“Göring's all washed up,” said Vera.
“Why?” asked Donovan. “He's next in line to Hitler.”
“He's also no longer running his own air force. Udet, who claimed he built the greatest air fleet in history, was found dead, a revolver at his side, after scrawling on a wall: ‘Göring sold out to the Jews.’”
Donovan asked why German fliers kept fighting. Courage?
“It's easy to look brave when things go your way,” Vera said. “Civilians display true courage by getting on with their daily lives between nights of terror bombing. They do it from a sense of duty. Duty is the mother of courage. Real courage is in facing impossible odds.”
She was more animated than he had ever seen her, since she had spoken of a pilot she had known and lost. She said natural courage was not readily apparent, like other aspects of character. It had nothing to do with nationality. Pilots in the Battle of Britain included 147 Poles. Duty drove them, also hatred and often despair.
Some extra quality drove Krystyna, the Polish countess. She had sent word of Jan Nowak, formerly of Poland's horse artillery, whose cavalry had charged German tanks. He was now fighting underground, and was anxious to make a fearfully dangerous journey to London to personally plead with Churchill for help. Krystyna had built a network from Poland to the Turkish legation in Budapest. The network chief, Marcin Lubomirski, was arrested while bringing British prisoners out of Poland and was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Before ending up in the gas chambers there, he escaped. His whereabouts were unknown.
Nowak arrived in London during the cruel winter of 1943–44, bringing material evidence of German experiments with new weapons, together with a touching handwritten tribute to Winston Churchill from Polish resistance fighters. Nowak cooled his heels for weeks before he could deliver this to Churchill, which puzzled Vera. She worried that hostile forces were at work behind the scenes. Gwido Langer, the Polish mastermind who broke the first Enigma code, and all his code breakers should be in England. Direct contact had to be made with closework fighters in Poland, because she was not sure that the government-in-exile in London was entirely free from political bias. She needed to hearten the Poles with drops of arms and supplies, and it took all her tradecraft and charm to “borrow” an old RAF Whit-ley bomber. The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley's normal range was 630 miles, hardly enough to reach Poland. Its cruising speed was 165 miles an hour, which made it a sitting duck for German fighters. Vera had an auxiliary fuel tank fitted to extend the range and adapted the bomb bays to hold cylinders attached to parachutes. The conversions were designed by an Englishman who had run an engineering factory in southern Poland before the war. He was known as Colonel Harry Perkins when he joined Gubby in Warsaw during Vera's first mission there. Krystyna, who seemed to leave a trail of lovers behind her, called him “Perks Kochay” or “Darling Perks” in letters that reached him at one of the secret SOE “toy shops” in England. Accusations that she was a double agent had been made against her by the Polish government-in-exile. Gubby used his reputation to stop the lies, which again seemed to be politically motivated. Vera gave Krystyna permission to return to France to learn the fate of any Polish code breakers still there.
Flight Lieutenant John Austin was chosen to pilot the Whitley to Poland. The flight would take fourteen hours, through enemy skies. Vera sat with him during practice runs. Austin dispensed with the normal crew of five, replacing them with three Polish parachutists, and loaded the aircraft with fuel for 1,930 miles. The only way to get off the ground with extra fuel and containers was to open the throttles, rush down the runway, heave the Whitley into the air, drop back on the tarmac, and keep bouncing until fully airborne. Vera winced, thinking of her couriers and bicycle brigades and of Krystyna begging for advanced technical apparatus to meet the needs of the secret armies.
The old Whitley bomber, even after the pilot managed to get airborne, did not get far the first time. The oxygen was insufficient for long flights at high altitude; the exactor controls tended to freeze, which prevented the aircraft from climbing; and if the lines leaked, one restored pressure by urinating into the system. It gave a new meaning to being “full of piss and vinegar,” Vera recalled. The second time, without gunners in the forward or rear turrets, the pilot had to turn back with engine trouble. On the third try, the stripped-down Whitley lumbered into the air after several sickening plunges and droned through the night skies to Poland at twelve thousand feet, with everyone freezing from the numbing cold. Three Polish couriers parachuted. Resistance leaders in Warsaw were overjoyed. Here was proof of massive, future air support.
