by Paul Kix
This was the country into which La Rochefoucauld was parachuting.
The plane circled around the Yonne department in central France, looking for the résistants on the ground who had helped organize the landing. A drop like this required twenty-three different steps, and the Brits and French were now near the end of the checklist. Each side operated with a wireless radio called an S-Phone, developed by SOE, which allowed both parties to speak on a secure airwave. The men on the ground had brought portable lamps and flashlights and organized themselves in formation, trying to catch the pilot’s eye. After two passes, the plane swinging ever lower, the pilot saw them. The airplane’s hatch opened and La Rochefoucauld moved to its edge. He sat down, his feet dangling into open air. Straight ahead of him were two lights: The red meant don’t jump, the green meant do. The red one was lit and La Rochefoucauld stared at it, nervous.
Then it turned green.
He landed, uneventfully, and a dozen men helped him fold his parachute and gather the bags and weapons that had fallen after him. They worked quickly, afraid that Germans had heard the plane as it whined and circled or seen the parachutes bloom in the moonlight. They moved to trucks idling on a road near the woods and headed out.
These men were mostly from the local chapter of the Alliance, a nationwide resistance and intelligence group formed by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, a beautiful milky-skinned mother of two. Before the war, she had served as the secretary for a magazine, L’Ordre National, which published the battle plans of Hitler’s land, sea, and air forces. The magazine built up an intelligence network that after 1940 found a purpose outside journalism. With the majority of the magazine’s staff fighting the Germans, Fourcade decided to head the intelligence network herself. It was the perfect cover: No one in wartime France would expect a woman to be capable of such covert work. Over the next few years, she slipped across the demarcation line stuffed in a postal bag, escaped Nazi arrest on multiple occasions, helped her own children do the same, grew the network from a handful of agents to a thousand. She gave her people the code-names of animals and watched as the network’s actions became so notorious the Nazis took to calling it “Noah’s Ark.” By 1943, it was the only Resistance network covering all of France.
La Rochefoucauld rode in the pickup for an hour with these résistants, the landscape on the headlight’s periphery rising gradually to the hills of the Massif Central, then narrowing as great forests crowded the road and blocked the light of the stars. The trucks slowed to negotiate turns and switchbacks carved out of the thick groves of trees, the road itself becoming a shabby path until at last the men arrived in a remote camp deep in the woods south of Avallon, near a village called Quarré-les-Tombes, named for the Gallo-Roman tombstones near its church. The sun rose above the forest line as twenty men clustered round. La Rochefoucauld distributed the cigarettes and chocolates he’d brought in his bag.
The Alliance’s local boss was a vicar from a nearby cathedral, Father Bernard Ferrand, a forty-three-year-old with failing health and what some thought to be monarchist views, who hated the Germans and had joined the Resistance in 1941. Swarthy and bifocaled, Ferrand emerged as a leader because of his seniority—most Resistance fighters were, like La Rochefoucauld, young—and also because of his profession. Just as people thought Fourcade’s gender prohibitive, many didn’t think a man of the cloth capable of commanding saboteurs. He had a quiet intensity and a priest’s righteousness. He didn’t seem to mind that among his scores of fighters were socialists and even atheists. To Ferrand, only reclaiming France mattered, and so he recruited other holy men to his cause, convincing them to hide out résistants or downed British pilots in cathedrals or rectories.
La Rochefoucauld’s job in Quarré-les-Tombes would consist of training Ferrand’s men, and those from other Resistance groups, in the use of explosives. They would learn to place bombs against power plants or railroads; the Frenchmen who had the daring to become saboteurs often lacked the technical skills. La Rochefoucauld would fix that.
But as the sabotages had increased in central France, more Nazi agents had gone undercover and found their way into groups. “Arrests,” Fourcade later wrote, “became a nightmare.” Her people needed to speak with London by radio, but the Nazis knew the frequencies the combatants were likely to use and had developed tracking equipment that quickly isolated the neighborhood, then the block, and, finally, the apartment with the wireless transmitter. Radiomen were to keep communications to seconds, but most needed far more time to relay their information. “Our radio operators were the real frontliners, the first to sacrifice their lives,” Fourcade wrote.
