by Matthew Cobb
Four days later, in the middle of a London air raid, Lucie gave birth to a baby girl.
Shortly afterwards, a rather different escape took place, again with the help of the RAF. At eleven o’clock in the morning of 18 February 1944, three waves of RAF Mosquito bombers, protected by Typhoon fighters, took off from RAF Hundson in Hertfordshire. The nineteen Mosquitoes skimmed the Channel waves at nearly 300mph – flying dangerously low to escape detection by the new German radar stations – and then screamed over the flat, snow-covered terrain of northern France, heading for Amiens prison as part of Operation JERICHO.643
Amiens jail was crowded with the normal inhabitants of prisons everywhere – petty criminals, thieves and murderers. It also housed scores of résistants, including Dr Antonin Mans and Raymond Vivant of the OCM, Jean Beaurin, who worked for the SOSIE circuit as a saboteur, and two MI6 agents, Robert Beaumont and Maurice Holleville. At noon the first of the Mosquitoes reached the prison and dropped its bombs, followed in close succession by the other planes. Within ten minutes there were gaping holes in the north and east walls of the prison. As shouting and screaming replaced the thunderous noise of exploding bombs, and the planes roared off into the smoke-filled sky, hundreds of prisoners poured out of the jail into the surrounding streets and fields. Forewarned of the attack, many résistants fled to freedom, although Dr Mans preferred to stay and tend the wounded.
Tragically, over a hundred prisoners had been killed. Despite the dead and injured – who included Robert Beaumont as well as twenty-eight-year-old Group Captain Pickard and his navigator, twenty-two-year-old Flight-Lieutenant Broadley, who were shot down by the Germans – the attack restored French morale by showing the power of the Allied military machine and its concern for the fate of the résistants. Dominique Ponchardier, head of the SOSIE circuit, who was involved in planning the operation on the French side, later called it ‘the most beautiful act of Franco-British solidarity in the whole war’.644
Probably the most important result of the raid was its direct effect on the intelligence received by the British. The résistants who disappeared into the backstreets of Amiens or who hid in the villages of Picardy helped reform the shattered intelligence circuits in the region, providing valuable information about the Nazi V-weapons that were aimed against Britain. Finally, by focusing German attention on the north of France, which the Allies were still pretending would be the site of their invasion, Operation JERICHO may also have helped deceive the Nazis about the true location of the D-Day landings, now less than fourteen weeks away.645
Most Allied-inspired escapes were far less dramatic and involved not résistants but downed Allied airmen. Shortly after the outbreak of war, London set up a section of the Secret Intelligence Service specifically charged with organizing the return of British servicemen – MI9.646 On its own, MI9 could not do a great deal to ensure the safe return of their comrades; they needed the active and extensive cooperation of the French. In this way, assisting Allied pilots in what were known as ‘escape lines’ became another form of resistance.
One of the most effective MI9-run escape lines in France was the ‘Pat O’Leary’ line, based in Marseilles but which had contacts all over France. The line had been set up by a Scottish officer, Captain Ian Garrow, who found himself trapped in Marseilles after the fall of France. Rather than escape himself, Garrow spent the next year helping over fifty British servicemen return to Britain. After Garrow’s arrest in the summer of 1941, ‘Pat O’Leary’ took over the command of the organization, and it became known by his name. O’Leary claimed to be an evading French Canadian airman; in fact he was a Belgian army doctor named Albert-Marie Guérisse, who had been working for MI6 when he was stranded in southern France in April 1941. Over 600 Allied airmen – among them Guy Lockhart, who flew Lysanders into France – were saved by the Pat O’Leary line.647
At the same time as the O’Leary line was getting into its stride, another escape line – COMET – was created by a young Belgian woman called Andrée de Jongh. With contacts spreading from Belgium down to the far south-west of France, COMET was able to perform some astonishing feats. One was the return of all seven crew members of an RAF heavy bomber, who had parachuted to safety near the Dutch border and, thanks to COMET, arrived in Gibraltar a week later (this rapidity gave rise to the line’s code name). De Jongh accompanied virtually every one of her charges – in the space of 16 months, she crossed the Pyrenees 35 times, taking 118 evaders to safety.