Couriers began hair-raising overland journeys from Poland to England with proof of home army successes and with appeals for air support. Among the mandarins of Whitehall, though, there were concerns about the Soviet Union's reaction to a British secret army on Stalin's doorstep. The chief of the air staff, Charles Portal, again raised objections. “My bombing offensive is not a gamble,” he insisted. “I cannot divert aircraft from a certainty to a gamble, which may be a goldmine or may be completely worthless.” Vera noted waspishly that the bombing force was strained by outlandish improvisations like razzles, transported in milk churns filled with water to avoid spontaneous combustion before being released on flare chutes to set fires on the ground. Razzles also set fire to bombers’ tails. Teabags were thrown overboard to prove to the Germans that Britain was not being starved by the U-boat campaign.
23
“She Has to Believe in What She Is Doing or Go Mad”
“Say White Rabbit and Three Blind Mice to Vera and you need say no more,” recalled Leo Marks, SOE's boy coding genius. The White Rabbit was the nickname for a thirty-eight-year-old Englishman, F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, general manager in 1939 of Molyneux, the great Paris fashion house. Three Blind Mice was the poem-code of a suburban London shopgirl, Violette Szabo, who left school at fourteen. Their lives, one genteel and privileged in origin, the other humble, brought them together with Virginia Hall and Rolande Colas, all recruited in Paris when Vera first went there scouting for agents, and all three were brilliant and brave in adversity.
France was still a great power. With a population of 105 million, France was the largest powerhouse to fuel the new German Reich. France had a revolutionary past that made it ripe for resistance against an oppressor, but it was also so highly individualistic that the Free French seemed always in disagreement. The White Rabbit, hopping in and out of this country haunted by local pride and ancient prejudices, negotiated agreements between guerrilla forces with a display of such nerve and moral integrity that he was able to push his way into Churchill's presence with a plea for greater material support. And the agent's reputation was such that Churchill had to listen.
Head and shoulders above the other exiled European government leaders stood General Charles de Gaulle of France. His authority bridged the divisions, but he had no experience in closework. Nick Bodington, a former Reuters news agency man in Paris, began by forming liaisons between resistance cells and moved back and forth to France with such nonchalance that internal security, MI5, with no experience of the realities of field operations, suspected he was working for both sides.1
Vera knew secrecy provided opportunities for character assassination. De Gaulle's Free French in London, competitive and divided among themselves, tried Churchill's patience to the breaking point. Vera understood the peculiarities of their secret-service people on Duke Street, and they in turn were more ready to confide in her than in the SIS, which was distrusted as an arm of the British Foreign Office when Halifax was associated with appeasement.
The French spymaster Jean Moulin advised her, “When tired or upset, or both, eat.” When in London, he started his day with ham, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, toast, marmalade, and tea. He would consume this un-French breakfast after a long night's work and then telephone a private number, Whitehall 4503, and walk to the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street to be shown into a drawing room where, he claimed, Victorian
chorus girls used to hang themselves in despair when pregnant. “Our war,” he told Vera, “gives the desperate a reason to live.”
Moulin was one of the tragic giants of the French resistance. He observed dryly that the purity of English womanhood was a nineteenth-century concept that influenced the War Office view that “women are ‘doing their bit’ in factories or noncombatant branches of the armed forces. If they must engage the enemy, they can do it on their backs.” A propaganda poster in the Duke Street office of the Free French showed a blond bombshell seductively draped over a daybed, surrounded by uniforms, under the bold warning: KEEP MUM. SHE'S NOT SO DUMB! Moulin said: “English ladies never reveal secrets in the heat of passion. They close their eyes and think of England. I never thought of Vera as English.”
Between them there was a shared excitement, tightly controlled. She drew comfort from his intellect. He was teased by her faint air of not quite belonging. “She has a smile that is as remote as it is seraphic,” he was quoted as saying. “She must believe in what she is doing or go mad.”
