The Maquis, using arms dropped by London that had often been arranged by Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester and the Marksman network, had increased its attacks. In retaliation the Milice burned down farms and shot villagers. Rochester had narrowly missed being caught—and most probably executed—when she arrived at a location late, to check a dropping area. The village’s population had been wiped out by the Milice.
Despite the growing dangers, the tall American woman continued her work, carrying messages and supplies. Network leader Richard Heslop said she was unable to stay still, always pestering him for new tasks and missions.
His concerns about the fact that she looked and acted so little like a local French countrywoman still nagged at him, but it amused him too. Watching her striding toward him in the mountains, she looked so much like an English lady that he expected her to have two Labradors at her heels and to greet him with the words, “Had a bloody good walk, you know, nothing like it for keeping fit.”
Another leading SOE agent, George Millar, remembered she had a “genially commanding” attitude to her maquisards, that she dressed in “superb” tweeds, and kept expensive luggage including gold-tipped bottles and jars in her Alpine hideouts. If the mountains gave her a feeling of security, that was about to change.
On February 2, 1944, the BBC broadcast a warning: “Attention the Maquis! Attention the Haute-Savoie! The Oberführer Joseph Darnand has decided to launch a massive attack tomorrow, February 3, against the patriots hiding out in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. . . . There is not a minute to spare—you must take up your defensive positions!”
Hundreds of résistants climbed through the deep snow to join the maquisards who had gathered on the Glières Plateau, a vast area in the hills above Annecy, almost uninhabitable during the winter months. Here they believed that had created an “impregnable fortress.” It was actually a trap.
A final reckoning on the Glières was coming, but Rochester would not be there to see it. Heslop’s concerns about her appearance in these dangerous times eventually led him to act. He could no longer use La Grande for missions to the towns—she was too recognizable, too well known. She had worked hard, done her bit. He asked London to recall her. When Baker Street’s message came through agreeing to his request, Rochester refused to go. Heslop reminded her that her invalid mother was in Paris, under surveillance as an enemy alien, and that her capture could put her mother in danger.
Early in March 1944, Rochester left, not for London but for Paris, where she moved into a convent. While sheltering she learned about a friend who was being held in prison. She began to plot an escape attempt.
On March 20, she visited a Swiss friend’s apartment, where she had left her bicycle. There was a rapping at the door and, as she answered it, two Germans and a Milice officer pushed her back and accused her of being an American spy.
Unsure how they had found her—she later believed either she had been betrayed or a telephone call she had made in Paris had been intercepted—Rochester decided to stick near to the truth without admitting anything incriminating. She admitted to being an American but said she had recently returned to France from Switzerland. She was able to describe her life in Geneva well, as she knew the city from her days working on an escape line for Jews and airmen through the French Alps.
Unsure what to do with her but with no incriminating evidence on her person or proven links to a spy network, the Gestapo locked her up in Frèsnes prison.
Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester’s future might have looked uncertain, but her move from Les Glières came just before a major assault by elite German mountain troops of the Gebirgsjäger. A three-thousand-strong force scaled the “citadel of Glières” on March 26 and dispersed the Maquis over four days of fighting. Heslop escaped.
More than 130 miles to the south, a second Resistance gathering on a lofty plateau also believed itself to be impregnable. The Maquis had been gathering at the immense and awe-inspiring Vercors plateau in the Rhône-Alpes region of the southeast, planning to make it a Resistance redoubt at the heart of France following an invasion.
This they would do, but like the maquisards of Glières they would discover that the Germans still had the will and the firepower to put down even a mass insurrection. Among the Resistance fighters of the Vercors was a female SOE agent, too—and like Rochester she was foreign born.
Christine Granville was an adventurer, a lover of life and of men, who had been described as “the sort of woman our mothers warned us about.” She was strong-willed, multilingual, and incredibly brave. Vera Atkins called her a “beautiful animal with a great appetite for love and laughter.”
