by Giles Milton
Rodolphe Peugeot stopped him in mid-sentence. ‘I am to destroy my own factory? My dear man…’
Ree nodded. That is exactly what he was suggesting. ‘One way or another it will be destroyed,’ he said. ‘If we do it, there will be few casualties and furthermore we can put the explosive where it will do the greatest harm to production and the least to the fabric of the factory.’ Once again he warned that if the RAF returned on a second raid, ‘the whole place will be smashed to smithereens.’9 Rodolphe Peugeot mulled over what Ree had told him and realized he had little choice. He decided to allow saboteurs into his factory.
Once he had made up his mind, his support was wholehearted. He ‘not only gave Henri [Harry] a plan of the factories and details of the machinery halls to be selected as targets for sabotage, but he gave him inside contacts as well’.10
Among these contacts was ‘a quiet, intelligent man’ named Pierre Lucas, the chief electrician at the works, and a few of his comrades.11 ‘We met at a café outside the factory one afternoon,’ said Ree. ‘They gave me some dungarees and I changed in the lavatory of the café and went with him around the factory.’ It was a tense moment. As Lucas led Ree inside the complex, he noticed ‘a lot of German security police’.12
Only now, as he toured the factory, did Ree appreciate how exemplary had been George Rheam’s training at Brickendonbury Manor. He remembered ‘with the utmost clarity the many hours he had spent … studying the weak spots of presses and lathes’.13 As he cast his eye over the turbo-compressors, boring machines and turret lathes, he realized that a few pounds of plastic could cripple such machines.
The Peugeot factory was close to the Swiss frontier, as well as the German, and Ree now crossed the border into neutral Switzerland in order to arrange for Baker Street to parachute the necessary explosives into the area. Aware that it would be several months before a mission of this scale and complexity could take place, he requested that the RAF suspend any more bombing raids on the factory. Bomber Harris was extremely reluctant to agree, since he refused to accept that Gubbins’s outfit, ‘staffed by long-haired civilians, would ever render useful service in para-military operations’.14
This, coming less than six months after the Norsk Hydro triumph, left the Baker Street staff speechless. After a stormy meeting with the chiefs of staff, Bomber Harris said he would halt the raids only on the condition that he received regular reports on the plans to disrupt production. This news was transmitted to Ree, who agreed without hesitation. ‘It was a wonderful job for an ex-conscientious objector to stop the bombing,’ he said.15
Pierre Lucas now introduced Ree to André van der Straaten, the foreman of the plant. He was keen to be involved in the forthcoming sabotage. Lucas also persuaded three other workers to take part in the operation, bringing the total number to five. Ree himself was to direct the mission from outside the plant, since everyone agreed that it was far too risky for him to be present on the night of the planned destruction.
Huge quantities of limpet mines and incendiaries had to be parachuted into France and then smuggled inside the factory. Not until the beginning of November – far later than anticipated – was Ree ready to give the green light.
On the evening of 3 November, at the end of the day shift, the saboteurs assembled in the main courtyard at the front of the factory. A few German guards were knocking a football around in the yard and they now shouted across to the would-be saboteurs and asked them to join a France versus Germany match. Fearful of arousing any suspicion, Pierre Lucas and his men reluctantly formed themselves into a team.
André van der Straaten ‘took a kick of the ball’ and sent it flying across the courtyard.16 As he did so, a limpet mine fell out of his pocket and clattered to the ground. ‘One of the Germans said, helpfully: “Attention, vous avez laissé tomber quelque chose, monsieur” – you’ve dropped something.’
André van der Staten was horrified and ‘hastened to pick it up, murmuring something about electric fuses. This was accepted without question and the game continued.’17
The football match lasted so long that the attack had to be postponed for the night. Ree rescheduled it for 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night in Britain and a fine date for making loud bangs. This time, the saboteurs avoided contact with the German guards and slipped inside the factory as soon as the workers had left for the night, using their pass-keys to open the door. In the working day, the cavernous machine hall was alive to the sound of clanking, grinding machinery as yet more tank-tracks rolled off the production line. Now, the place was eerily deserted and the fading twilight seeped like dirty water through the grease-smudged glass roof panels.
