They Fought Alone

by Maurice Buckmaster

  Roger was tireless in his reorganisation. The Gestapo were furious at the failure of their ambush and did everything they could to arrest him. There were ceaseless snap controls and endless efforts to subvert more members of the Resistance. Thanks to the strictness of the security precautions which Roger took, Commandant Dhose never succeeded in destroying the Réseau, though he had come very close to it.

  More recruits were now enrolled and those whom Le Chef had led were severed from all connection with the organisation proper. An almost completely new army was raised which, by D-Day, numbered 5,000. In general, of course, now that the war was turning our way, recruiting was much easier. Those who had failed to join us in the really hard days were now keen to do so. This last-minute reversion to the cause of the Allies became something of a joke with the seasoned Maquisards and resisters. Those who joined up at the last minute (and it was not yet arrived) were called napthalinés by their veteran colleagues, because they smelt of the moth balls from which they had so lately removed their uniforms. Uniforms were, incidentally, available to most of our officers by the time D-Day came and they put them on to lead the final and most vital missions of their men. Many shocks among the French population were caused by the sudden emergence in British uniform of a man whom they had long regarded as one of themselves.

  † Charles Corbin, later the organiser of the CARVER Circuit.

  Chapter 11

  Kindling

  In the middle of 1943 we had had a top secret message telling us that D-Day might be closer than we thought. This message had been tied up with international politics on a level far above our knowledge and we, of course, had acted upon it without question. In the event, it had not come true and, as everyone knows, our friends in France – and the whole world – had to wait another year before the liberation began. Nevertheless it was from the reception of this message that a certain change in our objectives can be dated. From the middle of 1943 we were specialising much more in the planting of arms dumps and the training of a secret army than we had up till then: earlier we had concentrated on sabotage and ‘economic warfare’ – attacks on key targets in accordance with directives from the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  Now we attempted to serve two masters, the MEW, to whom we were technically responsible, and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), newly come into existence, with whom we were strategically linked. The pace increased. And this increased pace was, I think it fair to say, to some extent responsible for the flurry of arrests which, in some areas, temporarily dislocated the French section of SOE. It was much easier to indulge in sporadic sabotage and get away with it than it was to organise large clandestine armies without allowing a single weak link to infiltrate a section and betray his comrades.

  The first serious wave of arrests took place in Paris in the months of June and July 1943. It was in these that Prosper, one of the most trustworthy, brave and resilient officers that served in SOE, was caught. Francis Suttill was a barrister before the war and the qualities of his mind were those of keenness, coolness and confidence which go to make the successful lawyer; he knew his limitations, and if they were few, he knew well enough never to go beyond them. He was a tireless organiser in the Paris area, to which he was sent in the middle of 1942. Andrée Borrel, a French girl, went with him as his courier, with the special additional responsibility of making sure that he was not forced to speak too much French at first, for, though he was fluent, our experts told us that Francis’s accent might be suspect to someone with a really good ear – as most Frenchmen have – for foreign inflections. His cover story accounted for this by saying that he had been educated abroad, I think in Canada, something that was quite plausible and would account for a non-metropolitan accent.

  Francis and his helpers organised a number of excellent Réseaux and soon they were planning large-scale sabotage. Their exploits included the destruction of a large stock of German aero fuel which was being used to power bombers attacking London and southern England. Paris was, of course, far and away the most dangerous place in which to work: it was swarming with Germans and with security police of every description. Nevertheless, Francis fashioned, in the face of every hazard, a model organisation. It attempted nothing beyond its abilities nor failed at anything within them. When the time came for the changeover from economic warfare to planning for D-Day, the necessary re-thinking was so sweeping that we decided that the best thing would be to bring Prosper over to England for his new briefing. We sent a message asking him whether he would be prepared to return for a few days’ well-deserved leave. He replied that he did not like to leave but would come if it was really necessary. A Lysander was sent for him and he was in London within a few hours.

  I had lunch with him the day of his return and he looked older, I thought – hardly surprising in the circumstances – but his morale was high and I had no doubt that he would be able to continue to the end the job which he had started with such conspicuous skill. We had many conferences with Allied high-ups and then, a fortnight later, Francis returned to France. I cannot but think that during his absence that vigilance which was so much a part of the character of the man had been relaxed, in spite of the most energetic and careful measures adopted by Archambaud, his W/T operator, and Andrée. Anyway it was evident that enemy agents or time-servers had permeated the Réseau. We had already formed a shadow organisation in Paris, totally separate and beyond the knowledge of Prosper, which was intended to take over if anything should happen to Francis. We now started another shadow organisation beyond that, so that we had three whole set-ups acting quite without knowledge of each other.

  Francis began to send us messages which suggested that he himself was worried about the recruits which some of the subsections had made and the pressure of work upon him personally was growing steadily; he was under a grave strain. It may be argued that I should have brought him out of France; that view misunderstands the nature of war: Francis was very capable, a very brilliant officer, and could not be – nor would want to be – withdrawn because the work was tough.

