Shadow Warriors of World War II

by Gordon Thomas

  Three days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland and sparked World War II. Fifty-two Wehrmacht divisions, 1.5 million men, led the blitzkrieg, an aerial and ground tactical attack that swiftly destroyed the Polish defense.

  Rochester cabled her mother and said she was going to head for Paris and stay there for a while to see what developed. Her stepfather wired her money and told her she should buy a car in case she had to drive to the coast and catch a ferry to England.

  As she boarded a ship for Marseilles, the radio revealed the news that the previous day a British passenger liner Athenia had been sunk west of Scotland en route to Canada. No warning had been given by the U-boat commander. Of the 1,400 passengers, 118 were drowned, 28 of them Americans.

  In the first week of war the belligerents had all stated they would observe the Geneva Convention and not use gas, as they had done in the Great War. In France, the population was ordered to collect their gas masks from the depots distributing them. Rochester carried hers in its canvas bag wherever she went. In her purse she had her American passport and French identity card, which she was required by law to carry.

  Regular visits to the American embassy kept her updated on the war. When the United States had declared its neutrality on September 5, Canada had announced it was at war with Germany. Two days later Hitler broadcast that the German navy would not attack neutral ships, “especially those of the United States.”

  As the months passed, Rochester continued to look for work. In her diary she wrote, “I continue to hammer on doors. I climb stairs and knock on doors. No one seems to want an American to help La Belle France. There are lots of Frenchmen and women ready to do this. They see me as an American in a French war against Germany with America looking on.”

  Finally a clerk at the embassy told her that the American Hospital was looking for ambulance drivers. They needed to speak French and know their way around not only the city but the countryside beyond.

  She went to the hospital for an interview. Its director was an elderly woman from Boston in a nurse’s uniform. She took Rochester to one of the ambulances and told her that if she passed her driving test she would be assigned to it. For an hour the nurse sat beside Rochester as she drove them through the streets. The job was hers.

  There were eleven ambulances, each with two drivers, one of whom would serve as a paramedic. She had learned first aid at Roedean and in weeks was assigned to bring back the wounded in her ambulance from the badly mauled French army making its last stand on the banks of the Loire.

  She was dressing wounds in the back of the ambulance when an old, broken voice came over the radio informing the people they had lost the war; Marshal Philippe Pétain announced the armistice. Within days the hospital was emptied of its lightly wounded soldiers, and some of the more seriously injured were driven south in trucks, along with doctors and nurses. Rochester found herself alone with her ambulance and its equipment.

  The hospital director said she could use her ambulance to take food to French prisoners of war held in a compound in a Paris suburb. In between she could take one of the few doctors remaining for house calls now that the hospital emergency room had closed down. Their visits turned out to be to Jews.

  The Milice, French men and women working with the Gestapo, were combing the Jewish quarter in the city to bring families to a holding camp in a suburb near the Gare du Nord, from where the trains left for the concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

  She drove the doctor to a Jewish family, a mother and her sick children. A stranger introduced himself as the district Resistance leader. He thanked them for coming but said he would soon have to move the family as he feared they could be betrayed. He explained he had a relative, a farmer, outside the city. Could Rochester drive them there? She immediately agreed and soon learned the Resistance was helping Jews to get out of the country and into Switzerland. Rochester and her ambulance became its transport.

  America was still neutral, and the Paris embassy regularly reminded those Americans still in the city that the State Department wanted its citizens to remain that way.

  After another trip that had brought another Jewish family to safety, she stopped at a field on her way back. There were freshly dug graves with French helmets stuck on rough crosses, each with a number. She knelt in prayer as she had done in chapel at Roedean. Nearby she found a box filled with Croix de Guerre decorations. She brought the box back to the apartment and gave them to the Resistance leader. He said he would keep the ribbons to give to the relatives of the fallen.

  Rochester also began to escort RAF pilots who had been shot down over France and hidden by the Resistance in the countryside.

  Some were destined to be picked up from north Brittany beaches by Royal Navy high-speed motor gunboats or a submarine lying offshore in the Atlantic swell. More than once she found that a village priest would supply more than pastoral care. On one occasion a clergyman dressed two airmen in priest robes and gave her a nun’s habit and wimple to wear as she drove them to the next stage of the escape line. Before long she was making dangerous drives to the South of France and into the Pyrenees for the pilots to be escorted by British officials from the Madrid embassy. They were ultimately returned from Gibraltar to England.

  In late 1942 Rochester had only narrowly escaped being interned as an enemy alien. She buried her American passport and fled to the South of France, before heading for the Swiss frontier.

  She and a group of refugees paid a passeur to take them to an unguarded stretch of the border where they laid coats and blankets over the thick bundles of barbed wire and pulled themselves over.