The SD unraveled many Resistance groups in the summer of 1943. The brilliant SD head in Bordeaux, Friedrich Dohse, flipped a fighter, which led to the dismantling of a massive network in southwest France called Scientist. In Paris, SD agents infiltrated and tortured members of the city’s largest Resistance group, Prosper, which crumbled in July. Even the most important figure of the Resistance, Jean Moulin, who had persuaded France’s eight largest Resistance networks to align themselves under one heading, was betrayed and arrested in June 1943. He died after weeks of torture, at the hands of the infamous SD agent Klaus Barbie.
The Alliance suffered that summer, too. In July, just as La Rochefoucauld was establishing himself in country, Fourcade agreed to leave it. The threat to her life was too great. “I was deeply afraid of what lay ahead,” she later admitted. She fled to England, to command the network remotely. The dismantling of so many groups, the partial compromising of still more, and the arrests of hundreds of people led to a “total stagnation” in leadership in 1943, said Jacques Bingen, a formative résistant who survived that summer’s arrests—only to be betrayed and arrested himself.
The fallow period meant the fighters who remained—courageous or naive or both—had to play outsized roles in the rebellion. Robert, all of nineteen, soon found himself training and leading forty men and getting pulled aside by a captain of a Resistance group, a man in his forties calling himself Pius VII. He “very insistently told me . . . he was painfully lacking in arms,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. Could Robert help to supply him? The two first ran an inventory to see what was needed, and La Rochefoucauld found the chapter “truly weak, in weapons and in explosives.” So, with the help of a wireless man, Robert contacted an R/F agent in London with the code-name Henri and requested an immediate drop.
Henri said multiple containers of explosives and small arms could be parachuted—but the date and time remained to be decided. For two weeks, Robert waited until he received word. The mission at last appeared a go for the following night.
Six arms drops occurred that summer in the region, and though three of them could have been La Rochefoucauld’s, the one that most likely involved him was scheduled for July 22, in the small village of Chassy, an hour from Quarré-les-Tombes.
To communicate with the Resistance, SOE used not only encrypted radios but very public ones. The BBC, in fact, put out communiqués meant for the underground, in its daily “personal messages” segment. These were outright bizarre missives that aired on the broadcaster’s English and French services—phrases that sometimes meant nothing but other times, if résistants had been warned in advance by their British handlers, meant that a mission was on. The evening of the proposed Chassy drop, during the personal messages segment, amid dozens of coded phrases—like “Romeo is kissing Juliette” or “Esculapius does not like sheep”—résistants in central France and SOE agents in London heard a message that was their cue: “The collaborators already have sad faces.”
Well after nightfall, a handful of men drove their pickups from their camp to the drop zone, trees clustered here and there but the plains otherwise stretching to the moonlit horizon. The mission would be overseen by two local Resistance fighters who worked closely with SOE, Alain de la Roussilhe and Pierre Argoud. Soon their transmitter had contacted the pilot’s. The men turned on their electric lamps and within moments heard the whine of t
he plane, and then saw its outline. It traveled, as ever, with its lights off. The bomber missed them and circled back, flying lower now, no more than a few hundred feet above the ground. Then its hatch opened and seconds later the men saw the familiar bloom of opened chutes. There were many of them—too many to count as they drifted downward. Strung beneath each was a three-foot metal cylinder that held up to four hundred pounds of cargo. When the bounty struck ground, the men folded the still-billowing parachutes and immediately took the arms with them. “It would do no good to wait where we were,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. They drove to the safety of the Yonne’s unending forest, and took stock.
It was stunning: fifteen containers of submachine guns and plastic explosives and ammunition and money—even chocolate and cigarettes. “Everything we needed to wage war!” La Rochefoucauld wrote. Some members of the Alliance looked at Robert in awe: How did a kid like this help to pull off a drop like that? It gave La Rochefoucauld a cachet with certain fighters, and the mystery of this young instructor lured local résistants to him; many knew he had parachuted from London but knew little else. So as his training continued in the days after the drop the men listened to him, even if they were nearly double his age. He confidently told them how to mold plastic explosives, where to place them—a smaller sabotage against key equipment was sometimes better than a massive, fiery one. “In a few weeks, they became excellent pyrotechnicians,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “and, at the end of August, they knew the ins and outs of using explosives. Now we had to get down to our main mission.”
