The next morning she had two medical appointments. The first was with a dentist to check her teeth and fillings. If her dental work didn’t look like it had been done by a French dentist, the fillings had to be changed.
Her second appointment was with an orthopedic surgeon who would show her how she could turn her limp into a shuffle by learning to walk with an old-age stoop. By the afternoon she had managed to walk with her false leg, named Cuthbert, in a new way.
Having done so much formative work for the SOE, Hall’s new mission was to establish an OSS network, to be called Saint, and to prepare agents and local résistants for the invasion.
Hall’s handlers had hesitated to send her back. The Gestapo had her description from her activities in the South of France, and her leg made her more easily recognizable. But both the British and Americans desperately needed experienced agents in the field, especially since by late 1943 many of the Allied intelligence-gathering networks had been infiltrated, broken up, or were under threat of exposure. These gains by the Germans had increased pressure on agents at a time when more than ever top-class information was required from inside France. Plans for the landings on the northern coast were by then well advanced. The D-day invasion was imminent.
Hours after Motor Boat 503 left the Royal Navy base in Devon, Hall changed into her disguise. She dyed her hair and changed into a wide skirt and blouse to create an illusion of a heavier figure. She started walking with a swinging motion, like some older women did when their hips and knees were less agile and they had put on extra weight. The captain and MTB crew applauded before they helped her into the dinghy. The dawn was coming when two of the seamen rowed the dinghy up on the sand and helped her step down.
Carrying a suitcase, in which her radio set was tucked under her spare clothes, she made her way to Creuse, an area of rolling hills and steep valleys in central France, and set up home with a poor French farmer and his elderly mother. The cottage in which they lived on the edge of the village of Maidou had no water or electricity, but Hall quickly learned to adapt to the rustic lifestyle.
She worked as their cook and milkmaid, taking the cows to pasture and checking out which local fields might be suitable for drops or landing zones. She worked as her own organizer and wireless operator, and radioed London from a farmer’s hayloft. It was dangerous work. F Section radio operators typically survived only about eight weeks in the field, and they tended to favor big cities rather than peaceful rural areas where people were few and far between.
Hall’s mission was very much geared to the invasion, and she quickly found a way to increase the amount of information she could obtain about troop movements. The farmer’s mother made cheese, and so Hall offered to help her sell it to one of her main markets: the Germans. She was able to overhear information exchanged by soldiers, who had no idea she spoke German.
Hall’s messages were sent to the SOE to be relayed to the OSS. One day, she had just finished packing her radio away in the farmer’s cottage when she heard a car outside. Going downstairs, she opened the door to find a group of German soldiers. An officer asked her what she was doing, and she put on her best vulnerable old lady voice to explain she was the milkmaid to the farmer and his mother. The officer waved his arm and three soldiers swept by her into the cottage. They turned over the furniture and then made their way to the room from which she had been transmitting only minutes before. Hall knew that if they found her radio she would be arrested. She eyed the open fields behind the officer and wondered how far she could get if she ran. With her wooden left leg, she was not the best equipped for such an escape.
After a few moments a soldier returned and handed a large piece of cheese to the officer. He wanted to buy it for his men. He handed over some coins and the soldiers left.
Shaken but undeterred, Hall moved from one safe house to another. In one she transmitted from an eighty-four-year-old man’s attic. In another she took on a role as a goatherd and, from beneath the crinkled headscarf of a stooped peasant lady, counted the German trucks and tanks passing through the area. When London arranged a drop of arms and equipment onto one of her fields, she rode out to collect it on a hay cart with members of her Resistance team.
Hall used money sent in from London to finance a growing band of résistants. They already numbered in the hundreds, and urgently needed weapons. In her radio messages home, Hall kept up the pressure on London to provide more arms for them. She wanted the Resistance to be a private army by the time D-day came. She had already discussed with them an attack on the German garrison at Le Puy as part of a prelude to the invasion, which was continuing to gain momentum.
Meetings had already taken place in Algiers between Henri Frenay, a Resistance leader; John J. McCloy, the American assistant secretary of war; and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, an opium-smoking former journalist who had formed one of the earliest Resistance networks. Winston Churchill had chaired discussions.
The prime minister saw the arming of the Resistance in southeastern France as essential to Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast, and he dreamed of creating an underground army like Tito’s in Yugoslavia. Caches of small arms that had been hidden after the French army’s surrender in June 1940 would be supported by arms dropped from England by the SOE and OSS.
During the spring of 1943, nearly 150 tons of supplies were dropped. In the lead-up to D-day this would rise to 938 tons, each drop by either the RAF or the USAAF consisting of containers of weaponry, explosives, and ammunition, as well as smaller packages. It was a substantial increase, although still far less than Tito received.
Virginia Hall’s activities were being repeated across France. Agents were preparing résistants for the coming battle and were pleading with London for more and more supplies.
Both the SOE and OSS knew they had to expand their networks through France. No one yet knew when the invasion would take place, but both Gubbins and Donovan recogized that, in the meantime, their operations in France had a special role: to prepare the path for invasion, particularly by uniting and arming the various Resistance networks.