  Dulles listened to her story and noted how eager she was to return to France. He decided to use Rochester as a courier. She returned to France with messages for Resistance groups and to help refugees escape the police roundups, rafles, in southern France. On one occasion she smuggled three airmen across the border into Switzerland.

  The Frenchmen she worked with complained about a lack of arms. She understood their desire to fight back hard against the Nazis; a trip to Berlin in her teens had turned her violently against all that Hitler stood for.

  A Resistance leader in the Haute-Savoie urged her to travel to London to explain what they needed. She could plead their case, have armaments dropped. She agreed that her next mission would take her not back to Switzerland but to London as an envoy for the Resistance.

  That summer Donovan had also established a permanent OSS headquarters in London. The five-story office block was at 70-72 Grosvenor Street in the center of Mayfair. But the cost of converting it into America’s first overseas spy organization had once more caused Harold Smith, Roosevelt’s budget chief, to blink furiously behind his wire-frame glasses.

  Donovan had already spent several million dollars refurbishing his Washington headquarters, including salaries for over seven hundred staff and purchasing real estate in Maryland and Virginia to be converted into training schools. For OSS London, another million dollars was spent to purchase furniture, safes with special combination locks, and a range of equipment listed on invoices as “communication materials.”

  On the first floor was Secret Intelligence (SI) and Special Operations (SO) together with Research and Analysis (R&A) including cryptographers and cartographers. On the second floor was Counter Intelligence (X-2) and Sabotage. The third floor was Communications and Propaganda. The fourth floor housed a small unit that worked with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French intelligence section in London. On the same floor were the Country Units, each assigned to collect geographic, economic, political, and military intelligence to support OSS missions into occupied Europe. All the departments had their quota of women.

  In a memo Donovan circulated to his heads of departments, he wrote, “Our women are the invisible apron strings of our organization which will touch every theater of war. They are not just there to file reports, encode and decode messages, and keep the records. Much of what they do is essential for the success and security of our opera
tions.”

  Donovan brought a new idea each time he visited OSS London. One was to create a unit—the Labor Branch—that would identify potential agents from newly arrived immigrants in Britain who could be trained for missions. Arthur Goldberg would head it. Donovan had set up a clothing depot where agents would be fitted with clothes worn in the country where they were being sent. He decided to change how the OSS referred to agents. The men would be “Joes.” The women would be known as “Janes.”

  Life in France for the general population, as well as for agents and résistants, was sharply affected by Operation Torch. Three days after the landing, the Germans responded by occupying the area previously controlled by the Vichy government. While the Vichy state officially continued to exist, there were now Wehrmacht soldiers in the streets and Gestapo men in the shadows.

  In addition, after Torch, the threat of invasion always seemed near for the men and women of the occupying forces. The Milice and those French police officers who had sided with the Germans became ever more desperate and vicious, knowing that the Resistance had warned them that there would be no quarter given or mercy offered once the invasion had led to liberation.

  Soon after the Gestapo arrived in Marseille it began to hear reports from informers about a female Resistance leader who ran an escape line for British prisoners of war, distributed subversive literature, and organized Resistance throughout Provence. The Gestapo opened a file on this elusive figure, whom they nicknamed the “White Mouse.”

  Thirty-year-old Nancy Wake might have been running rings around them like a little white mouse, but she was anything but mouse-like in character. Wake was bawdy, adventurous, and known for her infectious high spirits. She drank, smoked, and partied.

  Wake had been born in New Zealand to a journalist father, who deserted the family when she was a small child, and a strictly religious mother, against whom she quickly rebelled. At eighteen she lied about her age and obtained a passport. She traveled by ship to New York, where she spent her time drinking in speakeasies, and then used the last of her money to buy a ticket for England. In London she decided to study journalism and got a job as an overseas correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. She was posted to Paris, from where she was told she might be sent on assignment throughout Europe and the Middle East.

  As well as enjoying the Paris café lifestyle, Wake traveled to Austria and Germany, witnessing the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews. “It was in Vienna that I formed my opinion of the Nazis,” she said. “I resolved there and then that if I ever had the chance I would do anything, however big or small, stupid or dangerous, to try and make things more difficult for their rotten party.”

  Wake’s work and social life helped her develop excellent French—although she had little time for “all that bloody feminine/masculine stuff, all the le this and la that”—and brought her into contact with a wealthy industrialist named Henri Fiocca, who had fallen for her when he saw her dancing a tango with a boyfriend in a nightclub.

  In November 1939 she and Fiocca were married. Wake resigned from her job and settled in Marseille, where the couple bought a penthouse apartment with a balcony with a view across the red rooftops of the old city and down to the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean.

  Fiocca was called up to the French Army soon after and, when the Germans invaded France, Wake borrowed a truck from one of his factories and drove north. Converting the truck into a makeshift ambulance, Wake joined a voluntary ambulance corps and headed to the Belgian border. As she drove she was swamped by the thousands of refugees fleeing the German advance from the opposite direction. Wake’s knowledge of first aid was rudimentary, but she had purchased a good selection of medical supplies and was able to carry injured soldiers away from the front line.

