During the first two weeks of January, Plewman and her team of saboteurs damaged thirty trains. The number of operations put her under strain and forced her to take risks. When her brother visited her in Marseille he was horrified to discover that she was carrying a bag of plastic explosives and that she was on her way to lay a charge. He insisted on helping her, telling her she had to take care—the success of the Monk network would bring greater attention from the Germans. His warning was eerily prophetic.
At the other end of the eastern side of France was a plump, fair, and rather shy woman who had married an SOE instructor shortly before arriving in France by Lysander in September 1943.
Yolande Beekman, who came from an Anglo-Swiss family and spoke French perfectly, had been put down on the same landing ground near Angers that had received Noor Inayat Khan, Cecily Lefort, and Diana Rowden three months earlier. It was to be a terrible omen.
If the double agent Déricourt had ensured she was followed on arrival, as he had the others, Beekman either shook off her tail or they lost her during her long journey to Saint-Quentin in the northeast.
Beekman was to work as wireless operator for the Musician network led by Gustave Biéler, who had been using a Prosper radio until that réseau collapsed. Saint-Quentin was at the heart of a key area for the Resistance. It was the center for the industrial canal and railway networks for the region, and the rail link to Lille was essential for the Germans. It was also an area busy with Luftwaffe bases, housing bombers bound for England and fighters protecting the Reich.
Musician was already under strain. The area was filled with German troops, and Resistance attacks on the railway line had increased pressure on Biéler and his men.
Beekman was known during her training for her care, but for three months during the autumn and winter she had to use the same safe house from which to transmit. For each message she made her way into the freezing cold attic of a building. She sat on a velvet divan, reading, turning the pages of the book with mittened hands, while waiting for the time to transmit or receive.
Her messages organized large and urgently needed deliveries to the twelve Maquis groups in the Musician network. She radioed for drops of Sten guns, bazookas, arms, and explosives. She also reported the increasing number of successes achieved by Musician. Bridges, gasoline pumps, tracks, signal boxes, and locomotive sheds were blown up. Working with railway workers, they added abrasive grease to lubricants and damaged ten locomotives.
Buckmaster noted that Biéler had “an amused tolerance for the women engaged in our work,” but he developed a deep respect for Beekman, and she accompanied him and the others on several of the sabotage missions.
Despite the level of German activity in the area, Biéler’s ambitions were high. His next plan would prove a major success, but at a terrible cost.
A month after Yolande Beekman’s arrival, a Hudson from Tempsford, flown by Johnnie Affleck on his first such mission, circled over the village of Lons-le-Saunier searching out the same landing ground that had been used by Eliane Plewman.
Inside, the aircraft dispatcher stepped back through the fuselage and nodded at the four passengers. It was almost time. One of the passengers was a tall, athletically built woman with red-gold hair. A few hours earlier, Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester had been eating her two fried eggs at Gaynes Hall. Now she was preparing to step once more onto the soil of the country she had fled that spring.
Landing in the dark with only flashlights to guide him in, the pilot clipped a church belfry, sending cases stacked in the airplane crashing to the floor. By the time they touched down, Rochester was afraid the noise had alerted Germans in the area, and she scrambled quickly out of the plane. She fell on her face in the French mud.
One of the men with her was Richard Heslop. He was to be the organizer for a new network, Marksman, for which she would be courier. The other, Owen Johnson, was Heslop’s wireless operator.
They were headed to the Haute-Savoie, an area that Rochester knew well from her days as a courier taking messages across the Swiss border. It was also the rugged mountain country that Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom had shown could be productive for the Resistance, until their capture earlier that year. Despite the collapse of Churchill’s Spindle network, the Maquis had continued to grow in the area. Marksman agents would ensure they received the arms they needed.
Rochester moved into a chalet in Albigny, near Lake Annecy, and stashed a suitcase filled with plastic explosives in the cellar. Despite Heslop’s concerns about her appearance—her height, in particular, made her stand out, and she always felt uncomfortable taking messages to larger towns and cities, such as Lyon and Grenoble—he later admitted that she carried out all her work with “guts and imagination.” That Roedean girls’ school education made her sharp under pressure, and she could memorize long messages without needing to write them down.
Early on, a young résistant came to talk to her about a group of his comrades who were planning a sabotage operation. She was taken aback when he said, “I suppose you’ll want me to contact the boys so you can brief them?”
“You don’t really think I’m going to do it?” she said.
“Why not? That’s what you were trained for in England. If you can teach them how to do it, you can do it yourself.”
There was something in the young résistant’s manner—the smile, the way the Gauloises hung almost insolently from the side of his mouth—that made Rochester think that he found it amusing to have a woman prepare and then lead the mission.
A few days later Rochester stood in the cellar, laid out detonators, time pencils, and plastic explosives, and prepared the charges. Then, under the watchful eye of the maquisards, she took Sten guns from where they were concealed and handed them one each.
The next day the snow fell most of the morning. When it stopped and the sun baked the mountains, Rochester led her sabotage team down a hill toward the lake. They waited until dark at the home of a contact, and then separated to make their way alone into the town of Annecy.