Born Krystyna Skarbek in Poland, she had a Jewish mother and an aristocratic father, and was brought up a Catholic with a deep love of her country.
She had been traveling in Africa with her husband when Poland had been invaded, and had gone to Britain to volunteer to help. MI6 saw her potential, recruited and trained her, and sent her to Hungary posing as a journalist. From there she had organized a supply route for the Polish Resistance, making a series of dangerous trips across the border on her own. She also organized propaganda to persuade the Poles that the British had not abandoned them and planned acts of sabotage, with an old friend from the Polish Army, with whom she began an affair.
She was twice arrested in Hungary, but escaped. In Poland she tried to persuade her mother—her father had died before the war—to go into hiding as her Jewishness was well known. Her mother refused and was later arrested by the Gestapo. Granville never saw her again.
In February 1941, she smuggled out microfilm from Poland containing footage taken by Resistance fighters and drove it in a battered old Opel car to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. There she had made contact with a young air attaché at the British Legation and handed over the microfilm. It was found to contain footage of hundreds of tanks, army regiments, and Panzer divisions being amassed near the Russian border.
Granville had delivered the first intelligence showing that Hitler might be planning an attack on his ally, the Soviet Union.
She escaped through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Syria, and Palestine to Egypt, where she was recruited by the SOE under the name Christine Granville—an English-sounding name she had earlier given herself while in Hungary. Her handlers were delighted with the new intelligence she now delivered to them. Her prewar travels and aristocratic blood meant that she knew important people in many European countries and could provide information on their activities and political affiliations. She had also made a detailed study of the bridges of Syria as she had driven through.
Granville was recruited into the FANYs, although she only ever wore the uniform to have her photograph taken for her identity card. In October 1942 she took an SOE wireless operator’s course in Cairo in preparation for her planned drop on a mission into Turkey. The operation was canceled, and it was early 1944 before she completed her parachute training in Palestine at RAF airbase Ramat David, near Haifa.
In March that year she received training in elementary explosives and attended an SIS firearms course. Although she had hunted with a rifle before the war on her family’s estate, she found the Sten too loud. She preferred the “ideal” fighting knife developed by SOE instructors Bill Fairburn and Eric Sykes. She had a leather sheath designed so she could strap the knife to her thigh.
Christine Granville was desperate to get back into the war and, when another mission—this time to Hungary—was canceled, she realized that France was the place that they needed to send her.
She confronted an SOE coordinator, Douglas Dodds-Parker, and told him: “I want to go to France. I am going to France.”
He told her she was too flamboyant, too brave, and that she would get caught.
“I’ll kill you,” she told him.
Dodds-Parker sent her to see the new regional head of the SOE, Major General William Stawell. After dinner the pair disappeared behind a sand dune, and when Stawell returned he was said to be “knocking at the knees.�
�� Stawell instructed his officers to find Granville a mission immediately. She was going to France.
As D-day approached, the Stationer circuit was showing signs of strain. Jacqueline Nearne, still unaware that her sister was in France 260 miles to the north, was close to a breaking point. She had been working undercover across a huge area of the country for more than a year, carrying out sabotage operations, relaying messages, and helping to organize sometimes ragged bunches of maquisards.
Network leader Maurice Southgate was exhausted too, with problems arising across the circuit. One agent proved unreliable and ran off with a mistress known to have pro-Nazi sympathies. Another disappeared while searching out potential new landing zones near Poitiers and then sent a cryptic note asking Southgate or Pearl Witherington to meet him in the city. Southgate was unavailable, so Witherington made her way to Poitiers boys’ school where the agent had a contact. In fact, the agent had been arrested, the note had been sent by the Germans, and Witherington was headed straight into a trap.
When she arrived at the school, she was stopped by a concierge who whispered that the building was crawling with Gestapo. Witherington realized that she had to escape calmly in case she was being watched. She took a deep breath, tied a scarf over her head, and walked away.