  After the French surrendered, Wake returned to Marseille and was joined soon after by her husband. The couple remained wealthy and continued to live a privileged life in the “free zone.” But Wake wanted more.

  She realized that her husband’s wealth and status gave her opportunities to travel and fund various illegal activities. She discovered that British officers had been interned by the Vichy government inside the seventeenth-century Fort Saint-Jean, which stood at the entrance to the Old Port of Marseille, and she began to supply the prisoners with radios, cigarettes, and food. Then, teaming up with an escaped Scottish officer named Ian Garrow, she helped develop an escape line for some of the men. Fiocca’s factory and an Alpine holiday home were used as safe houses.

  Garrow was arrested and Wake pledged to free him. When he was moved to Meauzac concentration camp, near Bergerac on the Dordogne River, Wake contacted a former prisoner there who said there was one guard who was open to bribery.

  Wake rented a room in the little town of Meauzac and began visiting Garrow every day, telling the authorities she was his first cousin. After a couple of weeks the corruptible guard—seeing her devotion to her “cousin”—approached her in a bistro and wondered if she would like to do a deal. The price was half a million francs. Fiocca had already said he would pay.

  A couple of days later Garrow was given a guard’s uniform and was allowed to join a line of guards as they walked out of camp. Wake organized his escape to Spain.

  By the time of Garrow’s escape the Germans had moved into southern France. One day Wake stopped to buy cigarettes in a corner bistro near her home and was told by the owner that he thought she was being followed. She was not surprised. She and Fiocca had begun to suspect that the strange clicking sound on their phone indicated that it had been tapped, and they had discovered a man going through their mailbox.

  She did not want to leave Fiocca but he insisted. He sent her away to a safe house in Toulouse. Soon after she followed Garrow across the Pyrenees and into Spain.

  On July 18, 1942, William Phillips, a distinguished Foreign Service officer who had held several State Department postings in prewar Europe, was chosen by Donovan to oversee the settling-in of the London station. Sitting beside him on the Pan Am flying boat flight to London was a slim, attractive young woman, Evangeline Bell. A graduate from Radcliffe College, she had also been educated in Paris, Stockholm, and Rome. She had followed Donovan’s advice and packed in her luggage linen bed sheets—“not available in London,” he had said—and warm clothes.

  Bell would be responsible for the OSS women assigned to the station. The first consignment would arrive onboard the Queen Mary, along with fifteen thousand American troops—a full division. Before they sailed for England, the women had gone to an army commissary at the dock and collected their prepacked box containing pajamas, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, and candy bars. They were told these items would not be available with their ration books, which would be issued to them in England. They were each issued an American passport identifying them as a member of the OSS, which they must carry at all times.

  Among the women was Lillian Traugott, a trim twenty-three-year-old Swede. She would be the only OSS woman agent assigned to work with Communist groups in Scandinavia. Her mission was to use the training she had received at Camp X in Canada to prepare agents to go to Germany and provide important intelligence that she would transmit to London. Sue Hannifin, a New Yorker, had been assigned to work in X-2 counterintelligence. The unit included Grace Tully and Aline Griffith, a striking runway model from Pearl River, New York. The three women would later run an OSS network from Madrid that provided significant information for the preparation of D-day.

  On arrival in England the women earmarked as agents were sent to what Donovan called his “finishing school” north of London to be readied for their missions. They would later join OSS stations in Algiers and Rome.

  After a five-day voyage across the Atlantic, the OSS women disembarked at Southampton in their Women’s Army Corps uniforms and had the first sight of bomb damage as they were taken by train to Paddington Station in London. They arrived as the all-clear siren sounded across the city.

  Priscilla Symington, whose father wo
rked in the State Department, recalled she was “impressed by the buoyant good mood of the station porters as they stacked our luggage in waiting trucks, and Red Cross women offered us tea and coffee.”

  Waiting on the platform was Evangeline Bell, who had arrived earlier and had helped to set up OSS London. On her clipboard she checked off their names, next to which she had written the department to which they would be assigned. They included secretaries, filing clerks, interpreters, and translators.

  From the list provided by Eleanor Grecay Weis in New York, in charge of vetting recruits for London, Bell had selected a number of them to work with her in the Document Branch of Counterintelligence. The department provided identification documents and suitable clothing from the countries where agents would work in Europe. Their lives would depend on the cover stories she would produce with the help of her staff.

  Donovan described Evangeline Bell as “intelligent, beautiful, mysterious, and ethereal.” The daughter of an American career diplomat, who was posted to Peking, she and her nanny used to take walks along the Great Wall of China. She was still a child when her father died and her mother married the British diplomat Sir James Dodd in 1927.