by Clare Mulley
In February, Francis’s return flight was forced to turn back because of snow. On the way back he thought he could hear ‘hard things’ hitting the outside of the plane.23 A moment later one of the engines was on fire. It is possible that ice was the cause, but a solitary British plane flying over occupied France would have been a mouth-watering sight for any alert German gunner. When a second engine caught fire the crew dropped their containers, and soon they and Francis were forced to jump from the burning plane at 10,000 feet, 100 miles from their intended destination. Minutes after he landed in a snow-covered potato field, he heard the plane crash into the hills close behind him.
By now Francis had three million francs on his head, a sufficiently flattering sum for him to joke that the Germans apparently ‘attached greater value to him than the War Office’, so he was taking a calculated risk when he walked up to a farmhouse and knocked on the door.24 Fortunately, seeing a British airman on their step, the farmer shouted to his wife to ‘get the wine out’.25 Over the next few months the farm would become one of Francis’s most reliable safe houses. In another stroke of luck, the canisters bailed from the burning plane were picked up by a small resistance group who had been waiting sixteen months for supplies. It was all put to good use. Francis’s first thoughts, however, were for the five aircrew, uniformed officers, who had been forced to bail out with him. It took him four days to find them and several weeks before he could put them on the escape route through Spain. Meanwhile, despite speaking no French, the twenty-one-year-old flight engineer, Sergeant Len Gormal, disregarded his squadron leader’s specific instructions to lie low, and insisted on supporting Francis’s operations, at one point helping to save the lives of four French resistants.*
By March 1944 Francis was up to his neck in preparations for the planned Allied invasion. The Wehrmacht were moving reinforcements into his area, supported by both the Gestapo and the crack troops of the Waffen SS, and as measures against the resistance intensified several of his local leaders were arrested. ‘Passing very difficult days’, Francis filed. ‘Germans are attacking all … reign of terror, farms burnt, shootings and hangings … picture is black.’26 Hitler’s proclamation was already being translated into action, but things were about to get infinitely worse.
At dawn on 6 June 1944 the Allies invaded northern France. Bombing raids and local resistance circuits had already damaged much of the German coastal defences and radar installations. More than 100,000 troops arrived by air and sea, while further south, Jockey rail-cutting teams immediately went into action. Every train with German troops or supplies leaving Marseille for Lyon after D-Day was derailed at least once by Francis’s resistance groups, and over 800 lines were cut during June alone. The same pattern was followed across the country as SOE circuits attacked enemy troops moving towards the Normandy beachhead. The Nazi reprisals were swift and brutal. On 10 June the SS entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and murdered 642 people, including 190 schoolchildren. If the aim was to inhibit further resistance, the result was inevitably to instil an even greater determination. Francis knew that if the Jockey circuit were to maintain its level of attack against Nazi production, troops and communications, and the respect and loyalty of the 10,000-plus local resistants, mainly the Maquis in the mountains, he needed more arms, more equipment, and many more officers – and in particular a new female courier. His requests to London became ever more urgent and eventually he got what he wanted.
As ‘Jacqueline Armand’, code-name ‘Pauline’, Christine had been issued a rubber-lined crash helmet, loaded revolver, razor-edged commando knife, torch, and round, brown, rubber-coated cyanide tablet sewn into the hem of her skirt. She had French papers forged near Harlow by the cream of British and Polish professionals, who happened to be out of prison when recruited, and a money belt stuffed with gold sovereigns. In some accounts she was given a square of silk printed with a local map, a compass hidden behind her hairclip, and a magnifying glass placed in the end of a cigarette.
As a ‘Joe’, her flying suit, pack and harness reduced her mobility but helped to keep her warm and cushioned her bumps as the plane lurched through both turbulence and enemy flak. Occasionally she and her fellow Joes were knocked sideways and down between the packages that were carefully wedged along the floor. The larger metal containers were carried in the modified bomb bays. Christine was travelling with three officers of the ‘Paquebot mission’, led by Captain Jean Tournissa, an engineer who had been detailed to supervise the construction of a new airstrip in the Vercors region, south-west of Grenoble. Soon they were playing sardines, squashed together in the metal belly of the plane, the noise of the engines drowning out any attempt at conversation. As the hours in transit wore on, the light oily, tinny, smell that is peculiar to military aircraft was soon competing with the more pungent odours of fear, brandy and thermos tea. It was 7 July 1944, a windy, moonlit night. Christine was thirty-five years old, although her passport said twenty-nine, the same age as Francis Cammaerts.