In addition to Hall, a number of female agents were sent behind enemy lines. Their lives became increasingly dangerous. Invasion planning meant that they had to travel farther, carry more messages, meet with more contacts, and increase the number of radio messages to London.
The Prosper network had shown how damaging betrayal could be. While its tentacles had spread throughout northern France, it had been destroyed well before it could provide any meaningful help for invasion planners. Elsewhere, though, networks continued to grow, with more and more women arriving in France by moonlight to live in the shadows.
Away from the disaster unfolding in the north, Jacqueline Nearne and Maurice Southgate had been busy creating one of the most important réseaux in the unoccupied zone. Since January 1943, they had been working hard to unite various Resistance groups into a fighting force. This had been no easy task.
The area covered by their Stationer network stretched from the Massif Central, the high plateau at the heart of France, to the foothills of the Pyrenees. The pair had quickly developed a strong working relationship and, after three months when they received a wireless operator, Amédée Maingard, their ability to grow their network was enhanced further. Nearne even recruited her own brother, Francis, who lived near Grenoble with his wife and three-year-old son, as a courier. A bespectacled commercial traveler with dark brown hair and brown eyes, Francis was of a rather nervous disposition, but he desperately wanted to help his younger sister with the war effort.
The number of people joining the Resistance was increasing, a consequence of German and Vichy efforts to force young people to work for them. At the end of 1941 Hitler had decreed that fortifications should be built on the Atlantic coast to resist any invasion. The Todt organization created paid employment for local French people but also forced large numbers of Jews, North Africans, and Spanish Republicans to work for them. Increasingly, the Germans abandone
d all pretense of seeking volunteers, and in September 1942 a French law allowed workers to be drafted into employment “in the national interest.”
Then in February 1943, Vichy instituted Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) requiring Frenchmen of military service age to undertake two years of compulsory labor service. Several hundred thousand Frenchmen were already working in Germany, and it was widely understood that most young men affected would be sent to join them.
Throughout the spring of 1943, the Milice also increased its activities across southern France. It evicted restaurateurs suspected of dealing in black market food and harassed and arrested Jews, Communists, and Gaullists.
This, along with the presence of the recently arrived German forces and the anger at the STO, encouraged people to take sides. It is believed that as many as 260,000 young men took to the hills and woods to escape the STO, and many ended up joining or forming Resistance groups.
This increased the work of the agents of Stationer. Nearne spent hours on the overnight train from Clermont-Ferrand to Toulouse and the morning train on to Tarbes. She carried messages for Maingard to transmit to the SOE, written on paper small enough that she could swallow it if needed. Sometimes she used a briefcase to carry documents, wireless components, or supplies that could not be easily hidden.
Often leaving a railway station was the most dangerous moment for an agent carrying incriminating material. It was here the French police and Gestapo set up their checkpoints. Nearne developed a routine at stations where she feared her luggage would be searched. She would summon a porter and have her case put in left luggage. She would return to the station when the checkpoint had been dismantled.
Autumn came, and the invasion that agents and the growing Maquis had expected did not. Then, on the night of September 22, 1943, Southgate was told to attend the drop of an agent in fields near Châteauroux. He and the reception committee watched the parachute come down some distance away, and they rushed around a large pond to find the parachutist. They eventually found a figure crouching down behind a tree urinating. Pearl Witherington had arrived.
Witherington was a clear-thinking, resourceful twenty-nine-year-old who had grown up in Paris with an alcoholic English father. Her suitcases had sunk to a bottom of the pond when she jumped, but she was used to adversity and knew how to cope when things went wrong; from the age of twelve she had had to deal with creditors chasing after her father. She had had only four years of schooling before becoming first a typist and then personal assistant to the air attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. In June 1940 she had arrived at work to discover that everybody had left and that she was trapped in Paris. When she had finally escaped from France, she had left behind her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had joined the army and been captured during the German invasion.
On arrival in England she contacted the Air Ministry and was given a job as a personal assistant to the director of Allied Air Forces and Foreign Liaisons. As she took shorthand notes and typed, her mind was always on Henri and returning to France. In September 1941 she received a letter from Henri’s grandmother in Lausanne to say he had escaped from a prison camp and was now safe in France.
That November, having heard about the SOE through friends at the Air Ministry, Witherington met with Maurice Buckmaster. Recording the meeting in his private diary, Buckmaster later drew a circle around her name: he had found a new recruit.
Buckmaster’s order to Southgate to be at Witherington’s drop was a surprise for both agents. They had been in the same year at the British School of Paris. When they had met by accident later in London, it had been Witherington who had put Southgate in touch with Buckmaster. Both joined the SOE.
Now, in the darkness of occupied France, Witherington heard a low whistle. Two descending notes. She knew that Cornioley had received a message to tell him that she was coming. “Henri? Is that you?” The man’s voice that came back was one that she recognized, but it was Southgate, not her fiancé. “Pearl?” came the urgent whisper. “C’est toi?”
Witherington not only would take pressure off Nearne but also would become one of the SOE’s finest and most successful operatives.
