They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  ‘We shall see. I will phone you tomorrow night at eight o’clock. You will tell me your decision then. Whether you care for yourself or for France. Good night, Monsieur. Oh, remember what I said about the police, won’t you?’

  Hector left. The next night he phoned Monsieur Legros: ‘Well, have you decided what you are going to do?’

  ‘I have nothing further to say to you,’ the managing director said. ‘Nothing. I call your bluff. If you try to get in touch with me again—’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you,’ Hector interrupted.

  Hector saw Jacqueline that night.

  ‘I really don’t think it’s going to work,’ he said. ‘Legros won’t help us. We’d better get Amédée to tell London what’s happened and see if they can get the RAF to show Monsieur Legros and those like him that our threat is no bluff.’

  I got the message the next morning. It seemed desperately short time in which to try to arrange a raid on the Michelin factory. One couldn’t lay on an air raid as if one were calling a taxi. I rang Bomber Command and asked them if there was anything they could do. My friend, the Wing Commander, said he would see what could be done. ‘But frankly, old boy, I’m not very hopeful.’ It was obvious that if the raid were to achieve anything it had to take place within the next few days, and the sooner the better; only then would a real causal connection be set up in Legros’ mind. Once it was, he would be sure to pass the message on to his fellow industrialists. The blackmail plan would explode altogether if he told them it was all bluff. The whole scheme hinged on getting the RAF to bomb the Michelin factory at Clermont-Ferrand. At midday I phoned an Air Vice-Marshal I happened to know in the Air Ministry. I put the case to him as forcefully as I could. SOE had recently been incorporated on the COSSAC (Chiefs of Staff for the invasion of Europe) organisation, and this new official status greatly aided my negotiations with other branches of the service; nevertheless, the Air Vice-Marshal was gloomy. He thought there was little chance of the target lists being changed at short notice.

  At a briefing in the south of England, the Squadron Leader was just finishing giving details of the night’s targets when he was called to the phone…

  In Clermont-Ferrand, Hector had Amédée send another urgent message to us. We must hit the Michelin factory or the Resistance would lose face, possibly irrevocably, and its attacks on French factories in German use would be desperately hampered.

  The meteorological office forecast that the weather would be fine that evening. Bombers should be able to make their primary objectives without interference from adverse weather.

  The Squadron Leader in charge of briefing returned to say that he had a message for the squadron from the Air House. If the bombers could not get through to Turin, their secondary target was, as they knew, dock installations at Marseille; failing that, their third target was marshalling yards at Lyons.

  ‘We know all this,’ a pilot muttered irritably.

  ‘Now here’s the new bit,’ the Squadron Leader went on.

  ‘If you can’t get through to any of these three targets—’

  There was some laughter. ‘Listen to this, carefully; if the weather closes in and you can’t get through, your fourth target will be the Michelin factory at Clermont-Ferrand. Now here are the details. Look at this map, please…’

  The weather, towards evening, was perfect. ‘It’ll be a clear run to Turin,’ was the verdict in the mess.

  I was powerless to pull any further strings at the Air Ministry. We could only wait. Night fell. The sky was as clear as water.

  In Clermont-Ferrand, Hector and Jacqueline sat morosely in a café. At nine o’clock Amédée joined them. He had two messages from us. Neither promised the raid. Both concerned a derailing which we wanted done the next week. The three agents were deeply depressed. Hector had tried once again to get in touch with Monsieur Legros to see if he had changed his mind. The man would not speak to him.

  At ten o’clock the bomber squadron took off for Turin. The night was still fine. I rang the met. people and asked them what the forecast was. ‘They should hit the primary objective, Colonel Buckmaster,’ was the smug reply. I sat glumly in my office as the night ticked away.

  In Clermont-Ferrand, the three agents said good night to each other and went home. The bombers crossed the French coast and headed south-east for Turin. When they were over Tours, the leader said to his co-pilot: ‘Hullo, it’s closing in.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ agreed the other.

  Visibility closed down like a shutter. Ahead of them the sky was rent by electrical storms. The planes started to be thrown around like dice in a box. With each second things worsened.