As the plane approached the reception field, the RAF dispatchers attached Christine’s static line to her parachute. For stealth and accuracy, she and her fellow officers were to be dropped too low for their canopies to open unaided, so the bags in which they were stowed were tied to the aircraft fuselage. When Christine dropped, her line would be pulled taut, holding back the bag and freeing the canopy just below the plane. Now they learnt they were facing near gale-force winds. As the dispatcher opened the exit hatch, blasting the passengers with a rush of cold air and the deafening roar of the engines, Christine could see the moonlit ground below. There were few lights to confuse with the landing torches. Christine was not worried about finding her reception committee or starting work in Nazi-occupied France; she was not even anxious about whether she might smash her face on the circular exit hole as she jumped, or break her legs on landing. She was, quite simply, exhilarated. Anything less dramatic than this stormy flight would have seemed inappropriate after all the build-up and delays in Algiers. Laughing, she tapped out ‘an excessively rude’ Morse code message on an old Aldis lamp in the plane, before swinging her feet into the hole, watching for the red signal light to change to green, and plunging into the air, like a hangman’s victim, just 150–200 metres above the arranged drop zone.
Christine was immediately blasted sideways on a torrent of wind. Swept four miles off course, she finally hit the ground with such force that her revolver was smashed and her coccyx and one ankle fared only slightly better. While other agents talked of the beauty of their chutes opening like flowers above them, of swinging in ever-decreasing arcs like a pendulum through the sky, and of the silence and the bright moonlight, Christine simply said she dropped ‘like a wet dish-cloth’.27 Later she embellished the story of her landing, saying that she fell straight towards a church spire, which she only avoided with ‘supreme effort’, and that her head was still ‘battered’ by the gravestones in the churchyard.28 But if the truth was less dramatic, it was also more impressive. The gale had completely separated Christine from her fellow officers, one of whom, it later turned out, had broken an arm and fractured his skull on impact. Landing alone in a wheat field, she immediately buried her parachute and broken revolver in the hard summer earth and was met the next day looking as though she was on a regular morning stroll through the nearby forest. Her plain clothes looked perfectly French, and her manner seemed perfectly easy despite the searing pain of her twisted ankle. Once she had verified that her new companions were indeed her reception committee, however, ‘her language shocked several of its more conventional members’.29
That afternoon Christine was reunited with Jean Tournissa. Together they caused quite a stir as they sat beneath the apple tree shading the entrance to the town hall at Vassieux-en-Vercors, the largest town on the imposing Vercors plateau. Here they were given their local French forces permit cards, a telling indication of how strong the resistance was in the area.30 Although their French was fluent, their accents were obviously not lo
cal and the villagers were intrigued as to where the ‘commandos’ came from. Tournissa was thought to be Canadian, and a rumour quickly spread that the pretty ‘Pauline’ was Irish. Everyone knew better than to ask unnecessary questions, but the town’s schoolteacher, Jeanne Barbier, who had been baking a ‘victory cake’ with her friend Suzy Blanc, could not resist making a note in her diary wondering about the sole young woman among the men who had just dropped in.31 Christine was already causing a stir.
She met Francis, now Major ‘Roger’, a few days later when they were collecting canisters of explosives and equipment that had been dropped the night before. ‘I saw a beautiful, slender, dark-haired young woman’, Francis remembered. ‘Even in those rough conditions I was impressed by her features and bearing. Her face was sensitive and alert…’32 Later he refined this impression to describe her as ‘structurally very beautiful’, but at the same time ‘an actress’ who could ‘pass completely unnoticed’ at will, or draw people’s eyes ‘with a tremendous magnetism’.33 Slim, fresh-faced and suntanned from her months in Egypt and Algiers, she was fit and attractive, and despite her sore ankle she moved with the fluid grace that was one of the legacies of her convent schooling.