The pressure experienced by the leaders of Stationer would continue to take its toll on her. Having spent so much time sleeping in unheated railway carriages, she had developed rheumatism, which forced her to stop her courier work for a while.
With the network under such strain, Nearne finally agreed to follow Buckmaster’s and Southgate’s orders and return to London for rest. She traveled to a landing ground at Villers-les-Orme to meet a Lysander. Nearne’s smile flashed in the dark when she saw the message that Buckmaster had written on the side of the fuselage in chalk: JACQUELINE MUST COME. THIS IS AN ORDER. The inbound passengers got out, and she exchanged greetings with one: it was her friend Lise de Baissac. There was time only to embrace.
Nearne clambered into the aircraft cockpit beside a Frenchman whom she had never met. He shook her hand and introduced himself with his code name, Regis. He was Jean Savy. Nearne was seated next to her sister’s leader, traveling back to London on a trip that Eileen had arranged, with his urgent message for Buckmaster.
The code name Regis meant nothing to her, and she turned her head to watch the French countryside move past the canopy as the plane lifted into the sky.
Jean Savy had discovered the Nazis’ latest plan for a new Blitz on London. While traveling to the northeast of Paris, he had come upon a quarry that the Germans appeared to be using as an ammunition dump. After liaising with local résistants, and taking a closer look at the site, he discovered that in fact the quarry contained around two thousand V-1 rockets. The Allies already knew about other rocket sites and, in August 1943, had launched an RAF raid on the rocket-making center at Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast. But the quarry Savy had found at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent contained enough firepower to perhaps bring London to its knees.
Working with Savy’s intelligence, the RAF launched a series of raids that destroyed the rockets at the quarry. But it was just one site of many, and on June 13, 1944, the first of the V-1s—sometimes called doodlebugs—reigned down on London. The Nazi regime was still far from defeated.
Five weeks before D-day, Maurice Southgate was arrested in the town of Montluçon, sixty miles from Vichy, at the home of one of his wireless operators.
During his interrogation at Avenue Foch, the SD colonel who was questioning him asked if he knew the man code-named Claude, real name Henri Déricourt. The SD colonel already seemed to know everything about Southgate and many of his associates. “Claude is a very good man of ours,” the colonel explained smugly. “From him we get reports, documents, and names of people.”
The Germans may well have thought they were about to have another summer of success to rival the arrests of the Prosper network almost a year earlier. They surrounded Montluçon, almost trapping Southgate’s courier Pearl Witherington and her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who was now working with her. They escaped the cordon by splitting up and taking various back roads to safety.
Witherington had, by now, been in France for eight months. She had worked tirelessly, once even escaping death from members of her own side when, without a password, she arrived to collect money from a Maquis leader she did not know. They believed she was an agent of the Milice and prepared to strangle her. She only persuaded them she was SOE by giving the name of the farmer in whose field she had landed months before.
One SOE instructor had noted of Witherington: “This student, though a woman, has definitely got leaders’ qualities.” Despite the sexism of the qualifying phrase “though a woman,” the instructor’s assessment of her leadership skills was correct. Witherington’s work in the field proved it. London made the decision to split the large and unwieldy Stationer circuit and make Witherington, code name Pauline, leader of the northern half. Cool and resourceful, she immediately split her circuit, dubbed Wrestler, into four subcircuits each under a lieutenant reporting directly to her.
Witherington called in fresh arms drops from London and organized her networks into something approaching a private army. The legend of Pauline, the agent for whose capture the Nazis would offer a reward of one million francs, was born. D-day was coming near and, in its wake, she would become an incomparable leader of Resistance action.
Nancy Wake, a woman of equally strong character, was on her way to the rugged countryside just east of Witherington. Like Pauline, Wake would become a battlefield leader. And like Christine Granville, she had caused her SOE instructors a considerable amount of trouble.