The saboteurs made their way to the executive floor, where their plastic explosive lay hidden in the cleaning cupboard. There were also boxes of limpet mines in various shapes and sizes, ‘so that the bomb could be easily stuck on the sensitive part of a valuable machine’.18
The men checked the explosives and then settled in for a long wait. Ree had warned them not to plant their charges until night had fallen. Not until 11 p.m. did they move ‘to their prearranged stations in various sections of the factory’.19 Each saboteur knew his allotted task. One was to blow up the jig-borer, another was to target the gas production plant. The foundry sand dryers and bodywork transformers were also on the hit list, along with the biggest lathes and compressors.
The most difficult target was the irreplaceable centrifugal compressor. This was a serious challenge, for the compressor room could only be entered ‘under conditions of incredible danger and physical strain, namely crawling up the ducts and into the compressor room’.20 It was probably André van der Straaten who undertook this task, squeezing himself along the duct and then swinging himself down into the room. This was the very heart of the Peugeot factory and vital to the functioning of the machinery.
In pitch darkness, he groped his hands into the compressor. He then snapped a limpet mine on to the metal. If all went to plan, it would detonate within the hour. He then struggled back down the narrow duct and dropped into the main factory, meeting one of the foremen as he did so. He was ‘working with quiet detachment’ and the two of them paused for a moment as they listened to two of their comrades who were ‘engaged similarly in another sector of the shop floor’.
It took almost an hour to plant all the explosives. Once the last fuses had been activated, the men ‘hurried down to a disused side door’ which led ‘into a deserted yard at the back of the factory’. A second door gave them access to a side alley that ran along the perimeter of the fence. ‘They all shook hands and hurried away: they had to get home as quickly as they could, for curfew had started and there would be a terrific turn-out of police and military as the factory went up.’21
* * *
Colin Gubbins faced an agonizing wait for news. He had staked his reputation on a successful operation and knew that if he could pull off such a massive attack, it would almost certainly guarantee his team a leading role in advance of the planned landings in Normandy.
According to a report by Maurice Buckmaster, head of Baker Street’s French Section, the destruction began with a series of muffled bangs. ‘At about ten minutes past midnight, the shop-floor of the Peugeot factory was rent by several violent explosions.’22 The limpets detonated as synchronized, with the noise of the blast being contained by the factory walls. The outdoor explosions were altogether more spectacular, detonating with such force that the inhabitants of Sochaux were rocked from their beds. The concrete transformer houses were split in two by the blasts and one of the heavy outer doors, made of reinforced steel, blown fully eighty feet into the night sky.
The full extent of the destruction would not be known until the morning, but long before daybreak it was clear that Ree’s men had caused irreparable damage, for the heat of the explosions had sparked a fire fuelled by a lethal cocktail of oil, petrol and gas.
Ree spent the night in a safe house and awoke with a feeling that life had just taken a turn for the better.
Later that morning, he sauntered over to the factory in order to inspect the damage. As he passed one of the transformers, he noted that the ‘brick building [was] laid flat and pulverised’ while the transformer itself was a mangled ruin. Inside the factory, the destruction was writ large over the smoke-blackened machinery. ‘Turbo: huge hole in side. Leaves twisted to blazes. Coussinet [bearing machine] pulverised. 8,000hp motor irreparable.’ Most of the targeted machines were contorted beyond recognition.
‘I wish you could see the faces of German guards,’ he wrote in a gleeful report to Baker Street, ‘and compare them with faces of workers, directors and population of Sochaux.’
He gave a full appraisal of the damage, as requested by Bomber Harris. The transformers and turbo-compressors had taken the biggest hit and were so badly damaged that none of them would ever work again. ‘A stoppage of five to six months is anticipated.’
