Donovan returned to the beach, where he tried out his German on a captured Wehrmacht captain who told him he was “overwhelmed” at the sight of the Allied armada and that he realized he was witnessing a historic event.
Donovan returned to Plymouth, England, on June 9. He sent a six-page memo to Roosevelt about what he had seen in Normandy, noting that the Germans did not have the resources to meet the Allied attack at every landing point. Hitler’s Atlantic Wall had been breeched.
In a letter to another friend Donovan wrote, “There will be a lot of hard going [in the months ahead] but something has died in the German machine.”
In the days and weeks after the D-day invasion, a key task for the agents and the Resistance networks was harassing and delaying German reinforcements trying to reach the Normandy battlefield. If the Nazis were able to rush enough tanks and troops into the area there was a danger that the invasion could at best become bogged down and at worst fail altogether.
One key target was the Second SS Panzer Division, known as Das Reich, which began its deadly march north from Montauban—450 miles south of the Normandy beaches—on June 8. Das Reich was made up of fifteen thousand battle-hardened men and more than two hundred tanks and self-propelled guns. British intelligence had calculated that the division could be moved onto the battlefront in three days. The SOE said that time frame had to be extended; Das Reich’s arrival at Normandy must be delayed.
Carrying out that order required great courage, and the price would be paid in blood, often that of French civilians who played no part in the Resistance.
Five of F Section’s networks would be deployed to stop Das Reich. Tony Brooks, an efficient and brave English-born agent who had been brought up in Switzerland, used a network of railway workers, cheminots, key members of the Resistance for their access and knowledge of the rail network, to sabotage flatcars that Das Reich planned to use. These flatcars were the only carriages that could pass under bridges while laden with tanks. Brooks and his team spent many dark nights using grease guns to apply an abrasive paste to the axle bearings of the flatcars, which caused them to seize up after only a few miles on the rail track.
Das Reich, which had been spread across camps over a thiry-mile area, set off by road, an immense convoy of armored cars, towed artillery, half-tracks, troop carriers, and tanks. It tore up the asphalt on the roads as it rumbled forward, the vehicles traveling three hundred feet apart in case of air attack.
The Maquis, some woefully underequipped, rose up to meet them. At the hamlet of Groléjac, fifteen men who had never seen action—one holding a 1914 French Army rifle—lay in wait next to a stone bridge. They faced a battalion of Panzergrenadiere. The action was swift. Five maquisards and five civilians died. This was the first violent action against Das Reich. It had been delayed by about twenty minutes, but the pattern had been set.
In another small village that the German division passed through after taking a wrong turn, it fired indiscriminately, killing thirteen unarmed people. Throughout Corrèze these acts of sacrifice and bravery continued, with Resistance men also cutting down trees and creating roadblocks to try to slow the advance.
Villages on the route north were set on fire and families shot out of hand. The saboteurs continued. When a troop train was derailed, a fierce gun battle followed between the soldiers and the Maquis. Several were killed. One was captured and was thrown into the locomotive furnace and burned to death before the locomotive continued its journey toward Normandy. Each German soldier had been read an Order of the Day from Hitler that no one should show mercy to any French man, woman, or child. Nevertheless, reports coming in increasingly showed that the Maquis actions were reaching considerable proportions.
On arrival in Tulle on June 9, Das Reich took back the town from the Resistance and began reprisals. Between four in the afternoon and seven in the evening, ninety-nine people were hanged in the streets from lampposts and balconies. The killing stopped when the Nazis realized they were running out of rope.
The following day members of Das Reich carried out an even larger massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. The town’s menfolk were herded into garages and barns and shot. Women and children were murdered in the church. More than 640 died in a few hellish hours—205 of them were children.
During the evening of June 9, an open Talbot car containing Major Helmut Kämpfe, who had won the Knight’s Cross in Russia and now commanded a battalion of Das Reich, approached a road junction fifteen miles outside Limoges. He saw lights up ahead and stopped. He was immediately surrounded by armed maquisards and bundled into a truck. Kämpfe was never seen again—it is presumed he was executed shortly afterward—but his unit carried out a desperate search for him.
