The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  In revenge, Nal organized another attack. Early in the morning of 2 December an anti-Nazi Polish Wehrmacht conscript planted explosives in a German barracks; fifty Nazi soldiers were killed and another hundred were injured.667 In reply there were yet more murders by the Milice, including the assassination of René Gosse, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Grenoble, who was killed with his son. The pair were arrested and then found the next day on the side of a road, each with a bullet in the back of the neck. The Resistance tracked down their killer and left his body at the same place.668

  By the end of the winter, even the most non-violent sections of the Resistance recognized that the new combination of Milice brutality and Nazi repression called for a determined response. Défense de la France, the mass-circulation underground newspaper whose journalists had initially opposed armed action, published an editorial entitled ‘A Duty to Kill’:

  We are not obsessed with murder. In fact, we are obsessed with a peaceful and happy life, in which we can create, build and love. But those who want to stop us from living must die! . . .

  Our duty is clear: we must kill.

  Kill the German to cleanse our territory, kill him because he kills our own people, kill him to be free.

  Kill the traitors, kill those who betray, those who aided the enemy. Kill the policeman who has in any way helped arrest patriots.

  Kill the men of the Milice, exterminate them, because they have chosen to hand over French men and women, because they have embraced betrayal. Shoot them like mad dogs on the street corners. Hang them from the lampposts, following the example of Grenoble. Destroy them like vermin.

  Kill without passion and without hate. Never torture or inflict suffering. We are not butchers, we are soldiers . . .

  If you dare not risk your life, it loses its value, and we will do nothing to defend it. But if you carry out the duty of war, we will be brothers in arms. French men, French women, look into your hearts and answer this:

  Do you want to live or die?669

  Resistance actions became increasingly widespread, no longer the prerogative of the Communist-led FTP or MOI. For example, the ‘Special Section’ of Turma-Vengeance blew up a fifty-ton railway crane used to lift derailed and damaged trains. On a smaller scale, Bernard Chevignard, the thirty-year-old leader of the Special Section, carried out audacious operations against German troops, stealing their uniforms and their vehicles, in order to carry out further attacks with impunity. Chevignard was finally cornered at the end of August during one of his regular raids to steal uniforms from the changing rooms of a floating swimming pool moored in the Seine. Pursued by an irate French crowd who took him for a thief, he was arrested by the police under the eyes of his sister, who was waiting for him with a getaway bicycle. Chevignard was executed on 15 March 1944, together with his young sidekick, betrayed by a Gestapo infiltrator.

  At the beginning of December 1943 Vengeance organized a training school in a decaying château in the small Normandy village of Cérisy-Belle-Étoile. François Jacquemin, a twenty-year-old student at the time, recalled how the first half of the school was devoted to weapons use and to physical training, while in the second part they discussed more theoretical issues such as the origins of the war. To reinforce their cover story that they were a charity devoted to physical education, they marched through the village in their PE gear, singing the Vichy anthem ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’670 Jacquemin later recalled the end of the school: ‘In the morning of the 10th, full of enthusiasm, we went our separate ways, without imagining that so many of us would soon die, in front of the firing squad, in the battles of the Liberation or in the Nazi camps.’671

  *

  Although the résistants were desperate to fight and the maquis was growing, the Resistance was rudderless. Moulin had dominated the Resistance and the Secret Army through his exclusive contact with London and by his relentless centralization. All his effort was aimed at the creation of a Gaullist government after the Liberation, as shown by his close work with Delestraint, whom de Gaulle had named as head of the SA.672 After the arrests of the two men in June 1943, things drifted. De Gaulle and the Free French had always been ambivalent about the Resistance; distracted by the politicking in Algiers, they paid no serious attention to the question of finding a replacement for Moulin.

  Without Moulin’s strong leadership to keep the Resistance tied to the Free French, the movements began to reassert their independence. On 23 July 1943 the MUR and some of the small Resistance organizations set up a ‘Central Committee’, which deliberately excluded all the political parties (including the Communists, the FTP and the Front National) and which sought to control all armed action.673 In response, de Gaulle’s delegate to the northern zone, Claude Serreulles, set up a rival CNR ‘Bureau’, composed of the Front National, the PCF, the CGT trade union, Ceux de la Résistance, the OCM and Libération-Nord, which also claimed control over the maquis and the Secret Army. This was a straightforward power struggle over the leadership of the Resistance, but the contending parties were aligning themselves in an unexpected way. The Parisian Gaullists had united with the Communist Party, while the Resistance movements had the support of Colonel Passy’s BCRA, in the shape of Pierre Brossolette, who was sent back to Paris in September 1943.674 In reality, the BCRA wanted the leadership of the Resistance to be weak and fragmented, so that Free French Intelligence could dominate it.