Ree appended an addendum to his memo, extending his gratitude to those who had trained him. ‘My 17 [Brickendonbury Manor] training is being invaluable in this area. Please thank Rheam and his staff.’ He added that ‘my Scotland training invaluable for crossing frontier.’ In a postscript, written in capital letters, he urged: ‘DO YOUR BEST TO KEEP RAF AWAY.’23
The Gestapo began their hunt for the perpetrators within hours of the attack. Their first port of call was the Peugeot family, who were subjected to a lengthy interrogation. But they were found to have clean hands and ‘there was nothing the Germans could do to incriminate Rodolphe Peugeot’.
The finger of suspicion soon fell on a group of factory workers ‘of whom five were missing’.24 They, along with a rumoured Englishman known only as Henri, were the prime suspects. The Gestapo were highly experienced in rooting out saboteurs, aware that they would be swallowed up by safe houses and then lie low for several weeks. Ree knew this and decided to change the rules of the game. Far from going into hiding, he persuaded his saboteurs into undertaking another strike on the following night, when it was least expected. This time, they attacked two new targets, the huge foundry at Sainte-Suzanne and the nearby Marty factory which produced engine parts. He sent a second upbeat message to Baker Street. ‘Both transformers pulverised and flying pieces smashed three electric motors, a switchboard and two batteries of accumulators.’25
Over the weeks that followed, Ree masterminded a sustained campaign of sabotage, destroying machinery, setting fires and derailing goods trains. On 19 November an auxiliary compressor was delivered to the Peugeot factory to replace the one destroyed in the initial attack. That very evening, as it stood in the front yard, Ree’s men scaled the fence and attached a limpet mine, wrecking the machine before it had even been unwrapped.
Ree was by now in real danger, for both the Gestapo and the SS were on his heels. In need of a new safe house, he called at the home of a local schoolmaster, Monsieur Hauger. He soon discovered it was safe no longer. The door was opened by a German officer, who ordered him inside at gunpoint.
Ree had been trained for just such a scenario and that training now proved invaluable. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he said to the German in a voice that was intended to display his innocence. ‘It’s very dangerous to play with firearms like that. For Heaven’s sake put it away.’
The man whipped out his card, which revealed him to be a member of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence agency. ‘I said, “Oh, I beg your pardon” and put my hands up.’26
The German officer informed Ree that Monsieur Hauger had been arrested after having been found hiding explosives. He seemed to swallow Ree’s story that he was merely a friend of Monsieur Hauger, but said that he would nevertheless need to be interrogated by the Gestapo. ‘Since I knew that they were looking for a certain Henri,’ said Ree, ‘a tall, fair Englishman in that region, and since I had 50,000 francs on me, I decided not to risk the interrogation.’27
Now, his imperturbable coolness once again came into play. He made his way to Monsieur Hauger’s drinks cabinet and offered the officer a glass of wine. It was to be a drink to remember. ‘I brought the glasses down from the cupboard and as I was walking behind him with the bottle, I hit him on the head with it.’
It should have knocked him unconscious, but he didn’t strike with sufficient force. The officer spun round, only mildly concussed, and fired his pistol six times. ‘And as he fired I remember thinking, “Good heavens, how extraordinary” – I was by that time hitting him – “they must have been blanks in there” because the pistol was sort of pointing at me.’
When the gun was spent, a brawl ensued, with each man trying to overpower the other. The German repeatedly thwacked Ree on the head with his pistol butt. He then locked his neck ‘into one of those bloody grips, a sort of half nelson, and I remember it going through my mind: “If you’re ever going to see your daughter, you’ve got to get out of this one.”’
It was now that his Arisaig training proved its worth. Ree had not been the most proficient of students, but he had listened carefully when being taught self-defence. Sykes’s technique was designed to cause real pain. Ree flattened his palms and then ‘pushed them up into his stomach’ and deep into his internal organs. The German ‘fell back against the wall’ – he was in severe pain – ‘and said: Sortez, sortez.’
