The poem she had memorized went:
She stood right there,
In the moonlight fair,
And the moon shone
Through her nightie;
It lit right on
The nipple of her tit,
Oh Jesus Christ Almighty!
Wake, Farmer, and Rake lived in the woods with a ragged bunch of résistants. Wake led them in weapons training, and the novelty of having a woman among them was hard to ignore—even if she wore army boots, khaki trousers, a shirt and tie, and a beret. On the first morning she went out among the pine trees to urinate, she noticed the bushes around her were moving. When she got back to camp she told the sniggering men that they had seen her peeing once and that should be enough.
From her base in the forested valley at Chaudes-Aigues, Wake became the chef du parachutage for the estimated seven thousand maquisards in the area. She chose the fields she would use for parachute drops and gave them code names so London could identify them using a Michelin map.
Early on, Wake insisted on joining a Resistance raid on a shop owned by a collaborator in the town of Saint-Flour. As she broke the window glass, helped grab handfuls of supplies, and sat in the getaway truck as it sped into the darkness, she decided that she “liked this kind of thing.”
In the weeks to come, Nancy Wake would climb under bridges to set explosives and lead attacks on German convoys and a raid on a Gestapo headquarters. She was the perfect soldier-agent to be on the ground in France as the final details of the D-day landings were arranged.
11
Out of the Shadows
LATE IN THE EVENING on June 5, 1944, agents and résistants were huddled around radio sets across France as the voice of BBC’s French service read out a list of “personal messages.” Each message had been prearranged with the various Resistance groups. All were coded differently, but they meant the same: the invasion was on its way! Le Jour J was here!
In the space of just fifteen minutes, two hundred messages were broadcast. As each group heard the words meant for them, they switched off their wireless sets and headed out into the night to play their part in the liberation of their homeland.
SOE wireless operator Yvonne Cormeau, who sent more radio messages back to London than any other F Section operative, watched the actions of the maquisards in her area of Gascony. “They went round, got all their matériel out of the hiding places, cleaned the weapons, stuck the ammunition in, and then they were ready to move.”
Within twenty-four hours the French railway network had been paralyzed by up to one thousand acts of sabotage. It was a huge blow for the German generals planning the defense of France. Nine out of ten of the troops required to reinforce their defenses needed to be moved by rail.
The Wheelwright network in which Yvonne Cormeau acted as wireless operator had been developed by Cormeau and her leader, George Starr, to cover an area from the hills of the Basses Pyrenees in the southwest to the valleys of the Gironde, where the mouths of the rivers Garonne and Dordogne merge. The pair, who had a strong friendship, created a cell structure within the réseau that gave it an added layer of security.
Keenly intelligent, Cormeau had been in France since August 1943 and had seen the nature of the Resistance and of the occupation change. Across the months from that autumn to the summer of the invasion, the battle had come to be fought more and more out of the shadows. Explosions ripped through the rail and power infrastructure. German soldiers—sometimes Gestapo officers—were shot. The Germans retaliated by shooting hostages, burning villages, and increasing the number of radio detection vans patrolling the country and the towns.
Knowing that wireless operators had one of the most dangerous jobs in the occupied territories, Cormeau worked hard to improve her odds of survival. She used her natural skill with the wireless to keep her transmissions down to a safe duration—never more than thirty minutes at the most. The SOE noted that she was “one of the most technically efficient wireless operators we had ever sent out.”
She was also observant, noting quickly that local women in the Gascogne always wore a small item of jewelry, such as a necklace or bracelet, and quickly acquiring the same. She amended her eating habits, too, when she noticed she was the only woman sipping her soup from the side of her spoon.
Cormeau, code-named Annette, had lost her husband early in the war and had a young daughter at home, but at Christmas 1943 she resisted the chance of returning to London for a short break. Seeing her little girl for a few days and then having to leave her again would have been confusing for the child and agonizing for Cormeau herself. The hope that the invasion had to come in 1944 must have provided some slight compensation; she yearned for the clandestine life to finish.
In January 1944, after appeals to London from Starr for support for the overworked Cormeau, Anne-Marie Walters joined Wheelwright. Although only twenty years old, Walters had the determination and self-confidence one might expect from someone whose father was an Oxford don and a senior representative of the League of Nations. Raised in Geneva, she had struck SOE instructors as being “active minded” and “curious” but also “domineering.” “She will not hesitate to always make use of her physical attractiveness in gaining influence over men,” the trainer stated.
Her attempts to get to France had been fraught with danger and tragedy. A Halifax carrying her was forced to return to Tempsford and attempted to land in dense fog. The plane crashed and three of the crew, including the pilot, died. Walters had been saved by the padding of her helmet, parachute, and jumpsuit.
When she finally made it to French soil, she dropped from a clear moonlit sky onto a marshy field not far from the town of Condom. With her was Claude Arnault, an explosives expert.