  Our men knew what they were in for when they volunteered and my job was to see that they had the tools with which their task might be accomplished and to do everything I could to facilitate that accomplishment; at the same time, however, this was a military operation and while I have emphasised the personal side, I should not have been carrying out my own assignment if I had allowed personal considerations to override tactical ones. Francis was the best man to do what he was doing and he had to stay there. Of all the men whom we sent to France I think I admired and respected him the most and his death came as a cruel blow to me, yet, thinking as I did that D-Day was imminent, I cannot feel now that I was wrong to leave him in Paris, bitterly though I regret that I did not pull him out in that May 1943. For he told us that he was uneasy about the way things were going; yet one cannot pull out a commanding officer when the situation gets hot: we had to consider the operation as a whole, a military whole. All commanding officers are torn between what they would like to do and what they must do. That is the burden they carry, and it never leaves them.

  That Prosper’s Réseau became permeated with enemy agents was probably the work of the notorious Sergeant Hugo Bleicher whose conceit it was to style himself Colonel Henri. He was a German businessman before the war whose talents particularly suited him for the counter-espionage service; he became attached to the Abwehr and busied himself with rooting out the Resistance in the Paris area. By a series of lucky flukes, of which he cleverly took the greatest possible advantage, Bleicher had also netted Peter Churchill and Odette. His men were able to catch Prosper largely because the pressure of work forced Francis to come out into the open and attend ‘parachutages’ in person. It was after one such operation that he was arrested. Nor did the arrests stop with the king-fish. Man after man was picked up, the Germans cleverly synchronising their arrests so that no one could give the alarm. Andrée Borrel was also captured and so was Archambaud who had dro
pped at the same time as Roger Landes. All were put to death.† Bleicher was triumphant. ‘We have wiped out the Buckmaster organisation,’ he boasted. But even in Paris, there were two shadow organisations about which he knew nothing. He imagined that Prosper was the chief of the whole Resistance: he could not conceive of the staff of a distant officer in London being the sole link between all the different Réseaux and fancied that they were centrally directed from Paris, as any efficient German set-up would have been. It was this failure of imagination which led him to think that the Resistance was headless. But like the hydra, it grew new heads to replace old ones.

  Bleicher’s boast, and to this day he is not ungenerous in his own praise, has led people to think that the Resistance was virtually disarmed by Prosper’s arrest. The truth is that it was seriously disjointed, in the Paris area, for a time, but that elsewhere it grew steadily, unaffected by the disasters which Bleicher, by a mixture of genuine ability, cunning and good fortune, had brought upon it in the capital. Many arms dumps in the Paris area were betrayed to the Germans as a result of the arrests they made and we were, to be quite frank, never again able to restore the Paris Réseau to the full standard of efficiency which they reached during Prosper’s command.

  Bleicher came to believe that there was little which his suave tongue and his ingratiating manner could not achieve and he did in fact have further successes, for instance in the capture of Peter and Odette, who, thank God, survived the ordeal to which they were put. Bleicher’s methods were insidious. He subverted tough and loyal men, who would have withstood torture, by pretending that he was anti-Nazi and hated the thought of handing them over to the Gestapo; in this manner he managed to break them down with a sly and malevolent kindness, so bringing them to implicate their companions and introduce him, as a friend, to Resistance circles.

  In London, we remained impervious to his doubtful charm and again and again we warned our men to have nothing to do with him. Some thought that they could deal with him; a few managed to do so for a time, others did not. It was a battle of wits, and Bleicher had his about him. He got Prosper and he captured others. There is no doubt that he was a subtle and, on the whole, chivalrous opponent; that I do not dispute, and while I am unable to regard the death of these men and women as merely the luck of the game, I recognise that Bleicher was doing what he thought was his duty. What I am unable to stomach is the pretence which he has adopted since the war, that he was really ‘a lover of France’ and that it grieved him sorely to hand patriots over to their executioners and the torturers of the Gestapo. He claims that he did not know what the Gestapo did and was powerless to stop them. That is rather like the Irishman who said he did not steal the bucket and that even if he did it had a hole in it.

  Unfortunately, the results of the Prosper affair did not stop with the immediate arrests. Naturally, I considered that we must find out what went wrong and try to plug the holes and extirpate the rotten sections of the set-up. While security sought to insulate one section from another, it might be that certain elements would hook themselves on to the new and healthy organisation and bring about its ruin by the same means which had destroyed Prosper. We had to try to find out where the treachery lay. This was never successfully done. The web of suspicion was a broad one and we did in fact bring some people back to England for questioning: no satisfactory picture of the situation was ever completed and eventually we decided to probe no further and we gave the benefit of the doubt to those for whom torture and terror had perhaps, but not certainly, been too much. As I have said, however, before we decided to drop the matter, Antoine,† a magnificent officer, and another of our women agents, Noor Inayat Khan (known as Madeleine), were captured and, finally, shot.