  Brossolette had arrived back in France in September 1943, together with his close friend, SOE agent ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas. Brossolette was supposed to act as a liaison for Émile Bollaert, de Gaulle’s new delegate to the CNR,675 while Yeo-Thomas was to report on the situation of the Secret Army and the maquis.676 Brossolette’s aim – with Passy’s full support – was to exploit the lack of direction at the head of the Resistance and bring about the kind of changes in its organization and control that he had tried to produce during Moulin’s absence earlier in the year. De Gaulle had conspicuously passed over Brossolette when the question of Moulin’s replacement had been discussed – hardly surprising, given that Brossolette was viscerally opposed to the inclusion of political parties in the Resistance leadership, which was at the heart of de Gaulle’s strategy for gaining the support of the Allies. Brossolette and Passy now hoped that while the Free French leadership was focused on its struggle with Giraud, and there was no one with Moulin’s vision or authority to oppose them, they could get their way.

  As soon as Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas arrived in Paris, their relations with the Parisian Resistance leaders became extremely strained. The immediate flashpoint was Brossolette’s scathing criticism of what he saw as the lax security procedures of Claude Serreulles (‘Sophie’). As Claude Bourdet recalled, even Serreulles’ appearance was a provocation:

  He was a tall lad, with an air of British elegance; his Savile Row suits, the tiny collars on his well-fitting shirts – not forgetting his umbrella – made him look like a City gent, straight out of the pages of Punch. We found his easily recognizable appearance both amusing and alarming. We were wrong, because the Gestapo seems not to have paid much attention to looks, and Serreulles was not in any greater danger than those of our comrades who looked like real conspirators, with their leather jackets, hats pulled down low and their sunglasses . . .677

  Yeo-Thomas was less charitable than Bourdet, and in his SOE debriefing complained that Serreulles had ‘a most dangerously self-satisfied frame of mind . . . overconfidence oozed from every pore’.678 Serreulles breezily dismissed such worries; as Yeo-Thomas reported it, the French considered ‘we had grossly overstated the dangers of clandestine work and that we were both timid and possibly scared . . . Our friends openly showed us that they considered our insistence on the security angle quite childish.’679 But within three days of Brossolette’s arrival, one of Serreulles’ closest colleagues was arrested, and shortly afterwards his secretariat was raided by the Gestapo. Four months’ worth of uncoded archives, containing all the messages that had gone back and forth t
o London in that time, were seized. As a result, nine résistants were arrested.680

  Whether or not Serreulles’ behaviour was responsible for the Nazi raid, the reality was that the Gestapo were getting closer, and everyone was making mistakes. Yeo-Thomas recruited two liaison agents who at first appeared merely feckless but turned out to be Gestapo spies; he was followed on a number of occasions (he had to shoot one of the men who was tailing him, and then dump the body in the Seine), and he left some of his effects and 125,000 francs in a ‘safe’ apartment, all of which were found by the Gestapo when they raided it.681 In this context the furious tone of the correspondence from Yeo-Thomas and Brossolette seems ill-advised. In a letter to Passy, Brossolette called for the immediate recall of Daniel Cordier (Serreulles’ secretary), complaining of the ‘disorder’ and ‘cliques’ that were weakening the Parisian Resistance leadership and arguing that if Cordier remained in post it would be ‘catastrophic’.682 Yeo-Thomas supported this view and even argued that Brossolette (‘Briand’) should be given full command, before signing off in a typically jocular manner:

  SOPHIE AND SECRETARY APPEAR FOLLOWED AND IN DANGER HAVE WARNED THEM REPEATEDLY IN VAIN STOP ENERGETIC MEASURES REQUIRED TO SAVE SITUATION CONSIDER PASSY BE REQUESTED TO GIVE BRIAND MEANS AND AUTHORITY TO TAKE MATTERS IN HAND AND AVERT DISASTER DOT THERE IS NO TIME TO WASTE DOT GREAT LIFE IF YOU DONT WEAKEN NOT ARF TOM683