The streets were quiet and thick with snow. Rochester turned down a dark alley and then stepped into an abandoned warehouse, where she was due to meet her team. Stepping carefully across the debris-strewn floor, she peered out through a broken window at the station yard. Passengers were already arriving for the night train to Lyon. Rochester knew there were three locomotives just inside the terminus. These, intelligence from a railwayman told her, were unguarded before the 11:00 curfew.
Rochester dispatched a small cover party to keep guard with their Stens. The final maquisard—her guard—came with her to watch over her as she laid the charges. Their boots sank in the soft snow as they made their way toward the tracks and then along to the locomotives. Rochester quickly attached charges to the first and second locomotives, and then walked around the third. Just as she had finished laying the final explosives, she slipped and stumbled against a steel girder. A loud clang broke through the silence. She and her guard held their breath.
There was a noise and a shaft of light. Someone had opened a door into a back room in the terminus and was peering toward them.
“Il y a quelqu’un?”
They could not see who it was. The maquisard stood in the shadows, his Sten raised.
Rochester shouted to the man at the door that she had lost her dog and that she had tripped and hurt herself.
The man came forward to see if he could help, and she could see by his overalls and the coal dust on his wrinkled face that he must be one of the engine drivers. Her guard stepped out and shoved the gun into the man’s back.
Rochester checked the third charge and all three left. Back in the warehouse the train driver explained that he wanted no part in the Resistance and had been in the back room sorting out cigarettes that he brought from Switzerland to sell locally.
One of the Resistance men took the driver under guard back to his home, while Rochester headed back up the hill toward her chalet. Leaning on the gate outside her lod
gings, with her warm breath making clouds in the cold air, Rochester looked back at Annecy and waited for the charges to detonate.
As the detonation time arrived, and then passed without result, she feared she had made a mistake—perhaps she had forgotten to prime them? Or maybe they had been discovered?
She gripped her watch and stared at the dial. It was 11:00. She thought of England. It was closing time in the public houses, and she saw warm, laughing faces and beer in pewter mugs. Then the first explosion ripped through the night, and the tension disappeared from her body. Suddenly very tired, she turned, just as the second charge went off, followed immediately by the third.
Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester, who the Maquis had already honored with the nickname La Grande because of her height and bearing, was making herself known in the mountains of eastern France.
In Saint-Quentin, after a series of attacks on the railways, Gustave Biéler had bigger plans for Yolande Beekman and his sabotage team.
The Saint-Quentin canal was of great importance to the Germans and was used to transport submarine parts that left requisitioned factories in the north to be taken by barge to Bordeaux and the Mediterranean. The SOE saw cutting off this supply of parts as an efficient way of reducing the role U-boats could play in the harassment of ships supplying Allied armies in Italy. A plan was formed to attach limpet mines to the barges and the lock gates, and, under cover of darkness, Biéler led a team to lay the charges. When the gates next opened, the charges detonated and the canal was jammed with broken gates and the wreckage of barges. That section of the canal was out of operation for many months. The attack brought even greater attention on Musician. Beekman dyed her hair blonde and switched her identity papers and cover story but remained in her safe house.
The Gestapo realized that the Resistance must be receiving supplies from London and that a wireless operator was at work in the area. Teams of detector vans converged on the city. Beekman’s landlady even saw one pass by her front window. Beekman’s radio was pinpointed, and too late she decided to move. She found lodging at the Moulin Brulé, a small café by a canal bridge. The network’s regular members used it as a meeting place. But by now, she and the others were under surveillance.
The next day, a frosty morning in the middle of January, Beekman came down from her room for a meeting with Biéler and another man. Two dark cars screeched to a halt outside the café and Gestapo officers ran in, guns in their hands.
According to Buckmaster, Beekman reached for her revolver but it was too late. She and Biéler were dragged into the cars and taken to Gestapo headquarters.
It was the end of the Musician network.
The moonlit nights of March 1944 saw a number of women arrive in France to bolster networks and take part in sabotage attacks ahead of the proposed invasion.
Twenty-eight-year-old Parisian Denise Bloch had been transferred from her work in the Resistance to work for SOE wireless operator Brian Stonehouse almost two years earlier. Having narrowly escaped arrest more than once, she had fled to London and been trained as a wireless operator. On March 2 a Lysander from 161 Squadron dropped her to work in a developing réseau whose role was to sabotage electricity pylons linking the Pyrenees and Brittany, and to carry out sabotage on the railway system around Nantes.
Yvonne Baseden, a twenty-two-year-old radio operator, was dropped by parachute into southwest France. She spent four days traveling to her area in the Jura, where she was to help set up a new network, Scholar, and arrange arms drops.
Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan was the Dublin-born daughter of an Irish journalist who had been educated by a Belgian aunt at a number of schools in Europe. Strong-willed, with a tangle of ginger hair, O’Sullivan’s mission was to work a radio for the Fireman network, which was developing in the northern part of the Creuse. She almost lost her life in the drop when her parachute cords became tangled and she struggled with the lines trailing above her. Dangerously low, her parachute at last blossomed out above her, but she still hit the ground hard and was knocked unconscious.