When de Jongh was arrested as she prepared to leave with another group, she decided to tell the truth about her role, to protect her comrades. But the Nazis refused to believe that she was the organizer of the line, because she was a woman. Interrogated twenty times, Andrée was eventually deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Within a month, another hundred members of the line were arrested, and yet new recruits were found and the organization continued to function right up until the Liberation. Altogether around 800 people were involved, many of whom were arrested. A hundred and fifty-six of them were either executed or died in the camps or in transit. As a result of this price, 700 Allied servicemen were helped, 288 of them making the long trip to Gibraltar.648
The main work of the British Secret Service in France involved the collection of intelligence.649 Probably the most important of the intelligence circuits was ALLIANCE, set up by Commander Georges Loustaunau-Lacau in 1940. As a loyal military man who retained strong illusions about Pétain, Loustaunau-Lacau was deeply suspicious of de Gaulle, so he put his growing intelligence circuit at the disposal of MI6. After the arrest of Loustaunau-Lacau in July 1941, the circuit was run by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (‘Hérisson’ – hedgehog). Her MI6 handlers at first had no idea that ‘POZ 55’ – her radio code name – was a woman, and Fourcade carefully hid the fact in her transmissions.650 They finally discovered she was not ‘the moustachioed officer we imagined’ in December 1941, when Fourcade met British Intelligence officers in Madrid, having been spirited over the border hidden in a mailbag.651 The Germans were only slightly better informed: when they were hot on her trail, they asked for the whereabouts of ‘Mrs Harrison’ – they mistook her code name for a British surname.652
Other MI6 intelligence circuits were the product of joint French and British initiatives. For example, the JADE-FITZROY circuit was set up by Claude Lamirault (‘Fitzroy’) a twenty-two-year-old on the far right of French politics. Lamirault escaped to London in October 1940, and parachuted back into France four months later, charged by MI6 with setting up a military intelligence circuit. His first recruit was his wife, followed by an ex-army colleague, Pierre Hentic, who was at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Despite their political differences, the two men worked closely together. Hentic took photos of the German military aerodrome at Boissy-l’Aillery near Paris, using a camera hidden in a bag, and was soon in charge of the circuit’s extensive air contacts with Britain.653 Within a year the circuit extended to all the major ports of the Occupied Zone and had sub-circuits on the railways and in the Post Office. In 1942 and 1943 JADE-FITZROY was repeatedly targeted by the Nazis, and in December 1943 Lamirault was arrested and deported to Dachau.
Gilberte Champion, a thirty-year-old woman whose eldest son was looked after in a British boarding school while she worked for the circuit, was one of the JADE-FITZROY radio operators. She was arrested in Lyons in April 1943 and held incognito for three months, during which time she was regularly interrogated by Klaus Barbie. She later recalled Barbie going into the cell next door to interrogate a Jewish prisoner:
The cell door opened, he didn’t pronounce the prisoner’s name, he said, ‘So, have you decided to talk? You’re a bastard,’ and he took out his revolver . . . He said, ‘You dirty Jew’ and so on . . . I heard the prisoner say, ‘Please, don’t kill me, I’ll tell you everything, I’ll tell you everything, don’t kill me,’ and then, at the same time, bang, bang, and it was all over. The next day, I quickly asked the person who brought the soup round, ‘Next door?’ an
d was told, ‘We tidied everything up, it’s finished.’ Barbie had killed him, he had shot him. We lived bathed in terror.654
Gilberte was eventually deported, first to Mauthausen and then to Ravensbrück. With over 700 members, the JADE-FITZROY circuit saw 217 arrests; 82 of its members were either killed or died in the camps. As Gilberte discovered, the fact that the circuit members worked for the British made life even more difficult in the camps – not because of the Nazis, but because of the other inmates. Each group of résistants, in particular the Communists and the Gaullists, would look after themselves. The MI6 agents, seen as being outside the Resistance, were told to ask instead for help and support from imprisoned British soldiers and operatives.655 In the hell of the camps, the situation was so appalling that even the basic solidarity between people fighting on the same side broke down. For those unfortunate enough to experience these terrible conditions, this was one more reason to pray for the Allies and the Resistance to smash the Nazis once and for all.