  ‘What’s our position?’

  ‘A hundred miles north-west of Clermont-Ferrand.’

  ‘I don’t much fancy this lot over the Alps. It’ll be murder.’ The lightning filled the cockpit with its bright flashes and the rain rattled like bullets on the hulls of the planes. ‘I don’t think we can make Marseille even.’ All around them the conditions grew suddenly more ominous, thicker and more electric.

  ‘If I had my way we’d turn back now,’ the Squadron Leader’s co-pilot grinned.

  ‘Squadron Leader to all Captains. Change of plan. Change of plan. Abandon objective Turin…’

  The heavy bombers turned in the silent sky and one after another came in on their bombing run. Within a quarter of an hour of the raid’s beginning, the Michelin factory at Clermont-Ferrand was a gutted ruin. Hardly a pane of glass was broken in the surrounding houses; even if the weather closed in, even if Michelin was only a fourth alternative target, the bomber pilots took trouble to carry out their missions with deadly accuracy.

  † Maurice Southgate, organiser of the STATIONER Circuit.

  Chapter 9

  Check

  Roger Landes – or Aristide as we called him – was dropped to the Bordeaux Circuit in October 1942. He, like so many of the others, was a British subject of French origin (he had an English father, but was born in France) and in fact his French was better than his English. He was a lean man of medium height, who had applied to join us in 1941, though he was not ready for the field till the following year, largely owing to the long time which it took to train a wireless operator from scratch. By late 1942, he was ready to go and Claude de Baissac who had been in training with him and was now in charge of our Bordeaux Réseau applied for his services. Roger was the sort of person that anyone would want in his circuit. He radiated determination, coolness and courage.

  There were two agents to be dropped that night: Aristide to the Bordeaux Circuit, Archambaud† to the Paris Circuit run by Prosper. There was a lot of cloud about as the plane crossed the French coast.

  ‘I think we ought to turn back,’ the pilot said. ‘What do you blokes want? Shall we risk it or would you rather go back and try again another night?’

  This kind of disappointment was not infrequent and there was nothing our men hated more than getting themselves keyed up for the drop and then finding that the weather was too bad to permit the completion of the mission. It was subconsciously humiliating to say goodbye to all of us in London and then, a few hours later, to return; agents were always deeply depressed on these occasions and I often spent the evening with them trying to take their minds off a kind of failure for which they could not even remotely be blamed. The risk lay in the fear that they would somehow come to think of themselves as unlucky. There was not a great deal of superstition among our agents (most of them were too level-headed for that) but the feeling of being ‘unlucky’ was a subtle, and could become a pervasive, one.

  Roger had had no less than six shots at getting into France and each had been in vain. He was determined to drop this time, no matter what happened.

  ‘I’d sooner try it this time,’ Aristide said casually. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m with you,’ Archambaud said.

  ‘I’ll drop you if we can see the reception committee all right. Otherwise not. OK?’ the pi
lot inquired.

  ‘It’ll have to be,’ Roger replied.

  The plane droned on. Soon they passed over Le Mans.

  ‘Approaching the dropping area. Stand by,’ came the words of the Captain.

  The cloud was very thick as they came up to the dropping zone. The plane lost height steadily as the pilot sought to drop below the clouds. Not till they were only 250 feet above the ground could he get into the clear.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ he asked. Roger and Archambaud could hear his voice over the intercom. Archambaud was to drop first and then, seconds later, Roger would follow. The atmosphere was very tense.

  ‘There they are,’ the co-pilot called suddenly.

  Soon the plane turned in to make its run. ‘Stand by.’ The dispatchers stood waiting to give Archambaud the word ‘Go.’

  ‘GO!’ Archambaud dropped through the bottom of the plane and Roger jumped into his place. The plane turned and came back again. Even at this height there were wisps of cloud tearing on the wings.

  ‘Go,’ called the pilot.

