The Saboteur

by Paul Kix

  In July, La Rochefoucauld met with someone who was likely, according to the historical record, a top Georges lieutenant and some of his staffers. This was in a group safe house, a cave outside Bordeaux, where the top man brought a bottle of wine and glasses and laid out his plan. He said three men from Georges had recently begun working at the Saint-Médard plant, scoping out its parameters and committing the layout to hand-drawn maps. La Rochefoucauld would meet these men when their shift at the factory ended. Because Robert knew how to lay plastic explosives, he would work at the plant alongside them. With the Allies moving inland from Normandy and the Germans fighting desperately to retain ground, there wasn’t time to train men to do the work that La Rochefoucauld could do himself—if he just got inside the plant.

  Robert loved the idea. He had not parachuted into France so that he might supervise someone else’s job. Pleased with the response, the lieutenant left the men to their bottle of wine and open-ended afternoon. Soon thereafter, they themselves departed on bikes for a hideout closer to the factory, about ten miles west of Bordeaux.

  The beauty of the vineyards in sun-dipped and fragrant July masked the danger of the Occupation. Robert and the rebels took a careful if not circuitous route, off the main roads where people looked friendly but might secretly work for the SD chief Dohse. A short while after they made it to the house, the three plant workers joined them, and they all decided to celebrate their mission. From the vague phrases La Rochefoucauld later wrote, it appears the résistants took him to Bordeaux’s finest brothels that night. “We were perfectly received,” said Robert.

  The next day, Sunday, was not a day of rest. The Georges men and La Rochefoucauld gathered round a table at the safe house, maps spread before them, everyone hunching over. The munition works was massive: on the northern and eastern half of the compound sat the “old” factory, next to a railroad track that had shipped the works’ supplies for generations; the “new” one was on the grounds’ western and southern half, built in advance of World War 1; and the so-called “pearl” factory, constructed at the start of this war by two thousand imprisoned Spanish Communists, bordered the two other factories. The compound was surrounded by twelve workers and officers’ camps where some Germans and many of the 5,500 laborers lived. In total, the grounds encompassed more than a square mile. From the aerial maps, the Saint-Médard factories and their surrounding barracks resembled less a place of labor than a city unto itself.

  La Rochefoucauld’s job was not to blow it all up. The massive bombing campaign in April hadn’t even done that. Robert’s task instead would be to place pinpoint bombs at key positions throughout the compound, crippling it from within. As the British sabotage instructors had said: It’s better to target small but vital components of a factory. This is the mark of a true saboteur.

  To get inside the grounds, La Rochefoucauld first had to replace one of the three factory workers. A man named Pierre, who unloaded trucks at the plant, looked the most like Robert: roughly his height, dark hair swept back off his forehead. Pierre’s best feature was his glasses: black-rimmed and big enough to obscure the shape of the face behind them. Did Robert look like Pierre when he put on the glasses? Not really. But he looked nothing like anyone else there. So Pierre handed over his plant ID card—reissued every two months for factory security—and La Rochefoucauld and the other résistants did the hard but also routine work of making a fake ID, of transferring La Rochefoucauld’s photo from his identification to Pierre’s factory card. At long last they had it. The ID looked authentic.

  The men then began thinking how to traffic explosives past the German guards. No single idea had everyone’s support until, at last, someone said they should put the bombs in their food—specifically, in the round loaves of French bread that each man took with him for his midday meal.

  The résistants set about kneading dough to see if it could work. When the loaves came out of the oven, the men slowly, delicately, carved open the top of each one, cutting out the moist middle and dropping in a couple pounds of plastic explosives. They then set the severed top back on the loaf and studied it. From the outside—voila!—it looked like lunch.

  La Rochefoucauld arose early Monday morning and got dressed. Many factory workers favored denims and newsboy caps, and Pierre’s big-rimmed glasses further hid Robert’s features. As he put on his clothes, he couldn’t help but worry that the disguise was not enough. In fact, that’s what everyone worried about. The Georges men, as a precaution, had decided to arrive separately at the plant, lest all three résistants be implicated in a La Rochefoucauld arrest.

