While at Nevers he took a day off to slip across into unoccupied France to visit his prospective father-in-law to formally ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The daughter worked in de Gaulle’s headquarters in London. Returning again to the Nazi occupied zone he met up at the end of the month with two other members of his team at Sables d’Olonne on the Atlantic coast in the Bay of Biscay between St Nazaire and La Rochelle to await recovery by a British submarine. After waiting several nights for their pick-up, the submarine HMS Tigris appeared on the night of 4 April, but the weather was so rough that two of the three canoes which were to come ashore to collect the party were wrecked and only one made it to the shore to rescue Berge and only one other parachutist, Forman. The third, Letac, had to be left behind. The rescuing canoeist was Geoffrey Appleyard of the Small Scale Raiding Force, a unit later to become an integral part of SOE with a troop based at Inchmery House.
Although Operation Savanna was a failure, it proved that the methods of delivery and recovery of agents were effective, and that the agents could move about inside France with relative ease. In addition to proving that operations were possible, Berge brought back with him a mass of intelligence about living conditions, curfew and many other rules, identity papers, ration cards and prices of cigarettes and essential goods and materials, and invaluable information about railway travel – intelligence that SOE had vainly sought for months.
On his return, Berge was lionized by Colonel Passy, and senior people in SOE, was awarded the British Military Cross and met the Prime Minister and his wife. Afterwards he was posted to Inchmery House to prepare his troops for another mission.
There was a small number of Free French parachutists at Inchmery at this time undergoing training as intelligence officers, saboteurs and secret wireless operators. The house itself was run by a British officer of SOE’s RF Section, which had just come into being to liaise with the Free French Secret Service, then in the process of creating the BCRA.
There were about fifteen members of the administrative and instruction staff at Inchmery House at this time. The instructors were mostly French, but the principal instructor in sabotage and explosives was a British officer, Lieutenant John Seeds, the elegant son of a diplomat. The day-to-day running of the house was entrusted initially to Sergeant Chef François Baconnais who had lost an eye during the retreat from Dunkirk.
On 15 April, 1941, shortly after the return of the Savanna pair, the RF Section of SOE in conjunction with the Free French Secret Service, began planning another raid, Operation Josephine B, a proposed attack on an electric transformer station at Pessac which provided power to the German submarine base at Bordeaux. The Battle of the Atlantic was being fought against German U-boats which were threatening to strangle this country of essential war materials and food supplies, and anything that could be done to hinder the German menace would make a significant contribution to the survival of beleaguered Britain.
Berge was given the job of selecting men for the operation. He went to Inchmery House and selected a team of three – Forman, who had been on Operation Savanna, Varnier and Cabard – and set about training them at Inchmery for the new mission.
The trio were parachuted into France on the night of 11/12 May. The official report says that they were parachuted blind near Bordeaux, but Berge (who survived the war and became a General) says that they were dropped at Mimizan near the Atlantic coast to the reception committee that he had arranged during his time in France in March on the Savanna operation.
The full story of the adventures of the Josephine B team is given in Foot’s history of SOE in France. It did not go smoothly; their plans were upset by the discovery of electrified security fencing round the target area. The attack was postponed, the trio missed their submarine pick-up and fled to Paris where they made contact with Joel Letac, the man Geoffrey Appleyard had been compelled to leave on the beach because of bad weather after Savanna. The four parachutists returned to the Bordeaux area, found their target unguarded except for a night watchman and the electrified security fence, and with very considerable ingenuity got into the premises. They attached their explosive and incendiary charges to the transformers and as they were cycling away the charges exploded, destroying six out of eight transformers. The power supplies to south-west France were seriously disrupted for many months, affecting not only the supplies to the German submarine base but also to local factories producing war materials for the Germans and the electric railway system over a wide area. All four of the saboteurs eventually returned to Britain after many adventures.
The effects of Savanna and Josephine B on SOE’s struggle for survival in the face of persistent attempts by other secret services and the armed forces to destroy it was considerable. It proved that a handful of trained agents could be landed and recovered successfully, could operate in enemy territory and inflict damage out of proportion to their numbers. It is ironic that SOE’s future was in no small part saved not by ‘conventional’ Beaulieu-trained secret agents but by Free French SAS-type parachutists trained at Inchmery House! This did in fact presage developments in SOE’s recruitment policy which was eventually to turn increasingly to the use of Special Forces troops instead of the commando-trained secret agents masquerading as civilians.
At the time of the attack on Pressac Inchmery House was the base for Berge and eight other officers, nineteen NCOs and seventy men, most of whom were exceedingly young. One of their number was a 19-year-old private, Gerard Brault, ultimately to be trained at Inchmery as a secret agent. Brault reported that they were undergoing a very tough commando training regime in the Southampton and Bournemouth areas.
In June they had a visit from Captain R. Lagier, one of the architects of Josephine B and a member of the SA Section of the BCRA (a section roughly equivalent to SO 2 division of SOE). Lagier selected twenty-one of the parachutists for special operations in France and as they completed their training at Inchmery they were posted to other schools for more specialized training. The rest of the Company, seventy-seven of them including Captain Georges Berge, left for the Middle East on 16 July, 1941, and were replaced in August by another, smaller group of trained French parachutists.