Before coming to London in September 1941 to plead for working capital, arms, and supplies, Moulin organized three resistance groups. He saw the untidy structure of SOE as a challenge. “Vera sand-papers egos until most of the secret services in exile work with her, though always with their own political agendas,” Moulin wrote in a report to General de Gaulle, who had tried his hand at covert action when he escaped from France in 1940 and launched the Bureau Central de Renseignement et d'Action. In its first closework mission, BCRA lost seven members, decapitated by the Germans. Another six French agents were beheaded later in that January of 1941. Vera gently pointed out that it would be wiser to build upon the growing spirit of spontaneous resistance among citizens, who misdirected Germans on the metro, dropped them off at the wrong bus stops, or sold them faulty goods. To give form and direction to this became Moulin's task.2
In London, de Gaulle's secret service planners lacked any experience in such work. Rémy, the code name for Gilbert Renault, ran one network for de Gaulle, while Marie-Madeleine Méric ran another for SOE. Vera did her best to make them speak with a single voice through the BBC, which broadcast prearranged open code messages, such as “Sister Aline wears pink” or “The cat eats fish this morning.” The system was suggested by Georges Bégué, the first SOE agent parachuted into France with a wireless transmitter in a suitcase. Back from a difficult mission, he reported that the Germans could jam his transmitter and were using direction-finding vans. He had an ally in Vera, whose rule was “Keep it brief.” Short enigmatic phrases were crafted by the initiator, and had meaning only for a particular agent. Bégué became known as Captain Noble to BBC producers, who inserted his terse messages into broadcasts to Europe that began with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the heart-stopping dit-dit-dit-dah. This was also Morse for the letter “V”—for Victory—a promise of liberation. A V-Committee was formed, but Vera became uneasy about a backlash to its longer, more explicit instructions for amateur sabotage. “‘How to make your own bomb’ sounds like fun,” she objected, “but overenthusiastic French listeners might draw attention to our trained agents in the vicinity.”
A former South African farmer, Douglas Ritchie, known as Colonel Britton in the BBC's “London Calling Europe” programs, advised, “When you knock on the door, when you rap the table for a waiter in a restaurant, do it like this.” And he would tap out the Morse for V. Transcripts of Colonel Britton's broadcasts were distributed in Britain, prompting MI5 to protest that this would incite communists and trade unionists. Vera already had reservations about psychological warfare experts with no experience in the field. When Colonel Britton prophesied “the greatest battle in the history of the world… And you in Europe will attack,” foreign governments-in-exile protested that they would prefer to broadcast their own guidance to their secret armies. And so “Colonel Britton” was hooked off stage.
Vera liked de Gaulle for stopping off to say farewell to his dying mother in Brittany before escaping to England. Two days later, he was shaving in the Hyde Park Hotel when Jean Monnet, future “Father of the European Community,” and Charles Corbin, the French ambassador, burst into his bathroom to propose a union between the United Kingdom and France, with a federal constitution, one parliament, one government, and common citizenship. De Gaulle flew back to France with the proposal, but it was too late. The government had accepted defeat. De Gaulle escaped again, and went to see Churchill, enjoying an afternoon's sunshine in his garden. The tall, gangling Frenchman brought tears to Churchill's eyes: Britain stood alone, and the only ally was de Gaulle's vision of an “undefeated France.”
The ill-feeling between the Free French and the SIS had been aggravated by Lord Halifax, who was still running foreign policy when he tried to stop de Gaulle's broadcast on June 18, 1940. “Any Frenchman who still has weapons has the absolute duty to continue the resistance.” Surrender of any piece of French soil was “a crime against the nation.” He told all generals in the French Empire to disobey the Germans. “I am France,” he declared.
“De Gaulle is like a man skinned alive,” declared the American novelist Mary Borden. “The slightest touch, even if meant to be friendly, makes him bite.” Mary was the wife of General Sir Edward Louis Spears, who had watched de Gaulle plead with Churchill to send over more aircraft before France fell. Churchill said if Britain had to fight alone, it would need every pilot and plane. De Gaulle had fallen several steps back and, after a silence, said in English, “You are quite right.” Churchill wrote later: “Here stood the Constable of France.”