  He steeled himself and set out on a bicycle for the munitions compound, carrying a bag with a loaf of bread in it. Robert arrived at the factory alone, around 7:45, fifteen minutes before the plant opened. He saw the two other Georges men standing together, but tried not to stare at them. Everyone formed into a line, which began moving at 8 a.m.

  La Rochefoucauld shuffled along, in a “delicate” state, he wrote. He slung the bag that held his lunch—and so much more—over his shoulder, just as the rest of the men did. He tried to look bored. Shuffle left, shuffle right, stare absently. Shuffle left, shuffle right, ignore the rising panic.

  Soon there was one man ahead of him, and then the German asked for La Rochefoucauld’s plant ID. He willed his hand steady and gave the guard the papers.

  The Nazi glanced at them, then at La Rochefoucauld. The German looked sleepy, or maybe just disinterested. He handed the plant ID back to Robert, then motioned for the next man in line.

  It was that easy. He crossed the factory’s threshold, trying very hard to hide his excitement.

  His job was to unload the trucks that had arrived at the grounds the night before and carry the boxes and crates throughout the compound. It was an ideal task for a saboteur. Robert walked through the wings, noting every aisle and crevice, mentally matching it against the maps he had spent Sunday studying: a fuel warehouse over here, metal presses and sieves there, a survey of the plant’s “most vulnerable spots,” La Rochefoucauld said. He also studied the Germans. They seemed an old and largely uncaring class of soldiers. The Nazis had hired a French firm called OPA at the start of the Occupation to oversee the Saint-Médard compound and two other nearby plants. The Germans demanded OPA acquire experienced workers, but the firm, perhaps as an act of passive resistance, instead hired ex-cons and prostitutes. They allowed, knowingly or not, résistants like the Georges men to comprise about one-fifth of the labor force. Plant production suffered, the workers delivering anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the war-machinery tonnage the Germans annually expected. And yet few repercussions fell on the laborers. The Germans were primarily concerned with security at the plant, and in this they were successful: There were no labor uprisings, no fiery sabotages, and even the more subtle resistance of lethargic work habits could be explained by the aging and outdated equipment. By 1944, the German attitude seemed to be, As long as they are here, working, they are not elsewhere, plotting. And as long as they are here, they are working for us. So the Germans tolerated the lowly sixteen tons of supplies delivered—they may have even been impressed by it, if the effort to get the plant operational after the British bombing was any indication.

  Because of the Germans’ lax oversight, La Rochefoucauld left the grounds Monday night feeling he could case the plant as he wished, unimpeded, and decided to use more than just bread to do it. That week, he and the other résistants also slit holes in the heels of their shoes that allowed for another pound of bombing materiel.

  The following days, then, fell into a routine: Arrive at the plant early, shuffle in nonchalantly, pass the hours ostensibly in the Germans’ employ—but then, with no one looking, twist the top off a loaf of bread or open the heel of a shoe and deposit explosives into hiding spots. Anxiety trailed Robert everywhere at the plant, sure, but it was also fun and somewhat easy work in this laissez-faire factory, even if it meant eating little more than bread crusts for lunch. At night at th
e safe house, to celebrate their deception, “There was always a bottle of very good wine,” La Rochefoucauld said. “After the schnapps, we would go out.” He was not yet twenty-one, doing the work of a lifetime and feeling so very alive. He would show the Germans, he would punish them, he would leave his impression on this war. After seven days, La Rochefoucauld and the two other Georges men had smuggled in roughly forty pounds of explosives.

  The sabotage was set for a Thursday. The plan was for Robert to work a full shift and, at 6:30, a half hour before the plant closed, activate the first fuse near a fuel warehouse, with a one-hour delay. He’d hide out on the grounds until the compound locked its doors at 7 p.m., then set surrounding detonators, all of them with a half-hour delay. To get out of the factory he had already stacked crates and boxes next to a high window that looked down upon the plant’s courtyard. He would climb the crates, open the window, and jump into the courtyard. The courtyard itself had high walls, about twenty feet tall. The Georges men would be on the other side and toss a rope over the wall’s edge. La Rochefoucauld would grab it, hurry over, and run away before the fireworks began.

