Escape from Paris

by Stephen Harding

  21. After resting up for several days, Munday joined a later group of evaders and eventually made it to Gibraltar, and from there back to England.

  22. Davitt’s E&E report says the man, F/O Peter Ablett of the RAF’s 78 Squadron, stayed in Andorra. But Ablett’s own account says that he was captured while still in France after becoming separated from the group. He spent the remainder of the war in a German POW camp.

  23. Harding-Higgins 2017.

  24. The general account of the time Roy Scott and Tony Trusty spent at Invalides is based on their escape and evasion reports, MI9/S/PG(-)1566 and MI9/S/PG(-)1449, respectively. Scott’s impressions of Joe Cornwall and Yvette Morin are contained in his 1996 interview with Canadian researcher Michael LeBlanc. Scott’s Halifax bore the serial number B8334 and wore the individual squadron code NF-X.

  25. Interestingly, the false papers provided to both Dick Davitt and Harry Eastman had carried the same incorrect stamp, but they got to Spain nevertheless.

  26. The author can personally attest that though the letters of Trusty’s inscription have been somewhat softened by weather and the passage of more than seventy-five years, they remain clearly legible.

  27. The organization was known to the Germans as the Französischer Infanterie-Regiment 638, and is most often referred to in English as the French Volunteer Legion.

  28. The phrase appears in Trusty’s MI9/S/PG(-)1449.

  29. In addition to Joe Cornwall’s E&E 125, details on the events of September 16–18 are drawn from Andrew Lindsay’s Escape and Evasion Report No. 389 and Percival “Vic” Matthews’s MI9/S/PG(-)1559. Lindsay was the copilot of a 386th Bomb Group B-26 shot down on August 22, 1943. Matthews was the pilot of a Lancaster of the RAF’s 61 Squadron, which was brought down by a German night fighter on August 15.

  30. Vic Matthews returned to the United Kingdom on November 12, 1943. It took Andrew Lindsay a bit longer—he finally made his home run on February 6, 1944.

  31. As in the case of Gabrielle Wiame, the suspicions about Andrzej Wyssogota-Zakrzewski turned out to be entirely unfounded.

  32. An outspoken critic of the Nazis and their French collaborators throughout the occupation, Chevrot was also a member of the resistance organization known as the Front national de l’independence de la France.

  33. Among those swept up was Noor Inayat Khan, a British SOE operative of Indian and American descent who was arrested on October 13, just three days before Joe Cornwall left Paris. The first female radio operator sent into Occupied France as part of Britain’s support for the resistance movement, she was betrayed by someone within her network. After harsh interrogation she was executed at Dachau concentration camp on September 13, 1944.

  34. Hampton-Claerebout 2017.

  35. There is some confusion about the identity of the third passenger. Though Cornwall said he was British and named Louis, Colonel Brosse identified him as a French captain named Bernard. (See Témoignage de M. le Colonel Brosse.) One possible explanation is that the third person was indeed a British SIS officer, but one who had grown up completely bilingual and while operating in France had for security purposes let his compatriots believe he was French. This is not as unlikely as it might seem: British agent John Goldsmith—author of the delightful memoir Accidental Agent: Behind Enemy Lines With the French Resistance—had grown up splitting his time between England and France, and his Parisian accent was so authentic that his French comrades were later stunned to discover he was British.

  36. McBride’s Lysander carried the serial V9367 and was coded MA-B. Details of Operation Primrose are drawn from McBride’s own mission notes in Report on Lysander Operations Undertaken by No. 161 Squadron on the Night of 18/19 October, 1943; the Operations Log, No. 161 (Special Duties) Squadron, Oct. 1943; Hugh Verity’s excellent history of the RAF’s secret landings in wartime France, We Landed by Moonlight; Agents by Moonlight by Freddie Clark; and Pierre Hentic’s Agent de l’Ombre.

  37. Sadly, James McBride was killed almost exactly two months after flying Joe Cornwall to freedom. The RAF pilot was returning to RAF Tangmere from an agent pickup mission in France on the night of December 17, 1943, and found the airfield shrouded in thick fog. He aborted his first landing attempt when he lost sight of the field, and on his second approach crashed about a mile short of the runway, possibly as the result of fuel starvation. The Lysander immediately caught fire, and though the two agents McBride was carrying—Léon-Marcel Sandeyron of the Azur network and a female member of the Amarante réseau known by the code-name “Atalas”—were able to escape, the pilot himself was trapped in the cockpit and died in the fire. A second 161 Squadron Lysander also crashed that night, again during a landing attempt. The second aircraft was on approach to fog-shrouded Ford airfield when it dove into the ground, killing the pilot and both passengers.