Shortly after ten in the next morning, soldiers from the division were combing fields and houses near the village of Salon-la-Tour when they saw a large black Citroën approach them and screech abruptly to a stop.
One man jumped out and ran away, followed by another man and a woman. Both were carrying Sten guns. The man was a résistant named Jacques Dufour, who had worked with the Stationer circuit. The woman was SOE agent Violette Szabo. She had arrived in France for the second time just over forty-eight hours before.
Just as a chance encounter had doomed Kämpfe the evening before, Szabo had now been caught up in the search for him. The Germans opened fire and a gun battle developed. A woman tending cows nearby was killed by a machine-gun burst from the Germans as she stepped out of a barn.
Dufour escaped, but Szabo either twisted or, according to one villager, was shot in the ankle. She continued to exchange fire from a position under an apple tree at the edge of a cornfield. It is unknown if any German soldiers were killed in the battle as there is no record of German casualties, but Szabo’s courage has never been disputed. She continued firing until she ran out of ammunition. When two soldiers dragged her to an SS officer for a summary interrogation, she spat in his face.
These small battles, the actions of the Resistance, and the hours taken to “punish” the population and to sweep north in search of more “terrorists” took a toll on the Second SS Panzer Division.
Field Marshall Gerd Von Rundstedt, in charge of the Nazi defense against the invasion, urgently needed its heavy armor. He demanded it be entrained and rushed to Normandy as a priority.
As word spread about the massacres many in the Resistance decided the price of sabotage was too high, and Das Reich suffered few attacks on the stretch that took it through Limoges.
However, a platoon of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) had arrived by parachute in the early hours of June 6, and it went into action, destroying rail track and trains, mining the roads around Poitiers—a staging and assembly point for all Axis troops in the southwest of France—and raiding convoys in Jeeps that had been dropped by parachute.
The SAS’s greatest success—before their forest hideout was discovered and they were nearly all killed—was the identification of eleven gasoline trains carrying vital fuel for Das Reich hidden in sidings near Châtellerault. Using their radios, the SAS arranged for a squadron of Mosquitoes to destroy the trains and the essential fuel they carried with lethal accuracy.
The combined efforts to harass Das Reich had come at a huge cost, but the delay Allied invasion planners wanted was achieved. The division only rumbled piecemeal into the rear of the Normandy battlefield between June 15 and 30. It did not fight as a unit in Normandy until July 10—over a month after the invasion began.
In the days before and after D-day, Denise Bloch had been working day and night with her organizer, Robert Benoist, to sabotage communications installations and railway track.
They brought down high pylons at the Île Héron and cut the railway and telephone lines coming into Nantes. A few days after the invasion, Bloch radioed London to say that all enemy traffic in the Dourdan-Rambouillet area was at a standstill thanks to the sabotage.
Benoist was a dashing figure. A former race-car driver, his wealthy family owned a number
of châteaus. Soon after D-day he and Bloch headed to one of these homes, Villa Cécile, an estate southwest of Paris, where he reckoned he could raise an army of two thousand people.
Benoist received a message that his mother was ill, and on June 18 he headed to Paris to visit her. As he left the château he told Bloch and the others there to “scatter” if he had not returned by lunchtime tomorrow. They took it as a joke.
By the time Benoist arrived in the city, his mother had already died. He spent time with his family and then went to a safe house to spend the night. As he opened the door, a pistol was pushed into his face. The Gestapo had been waiting. The group had been betrayed—to this day it is unclear by whom—and through a series of mistakes a warning that the group was blown never reached Bloch.
The next day, when Benoist did not return, Bloch was worried but not overly concerned. Having delivered her “sked” with London, she headed to the local railway station to see if Benoist was on the Paris train.