The hope was to sabotage the power plant that supplied electricity to portions of the nearby city of Prémery, and also a factory that repaired German equipment. A camaraderie grew among the men as they anticipated their mission, and those who trained under La Rochefoucauld began to think of themselves as part of Groupe Roche, according to Robert’s military records, suggesting the brash young man relayed not only the secret techniques of sabotage but a bit of his personal history. It must have been hard for the nineteen-year-old to remain discreet that summer. At last, he was fighting the Germans, sending his men on reconnaissance missions of selected sites, discussing plant layouts and engineering and when the Nazis stood watch and when they did not. “Chance is the most extraordinary thing you can have in your life,” La Rochefoucauld said, “and you should know how to take advantage of it.” He positively thrummed with energy.
One night in September, with the power plant transmitter unguarded, La Rochefoucauld and his men placed their plastic explosives against it, and against the surrounding inflow power lines. They set their timers and ran. The explosion downed the lines and tore up the transmitter. “Everything went perfectly well,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote, with a touch of English understatement. A few nights later, La Rochefoucauld said the men did the same to the German-occupied grounds that repaired equipment. They sabotaged the plant so that workers spent their days piecing it, and not the instruments of war, together again. Victory was now a nectar with a sweet aftertaste. The men next sabotaged two railway lines simply because they felt like it.
La Rochefoucauld’s saboteurs were not alone. That August and September, the Yonne’s Nazi-friendly politicians counted sixty acts of sabotage in the department, the work carried out by British-organized groups like Robert’s, as well as Communist, Socialist, and French nationalist ones. Each sabotage seemed to embolden the next, and as they increased in frequency and intensity they tinged each day in the shades of hope—or, conversely, despair. The sous-prefect of Avallon, a Nazi collaborator, wrote in September 1943: “Automobile theft, criminal attacks . . . fires, theft of food and sabotages are events which for two months have completely changed the public and created a small white terror amid our people.” Another collaborating politician in the Yonne reported nineteen injuries and twenty-seven deaths as a result of these “terrorist acts.” In response, a “special brigade” of German military police deployed to the northern half of the Yonne, armed with guns and even grenades. In the southern half, where La Rochefoucauld hid out, the Milice and military police made strong shows, appearing in what were formerly rural and unpatrolled municipalities. In Quarré-les-Tombes, for example, a village small enough for the “commercial district” to comprise a few shops, guards nevertheless stood watch at two stores day and night.
But the Nazis deemed even this increase in manpower insufficient, and the German high command in Berlin asked the head of the Abwehr in Dijon to intervene. The Abwehr oversaw German military intelligence and its man in Dijon, Oberleutnant Kurt Merck (aka “Captain Kaiser”), was one of the best in France. He was a thirty-six-year-old whose strong build belied his asthmatic wheezings, and who favored a silk scarf with his uniform.
Merck thought the best way to destroy Resistance groups was to infect them, and so he enlisted J. P. Lien, a dashing résistant from Combat, one of the first Resistance groups, whose underground newspaper Albert Camus edited. Lien had been turned during the war—perhaps under torture, though the historical record doesn’t offer irrefutable evidence—and now worked as a double agent for the Abwehr. Merck asked Lien to infiltrate the Alliance. He said the Nazis would handle the arrests.
The German high command had threatened to ship Merck to the cold and bloody Eastern Front if he failed in this mission, which was soon called Operation Gibet, and so he’d chosen Lien carefully. Many résistants in the Yonne department and throughout the country knew of Combat and its bona fides, but none knew it had a double agent. As summer turned to fall, Lien developed more and more relationships inside Alliance, his credentials aiding his secret hideouts. The Alliance even gave him the code-name Lanky.