Berge’s Free French paratroopers played a significant part in operations behind the German lines in the North African campaign and suffered exceptionally heavy casualties. Berge and another officer, Lieutenant Jordan, and about a dozen of their men joined David Stirling’s SAS and eventually became its Free French Squadron. Berge did his SAS training with Fitzroy Maclean who commented in his book Eastern Approaches on the remarkable zeal and tenacity of the Frenchman. They received further training in explosives and sabotage from that notable SAS character Bill ‘One Jump’ Cumper of the Royal Engineers, reputed to know all there was to be known about demolition.
In June, 1942, David Stirling organized a series of raids on German airfields in North Africa and elsewhere, the aim of which was to disrupt and cripple the German squadrons throughout the Mediterranean area while a convoy of British warships and merchantmen was making its dash through the Mediterranean to Egypt. All of these raids were carried out by the Free French Squadron of the SAS. Commandant Georges Berge led a team of Frenchmen and one British SAS officer, the renowned George Jellicoe, on a raid on Heraklion airfield in Crete in June, 1942, during which they destroyed twenty-one enemy aircraft, four trucks and a petrol dump. Afterwards they were betrayed by a Cretan peasant and only Jellicoe escaped capture and was retrieved by a submarine. Berge and his men were last seen engaged in a pitched battle with the enemy. He survived and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war of the Germans.
The Free French Squadron of the SAS suffered terrible casualties during this series of raids.
The young Frenchmen who replaced the first group at Inchmery House arrived on 15 August, 1941. There were three officers, including cadet Louis Kerjean, and about ten other ranks, among them Gerard Brault, Georges Ledoux and Daniel Cordier. They were supervised by Paul Schmidt, who
despite his name was French and was later parachuted into France to organize the considerable and growing clandestine traffic of French politicians and secret agents into and out of that country. Sometime during August they received a visit from General de Gaulle who watched them put on a display using explosives. It was shortly after this visit that Lieutenant Seeds lost a hand while handling a detonator. The previous day a French tutor had lost two fingers in the same way. The next day Seeds, seeking the cause of the accident and suspecting that the detonators were faulty, held one in his left hand so that if it did explode he would not lose his dominant hand. It was indeed faulty and it blew off his left hand. He was carried across the lawns of Inchmery House by his students and was rushed into Lymington hospital for treatment. He was replaced by Captain Johnson.
As the students finished their six months of training or were sent on operations they were replaced by other young Frenchmen. Some of them were taught some of their trade crafts by British instructors and lecturers borrowed from SOE and from the Finishing School at Beaulieu.
The French students were a high-spirited group and, unlike their counterparts in the Beaulieu complex, they seem to have been allowed out of the grounds of Inchmery House into the surrounding area whenever they were off duty. There are numerous stories of their pranks using small explosive charges. On one occasion they fitted a charge to some railway lines that had been laid within the grounds of the house and attached a trip wire out of the grounds and across the road from Inchmery to Lepe. An unfortunate car driver drove into it triggering off a blast. Badly shaken, the poor man took a lot of convincing that he had been the victim of a prank and not a serious attempt to kill him. On another occasion they raided the RAF base at Calshot and placed dummy charges on numerous aircraft and buildings, to the fury of the base commander. He had much cause for anger not only because of the breach of protocol but because his base was being used to man and service four Heinkel HE 115 seaplanes, formerly of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, but now painted in the full camouflage and regalia of the German Luftwaffe and belonging to a Special Duties Squadron carrying spies in their floats to many parts of northern and southern Europe for MI 6, the Secret Intelligence Service!
According to one of the senior Beaulieu instructors the discipline and sense of security of the French students and staff was appalling by British standards and the Finishing School staff avoided making any unnecessary formal contact with them. However, the staff of the two schools did mix informally. The French food at Inchmery House was far superior to that served up in the officers’ mess at The House in the Woods or in any of the student houses, and the British officers looked forward to dining there occasionally and used the opportunity to brush up their French.
There were important differences and few similarities in the syllabus of the two courses. The Beaulieu students did their para-military training elsewhere, whereas the French school at Inchmery was regarded by the British, but not by the French, as primarily a para-military training base where parachutists did their commando training. Beaulieu did not specialize in training students in demolition techniques, whereas Inchmery did, using live explosives. Railway lines had been laid in the grounds to the west of Inchmery House so that the trainee saboteurs could practise laying charges. They were also taken to Brockenhurst station and goods yard to learn to drive steam engines and to rehearse laying demolition charges on real railway lines and sets of points. One of the French students, Daniel Cordier, related that small teams were ‘dropped’ from the back of a lorry somewhere in the New Forest and, using their maps and compasses, had to find the railway line to London and at a predetermined spot lay specimen charges in time to ‘catch’ a train passing at three o’clock in the morning. The teams frequently got lost; sometimes they stumbled into the bogs for which the Forest is notorious, got themselves plastered in mud and on one occasion were so seriously delayed extricating themselves that they were unable to lay their charges until after 6 am, three hours after their train had passed!
