lewis and Eino Asial
a, the right waist and tail gunner, respectively, on Kee Harrison’s aircraft, were arrested by the Germans in late August as they arrived in the capital by train. They and another of their crewmates who had been captured, left waist gunner Staff Sergeant Earl Porath, spent the remainder of the war in German POW camps.

  14. The post–Bastille Day activities of Turner, Polk, McNemar, and Eastman are drawn from, respectively, E&E 98, E&E 109, E&E 110, and E&E 112.

  15. Like John Harding—the English sports promoter who was good friends with Jeff and Louise Dickson—Don Harding is not related to the author, though he and the author’s father both came from Kansas.

  16. Broussine had escaped to England in 1940 to join de Gaulle and parachuted back into France early in 1943 to establish the Bourgogne network. For an in-depth and fascinating account of the formation and operations of the Bourgogne line, see Broussine’s excellent L’Evadé de la France Libre.

  17. The Germans had confiscated much of France’s better rolling stock in the months following the armistice, leaving the SNCF and local railways to make do with older and far less reliable equipment.

  18. Both Americans and the RCAF gunner, Sergeant David McMillan, all eventually made it safely back to England. See Harding’s Escape and Evasion Report No. 111.

  19. In one of those coincidences that are so unexpected yet so oddly common in wartime, Munday’s Fortress bore the serial number 42-3330, one numeral off Salty’s Naturals’ 42-3331. Both aircraft had come off the same Douglas Aircraft assembly line in Long Beach, California, likely within hours of each other, and both had gone down on the same day, likely within minutes of each other. On top of that, all available sources indicate that Munday’s aircraft was shot down by none other than Egon Mayer.

  20. Details regarding the journey to Spain undertaken by Davitt, Carpenter, and Potvin are drawn from, respectively, E&E 99, E&E 100, and E&E 101.