  38. The USAAF did not provide Joe Cornwall with a car, driver, and escort for his journey to London as a courtesy—it was done entirely for security purposes. MIS-X and MI9 did not want newly returned evaders to speak to anyone about their experiences in France, so as not to inadvertently compromise the evasion networks or their members. Evaders who reached England by sea or by air from Gibraltar or North Africa normally traveled to London by train, seated in sealed compartments and escorted by armed guards. That Joe Cornwall made the trip to the capital by car was apparently due to the fact that he arrived in the United Kingdom in the middle of the night and by unusual means, and that MIS-X officials were eager to hear the reasons for his lengthy stay in Paris.

  CHAPTER 7

  1. The location, wartime operations, and administrative procedures of the U.S. Special Reception Center are detailed in sources including Military Intelligence Service in the European Theater of Operations (hereafter cited as MIS-X in the ETOUSA) and The Escape Factory: The Story of MIS-X. The townhouse at 63 Brook Street is still there, though as part of extensive renovations in the early 2000s its interior was completely gutted. During the reconstruction process No. 63 was joined to the much larger No. 61 next door, to form an office complex totaling more than thirty thousand square feet. On the other side of the townhouse, at No. 65, is the embassy of Argentina.

  2. MACR 116 pertaining to Salty’s Naturals was issued late on July 14, 1943. It lists Clara B. Cornwall as Joe Cornwall’s wife—the same personnel clerk obviously having assumed that Clara’s middle name was Brawner (her actual maiden name).

  3. Clara Gypin married Clarence Wester “Smokey” Rebuck in the spring of 1943. It is unclear why she was living in Raceland in the summer of that year.

  4. The two newspapers known to have run notices regarding Joe Cornwall’s MIA status were The Times of Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. Both papers ran the piece on Tuesday, August 3.

  5. The general nature of Joe Cornwall’s MIS-X interviews is extrapolated from descriptions of such sessions in sources including MIS in the ETO; M.I.S.-X Manual on Evasion, Escape, and Survival; and The Escape Factory. Specific aspects of the interviews are based on E&E 125.

  6. Details on exactly how the message was passed are unclear, but it is likely that the news was included in one of the regular radio transmissions between SOE and Pierre Hentic, who then passed the information through André Schoegel.

  7. Joe Cornwall was the 125th USAAF returned evader to be debriefed by MIS-X in the European Theater, hence the number of his report.

  8. The standard nondisclosure form is coded AG 383.6 and carries the subject line “Safeguarding of P/W Information.” Joe Cornwall actually signed his on October 19, 1943, the day of his arrival at 63 Brook Street.

  9. Company Morning Report, 331st Bomb Sq., Station 468, October 28, 1943, notes “Cornwall, Joseph E., S/Sgt., asgd [assigned] and jd [joined] 25 Oct, per par [paragraph] 5, SO [special order] #292, HQ, Eighth AF.”

  10. The crews of three B-17s were rescued after ditching in the English Channel or North Sea on the return flight, and the crew of one aircraft survived a crash-landing near Dover. The
Big Square A, 358.

  11. Joe Cornwall’s promotion was authorized by Paragraph 11, Special Order 83, HQs. USAAF Station 468, as noted in Company Morning Report, 331st Bomb Sq., Station 468, October 29, 1943.

  12. Joe Cornwall was actually issued two forty-eight-hour passes for his trip to London. The first (marked C-38288) covered the period from midnight on November 21 through midnight on the twenty-third, and the second (J-63548) from midnight on the twenty-third to midnight on the twenty-fifth. Both passes specified Cornwall was to stay at the Columbia Club.

  13. Information on Joe Cornwall’s return flight to the United States is drawn, in part, from the Entry Declaration of Aircraft Commander (Entry Immigration and Customs) filed by Captain C. B. Springer of TWA upon the arrival of C-54A serial 41-37283 at Washington National Airport on December 5, 1943.The C-54 was the military variant of Douglas’s DC-4 airliner. The C-54A had airline-style seats for 22 passengers, as well as a large loading door and a cargo hoist.