  A few days later Yeo-Thomas went even further:

  RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE RECALLS OF SOPHIE AND SECRETARY WHO ARE OBSTRUCTIVE DETRIMENTAL TO IMPROVEMENT SITUATION AND SECURITY DOT BEAR HEAVY RESPONSIBILITY FOR RECENT ARRESTS DASH WILL RETURN WITH EVERY JUSTIFICATION OF MY REQUEST STOP684

  Brossolette’s second mission in France was turning into a disastrous repetition of his first, exacerbating conflicts within the Resistance rather than overcoming them. Passy responded by instructing the Resistance to cut off all relations with Serreulles and Jacques Bingen, who was de Gaulle’s delegate to the southern zone, because they were deemed to be unsafe.685 Furious at this attack on their integrity, Serreulles and Bingen fought back. Serreulles wrote to Passy, complaining of his ‘criminal sabotage’ and insisting that he restrain those of his ‘collaborators who are losing their heads’; Bingen wrote to leading Free French figures, demanding a public apology and calling for an enquiry to discover how such a ‘warning’ had been issued. He got no reply. As Brossolette and Passy fiddled, the Resistance – or at least its Parisian leadership – was on the point of imploding and the Free French did not even notice.

  The Gaullists, now divided between London and Algiers, were focused on completing their victory over Giraud and on manoeuvring with the Allies. As a result, Resistance leaders often found that their messages went unanswered, and they did not get the moral and logistical support they needed.686 When de Gaulle eventually turned his attention to the problem created by Brossolette, his solution was designed to preserve his own authority. Emmanuel d’Astier and Henri Frenay had been removed from the Resistance by making them ministers in de Gaulle’s government-in-waiting. The same tactic was now applied to Brossolette, who was proposed as a delegate to the makeshift Free French parliament that sat in Algiers. In what at first looked like an even-handed decision, de Gaulle ordered Serreulles, Bollaert and Brossolette to return to London by the November moon, at the same time as SOE recalled Yeo-Thomas. But in a clear disavowal of Brossolette and Passy, and in a confirmation of his decision to appoint Bingen, the delegate to the southern zone was allowed to remain in France.687 Brossolette and Passy’s attempt to gain control of the Resistance had failed a second time.

  *

  Despite receiving clear orders from London, Brossolette initially refused to go back. When he eventually presented himself for a return flight, there was a disaster – one of the two Lysanders sent out had to turn back because of bad weather, and the other was shot down by German antiaircraft fire, killing the pilot and the two passengers.688 The safe house near the landing site, where Brossolette had been staying, was raided the following day, and the liaison agent who was due to meet him was arrested. Brossolette’s luck was running out, and the Nazis were closing in.

  Yeo-Thomas was eventually brought out on a flight from Arras on 15–16 November – the pilot had orders to bring him back by whatever means necessary, conscious or not689 – but things were not so straightforward for Brossolette, Bollaert and Serreulles. For six weeks appalling weather prevented them from leaving by air. Having failed to leave on the plane that took the Aubracs to London in February, Serreulles finally flew back at the beginning of March, through an old friend who worked for MI6 and got him a place on one of their flights.690 Brossolette and Bollaert eventually decided to travel by sea, but storms wrecked the fishing boat that was due to take them. On 3 February 1944 the pair were arrested at a routine roadblock in Brittany, simply because they did not have the requisite papers for the coastal region. They were taken to Rennes prison, but the Nazis had no idea who the two men really were – their fake IDs aroused no suspicions. In Britain and France the race began to save them.

  In London Passy was utterly distraught when he heard of his comrade’s fate. Jacques Soustelle recalled:

  I can still see Passy, completely overwhelmed, his eyes full of tears, asking me to leave for France: he hoped that the Gestapo would not have recognized ‘Brumaire’ [Brossolette] and that we could save his friend. He wanted to risk everything to save him.691

  Yeo-Thomas felt the same and persuaded SOE that he should undertake one more mission to France, to get Brossolette out of jail before the Nazis discovered who he was. On 24 February Yeo-Thomas parachuted back into France and was soon in contact with the Resistance, organizing an escape operation. The plan they finally settled on – Yeo-Thomas travelled to Rennes to scope out the situation – involved three résistants disguised in Nazi uniforms, claiming they had come to the prison to transfer Brossolette and Bollaert; they would then overpower the guards and take the two men to freedom.