  Noor, who has been the subject of a charming, though not very factual book, was altogether a remarkable girl. She too was captured, probably through the agency of one of Bleicher’s men, and taken to Gestapo Headquarters in the Avenue Foch. She succeeded, together with two men imprisoned there at the same time, in escaping through a skylight and thence on to the roof. At the critical moment, the air raid siren went. The rule of the Germans was that on such occasions everyone went to battle stations. One of these was on the roof. The three escapers made their way on to a neighbouring building at desperate risk on the sharply gabled roof in pitch darkness. The Germans were patrolling very near them on the adjacent roof of the headquarters. They forced a window and climbed in. All that was necessary was to get out of the flat into which they had broken, down the stairs and into the darkness. The room into which they had broken seemed empty. Then suddenly a light was switched on and a series of screams pierced the air. An old woman was asleep and had woken up to find the intruders in her bedroom. She screamed and screamed. The Gestapo were alerted and the three escapers were recaptured. Upon so thin a thread did the fortunes and the lives of our agents depend. They never got another chance.

  Noor behaved throughout with the greatest bravery and went to her death with that serene defiance which typified the gallant women of SOE,† women who, like Violette Szabo, dared everything in the defence of a cause in which they believed. Some people have suggested that we should never have sent women on these missions at all. I cannot agree. Women are as brave and as responsible as men; often more so. They are entitled to a share in the defence of their beliefs no less than are men. The war was not restricted to men. From the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us as couriers. I should have been failing in my duty to the war effort if I had refused to employ them, and I should have been unfair to their abilities if I had considered them unequal to the duties which were imposed upon them. For our part, we tried by our briefing – which became more and more precise and helpful – and by all the other means within our power to protect and help them, but in the final analysis an agent had to rely on himself, or herself, upon skill, upon coolness, upon courage and, most capricious of all, upon fortune.

  II

  Violette Szabo was first employed by SOE after one of our men called Philippe Liewer and his French colleague, Maloubier, had made Rouen too hot to hold them. She was sent to check on the position there and upon the possibilities of re-establishing the shattered Réseau. The circumstances of its shattering are perhaps worth telling.

  Philippe and Maloubier had succeeded in recruiting a first-rate crew of saboteurs and resisters and confined themselves, for a time, with drilling them into a force capable of being a real menace to the Germans when D-Day came. They might have remained inactive till that day had it not been for a target so tempting that they could not resist it. The Germans had anchored a number of submarines in the very centre of Rouen, on the River Seine. Perhaps they hoped that the proximity of the cathedral would protect them from aerial assault.

  Philippe observed that the guard which was set upon them was liable to be somewhat slack and accordingly they decided to attack. It was not too difficult to get a case of explosives to a house in the area surrounding the moored vessels and here the two waited till nightfall. Then they made their way nonchalantly along the river bank and down to where the submarines were tied up. The guard was not on the ship itself but patrolled the whole of the lower quay. They waited till he had passed the submarine which they had their eye on and then Maloubier went aboard. Philippe, his revolver in his jacket pocket, kept his eye on the sentry. Maloubier left the case in the engine-room, lit the fuse and came back through the hatch. The sentry had done one complete turn in this time and Philippe whistled to give Maloubier the all clear. The two men strolled away from the quay. Five minutes later the submarine was flung into the air.

  The operation had gone very smoothly, but the repercussions were anything but smooth. The Germans went mad. They tortured anyone whom they considered able to give them information. Philippe and Maloubier, knowing they would be hunted men as soon as the Germans got wind of them and knew for certain how the submarines had been sabotaged, ha
d already left Rouen by the time the arrests reached their height.

  The Germans were ruthless and persistent. By threatening to shoot whole families they persuaded those who knew something to save their friends and relatives. The arrests went on steadily. They even managed to get a picture of Philippe and one of Maloubier drawn by an artist from descriptions given them by frightened and tortured men. These pictures were hung on many street corners. Both were good likenesses, too good for it to be possible for the two men to return to Rouen until things were a lot quieter.

  It was of vital importance to us in London to know something of what was going on in Rouen, for it was one of the places where sabotage and resistance might prove extremely important when the big day came, and it was to this day that we were gearing all our efforts. At this stage we decided to send Violette Szabo to spy out the land. There were good reasons for choosing a woman, the main one being simply that she could travel about without exciting so much interest on the part of the security forces and was less likely to be rounded up in snap controls, since in the first instance the Germans concentrated on male suspects.

  Violette did an excellent job. She went round all the contact addresses which Philippe and Maloubier had relayed to us. All of them had been blown. There was not one safe house left in Rouen. Worse, she reported that descriptions of the two saboteurs had been widely circulated: it would be madness for them to come back to Rouen.

  Regretfully, we came to the conclusion that we would have to give up all idea of restoring the Rouen Réseau to its earlier strength.

  Violette was ordered to join Philippe in the Dordogne district where there was going to be plenty to do when D-Day came along. For in the district adjacent to the Spanish border was stationed one of the German crack units – the Hermann Goering Division. That division would have to be harried, depleted and, if possible, stopped altogether. It would be the great test of SOE’s efficiency and of the fighting power of the forces our men had recruited and trained through the long years of the occupation.