  14. The Army Air Forces in World War II: Volume 7, Services Around the World, 551. Hereafter cited as Services Around the World.

  15. Services Around the World, 525. Also see Psychiatric Experiences of the Eighth Air Force: First Year of Combat (July 4, 1942—July 4, 1943) for a more complete explanation of the mental-health issues specific to combat aviators in Europe and the way in which those issues were handled both overseas and once the individual returned to the United States.

  16. Redistribution Center No. 3 eventually grew to encompass five hotels and an apartment complex, as well as gas stations and an Elks Club. Most of the facilities were on Ocean Avenue, just to the north and south of the Santa Monica Pier and where today the Pacific Coast Highway intersects the Santa Monica Freeway. A satellite facility of the Redistribution Center known as Castle Hot Springs was located some fifty miles northwest of Phoenix, Arizona.

  17. Letter, Louise M. Dickson to Lawrence H. Templeton, October 25, 1943.

  18. Letter, Lawrence H. Templeton to Louise M. Dickson, n.d.

  19. Letter, Louise M. Dickson to Joseph E. Cornwall, March 31, 1944.

  20. In an April 18, 1944, letter written while she was still in Fort Myers, Louise Dickson gave a detailed account of her conversation with Joe Cornwall. The letter has no addressee, but was apparently intended for John Harding, the Dicksons’ longtime friend at the National Sporting Club in London.

  21. It has proven impossible to determine who the three other people were, and “Roger,” “Bob,” and “Paul” are almost certainly noms de guerre.

  22. The story of how the letter came into the author’s possession—and its surprising importance—is told in the following chapter.

  23. See La Régiment de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris, 1938–1944, 61. The Durins’ presence at the Morins’ home is also documented in Liste des Français Hébergés Pour un Temps Assez Long, Par la Famille Morin.

  24. The Corsican-born radio operator’s last name is sometimes rendered in official documents as Mario. He also occasionally used the nom de guerre “Robert.”

  25. The Paris Gestapo was subordinate to the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei (BdS), the commander of the security police and security service in the city, himself a representative of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin.

  26. Dupont was interrogated by the Belgian-born collaborator and Abwehr agent Georges Delfanne (alias “Christian Masuy”), who was infamous for his ingenious torture methods. Dupont was ultimately sent to Konzentrationslager (KZ) Buchenwald, where he used his medical skills to care for other prisoners. Dupont survived, and was freed on April 11, 1945, when the U.S. 6th Armored Division liberated the camp. Delfanne, for his part, was captured at the end of the war, tried for his crimes, and executed by firing squad on October 1, 1947.

  27. Wyssogota-Zakrzewski spent time in the Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, but survived.

  28. Mme. Melot was deported to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women located some ninety miles north of Berlin, but survived.

  29. Germaine Bajpai and Fernande Onimus were both likely betrayed by Comète member Maurice Grapin, who had been turned by SS-Major Hans Josef Kieffer, deputy head of the Paris SD. Sadly, both Bajpai and Onimus died in Ravensbrück.Cécile Durin also ended up in Ravensbrück, but survived and returned to Paris on May 16, 1945. Her husband never joined her, however. Paul Durin was initially sent to Buchenwald, near Weimar, but when advancing American forces neared the camp in April 1945 he was among the thousands of prisoners the Germans forced to march eastward. Many of the prisoners, including Durin, were put aboard the ocean liner–turned–prison ship Cap Arcona in the Bay of Lübeck. On May 2, 1945, the ship and others nearby were attacked by Typhoon fighter-bombers of the Royal Air Force; the British pilots had been told the vessels were carrying German troops and VIPs attempting to escape to Norway. Nearly five thousand prisoners, including Paul Durin, died in the assault or when Cap Arcona capsized and sank. See La Régiment de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris, 1938–1944, op. cit.

  30. The family name is also given as Lérida in some documents. Details on the brothers and their activities are drawn from Harding-Claerebout 2017. The men are also mentioned in several postwar MIS-X documents pertaining to the Morins.

  31. Sources indicate that one of the Dérida brothers was located and executed after the end of the war by a group of French Resistance fighters who had just returned from a concentration camp. The other brother was tried in 1946 and sentenced to twenty years in prison, though nothing more is known about him.