  Meanwhile, behind the prison walls, Brossolette was equally active. The very day he arrived in the jail, he was able to smuggle a message to his comrades in the Resistance – in total he managed to send fourteen letters. Having got wind of Yeo-Thomas’ arrival, he asked the Resistance to organize a safe house in Rennes and to send him chloroform and two metal saws.692 Then, a little over a month after Brossolette was imprisoned, his letters suddenly stopped. A week later the situation took a dramatic turn. The Nazis interrogated Brossolette and Bollaert for the first time; they addressed Brossolette by his real name and brushed aside his claims to be ‘Paul Boutet’. Somehow, his cover had been blown.693

  On the evening of 19 March Brossolette and Bollaert were taken to Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris. After being interrogated and beaten, they were then transferred to Fresnes prison, outside Paris. On 21 March they were again taken to the Gestapo building and again they were brutally interrogated. As this was happening, scarcely a kilometre away Yeo-Thomas – who thought the two men were still in Rennes – had a rendezvous at Passy Métro station at eleven in the morning. When his contact failed to turn up at the bottom of the stone steps leading to the station, Yeo-Thomas broke all his well-learned rules of tradecraft and hung about, waiting. Suddenly, the Gestapo arrived – they had arrested his contact earlier in the morning – and captured Yeo-Thomas. Stripped, interrogated and repeatedly beaten, Yeo-Thomas was about to take the dose of cyanide hidden in his ring when the Germans noticed and stopped him. After more beatings, they took their torture techniques to another level of depravity. Yeo-Thomas was taken into a bathroom, and his head was pushed backwards into the water-filled bath:

  I was helpless. I panicked and tried to kick, but the vice-like grip was such that I could hardly move. My eyes were open, I could see shapes distorted by the water, wavering above me, my lungs were bursting, my mouth opened and I swallowed water. Now I was drowning. I put every ounce of my energy into a vain effort to kick myself out of the bath, but I was completely help
less and, swallowing water, I felt that I must burst. I was dying, this was the end, I was losing consciousness, but as I was doing so I felt the strength going out of me and my limbs going limp. This must be the end . . .694

  But the whole point of water-boarding is not to kill, but to make the victim think they are dying, over and over again. Yeo-Thomas was repeatedly tortured in this way as the Nazis beat him with rubber truncheons and asked for information about his Resistance contacts and the location of SOE weapons dumps. Then, on 22 March, he was taken to the Avenue Foch for further interrogation, where he was beaten and hung from his manacles for hours on end. He almost cracked.695

  About an hour after Yeo-Thomas arrived at Gestapo headquarters that day, Pierre Brossolette was taken up to the fifth floor of the same building for another bout of interrogation. Suddenly, as his captors’ attention was turned, Brossolette ran over to the window and climbed down onto the balcony on the floor below. He then calmly put one leg over the balcony rail, then the other, and in a final gesture of victory stepped out into the air, falling four storeys to the ground. He died of his injuries ten hours later. Yeo-Thomas was only a few rooms away but knew nothing of the death of his friend. He had to endure several more weeks of torture and interrogation before he was put on a train to Buchenwald. Bollaert was also sent to the camps. He had been in post for five months.

  As Yeo-Thomas was arrested, another episode in the Nazi offensive took place on the other side of Paris. On the night of 17–18 March ‘Médéric’ (Gilbert Védy), the hard man of Ceux de la Libération, had been dropped on a beach in Finistère. In the middle of 1943, while in London, Médéric had come to know Yeo-Thomas well. The two men had a similar taste for audacious action, and hatched a madcap scheme to kidnap Admiral Doenitz, commander-in-chief of the German navy, and bring him back to Britain.696 Médéric had returned to France from Algiers, where he was a member of the Provisional Consultative Assembly, to take over as head of Ceux de la Libération after its leader had been shot by the Nazis in an ambush. But on 21 March Médéric was arrested in Paris, betrayed by someone within the Free French movement.697 When first questioned, Médéric tried to persuade the policeman to help him, but this failed and Médéric was sent for interrogation by the hated Commissar David, head of the ‘anti-terrorist’ Brigade Spéciale of the Paris police. Taunted by David, Médéric replied with words that later became famous – ‘You’ll see that a French man knows how to die’ – and then bit on his cyanide pill. His brother, Maxime Védy, had been executed by the Nazis two weeks earlier.