9
A Duty to Kill
As 1943 drew to a close, the mood in France was bleak. The war seemed to have reached new heights of destruction: Allied bombers were pounding German cities to rubble, dropping tens of thousands of bombs in enormous raids involving up to 1,000 aircraft. Bombs were also dropped on French cities, killing thousands in the Paris region and in Toulon. The hopes of an Allied invasion had evaporated: determined Nazi resistance in Italy was hindering the Allied advance, and there was no sign of a second front on France’s Mediterranean coast. Parisian student Bernard Pierquin wrote in his diary:
The reality is becoming painfully apparent: a new (and final) winter will take place under the Nazi yoke. The immense hope of September has evaporated. In Paris, everyone is depressed: we hoped for the rapid return of the people who have been deported, the prisoners. That’s all finished.656
In a lethal counterpart to the bloody events that were taking place around the world, the Resistance was hit by waves of arrests, as traitors and tortured prisoners gave information to the Nazis. Sometimes prisoners tried to play for time, hoping against hope that they could somehow dupe the Gestapo, or at the very least limit the damage they were causing. In the harsh world of the Resistance, their names, such as Roland Farjon or André Grandclément, both of the OCM, became bywords for betrayal.657
Most dangerous of all, Vichy and the Nazis now had another weapon at their disposal in their fight against the Resistance: the Milice. This paramilitary fascist militia, created by the Vichy government, mobilized the most reactionary sections of the population – mainly shopkeepers, professional people and fundamentalist Catholics – in a brutal anti-Semitic and anti-Communist crusade against the Resistance.658 In November 1943, after the Resistance assassinated the chief of the Lyons Milice near Annecy, the fascists organized a revenge attack. One member of the Milice said to another in a tapped phone call: ‘Do you have any Jews up there? Which hotels are they in? Give us the names of the most important of them.’ In the raid that followed, three suspected résistants and three Jews were killed.659 Despite the pro-Nazi role of the Milice, some ignorant and foolish young men who did not want to go on STO labour conscription felt they had a new alternative – joining the Vichy Milice instead of the Resistance maquis. They ended up fighting on the wrong side.660
Cranking up the machine of repression in January 1944, Pétain appointed Milice leader Joseph Darnand as the Vichy Secretary General for Law and Order. Darnand now had control over 45,000 gendarmes, 6,000 gendarmes mobiles and 25,000 members of the hated Gardes Mobiles de Reserve (GMR), as well as up to 30,000 members of the Milice. Vichy also set up special military courts to try ‘all those individuals accused of having committed an assassination or a murder, or having attempted an assassination or a murder, committed with arms or explosives, to support terrorist activity’ – in other words, virtually everyone involved in the Resistance. With such broad terms, the perfunctory judicial process (there were no lawyers involved at any stage) meant there was virtually no chance of being acquitted. If guilty, the defendant was to be immediately executed.661 Paradoxically, the repression revealed the weakness of the Vichy state. The collaborationists could no longer rely on the police, gendarmes and army to impose their will, so they had to create new structures with which to enforce their authority. Coupled with the growth of Resistance activity and a shift in the attitude of the population in some parts of the country towards support for armed resistance, the conflict between the Resistance and the maquis began to create something like a civil war mentality.