  32. After the war the building reverted to the Sûreté Nationale, and is currently home to the Direction générale de la police nationale (DGPN), part of France’s Ministry of the Interior.

  33. Surviving records indicate that the arrests among the Paris-based evasion organizations between June and August 1944 were almost certainly the result of information provided by a coterie of informers, including—among others—the brothers Dérida; a man named André Baveau (or Baveaux or Raveau); the well-known, Belgian-born traitor Jacques Desoubrie; and Roger Leneveu (known as Roger the Legionnaire). In postwar reports, both Andrzej Wyssogota-Zakrzewski and Gabrielle Wiame said they believed it was Baveau/Baveaux who specifically informed on the Morins. For more on these individuals and the damage they caused, see Patrice Miannay’s excellent Dictionnaire des Agents Doubles dans la Résistance and J. M. Langley’s Fight Another Day.

  34. Michel Bourgeois was deported to Bergen-Belsen, but survived. After the war, transformed by his experience in the concentration camp, he became a priest and spent twenty-three years as the chaplain to the fishermen of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, on the English Channel. Gustave Salomon was sent to Buchenwald, but also survived. Joseph and Yvonne Gorjux were deported on the same day and aboard the same train as Georges, Denise, and Yvette Morin. Yvonne Gorjux died at Bergen-Belsen, but Joseph survived. Their daughter, Pierrette, also survived the war.

  35. German records indicate that the people aboard the August 15 train represented twenty-six nationalities—the most numerous were French (1,867), American (83), and British (57), but there were also Poles, Swiss, Danes, Belgians, and a host of others. While the majority of the Americans were aviators and others POWs, one was an American-born woman who had married a Frenchman and joined the French Resistance against the Nazis. Her name was Virginia d’Albert-Lake, and her fascinating story is detailed in An American Heroine in the French Resistance. It is interesting to speculate whether d’Albert-Lake may have come into contact with Yvette and Denise Morin on the deportation train, or even at Ravensbrück.

  36. The tunnel episode is recounted by both Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Émile Bollaert, a decorated World War I veteran, interwar politician, and member of the Comité français de la Libération nationale who, like Georges Morin, was being transported to Buchenwald aboard the train.

  37. Georges Morin’s journey from Paris to Buchenwald is recorded in Effeckten an KZ Buchenwald, Morin, Georges, Kriegswehrmachtgefängnis Paris-Fresnes
, 10.8.1944. Details of his classification upon arrival at Buchenwald appear in Häftlings-Personal-Karte KZ Buchenwald, Georges Morin.

  38. Mittelbau-Dora was originally a Buchenwald subcamp, but was designated a camp in its own right in the summer of 1944. Fabrication of the V-1 and V-2 was transferred to Mittelbau-Dora after Allied air raids on the research center at Peenemünde prevented continued missile construction operations there.

  39. Veränderungsmeldung KZ Mittelbau, 26.12.44, Morin, Georges. The document states that Georges Morin—who, according to his SS death certificate, died in the early morning hours of December 23, 1944—was one of 46 prisoners whose bodies were cremated on December 25. However, because the Veränderungsmeldung KZ Mittelbau is dated December 26, many of the memorial plaques honoring Georges—including the two that grace the halls of Invalides—cite the 26th as the date of his death.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. An American Heroine in the French Resistance, 156.

  2. Häftlings-Personal-Karte KZ Ravensbrück, Denise Morin and Häftlings-Personal-Karte KZ Ravensbrück, Yvette Morin.

  3. Harding-Claerebout 2017. Yvette Morin-Claerebout also spoke about conditions in Ravensbrück in a 2016 video interview with the Fondation pour la mémoire de la déportation titled Témoignage CNRD 2016/2017 Morin, Yvette.

  4. Harding-Claerebout 2017.

  5. Some of the French female prisoners who were transferred from Ravensbrück to Torgau cite the date of the movement as September 11. But most German records—including Überstellungsliste von KL Ravensbrück nach KL Buchenwald (Arbeitslager Torgau), Morin, Denise; Morin, Yvette—list the date as September 21.

  6. Torgau was home to a POW camp known as Stalag IV-D, which housed some eight hundred French and British enlisted men who worked in various labor camps in the region.

  7. American Heroine, 164.