Walters used the cover of her fake identity as a Parisian student recovering from pneumonia to carry out her courier work for Wheelwright. She was busy that spring, taking messages and instructions to Starr’s many and varied bands of maquisards across the region, from Toulouse to Montréjeau to Tarbes. Sometimes she swung farther south into the Pyrenees to guide downed Allied airmen over the dangerous mountain paths and into Spain.
She used her looks to great effect, charming a ticket inspector who had become suspicious of the escapee she was accompanying, and making such friends with a local bus driver that he would let her off before a stop where he knew the Germans were checking papers.
In the lead-up to D-day, Wheelwright received “A” and “B” messages from London. These warned networks of the imminent invasion and included coded orders of what to do before and after. While Walters distributed these around the area, one Resistance leader was arrested with the “A” message in his possession.
Word went around her informers that the Gestapo was looking for a young, blue-eyed, fair-haired girl, and Walters went underground.
On the morning of the invasion, brimming with the confidence and cockiness of youth, she told a cautious and doubting résistant: “See? The Allies keep their promises after all. . . . You can hope openly now. . . . And no-one will stop you.”
Lise and Claude de Baissac were working in the southern areas of Normandy on D-day. Having escaped from France the previous summer, Lise had returned to a new region with a fresh cover name that April. She would have returned to France earlier but had broken her leg in parachute training at Ringway. The Lysander that had brought her back was flown by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity and had delivered her into a field northwest of Châteauroux. Her mission had been to work as courier for the Pimento network in Toulouse, a Socialist network under the control of an agent in Switzerland, who was suspected of not being completely loyal to the SOE. Lise had requested a transfer and headed north to work for her brother who had set up Scientist II.
Lise had arrived in Normandy early in April and had immediately begun work scouting for large landing grounds that paratroops could hold in the hours and days after the invasion. She became her brother’s second in command, stepping in when his argumentative pers
onality rubbed up against the eager and increasingly troublesome Resistance leaders. With the growing feeling that the invasion was near, there was anxiety and tension.
The Resistance, thanks to Scientist II, was now heavily armed. In the weeks before D-day, three hundred packages and almost eight hundred containers were delivered onto the local drop sites.
As D-day approached, Claude split the network between Calvados and Manche along the coast, and the Orne and Eure-et-Loir inland.
Lise was now cycling almost forty miles a day. Scientist II was so busy and in such an important area for the invasion planners that the SOE sent in a new radio operator. Phyllis Latour was a twenty-three-year-old South African with a French father. Because of the urgency of the situation, she was sent to France despite not completing her training. A resourceful agent, who had originally joined the WAAF to become a flight mechanic, Latour was motivated by a patriotic love of France, and revenge; a much-loved family friend had been killed by the Germans and his wife had committed suicide.
Lise de Baissac and Latour worked together to code and decode messages. De Baissac had a number of near misses as she cycled to Latour with messages and radio components. Sometimes she went through German checkpoints with radio crystals strapped to her legs and waist.
Latour dressed like a schoolgirl in a blue cotton dress when she had to leave her farmhouse. She stashed six bicycles at different safe houses to help her get around. When she met Germans, she pretended to be talkative and friendly, passing so well for a chatty teenager that they grew irritated and wanted to move her on.
Latour carried her codes on a piece of silk that she wound around a knitting needle and pushed through her hair, which was tied up with a shoelace. One day she was rounded up with a group of people in the street and taken to a local police station.
A female soldier made her and the other women in the group strip. The woman nodded at her hair. Latour reached up, pulled out the lace, shook her head and let her hair fall. The soldier paid no attention to the silk, and seeing that nothing was concealed in Latour’s hair, nodded her away. Latour got dressed and redid her hair.
When the D-day landings took place, Latour found herself close to the battlefield. Once, she had just finished transmitting in a farmhouse when two German soldiers burst in looking for food. She flipped shut her suitcase, covering the radio set, and said she was preparing to go home as she had scarlet fever. The Germans quickly left.
De Baissac was in Paris when she heard that the D-day messages had come through. It took her three days to get back to Normandy—the roads and railways were jammed with German troops.
The Gestapo had circulated a WANTED picture of Virginia Hall, a sketch based on descriptions from double agents and informers. Framed by shoulder-length hair, the face in the drawing showed a firmly set jaw and a look of steely determination in her eyes. The police artist had caught the essence of the woman.
Hall had worked with OSS agent Peter Harratt to create and expand the Heckler network across the Haute-Loire region of central France. By D-day they had three units of three hundred agents taking part in sabotage across the area, and as the invasion force crossed the English Channel, she and her teams of agents began a series of attacks to destroy bridges, trains, and phone lines, and to battle and harass local German troops.
Over the coming weeks, Hall worked tirelessly, organizing sabotage, covering the hills and lanes of the area on her bicycle, watching the roadways for German troops moving north, and reporting these movements back to London.
But she wanted an even bigger army. In her messages to London, she estimated there were a couple thousand men in the mountains who just needed weapons. The men were living rough in makeshift camps; many had escaped to the hills to avoid being sent to Germany as forced laborers. All wanted to fight now that liberation was close at hand.