  ‘GO!’ Roger let go and the slipstream tore him away from the aircraft. His parachute jerked him and checked his fall. The ground rushed up. Within ten seconds of leaving the plane he had hit earth. He rolled over and knocked the release mechanism of his chute. He bundled the chute into a ball and stood up. There was no one about. Not a sound disturbed the midnight silence.

  Roger walked to the hedge and covered the parachute with the trailing branches of a bramble bush and then he looked around. The reception committee should have found him, should indeed have been waiting for him. He dare not make any noise, for he could not be sure that the Germans had not disturbed the committee. He caught his breath and considered what to do. He decided to wait. It was an hour before a dark figure broke through the hedge on the far side of the field and came across towards him. Roger was in the shadow of the woods which bordered the field. The other man seemed quite alone and was definitely looking for something or someone. As he came almost as far as Roger, the latter stepped out of the wood and gripped his arm. The stranger jumped with shock and astonishment.

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ he stammered, never doubting that Roger was the other parachutist. ‘We’d given up looking for you. I was trying to find your body—’

  ‘Thanks, my friend,’ Roger said.

  ‘Come, I’ll take you to Paul.’

  It was raining quite hard by the time the reception committee was ready to move off from the dropping area. They were between Tours and Blois, near a place called Mer. Paul, the leader, took them to a small hut which belonged to a gamekeeper and here they were given something to drink and some sandwiches. ‘Now I’m afraid we shall have to turn you out,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t know where you are heading for and I don’t want to know. Good luck to both of you. Vive la France. Vive l’Angleterre.’

  After this speech both the agents were politely shown the door and, having shaken hands with their hosts, went out into the darkness. It was still pouring with rain. Roger turned to his colleague. ‘Good luck, my friend.’ They shook each other’s hands. They were never to meet again. One would die and one would survive.

  ‘Good luck, Roger,’ Archambaud said.

  II

  The docks at Bordeaux were empty of the invasion barges which had been ranged there when the first of our men were dropped into France during the summer of 1941, but there was still a certain amount of shipping in them and there was an air of sufficient bustle to cover the comings and goings of Claude de Baissac and his subordinates. Roger Landes was to meet his leader in a café called La Coquille down by the waterfront. He had reached Bordeaux without too much trouble, surprised, as many of our men were, by the fewness of the Germans; an agent often expected to see the place infested with the Boches and it was an agreeable shock to see that except in the larger towns and at the railway stations there were many less than he had been led to believe.

  ‘I’m glad you got here safely,’ Claude said when Roger had given him the password that confirmed Claude’s own recognition of his training companion. It was not always wise to rely on personal recollections; you might be deceived into greeting someone who was not the person you thought. The result could be fatal.

  ‘Glad to be here.’

  ‘The first thing is to find somewhere for you to live and somewhere for you to transmit from. You’ve got the set?’

  Roger nodded and pointed to the suitcase under the table. Claude looked tired; he had been in the field for over a year now and the strain was telling on him, particularly as the Germans had questioned him recently and, though they had let him go, he was conscious of being under continued suspicion. We knew of this suspicion in Baker Street and our instructions were for Claude to initiate Roger in the set-up of the Réseau as quickly as he could. After that we would move him to another circuit where he was not so well known. He would take on another identity and resume his work. We would always do our best to remove agents from areas where the danger was becoming too great, but we could only do this if we were told of their fears and if they were prepared instantly to do as we told them. This last remark is not supposed to suggest that there was indiscipline in the organisation; people took tremendous risks to obey orders, but there was always the factor that we were in London and the agents were in the field: they knew the atmosphere better than we and sometimes they backed their judgement against ours. They were picked to show initiative and they would always do what they thought best. But sometimes their judgement was faulty or their appraisal unlucky, and they only knew their own particular sector, while London had a more general view. There was little margin for error. Sometimes tragedy resulted from the view taken of a situation. But individual catastrophes could not deflect us from our purposes.

  Our men and our women were volunteers: they knew all the dangers and they faced them open-eyed; if a mistake was made – and there were not as many as some people would think – we at home felt the loss as a personal one, but it is hardly fair to suggest, as certain books and individuals have done, that it was our fault. Our organisation was human, so were its judgements, its failures, its achievements. The heroism was all the agents’, but the faults were not all ours.