Even before the military courts were created, the Resistance was subject to a terrible campaign of repression. In September 1943 sixteen-year-old Henri Fertet was condemned to death for shooting a German Customs officer near Besançon. A few hours before his execution, he wrote a last letter to his parents, settling his ‘affairs’ – reminding them that one school friend owed him a packet of cigarettes, that another still had his book on prehistoric humans, and asking them to return a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo to yet another. Henri’s letter concluded:
I will die for my country. I want a free France, and happy French people. Not a proud France, but a hard-working, honest France. The French should be happy, that’s the main thing. Farewell, death is calling me, I do not want a blindfold, nor to be bound with ropes. I embrace you all. It is hard to die . . . A thousand kisses. Vive la France.
A condemned man, H. Fertet
PS Sorry about the spelling mistakes, no time to reread.662
In a speech at the Albert Hall in London, Pierre Brossolette explained the effect of such terrible losses:
. . . after the initial shock, after a period of torpor, we return to battle even more determined, because it is now not only a question of victory, but also of revenge. And with these victims, inspired by their example and their sacrifice, the nation will also resist. Because the violence of German repression tells us something: it tells us the battle is close, and, through the battle, it announces victory.663
The sombre, determined mood of the times was captured by a popular song, ‘Le chant des Partisans’, which had been recorded earlier in the year in London by Anna Marly. In English, the lyrics seem flat and brutal; in French, sung by a trilling female voice to a Russian tune that is both mournful and powerful, accompanied by a pulsing guitar, they were a rallying cry on a par with the bloody words of the ‘Marseillaise’:
Ohé partisans,
Ouvriers et paysans
C’est l’alarme! . . .
Hey, partisans,
Workers and peasants
The alarm has sounded! . . .
Ohé les tueurs
À la balle ou au couteau
Tuez vite . . .
Hey, killers
With bullet or with knife
Kill swiftly . . .
Ami, si tu tombes
Un ami sort de l’ombre
À ta place
Friend, if you fall
A friend will come from the shadows
To take your place
Demain, du sang noir
Sèchera au grand soleil
Sur les routes.
Tomorrow, black blood
Will dry in the sunshine
On the roads.
Sifflez compagnons . . .
Dans la nuit, la liberté
Nous écoute.
Whistle, companions . . .
In the night, freedom
Listens to us.
Broadcast on the BBC, printed up as sheet music and dropped into France, ‘Le Chant des Partisans’ was sung in the maquis and the concentration camps – the lyrics both comforted and enthused the résistants, and gave the rest of the population a melodramatic glimpse of the dark reality of the struggle.664
In November and December 1943 there was no need for a song to communicate that reality to the citizens of Grenoble. On 11 November, while the maquis was parading through the streets of Oyonnax, sixty kilometres due south the Vichy police and
the Nazis arrested around 600 people at the end of a banned rally at the Grenoble War Memorial. Over 400 demonstrators were deported, of whom only 120 returned after the war. Within two days the Resistance retaliated, attacking a massive Nazi arms dump on the edge of the city. The operation had initially been launched five days earlier – Aimé Requet of the Grenoble MUR had planted explosives, set to explode in the middle of the night of 6 November. But the fuses failed, and, faced with the possibility that they could go off during the day, killing dozens of French workers, Requet went round and removed them all, despite the risk that they might explode at any moment. On 13 November he tried again, setting the timers for 11 p.m. That night, his commander, Louis Nal, sat at home, listening, waiting, as first eleven o’clock passed, and then midnight:
I felt utterly discouraged. Suddenly – I couldn’t believe it – a brilliant flash lit up the sky at the same time as an incredible explosion ripped through the air. The operation had succeeded. The arsenal had exploded.665
For the next three hours there was explosion upon explosion as several hundred tons of munitions went up. Windows were smashed in a 500-metre radius, blocks of stone were hurled hundreds of metres and the explosions were heard 100 kilometres away. When the Germans realized that this was a Resistance operation, they began to attack people on the streets – some of whom had left their damaged houses. Ten people were killed by the Germans that night. Over the next few days the Nazis and the Milice carried on with the killing spree, murdering a further eleven people, including the leaders of Combat and Franc-Tireur.666