Ree needed no encouragement. He fled by the back door and hurtled across the fields in his boots and raincoat. ‘I was getting very wet from the rain and I put my head inside to see if it was going through and it came out covered in blood. And I thought: “God, they weren’t blanks.”’
He swam across the river and made it to the nearby village where he knocked on the door of a local contact. The man answered in considerable shock, ‘seeing this blood-stained, bedraggled figure at the door, on a Sunday afternoon, about six o’clock’.28 He offered Ree a warm bed and then called a doctor who discovered that Ree had indeed been shot, but only by a single bullet.
Three nights later, Ree was carried across the border into Switzerland and taken to a local hospital, where he was nursed back to health. He continued to pull the strings from his sickbed, sending vital intelligence to his saboteurs and enabling them to pull off a whole new series of spectacular explosions.
Ree was to remain in Switzerland until May, when he eventually set off for England, travelling via Marseille, Pamplona and Gibraltar. Colin Gubbins felt a very personal sense of gratitude, for Ree had seen off not only the Nazis, but Bomber Harris and Lord Portal as well. He recommended that he be ‘appointed a Companion in the Distinguished Service Order’.29
Back at Brickendonbury Manor, George Rheam had never been known to waste his breath on praise, but even he expressed his admiration for Ree. In goading Rodolphe Peugeot into collaborating with the Allies, he had effectively invented a whole new type of warfare, one that Rheam labelled ‘blackmail sabotage’.
‘We have not made enough use of managements and owners of installations who, whilst unable to do physical acts of sabotage, can be contacted and from whom technical advice can be obtained which we, in turn, can pass on to saboteurs.’30
Winston Churchill was inclined to agree. One factory owner and a few bags of limpets were worth an entire squadron of Bomber Harris’s Halifax bombers.
18
Fighting with Hedgehogs
SECRETARY MARGARET JACKSON was able to provide Gubbins with remarkably accurate briefs on the success or failure of the sabotage missions that were by now taking place on a nightly basis. Wireless transmissions were received by the various country sections, where they were collated and forwarded to her. She, in turn, handed them to Gubbins when he arrived for work at Baker Street.
The situation at the Firs was rather different. It was a source of continual frustration to Stuart Macrae not to have any idea as to how and when their weapons had been used. In part, this was because they were too busy to enquire. As summer yielded to autumn that year, 1943, they found themselves working on ‘all manner of remarkable projects’. There were ‘bombs which jumped about on the ground, bombs w
hich leaped in and out of the sea and rockets which fired bridges over roads’1 – the latter being the latest invention from the drawing board of Cecil Clarke. Yet news of operations hardly ever reached the sheds and workshops at the far end of the lower lawn.
Macrae tried to keep tabs on successful limpet attacks, but even this proved difficult. Unlike Gubbins, he was not in regular contact with the army high command. As for Jefferis himself, he didn’t seem to care. Macrae increasingly found himself in the role of ‘a theatrical producer who had found an unwilling star’ – Jefferis – ‘and forced him to fame’. He felt rather guilty, for ‘whereas I had succeeded in making myself happy, it was obvious that I had done the opposite for Millis’.2 Jefferis wanted nothing more than to be left with his mathematics, his coloured chalks and the occasional tumbler of whisky.
His most complex invention, the anti-U-boat Hedgehog mortar, had started life when the two of them were still working in the War Office back in the early days of war. It had originally been intended as a sabotage weapon to be used in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain, but had slowly been transformed into an instrument of such complexity that it had required more than two years of fine tuning. The principal difficulty had been to calculate the recoil accurately, essential to the stability of any ship. One newly recruited engineer who found himself travelling in the company of Jefferis said that he ‘spent most of one train journey between Bath and London sketching furiously on empty cigarette packets’.3 As the train pulled into Paddington, Jefferis gave the hint of a smile: the mathematics finally made sense. And by the time the sea trials took place, the Hedgehog was near perfect. The mortars dived downwards in their streamlined casings and then homed in on their underwater foe.