  Claude de Baissac lived in the room above the café in which he and Roger met. He did not go out more than he could help and it was this fact which caused him to arrange meetings in his own lodgings, a practice which, in general, our men avoided. Roger Landes was found a room on the Quai des Chartrons, above a tabac where his comings and goings would pass unremarked. He set up his wireless in an empty house at Quatre Pavilions, close to the German headquarters. This was not a piece of deliberate bravado – Claude and he took the view that the Germans would not look for an operator on their own doorstep. Quatre Pavilions was on a hill and transmission was excellent except for the fact that the German HQ sets and Roger’s occasionally clashed and interfered with each other. Both put up with the inconvenience. Roger was able to start his skeds within a week of arriving in Bordeaux and they continued steadily. He found the house on the hill admirable for his purposes and he was never challenged by any of the military who infested the HQ nearby.

  The Bordeaux Réseau was a model one, as Roger soon came to realise. The whole thing was arranged in the manner which was supposed to be standard practice: there were a large number of separate knots of resisters who knew, of course, of the existence of others, but knew nothing either of names, identities or areas. Only Claude – and later Roger – had the full picture. Each subsection had its couriers for liaison with the others and its own operator to receive orders from London, but a single section could, theoretically, become infiltrated by German counter-espionage without the others automatically becoming contaminated. Claude had done his job in an exemplary manner.

  ‘Now then, I think you should have the picture pretty well sorted out,’ Claude said at the last meeting. ‘Are there any other questions you want to ask me?’

  ‘How much do the G
ermans know about us? They know we exist – that’s quite certain.’

  ‘They know that, yes. The men whom I have already pointed out to you are the only German agents whom I could definitely pick out. There are probably others. Things are deceptively quiet and frankly I imagine you may have a sudden flurry of arrests as soon as I have left. They’ll notice I’ve gone and they may suspect that someone else has taken over, in which case they may try and give you a hot time to start with. Now Le Chef, that’s Fragonard I told you about, he’s done a lot of fine work and he’ll probably have tabs on a lot of Boches. You can get one of his boys to let you know what he feels about things.’

  ‘He doesn’t know who I am of course, does he?’ Roger said.

  ‘No one does except Jean, who’ll act as your courier.’

  ‘The longer we can keep it that way the better.’

  ‘I quite agree; it’s fatal to have too many people know you,’ Claude smiled. ‘Not that I doubt the loyalty of our people, but you can never tell when the Boches will catch someone and force him to talk. You know how. One has to try and minimise the risk. I’m sure you’ll manage all right, Roger. Everyone is ready to work under you and they’ve got confidence in you. That’s half the battle.’

  Claude took his leave with this encouraging message and Roger Landes – alias Aristide – took over the command of the Bordeaux Réseau. It was a large and complex one and there were many ramifications. Two first-class men were needed, and we decided in London that Harry Peulevé should be sent to the area. He had been desperately unlucky to break a leg on that first drop of his, and he continually begged us to give him another chance. Now he was to have it. In the autumn of 1943 he again dropped into the Bordeaux area and later he teamed up once more with Raymond, the Spanish republican.

  Raymond was, if anything, more reckless than ever, and Roger sent a message to Harry to keep away from too close an association. Wireless operators were precious. Raymond was very much of a lone wolf and he had now established himself in a deserted chateau with a store of arms and explosives. So daring had he become that he had three flagpoles on the keep of this chateau from which he flew the French, British and American flags. The chateau was sufficiently remote to attract little attention, but this show of bravado caused some alarm in the more staid elements of the Bordeaux Resistance. Raymond was undeterred. He ran his own version of the ‘blackmail’ plan. He not only threatened the factory owners with the RAF: he was not above suggesting that they themselves might be roughly treated – all by mistake, of course – if they refused him permission for ‘a little explosion’. Few could resist the charming menace of the grinning Spaniard.