After escaping from the South of France and reaching London, Wake had approached the SOE for an interview. When she attended Orchard Court, she was delighted to realize that they knew all about the activities of the “White Mouse” who had eluded the Gestapo in Marseille.
Wake’s training began with psychological examinations, which were designed to see if an agent would stand up to pressure. She loathed them. When confronted with the Rorschach inkblot test, she replied, “I see ink blots.”
In Scotland, she got into an argument with a fellow trainee. Wake had been defending her friend Denis Rake, one of the SOE’s most remarkable agents. Openly homosexual at a time when being gay was a criminal offense, Rake had been a circus performer before the war. Despite hating guns and explosives, he had already worked for the SOE in France as a radio operator. He spoke French and German fluently.
The woman Wake had argued with reported her to Selwyn Jepson and raised concerns about the level of Wake’s drinking. Jepson summoned her and began to reprimand her. “We don’t like our girls to drink,” he said. She told him “what he could do and where he could put it” and was instantly fired. When she returned to her flat in London, she received a telegram ordering her to return her FANY uniform. Wake telephoned Baker Street and said if the SOE wanted her uniform Jepson could pick it up himself. One of the SOE’s most remarkable careers almost ended before it had begun.
Fortunately, Maurice Buckmaster heard about the argument. He and Wake had hit it off immediately. She saw him as “an Englishman of the old school,” and they had shared their common experience as prewar journalists in Paris. Buckmaster smoothed over the situation, and Wake was rehired.
She never apologized to Jepson and saw no reason to change her behavior on her return to the SOE. At Inverie Bay in northern Scotland, she loved the weapons training but began to worry that her reports might not be good enough. Determined to find out what her instructors thought of her, she made an impression of the office key in some plasticine and had a new key cut. Then one evening she let herself into the office and rifled through the drawers. She was pleased to see that there were no negative remarks in her file; in fact, instructors felt her larger-than-life personality was “good for morale.”
At Ringway, an American sergeant tried to embarrass her by passing a small
package across the breakfast table with a wink. “It’s a present,” he smirked. Thinking it was chocolate, Wake opened it to see three condoms inside. The sergeant winked but, unperturbed, Wake began to read aloud the instructions for their use—in great detail. When the red-faced soldier left, Wake put the condoms in her pocket and finished her meal.
Outside the room an officer apologized for the sergeant’s attempt to humiliate her and asked if she would like him to take the offending items back. “That’s not necessary,” Wake told him. “They might come in handy later on.”
Her exuberance lasted right through until her last night in Britain. When she boarded a Liberator on the night of April 30, 1944, she did so with a raging hangover. She spent the flight fighting off the urge to be sick into her oxygen mask. Alongside her was Major John Farmer, who would lead the new network of which she would be a part. Code-named Freelance, the network’s role would be to unite Resistance groups in the Corrèze. Denis Rake, who would be their wireless operator, had added parachuting to his list of dislikes, and was being brought in by Lysander to meet up with them later.
Over the drop zone Wake remembered the instructor’s voice at Ringway as he barked in her ear, “Remember what your mother told you: keep your knees together! Now roll, roll as you land!”
Wake did not get the opportunity to roll—her parachute caught in a tree. A local teacher and rugby player, Henri Tardivat, who led the Resistance reception committee, helped her down, making a quip designed to charm about how all trees should bear such beautiful fruit. Wake told him to cut out “that French bullshit.” They would become firm friends.
Wake and Farmer had been counting on the initial help of Maurice Southgate and were unaware of his arrest until they landed. One powerful Resistance leader, known as Gaspard, turned them away, saying he was not prepared to work with the British, but a second, Henri Fournier, offered them accommodation and help. When Rake arrived they were able to organize arms and explosives for Fournier’s Maquis. Wake carried and coded the messages, using the personal code poem that she had agreed on with the SOE’s codemaster, Leo Marks. He usually chose romantic poems or Biblical texts for the agents, but something more bawdy was deemed more appropriate for Wake. She agreed.
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