At 8 a.m. on September 16, 1943, as La Rochefoucauld basked in his success in the Yonne, SD men at a train station outside Paris arrested the Alliance’s top deputy, Marie Fourcade’s right-hand man, Commandant Léon Faye, on his way into the city. That morning, the agents also nabbed the Alliance’s head of operations, its head of security services, five radio operators, and seven more people who helped with transmissions, finding “arms, ammunitions [and] a large sum of money,” according to a German report. By the afternoon, a high-ranking Alliance man with the code-name Hedgehog sent a message to all local chapters: “Do not try to contact any member of our group stop examine ways of parachuting and rendezvous at sea stop . . .” Hedgehog thought the leak might be contained. He was wrong. Three days later, SD agents arrested two men in Paris who oversaw intelligence. Then Merck deployed his men to move through the provinces.
Young lieutenants from Lyon, radio operators, fighters who called themselves the Apaches—all of them were arrested. Parachuting experts who attempted to shoot their way out were killed. In the mountainous town of Volvic, in south-central France, SD agents surrounded the hidden headquarters of another Alliance cell, arresting a colonel who called himself Cricket, his lieutenants, radio operators and other agents, about twenty people in all. “Warning,” Hedgehog said in a message, “do not contact Cricket’s sector any more stop all captured stop . . .” In Autun, in the Burgundy region, the local boss’s wife, aware of the arrests, anxiously awaited her husband’s return from business in Paris. When she saw an unknown car slam its brakes in her drive, and then saw the felt hats and Macintosh jackets of the secret police stride toward the house, she threw her husband’s radio transmitter through a back window, and followed it out. But it was too late. The SD men surrounded the home, and they then paraded out her handcuffed husband and his second in command, a banker, who had chained to his neck the two pistols he had tried to hide from the Nazis.
On September 22, the SD came to the Yonne. In Sens, in the north of the department, secret police found two brothers and Communist résistants in a safe house. The rebels opened fire on the advancing secret police. One of the brothers and three of the Germans were killed, but the Nazis continued their push south. They arrested, among others, a man and his family in Chapellesur-Oreuse, two more brothers in Brienon, and attacked and “annihilated,” in the wor
ds of a subsequent report, a small group of Maquis fighters in Mount-Saint-Sulpice.
In Avallon, in the Yonne’s southern third, Father Ferrand spent the day learning to work a transmitter, near a secluded cemetery. The SD men found him there. They arrested him along with François Robb (likely Ferrand’s transmitter instructor), and a seventy-one-year-old priest named Froment. Panic spread through the remaining network.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade followed the news of Ferrand’s arrest, and so many others. “Treachery,” she later wrote, “left us completely defenseless.” Approximately 150 people were arrested in the span of a month. “There was no end to the list of names that I had to erase on my network chart . . . Each time I crossed out the name of a friend I experienced the feeling of having wielded the executioner’s axe,” she wrote. “I was dying of grief.”
Merck, meanwhile, dined happily one night at a private banquet in Dijon where J. P. Lien was the guest of honor. Lien was given the German Iron Cross with Sword, and two million francs. “The Alliance,” one Abwehr man pronounced, “the Noah’s Ark that we have been fighting since 1940, has been destroyed.”
La Rochefoucauld’s subset Groupe Roche was dismantled, and Robert himself stayed to the woods, contacting the R/F agents when he felt it safe and pleading with them to get him on a return flight to London. He was not yet six months in country and already felt the odds, as his SOE handlers had told him, working against him. But no plane could be spared. The almost ceaseless arrests—the SD nabbing fourteen more Alliance members after Ferrand’s imprisonment, and a Yonne résistant who under torture gave up twenty men across multiple Resistance groups—left a terrible impression on the Royal Air Force. Why help these irregular fighters? They seemed too poorly trained to avoid imprisonment, so why risk planes and pilots on them? The RAF had other excuses too. The weather in the last months of 1943 turned awful; the rain and snow blotted out the moon. Many arms drops were canceled. In fact, in all of northwest Europe, the RAF went on only twenty-three missions in November and December. By comparison, from July to September 1943, the British made 327 parachute drops in France alone.