Between July and October, 1941, at least six two-man teams trained at Inchmery were infiltrated into France, usually by parachute. Each team consisted of an organizer and a radio operator, both extremely young, in their late teens or early twenties.
One of the earliest Inchmery-trained resistance organizers was Lieutenant Henri Labit who became one of the heroes of the Resistance. With his radio operator, Cartigny, he was parachuted into Normandy in the late spring of 1941 to investigate the feasibility of making a sabotage attack on a large German air base near Caen. Labit spent two days on reconnaissance, actually getting into the base by swapping places with a labourer working in the air base. Afterwards he sent a report back to London. He and his radio operator subsequently ran into difficulties with the Germans. Cartigny was arrested and was never seen again, presumably shot. Labit hid in a stream and escaped detection. He eventually made his way to Toulouse, in the unoccupied zone of France, where he set up a resistance group. He was joined in October by Warrant Officer Forman, one of the original Savanna team, on his third mission, and two radio operators. Forman had expansive plans for organizing a large resistance group, while Labit spent his time training volunteers in underground warfare in the suburbs of Toulouse.
The Vichy police caught the two radio operators. Forman and Labit fled first to Paris and then to Brittany where they joined up with another group of RF Section agents including Joel Letac, another of the original Savanna team. On the last night of the year 1941 they were all retrieved from the coast of Brittany by a British Motor Gun Boat.
Henri Labit returned to France in April, 1942, but soon afterwards he was cornered at a wayside station south of Bordeaux while trying to cross the frontier into the unoccupied zone. He tried to shoot his way out of trouble but was faced with an overwhelming number of German troops. He burned his papers and committed suicide by swallowing the cyanide pill with which all SOE agents were provided. He was just 21 years of age.
Letac and his brother returned to Brittany by sea on the night of 3/4 February, 1942. Unfortunately, when stopped and searched, the Germans found incriminating documents in their pockets. They were arrested, interrogated and tortured and were eventually committed to one of the notorious German concentration camps. Both survived the experience.
Daniel Cordier, a small and slightly built young man who had trained at Inchmery as a saboteur and at Thame Park as a radio operator, became one of the secretaries to Jean Moulin, General de Gaulle’s chief political emisarry who ventured into and out of France on several occasions in his efforts to unite the various underground political and resistance factions. Moulin became the president of the underground National Council for Resistance. In June, 1943, the Gestapo pounced and caught the entire Council as it was assembling for a meeting at a house on the outskirts of Lyons. Cordier escaped but was now known to the Gestapo, i.e. ‘burned’, and was therefore of no further use as an agent. He managed to evade capture and remained in France for the rest of the war.
Altogether, twenty-eight radio operators who had received their secret agent training at Inchmery were parachuted into France in 1941 and 1942. Only Cordier and one other escaped arrest by the Germans. Of the twenty-six who were caught, nine were executed and sixteen were deported to German concentration camps after interrogation and torture. Among these was Louis Kerjean who survived the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau and after the war rose to the rank of General in the French army. Another survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, also from Inchmery, was Georges Ledoux who was parachuted into France on 12 December, 1942.
One of the Inchmery-trained operators was Gerard Brault, who was twenty years of age. He was arrested by the Gestapo on 15 October, 1942, but he was fortunate in being consigned to a French prison instead of a Gestapo gaol, from which, with the help of one of the warders, he managed to escape. He returned to Britain in July, 1943, having been on the run for nine months. On 11 April, 1944, he was again parachuted into France and went into the Ardennes to organize and r
un a ‘maquis’, a well-armed band of men fighting the Germans openly on the Belgian frontier. He was liberated by the Americans on 5 September, 1944.
French agents suffered appalling losses, especially during the early stages of the war, through inexperience of clandestine warfare and their own lack of security and their insistence on a centrally controlled underground organization under Jean Moulin. As a nation the French, perhaps more so than the British, were not conspiratorial by nature. They ignored the dangers of centralization at great cost to their resistance leaders and had none of the suspiciousness or the clandestine and conspiratorial skills of the Polish members of SOE, who used to tease them unmercifully about their inexperience.
The last word on the agents drawn from the original group of Free French parachutists at Inchmery House must be those of General Georges Berge, who in 1992 recounted that they were in the forefront, dropping from the sky in 1941 into action, following the SOE directives long before the (French) National Council for Resistance was formed. For a long time, he wrote, in 1941 and 1942 Station 36 remained the crucible where the first Intelligence and Action teams were formed.
The Free French forces vacated Inchmery House towards the end of 1942. Latterly it had become a ‘Holding Station’ for trained agents of SOE’s RF Section awaiting transportation to France.
There is no record of the date on which the French left Inchmery, or where they went after they left. What is known is that at the end of 1942 or very early in 1943 a troop of the British Small Scale Raiding Force moved from Anderson Manor in Bere Regis in Dorset to Inchmery House. Because of the tight security surrounding every movement and event in those days, the SSRF team were totally unaware that the Free French had occupied the house, or that it had been a holding station for Free French secret agents. They were under the impression that the previous occupants had been a unit of the Lovat Scouts, part of Lord Lovat’s commandos.
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