When he was not, she returned to the Villa Cécile and joined a group having an aperitif on the terrace. Soon afterward they saw a German convoy approach and turn down the long drive. The Germans began shooting before they reached the villa. Storming inside, they shouted the name “Line!”—one of Bloch’s code names. “Ou est Line?”
More than forty Germans searched the house, finding Bloch’s wireless and a cache of machine guns. Eventually, she had to give herself up. She and the others were loaded into trucks and driven into the night. Behind them the Villa Cécile was set alight.
Bloch was doubly vulnerable. She was not only an SOE agent; she was Jewish. Her courage held fast under interrogation, and when the Allies broke free from Normandy, she was one of thirty-seven SOE prisoners in Frèsnes, including Violette Szabo, put on a train to Germany.
The agents of the Wheelwright network, including radio operator Yvonne Cormeau and courier Anne-Marie Walters, had been hiding out in their headquarters in the hilltop village of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, a remote location with no electricity or running water, just a well. Cormeau would head into the hills to transmit, scanning her surroundings with the binoculars she kept at her side.
Soon after the invasion, a German spotter plane circled the village and reported Maquis activity. Early the following morning, the Germans launched an attack on the plateau on which the village stood. Walters cleaned and prepared grenades as the battle developed.
She also took charge of the network’s records, a bundle of papers that included details of contacts in the area. She hoped to escape with them if she could, destroy them if she could not. Slinging her Sten gun over her shoulder and pushing three magazines into her overall pockets, she made her way out of the village, which was already half-abandoned by the Resistance.
Walters scrambled through brambles and rocks to find a cave below the village church, which they had formerly used as an arms depot. She shoved the papers into an old sack, lifted stones, and scratched a hole in the earth. She buried the papers and covered them with rocks.
By the time she got back, the Germans were very close. As she made her way carefully along the side of a hill she heard a noise at her feet. Looking down she could see three men hidden in the bushes below her. They waved her down and explained that the Germans were on the crest of the hill opposite. She made the rest of the journey on her belly.
Yvonne Cormeau escaped from the village with the Resistance camp doctor, who carried her set in one hand and his medical case in the other. Cormeau carried her bag of codes and crystals.
They got away quickly, following paths and fields, posing as a rural doctor and his assistant if they were challenged. Behind them they heard the small arms and explosions of the battle. When they reached the road to Condom the doctor found a house where he had friends. Cormeau set up her wireless and told London what was happening to Wheelwright.
By one in the afternoon the battle was over and the village lost. Nineteen résistants were dead; the Maquis claimed to have killed more than ten times as many attackers. Their final act was to blow up an ancient tower where hundreds of pounds of high explosives had been stored.
Led by Walters, the Wheelwright team formed a long column of forty-five battered trucks and cars and wound its way southwest through country roads to Panjas and a new base. The fighters were exhausted, their legs wearily hanging off the sides of the vehicles, Stens and rifles at their sides. On top of each truck was a Bren gun and a Cross of Lorraine, which flapped proudly in the warm summer breeze. Some of the men nursed arm and leg wounds or had bandages around their heads. Most sang.
Walters prayed the column would not meet any Germans on the road—they were all too tired to fight. Her prayers were answered; the only troubles they had were getting through the crowds in each village, as women handed up wine and food and men sang “La Marseillaise.”
The people of France sensed the time was right to come into the open and celebrate the coming liberation.
About two hundred miles northeast of the Wheelwright agents’ base at Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, John Farmer and Nancy Wake had based their own Maquis in what seemed an even more secure hilltop retreat. Their force was huge, numbering seven thousand men scattered across camps on a plateau above the spa town of Chaudes-Aigues. In the week after D-day, Wake and radio operator Denis Rake organized four huge arms drops to their mountain army.
Wake had just returned from collecting the supplies from one of the parachute drops and was soaking in a bathtub when she heard machine-gun fire in the distance. Getting dressed quickly, she joined Farmer to hear scouts’ reports that the mountain approaches to the plateau were “black” with German troops. In fact, more than fifteen thousand SS troops were besieging the area with artillery and air support.