  At last, the appointed day arrived. The tension of what lay ahead drained La Rochefoucauld even as it energized him. He seemed to have the flighty unfocused quality of someone given too many cups of coffee. The hard work lay in concealing his frayed state.

  When 6:30 p.m. approached, he walked to the fuel depot. With no one looking, he positioned himself behind it. In a moment he had assembled the first explosive and embedded the charge in such a way that it would not explode outward, but inward and toward the depot. He set the time-delayed fuse for one hour and quietly reemerged from the shadows.

  Near 7 p.m., he crawled into a crook of the factory, a hiding space where no one could see him, but where he could watch as two Germans made the day’s final patrol. Then a siren sounded and the workers meandered out of the grounds. In a few minutes the guards exited and locked the front gates behind them. La Rochefoucauld crawled out.

  Every saboteur is an artist, casing his target as he sees fit with the materials at hand, the marks he leaves as idiosyncratic as his own fingerprint. There were about eight positions Robert needed to case inside the factory—water mains and conduits and so forth—and he wanted to time the detonators inside the plant to explode as the charge at the fuel depot did, about one hundred yards away. The most effective sabotages were simultaneous ones. So, inside the plant, he placed each detonator against its target, syncing the charges, one to the next, with a detonator cord that burned at 22,000 feet per second when ignited. He then set a time fuse within each explosive that would burn until 7:30, when the fuse at the fuel depot ignited the bomb.

  When he had cased everything, he still had about ten minutes until the fiery explosion. He hurried to the crates he’d piled next to the high window, his escape window, and climbed up the boxes. He looked out to the courtyard a short distance below and quickly broke each pane of glass and then the window frame. He climbed up onto the windowsill and jumped.

  He thumped to the ground, unharmed. His skin crawled with the strange but quite reasonable sensation that he was in mortal danger. He ran to the courtyard’s wall and just as he reached it he saw a rope, hurtling up and over and tumbling down to him. “Never in my life,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “neither before nor after, have I scaled an eighteen-foot wall at such a speed.” On the other side, he fell into a Georges worker’s arms.

  The résistants had brought a bicycle for Robert, and now the men pedaled away furiously. When they’d put enough distance between themselves and the plant they slowed, and then stopped, the anticipation overwhelming.

  Then—a great concussive boom. It shook the ground on which they stood. And then a second explosion, just as angry. The men exchanged brief, holy shit looks and kept biking, giddy boys suddenly, racing to their hideout.

  They reached it, laughing and celebrating and recalling it all. Bordes had already arranged a feast: enough food, wine, and merriment to last into the next day. La Rochefoucauld ate and drank, but soon realized he didn’t have an all-nighter in him. “I felt immense fatigue more than anything,” he wrote. “I thought only of sleeping.”

  Just as he was settling in Robert remembered he still had to send word to London. He removed the radioman momentarily from the festivities and together they crafted a succinct note, the better to avoid any Germans monitoring the airwaves:

  “Operation . . . successful.”

  The reply was even terser: “Congratulations.”

  With that, “I collapsed onto a straw mattress,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “and instantly fell asleep.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The morning after the mission he awoke to the dusty throbbing particular to the overserved, but the sound of success—those concussive booms—lingered in his head, coursing through the body like caffeine, freeing him of his hangover. The Georges plant workers surveyed the factory and reported back the level of destruction: water mains and conduits leveled, buildings charred. According to two subsequent British reports, the factory would be out of commission for fifteen days, a week longer than what the British bombing campaign had mustered. When one considered that this sabotage had not terrorized the people like the bomber fleet—where Frenchmen had run for cover with saucepans on their heads and farmers had found the limbs of their livestock in nearby trees—the July sabotage could only be judged as something close to flawless.