Terrible choices were being made. Vera learned to make those choices without dithering. She concluded, “It's faster than if I weigh all the evidence and confuse myself through a long drawn-out process of arriving at a judgment by studying every angle. The longer I dealt with emergencies, the more I realized my mind had absorbed experience and information that produced snap judgments that I could trust.”
She had learned early, from Churchill's decision to sink part of the French fleet on July 3, 1940, killing 1,297 French seamen who had been allies a few days before. A combination of the French and German fleets would eclipse Britain's strained navy. At Mers el-Kébir near Oran in Algeria, an ultimatum was issued to the French admiral: join us or we'll take action. At 5:56 P.M. a British bombardment sank French warships. A Vichy court convicted de Gaulle in absentia to a term in jail and later condemned him to death as a traitor.
De Gaulle remained emotionally raw. Churchill, remembering the general was born in Lorraine, groaned in a moment of exasperation, “The biggest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine.” But that cross was symbol and sword of nonnegotiable French sovereignty.
Vera had to remind herself that an English prime minister, William Gladstone, having ordered the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, still admired France, “tingling as it does to the very finger ends with vivacity, running over with a thousand kinds of talent.” The Vichy French government brought Germans in contact with diplomats. Vera was in touch with French-Canadians who maintained a presence in Vichy because the province of Quebec was traditionally French. Until November 1942, when the Germans occupied the south of France, Vichy was a place to gather information and deal with silent anti-Nazi Frenchmen and Germans. The U.S. ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William D. Leahy, had worked with FDR when Leahy was chief of naval operations from 1937 to 1939. While France was divided between northern occupied and southern unoccupied zones, his reports were invaluable. Vera judged that Vichy's usefulness no longer outweighed the value of destroying resources needed by the German war machine in both zones.
“You'll have to make tough decisions,” Vera told the White Rabbit before he was listed as Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas. He had started at the bottom of the RAF ladder. He was rejected as a volunteer in 1939 by the British military attaché in Paris. Asked later how he got his White Rabbit nickname, he replied, “Because I work for
a fuckin’ Mad Hatter's Tea Party.” He trusted Vera's cool judgment, but was appalled by some SOE foul-ups. On his last mission, he escaped from German torturers in such wretched physical shape that his father, seeing him on his final return to England, said, “My God, he's become an old man.”
The White Rabbit was saved by Violette Szabo, who perished in a German death camp. When he first arrived in London, Violette Szabo worked behind the counter at Woolworth's. She fell in love with a French Foreign Legion captain, Étienne Szabo, during General de Gaulle's emotionally charged parade through London of the Free French on July 14, 1940. Étienne knew the girl as Violette Bushell, whose mother was French. Violette thought it might be nice to give one of these poor French soldiers a decent home-cooked meal. Soon after, they married. Étienne left to fight in North Africa, and Violette volunteered to be trained as an agent. Leo Marks was going through her security checks when he discovered that she had made mistakes with the reserve poem she had chosen for coding her messages. Leo said that sometimes spelling mistakes were made because of an unconscious dislike of the poem chosen. She said she had always disliked knowing only nursery rhymes; the poem was one she had never been able to spell correctly in French as a child. The difficult word was “three.” She kept spelling it in French as troi, leaving off the final s. A simple mistake like this could cost her life. The poem was “Three Blind Mice.” Violette was given a poem composed by Leo himself.3
From France, Virginia Hall stoically reported that explosives parachuted to resistance groups were stored so badly that plastic showed signs of mold and metal parts were rusting. She could not let trigger-happy maquisards go off half-cocked. De Gaulle wisely wanted to unify opposition to the Germans and create a single solid Resistance, which would husband its strength but rise up when the right moment came, rather than squander resources in separate, small actions that resulted in savage reprisals against innocent civilians. Virginia relied upon her personal reputation to restrain more and more young men who were joining the Francs-Tireurs, Combat, and other independent guerrilla forces hiding in the forests. She was afraid they would provoke reprisals by launching their own ill-prepared actions, and only provide practice for German antiterrorist squads and an excuse for them to burn down nearby villages.
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