Jacqueline Nearne’s sister, Eileen, had been kicking her heels back in England, hoping Buckmaster would pluck her out of her work in decoding and send her to France to join her sister. Eileen did not know that Jacqueline had requested that he spare her younger sister from danger, an appeal which he listened to . . . for a time, at least.
But then in the autumn of 1943 Eileen was told she was being sent to the Drokes, a house on the Beaulieu estate, to be trained as a wireless operator. Instructors felt Eileen’s immaturity might be a problem—Kim Philby called her “pale and wide-eyed”—and this worried Buckmaster, but he had seen her sister develop into one of his brightest agents. Who was to say the younger sister might not do the same? he had asked himself.
He decided to take a chance. With a cover story of a shop girl, the name Jacqueline du Tertre, and her SOE code name Rose, Eileen was trained to go to France.
Jacqueline Nearne and Pearl Witherington were constantly on the move. Both using the cover of traveling representatives—Witherington’s cover said she worked for a cosmetics firm—they took and received messages from Resistance groups across a wide area.
They often found themselves having to command and guide the new and restless breed of men who had joined the Resistance. Most of them were in their early twenties, could be lax about security, and had egos that made them surly at having to follow a woman. Like other female agents, Nearne and Witherington were bound to face entrenched male attitudes in a country in which women had not yet even the right to vote. (Frenchwomen only got this right in time for the first election after liberation in April 1945.)
Nearne helped Southgate coordinate two of the larger, more effective Resistance subcircuits, made up of Communists and escaped prisoners of war, into sabotage parties, destroying generators, electricity pylons and a substation, trucks, and railway lines and signals.
Nearne and Amédée Maingard took joint charge of Stationer when Southgate was temporarily recalled to London in October 1943, coordinating reception committees for the weaponry being dropped by London. Southgate told his officers in Baker Street, “I could not have done half of what I have without her.”
During Southgate’s absence, a Communist Resistance leader whom Nearne considered a friend, Auguste Chantraine, was arrested. The network went into a security clampdown, with Nearne working hard to save Stationer from further arrests. It put her under tremendous pressure, and when Southgate returned to France in early 1944 he was shocked by how much weight she had lost and how tired she looked. Both Buckmaster and Southgate were worried about her, but she did not want to leave France with the D-day invasion so close.
In February the SOE sent a Lysander to pick her up. She went to the landing zone but allowed a French politician to take her place. Buckmaster was angry with her, but only because she was one of his best people in the field and he knew tiredness could make even the most efficient agent careless.
The SOE was also taking steps to strengthen its presence along the eastern side of France. On August 14, 1943, a twenty-five-year-old agent jumped from a plane near Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura mountains. She carried a briefcase containing one million French francs. The money was for the small Monk network that was based in Marseille.
The agent was a dark-haired but fair-skinned Anglo-Spanish woman named Eliane Plewman. Her brother, Albert Browne-Bartroli, would soon follow her into France, also as an F Section agent.
As she descended she could not see the lights of her reception committee. Instead, the roof of a farmhouse appeared to be drifting up toward her. A farm dog began barking wildly. She cleared the building and the yard and came down in the fields beyond.
Plewman struggled to her feet, having badly twisted her ankle on landing, and realized she had been dropped in the wrong place. She took her bearings and hid the case of money in some thick bushe
s and set out for help. She found her contacts had been arrested by the Germans. It took her two months to reach Marseille and, when a résistant was sent back for the money, he found an empty case. An opportunist passerby had obviously gotten lucky.
Plewman began a punishing work schedule, carrying messages for the leader of Monk, an agent named Charles Skepper, from his home in Marseille on a sixty-mile journey to the base used by his radio operator, Arthur Steele, at a hilltop villa owned by a Madame Régis. The cool and reliable Régis would become a local Resistance legend for her quick thinking in the face of the enemy.
On one occasion she saw a German on the terrace outside her villa just as the twenty-year-old Steele was at work in the villa. Urging him to hide his set, she went out to meet the German, who said he was on a routine check. She invited him in for a glass of homemade schnapps and introduced Steele as her son. The German was so taken with her, he often returned to enjoy a conversation and another glass of her drink. Her courage and nerve paid dividends: sometime later, when a detector van picked up a radio signal in the area, the Germans did not check her villa as they believed its occupant to be friendly to the occupiers.
Steele took the close shave as a warning though, and from then on he and Plewman would head into the hills and transmit in the shadow of a Roman aqueduct.
Plewman traveled to Roquebrune-sur-Argens, the nearest village to the villa, either by train or in a battered old truck, which was also used by the local Resistance to carry supplies and explosives. The journeys could be tense as the area was flooded with tens of thousands of German troops preparing defenses for any possible invasion in the south.
The beginning of 1944 signaled a change in the activities of Plewman and her Monk team. Sabotage was now their main priority. She trained résistants in how to destroy railway tracks, enabling a series of attacks on trains, including the derailing of the mainline train to Toulon inside a tunnel, which caused a holdup of four days.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 23