Christine, meanwhile, saw a young, handsome man, whose trim military moustache was surprisingly similar to Andrzej’s, but whose height – and enormous feet – were in a league of their own. Indeed, Francis’s field names included ‘le Diable Anglais’, but he was best and most affectionately known as ‘Grands Pieds’.34 His feet had even defied the infinite care that went into ensuring that all agents’ clothes were either originally, or apparently, French. Suits and underwear were always of French cut, French haberdashers’ labels were carefully added, telling hat-bands removed, and even buttons were sewn on ‘in the French style’. But Francis could not find French shoes in his size, and he was always concerned that his brogues, of a style and colour rarely seen in France, might give him away.
Francis, like Christine, was neither vain nor showy, but he was charismatic, and good to look at in his faded blue shirt, especially after months of walking in the mountains of the Vercors. He was also reassuringly meticulous given the situation, and he had great determination and a clear sense of right and wrong. Christine took a shine to him immediately. Soon they were laughing together as they searched for packages in the fields. Eventually they made their way down the stony hillsides, occasionally missing their footing as they struggled with the heavy metal containers, while the wind whipped Christine’s hair across her face.
Francis found his new courier a cottage at Saint-Julien-en-Vercors, a small village where he had a command post, just beyond the town of Saint-Martin where the local Maquis had its headquarters. Although she and Francis grandly christened it ‘la maison de Miss Pauline’, the single-storey building was little more than walls and a roof, but Christine liked it all the better for that. Never a home-maker, she preferred to keep her possessions stowed away in a knapsack and a large canvas bag, and ‘yet’, Francis said, ‘she always managed to look immaculate’.35 Christine did little more than sleep at her ‘maison’, hang up her few clothes, and very occasionally drink weak tea there with a pretty, russet-haired nurse called Sylviane Rey, who had been brought up in Algeria, and whose husband Jean was with the Maquis. Sitting on Christine’s step, Sylviane thought her friend’s almond-shaped eyes gave her ‘the look of a Siamese kitten’.36 Here the two women would steal a few moments to listen to the sounds of bees and cicadas, and watch the peacock and painted lady butterflies visiting the wild flowers in Christine’s untended garden. There was no time for any greater commitment to the place; Christine was working flat out from her first day.
She had been sent to France with two operational objectives. She was primarily a courier for Francis, the local resistance leaders and the Maquis. But she had also been tasked with helping to subvert any Polish or other foreign units fighting for the Germans. It was now just over a month since the Allied invasions in Normandy, and the Wehrmacht officers and troops in the south were getting increasingly nervous. Francis believed that his chief aim should be ‘to persuade everybody who was willing to help our cause, to join us’, and Christine did a fair bit of that, too. ‘She created a climate of warm friendship so rapidly that one felt one had known her forever’, Sylviane Rey remembered of their first meeting. ‘She was always calm, smiling and happy, and she was full of fun … modest about her own achievements, and generous in her praise of others.’37 Christine’s vitality, and her contagious ability to relax, were huge assets. Whether she needed to discuss the storage of guns or could just chat away about the pleasure of sunbathing, there was something at once open and conspiratorial about her, and she quickly won the confidence and devotion of her audience.
One of her earliest tasks was to support the drops of arms, explosives and detonators, both for Francis’s network and for the increasingly active Maquis groups in the hills. Liaising with Francis and Albert, she helped organize local reception committees of six to eight men to be on standby with bikes, mules or, if possible, a truck, and torches. Then she would sometimes join the designated reception leader and his family for an evening meal while they listened for the BBC radio message to confirm that night’s drop. Most agents agreed that sharing such moments was a privilege. New recruits were often thrilled by the idea of the mighty BBC broadcasting their message to all who chose to listen, a message that made sense to no one but them. But it was also the moment when the adventure became real, and dangerous, no longer owned by the team alone but also involving RAF pilots risking their lives to deliver supplies, and Bomber Command who were supporting the diversion of aircraft to the field. Christine would intuitively tune in to the mood in the room, reading how deeply the men drew on their precious cigarettes and how quick the women were to smile, and her natural self-assurance helped to calm their nerves. For this reason as much as any other she would sometimes join the reception teams, occasionally climbing high into the hills for hours, to help to count the parachutes bursting like spores from the back of the plane, and collect the packages and containers that landed with tinny clunks and rolled down the hillsides, sometimes over a radius of several miles.