Wake, Farmer, and Rake jumped into a car and rushed north to the village of Fridefont, where the most powerful Maquis leader, Gaspard, had his base. He had overcome his aversion to working with the British when he saw the amount of arms they could supply. However, he remained frosty to outside interference in his command. Farmer advised him to withdraw; he refused. Farmer, feeling the position was useless, got Rake to radio London to see if a Free French officer could order Gaspard to save his men.
While they waited for London to reply, Wake took the car around the Maquis positions and kept the fighters supplied with ammunition. As she drove, heavy artillery pounded the countryside and Junkers 88s swooped overhead.
On the road near Fridefont, Wake saw a shape similar to a Lysander, but she knew immediately what it was: a Henschel 126 German reconnaissance plane. As she watched it bank, she realized it planned to come in directly at her along the line of the road. As the pilot held his course he pressed the button that activated the plane’s forward-firing MG 17 machine gun and the dust in the road ahead of Wake spat into the air.
Seeing the angle of the plane’s descent Wake did the one thing the pilot least expected: she slowed right down. Unable to adjust the angle of the fixed gun, he flew over her head, without a round striking the car.
Now Wake accelerated. In her rearview mirror, she could see the pilot making a turn. At the side of the road a young maquisard she knew well waved frantically. As the Luftwaffe pilot began his new strafing run she screeched to a halt, jumped out, and ran for cover. Bullets again ripped into the roadway just a few feet from the car.
As the plane rose into the sky again, the young Frenchman tugged at Wake’s arm and pointed to the woods. But her eyes were on the car. She scrambled up the grass verge, ducked inside the door, and pulled out a package from behind the driver’s seat.
As the pilot opened up the machine guns in his third run, Wake jumped back into the ditch and ran into the woods. Behind her there was a flash and an explosion as a bullet ignited the car’s fuel tank.
Huddled against the side of a tree the young maquisard looked at the package and raised his eyebrows quizzically. Wake smiled and opened it to show him what it contained: some makeup, tea, and the red satin cushion she had br
ought with her to make life in the forests more bearable.
At Fridefont Denis Rake was still waiting for the message from London that Farmer hoped would persuade the Maquis to withdraw. The Germans had secured their positions on the slopes to the plateau and were sending forward advance parties up onto the plateau itself.
Wake was with Rake as he decoded the message. As they hoped, London ordered Gaspard to save his force and withdraw. Rake prepared to take it to Gaspard, but Wake stopped him. “I want you to add something to that message,” she told him. “Sign it, ‘Koenig.’”
Rake knew immediately what she meant. General Marie-Pierre Koenig was one of de Gaulle’s most respected generals, a man from whom Gaspard would be honored to receive any order, even an order to withdraw. The message was amended, and Gaspard agreed that his Maquis would scatter under the cover of darkness.
That night Wake herself led 120 men through the countryside. They walked for three days and nights and eventually met up with the others who had escaped in the village of Saint-Santin, near Aurillac.
Rake had feared he was about to be captured on the plateau and had buried his radio, so the unit had no way to communicate with London. Wake volunteered to cycle more than one hundred miles to where a Free French operator was known to be in contact with the SOE in Algiers. It took her three days to get there and back, passing through roadblocks and towns filled with German soldiers. Thanks to her marathon bike ride, the message to the SOE that the Resistance of Chaudes-Aigues had regrouped got through to Algiers, and two days later the SOE dropped Rake a new wireless set.
Pearl Witherington had been living the clandestine life of an agent since September 1943. Having taken over the Wrestler network following the arrest of Maurice Southgate in May, she found herself leading—with the support of her fiancé, Henri Cornioley—a committed force of several hundred maquisards. With the landings on D-day, Witherington, on whose head the Gestapo had put a bounty of one million francs, brought her force out into the open.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 27