When she came around she reckoned the two million francs packed into her backpack had saved her life. Her reception committee collected her belongings and radio, together with the containers dropped with her, and took her to a safe house where she slept for twenty hours.
O’Sullivan needed that sleep. Over the coming weeks, wireless operators were going to be busier and more important than ever.
The same night that Denise Bloch dropped into France, Eileen Nearne arrived onboard another black-painted Westland Lysander from Tempsford flown by Flight Lieutenant Murray Anderson.
Alongside Nearne was Jean Savy, who would lead a new circuit called Wizard to the southwest of Paris. Nearne would be his wireless operator, and they had already developed a great rapport. The thirty-seven-year-old Savy was intelligent and dependable but had two drawbacks that could affect security. As a former lawyer he was well known in Paris from his work before the war and could attract attention. The second was the reason for their arrival by Lysander rather than parachute: Savy had a withered right arm, something that made him distinctive and recognizable.
Nearne was heartened to hear their Resistance welcoming committee greet them in strong Parisian accents. They spent their first night asleep in a drafty and dirty barn. The next day at the railway station at Orléans, Nearne was so startled by her first sight of German soldiers that her companions had to tell her not to stare. In Paris, with the help of a local member of the Resistance she knew only as Louise, she found a room in Porte de Champerret and a house in the suburb of Bourg-la-Reine, from where she could transmit her messages.
The couple who owned the room, Monsieur and Madame Dubois, were taking a tremendous risk should their involvement be discovered. The Germans operated direction-finding equipment to try to capture “pianists,” a major prize for the Gestapo and Abwehr, and those sheltering them faced execution or a concentration camp.
Nearne’s fellow SOE radio operator Yvonne Cormeau said later, “Those who offered me a room and offered me food always knew that I had come from England. They were asked, ‘Would you take a radio operator?’ because that more than doubled the danger for them. And, I’ll give it to these people, not once was I refused accommodation.”
Cormeau, who had left her two-year-old daughter in the care of a convent when she flew from Tempsford to become the second female radio operator sent into France by the SOE, had her own remarkable escape. When her radio was uncovered by a German soldier at a roadblock, she managed to convince him that she was a district nurse and the wireless equipment in her case was an X-ray machine.
For the first few weeks there was little for Eileen Nearne to report to London, but then Jean Savy contacted her to say that he had a message for London that was too sensitive to relay by wireless. She was to request a plane for him at the earliest opportunity.
In Marseille, Eliane Plewman had tried to lie low after a series of successful sabotage attacks on the rail network of the southeast of France. Her fears that the Germans were actively pursuing the sabotage team had transmuted into a new concern: that there might be an informer at work in the réseau. It was not unusual for agents to feel a sense of foreboding, living in constant danger of discovery. She began to feel certain that something was happening to the group. One of her team suspected that the Germans had been inside his apartment, so he went to the barber’s shop beneath where he lived. The barber had just smothered his face in shaving soap when two German soldiers flung open the door and looked around.
Plewman refused a suggestion to leave Marseille, saying she had too much to do. When a friend left her one day, she said, “Au revoir,” to which an anxious-looking Plewman replied, “No, not au revoir—adieu.”
Her network’s fate was settled in a most unfortunate way. Plewman had to source some food for one of her team on the black market who had dietary issues. Her black market contact shared a mistress with an officer in the Gestapo. It was this woman who betrayed them.
Her leader, Charles Skepper, was arrested on March 23, 1944, and Plewman the next day. Within days, twelve members of the group were in cells at the Gestapo’s Marseille headquarters on the Rue Paradis. Throughout horrific torture, Plewman maintained she was simply Skepper’s lover and not an agent or résistant. At night she sang songs in her cell, to comfort herself and encourage her group not to give in.
Plewman was taken to Dachau concentration camp where, in September 1944, she was executed alongside Yolande Beekman, who had married just before leaving on her mission; Noor Inayat Khan; and Madeleine Damerment, whose capture resulted from the SOE’s refusal to believe that Khan had been captured.
Also executed were Madeleine Damerment’s male colleagues, France Antelme and Lionel Lee; Yolande Beekman’s leader, Gustave Biéler; Eliane Plewman’s leader in the Monk network, Charles Skepper; and her radio operator, Arthur Steele.
Throughout the winter and early spring, battles between the Resistance and the Milice in the Haute-Savoie region had become more intense.
Formed in 1941, the Milice was a paramilitary organization whose members swore an oath against “Jewish leprosy,” democracy, and opponents of Pétain’s Vichy France. It was a Fascist gang, hated by the Resistance but especially dangerous to résistants and agents because it was made up of French men and women. By 1944 its ranks had grown to thirty-five thousand members who included the dregs of French society, often former criminals and gangsters. They were divided into gangs where they lived, making them far more efficient than the Gestapo. Unlike the Police Nationale, which sought out “enemies of the state,” the Milice hunted, tortured, and killed for personal gain and satisfaction.Those with grudges against former lovers or business associates found the Milice the perfect outlet for their revenge.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 24