Hall, like many agents across France, found herself having to make repeated promises to the maquisards that the weapons would come, only to find herself let down by her bosses back in London. Many times she and her colleagues set off to wait for a drop and ended up waiting in vain for an aircraft that never came. This put her in the difficult position of having to placate large groups of angry and frustrated Resistance fighters.
Eventually three planes flew up a local valley to drop the delivery she had been promising for some weeks. Now, with a large armed force, she increased attacks on bridges and tunnels, creating such fear in the German garrison at Le Puy that a force of an estimated five hundred German soldiers surrendered.
Virginia Hall’s chief, Bill Donovan, did not want to be kept out of the fight. He had come to England in the lead-up to the Normandy invasion, keen to see the troops go ashore. Understandably, he was told that having the leader of America’s spy service right on the front line was a security risk that the US secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, was not prepared to take.
All the same, using a mixture of bluster and Irish charm, Donovan secured himself and his London chief, David Bruce, cabins onboard the heavy cruiser USS Tuscaloosa, which was part of the massive invasion force leaving the south coast of England.
At six in the morning on June 6, Donovan felt the deck of the Tuscaloosa tremble as its heavy guns opened up on the German defenses. The Germans quickly responded, with shells landing in the water nearby. Then there was an explosion as the destroyer USS Corry struck a mine.
The troops went ashore at 6:30 AM. Donovan watched through binoculars as four heavy enemy guns laid down a barrage on the beach. With the troops was a film unit from the OSS. Their work would later be screened for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
In the skies above them, Allied bombers passed over their heads, looking to target the gun batteries inland. In one aircraft was William Stephenson. He had traveled to Europe with Donovan and had also been determined to see the results of all the intelligence planning, the culmination of the work of their agents. Stephenson was tucked into the rear gunner’s seat in an RAF bomber.
Throughout D-day, Donovan hinted about going ashore. The following morning he was told he could go if he found transport. A launch was coming aside the boat carrying fliers who had been shot down near the beach and three dead bodies. Donovan and Bruce climbed down a swinging rope ladder and jumped in. The lieutenant commander eyed Donovan, who had pulled on a steel helmet and pinned his Medal of Honor to his battledress. Donovan told him to get them as close to the beach as he could.
Eventually transferring to a DUKW amphibious truck, Donovan and Bruce sat right up on the front hood and were driven up onto the sand. They jumped down and scanned a field map as men and equipment streamed ashore around them.
Casualties at Utah Beach had been lower than expected, and the men of the American First Army had began to march inland, but the Germans were still determined to push the invaders back into the sea. Donovan heard the scream of aircraft engines and looked up to see four Messerschmitts coming in to strafe the beach. He and Bruce dived for cover, with Bruce landing on top of his chief. The steel rim of Bruce’s helmet gashed Donovan’s chin, causing blood to gush down his neck. For one terrible moment, Bruce thought he had cut a vital artery and killed “Wild Bill” Donovan. But Donovan got up, dabbed his chin with a handkerchief, and pointed the way inland.
Perhaps unrealistically, Donovan believed he could find one of his agents or a member of the Resistance who knew one. They walked for miles before reaching a forward antiaircraft battery. When Donovan told the lieutenant in charge that he was looking for secret agents, the junior officer looked at him in surprise.
Donovan and Bruce walked on alone but then came under sustained machine-gun fire. Taking cover in the dip of land under a hedgerow, Donovan confided to his companion: “You understand, of course, David, that neither of us must be captured. We know too much.”
“Yes, sir,” Bruce said.
“Have you your pills with you?”
David Bruce had not been expecting to find himself in this position with Donovan. He had
left his L tablet on the ship. He shook his head.
“Never mind,” Donovan said, as the machine gun rattled again. “I have two of them.”
Donovan pushed his hands into his battledress pockets and searched through their contents. He had his hotel keys, passport, money, and photographs of his granddaughter, but no pills. Suddenly he remembered: he had left them in the medicine cabinet in his room in Claridge’s hotel in London.
He grasped Bruce’s arm. “If we get out of here, you must send a message to Gibbs, the hall porter at Claridge’s, telling him on no account to allow the servants in the hotel to touch some dangerous medicines in my bathroom.”
Then he touched the revolver at his side. “I must shoot first,” he said.
Bruce whispered, “Yes, sir. But can we do much against machine guns with our pistols?”
“Oh, you don’t understand,” Donovan told him. “I mean if we are about to be captured I’ll shoot you first. After all, I am your commanding officer.”
Suddenly, the ground around them shook as artillery shells pounded the German positions ahead of them. Both men got up and sprinted back across the field toward the beach.
On their return they found General Bradley in a barn that he had turned into his command post. Donovan told him he wanted Bruce to spend some time with the First Army.
An exhausted Bradley told him, “Bill, I would be very glad to have Bruce at my headquarters later on. But suppose you now go back to wherever you came from.”
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 26