  The Georges men began to plan their exits. Everyone assumed the streets would fill, were perhaps already filled, with vigilant Germans twitching to catch the résistants who’d pulled off the job. After a few days, the group decided La Rochefoucauld would be the first of his team to sneak to Bordeaux, to a second safe house, where a man with the code-name Jean would help smuggle him back to London.

  La Rochefoucauld spent the downtime sleeping well and learning the backroads between Saint-Médard and Bordeaux. On the designated night, when it seemed safe to head out, he said his farewells and left on a bicycle, without headlights but with the bends and turns of his darkened route memorized.

  It was not only Friedrich Dohse who made La Rochefoucauld’s trek to Bordeaux dangerous. The whole of the German army fought dirty now. The 2nd Panzer Division Das Reich had rumbled into a small village, Oradour-sur-Glane, in June on the rumor that a Resistance group held a German officer captive. But the Germans found no jailed Nazi and no sign of a Resistance group. Instead of leaving, the Nazis ordered all men into the village’s central marketplace. The Das Reich regiment raised their machine guns and mowed down the male population. Then the Nazis turned to the town’s women and children, herding them all into a church. The Germans encircled its grounds and set it on fire. In all, 642 people were murdered in Oradour. It was the worst civilian massacre of the German Occupation of France.

  Resistance fighters whispered about other barbarities, too, as they waged war that summer: the Nazis coldly assassinating thirty-six ailing résistants who had turned a cave into their makeshift hospital; the Nazis gang-raping women, dismembering men. Everywhere were stories of “terrorist” roundups and mass executions by collaborators who were now as desperate as the Nazis. They had picked the wrong side, and knew it, and their resignation gave them the permission to fight with a feral cruelty, a cornered panting prey.

  Pierre Poinsot was one of them, the commissioner of Bordeaux’s police department. Even now, he retained in his full cheeks the cherubic look of the seminarian he’d once been. But Poinsot was the man who, in 1941, made sure the Nazis received each of the forty-seven hostages the Germans wanted dead, in reprisal for a French Communist’s assassination of a Nazi officer. These forty-seven included people whom Poinsot in theory protected as commissioner, twelve of whom even he later admitted held no Communist views. Poinsot had the cruelty to send them to their deaths regardless.

  At the prefecture of police, Poinsot and his associates hung the men they interrogated from their thumbs, waterboarded them, burned them with cig
arettes, forced their wives to listen to their animalistic screams—women who were in turn stripped of their clothes and made to kneel on the floor. The torture did not cease until the interrogated betrayed their fellow résistants or, at length, died. Poinsot “massacred” people, a Bordeaux police officer later said.

  Soon he had an impressive and quite nuanced understanding of rebel groups in southwest France, which endeared him to someone like Friedrich Dohse. They became a formidable duo as the war ground on, systematically infiltrating and killing most of the region’s Resistance cells. For Poinsot’s assistance, the Nazi secret police brought him into their ranks, even giving him a number, member 192. He earned it. By that desperate summer of 1944, as La Rochefoucauld pedaled toward Bordeaux, Poinsot had helped to deport 1,560 Jews, 900 Resistance fighters, and had executed 285 people. All this despite having fewer than twenty men under him in his so-called Brigade of Killers.

  As La Rochefoucauld biked, he saw no one, which he knew wasn’t the same as no one seeing him. So he moved at a measured pace, straining to see and straining harder to hear. Behind him, suddenly, was the sound of an approaching vehicle. He threw his bike into a ditch and followed it in, a reaction so swift and instinctual it surprised even him. He heard the low rhythmic hum of tires and burrowed down deeper to avoid the sweep of passing headlights. When the car passed him, he peeked up and watched it fade in the distance, waiting until he heard nothing but the rush of silence in his ears. He then slowly and carefully set out again. Minutes later came the whine of a second far-off engine—back in the ditch, hiding out until he thought it was safe.