As these night-time deliveries were dependent on ‘Charlotte’, the rather romantic code-name for the full moon, and the moon-period that lasted a few days either side, Christine enjoyed some surprisingly busy nights in the remote fields and grazing pastures of rural south-west France. Occasionally the team might find themselves surrounded by cows as the curious animals came to get a closer look. Once while waiting for a drop, Francis saw other figures wandering around a building in the middle of ‘their’ field. Creeping up behind them he found himself facing a man with a Sten submachine gun just like his own. ‘We looked at our Stens and we said, I think we must be on the same side’, he told Christine, laughing.38 But usually it was quiet work, with just the sounds of insects and low calls between the team as they prepared to light the torches, bicycle lamps or the small creosote and oil fires made in biscuit tins that guided the supply planes to the drop site. Sometimes the moonlight was so bright that the men joked they should have brought newspapers to help pass the time before the sound of an engine – memorably described by Ben Cowburn as ‘a 5000 hp roar of defiance’ – finally heralded the arrival of a small dark shadow in the sky.39
It was not unusual for at least one of the parachutes to fail on these sorties, especially if the flight came from Algiers, where a shortage of silk meant that parachutes were sewn from heavier Egyptian cotton. If a chute failed completely, its metal container hit the earth with such force that it would be practically unrecognizable. Even when no one was killed or injured as a result, excavating these flattened containers was demoralizing work, as once prised open they usually only offered up rifles with their butts broken, or the barrels bent. Cardboard packaging, also used by the teams in Algiers, would often break up in mid-air, sometimes showering Christine and the team with explosives and detonators and leaving much
of the munitions unusable. But on good evenings they might find eight or nine undamaged containers, and many more of the lighter packages, which had treats shoved among the supplies: cigarettes, tobacco, slabs of chocolate, jars of butter, tins of food, warm clothes, and even notes of encouragement.
Once collected, the containers and packages were stowed in old houses or under fodder in barns, in caves or in wells. A few nights later the team would be back, unclipping the containers lengthways like ripe pea-pods, and checking their haul. Christine then arranged the deliveries: guns, ammunition, explosives, detonators and chocolate for small bribes to the sabotage teams; silencers to those men ‘who could not be trusted to use a knife successfully’; extra Stens, heavier arms, clothes and any parachute silk that could be made into clothes or tents to the Maquis; radio batteries to Albert, whom she daily blessed for saving her from the necessity of putting her own wireless training to the test; bicycle tyres, ration cards and cash to Francis.40 There was never enough of anything, but the only items missing from the shopping lists sent to London were extra lethal tablets. A contact in the hotel where the Luftwaffe local HQ was stationed had floated the idea of lacing the soup. ‘No’, London pencilled against the suggestion; that level of indiscriminate killing was taking things too far, even for the makers of exploding bicycle pumps and detonating horse manure.41
As a courier, Christine was also responsible for conveying messages between the well-dispersed members of Francis’s network, and between them and the Maquis. Travelling almost constantly through enemy-held territory, within a few weeks she had made contact with the more than fifty cells of the Jockey circuit, making her the only person besides Francis who knew all the key personnel. She ‘worked hard’, Francis noted, and had quickly become invaluable.42 For security, all messages were delivered in person and usually from memory, although Christine would sometimes carry an annotated cigarette paper that, if need be, she could easily lose, or even swallow. As a woman she avoided the suspicion that any able-bodied man moving around France by train now generated, but the constant travelling was suspicious in itself and with her dark eyes and hair she was still an obvious target for Nazi guards on train or road controls. Francis suggested she cycle but she absolutely refused, telling him that bikes made her ‘shudder’ and she would ‘rather make twenty parachute drops than accompany him twenty yards on a bike’.43 Staying in cheap lodging houses, and always dressed in a modest but immaculate blouse and skirt, Christine spent the whole time trying to play down the glamour attached to being a British agent in France, the very glamour that Francis admitted he found ‘a tremendous advantage’ in the field.44