She had already organized and led attacks to harass the occupiers in the lead-up to D-day, disrupting supply lines through the Loire Valley, stopping German reinforcements from moving untroubled from the south to the north. Now she repeatedly cut railways and telephone lines, often doing damage that would not be repaired until after the liberation.
Such was Witherington’s effectiveness that on June 11 a column of German soldiers left their barracks in Bourges and headed for her headquarters in the château at Les Souches. Witherington’s Maquis had taken over the château and its outbuildings from its Pétainist owners.
Expecting trouble, the Wehrmacht commanders brought two thousand men. The château’s defenses comprised only two groups of Maquis numbering about 140 men. Witherington’s SOE firearms instructor in England had concluded she was “outstanding. Probably the best shot, male or female, we have yet had.” All the same, that day she faced overwhelming odds.
It was a warm Sunday morning. Cornioley had just celebrated Mass with the maquisards in a makeshift chapel in an outbuilding when there was a bugle call from the main road. It was a warning from one of Witherington’s guards to say that Germans were coming.
Under blazing sunshine a battle developed into a series of skirmishes through the houses and buildings linked to the château. When the Germans brought in a column of vehicles led by Panzer tanks, Witherington ordered her men to allow them through and hit the thin-skinned vehicles from the rear.
She escaped out the back of the house, as the Germans spread out across the gardens. Cornioley stopped and shot one of the approaching soldiers, allowing Witherington to escape. She fled into a wheat field and took cover. She watched as the Germans began to torch the buildings as the remaining maquisards continued to fight on.
As Witherington hugged the earth, German soldiers fired at random into the field. She was terrified for Cornioley and those maquisards who had been unable to disperse into the woods, but there was nothing she could do. She was armed only with a pistol.
As darkness fell, the château smoldered, and the Germans finally left. At about 10:30 PM Witherington cautiously crawled out from her hiding place. Twenty-four of her men had died. The Germans had lost more than three times as many.
She escaped through the countryside, wondering how she would contact her men, thinking about the huge amount of arms they had lost in the fire. Frustrated at having to leave behind her stock of arms and ammunition at the gutted château, Witherington was quickly on to London for further supply drops and began to reunite her maquisards. Recruits had already come to her. Since D-day, the number of volunteers was swelling. Men were leaving their homes to join up. The old hands referred to them sniffily as the résistants de la dernière heure. Witherington’s army swelled to five hundred and later, by the end of August, to twenty-five hundred. She appointed four captains to command four subsections and organized huge arms drops, supplying both her Maquis and the local Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP).
Witherington’s men referred to her as Le capitaine Pauline, after her code name. When she arrived at one of the many camps she had organized, they would crowd around her bicycle to hear her words of encouragement and orders. Later, with her blonde hair tucked under her beret, she would lead them to help lay charges under railway sleepers and in the span of bridges, and her men’s respect grew even deeper. Throughout the forests and farmhouses of the southern Loire she was known among the population as the “Warrior Queen.”
She had not only the skill of a battlefield leader but also the power to call in the RAF. After she located a gasoline train on the Vierzon-Bourges line, she had her wireless operator radio its location, and sixty wagons were blown to smithereens by the RAF.
In the middle of August, Waffen SS soldiers from Das Reich returned to the area, still intent on settling scores with the Resistance. As they searched for Maquis leader Lieutenant Louis Chauvier, who was wounded and hiding in Valençay, Witherington had him whisked to safety and hidden in the woods. In anger, the Germans torched the town.
As the Germans retreated east, they continued to execute civilians and maquisards. One day Witherington was taken by her men to see the mutilated bodies of their comrades. The men had had their eyes smashed with rifle butts and had been crushed beneath the wheels of a truck. Witherington later described it as “atrocious mutilation beyond recognition.”
The next day she was present when a French commander ordered the execution of a captured German officer.
At the end of August, Paris was liberated, but the fighting south of the Loire continued. The Germans now had General Patton on one flank and the French First Army at their heels.
Wehrmacht general Botho Elster led a twenty-thousand-strong column of the 159th Infantry Division, a ragged procession of tanks, men on foot, horses, and carriages. Elster was a talented soldier, intent on leading them to safety so that they might regroup. His column, which stretched for miles, was being driven into the Cher valley, where Witherington’s men were waiting.
She ordered bridges to be destroyed and roads blocked. Maquisards hid plastic explosives under horse dung and watched as the lead German trucks ran over them and exploded. Her men poured machine-gun fire onto the vehicles trapped on the narrow roads through the valley. She led a number of these attacks, organizing maquisards who weeks earlier had been farmhands and shop boys into a force that so harassed Elster’s column that he was forced to turn it around. Too afraid to surrender to the Maquis, Elster laid down his arms for the American army. The SOE later calculated that, in battle, Witherington’s men killed over one thousand Germans in five months and wounded many more.
On a gray Sunday morning at the end of June 1944, Yvonne Baseden sat in a culvert in an open field, her radio at her side, her eyes scanning the sky.
She heard them before she saw them: a fleet of thirty-six Flying Fortresses of the US Air Force. For the past few hours, Baseden had been on her radio, sending crack signals to guide the planes in. Using the S-phone—an SOE device that allowed an agent to have voice contact with an airplane within a range of up to thirty miles—she spoke to the lead pilot.
Within a few moments the first of the containers floated down on the parachutes, and the men and women of the Maquis ran out to collect their much-needed supplies. There were four hundred containers in all. “It was incredible,” she said later. “I was jumping around, waving madly to them!”
As a jubilant Baseden, who was just twenty-two, left the drop zone she handed her wireless to a young volunteer who would cycle with it to her next location. The Resistance and the SOE put such value on a wireless operator it made sense, when possible, for them not to transport their radios themselves.
Baseden and the other central figures of the Scholar network had a meeting place just outside Dole in a tall building with a loft packed with ripening cheese. The building was empty apart from a friendly couple who acted as its caretakers. Two days after the drop the core network personnel met there to discuss plans for their newly stocked maquisards. As they talked they were unaware that the young man who had taken Baseden’s wireless had been arrested, tortured, and given away the address.
The group was just finishing their meal when they noticed a vehicle coming toward the building. The plates were swept away and everyone went to prearranged hiding places. The building was vast and filled with empty packaging cases and stacks of wood.
The caretaker’s wife answered the door, and the Germans made a cursory search. They found no one and left, leaving a sentry behind. Sometime later a larger force of Germans arrived and talked to the sentry. He had become suspicious that there were more people in the house.
This time about twenty men swept through the building, finding each of the résistants one by one. Baseden was yanked out of her hiding place by her hair. A fellow agent, who was still hiding, was shot in the head when a German fired randomly into the ceiling. As the prisoners were hurried out and loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon, a summer thunderstorm broke ou
t overhead.
The Germans had no proof that Baseden was a radio operator, and her refusal to talk angered her captors. Even when they carried out a mock execution she refused to change her story: she was not an enemy agent; she was a French-born shorthand typist who had become unknowingly involved with the people with whom she was arrested.
Working so close to the Normandy battlefield had forced Lise de Baissac, her brother Claude, and their radio operator Phyllis Latour to abandon their previous security precautions and to share a house. They struggled for food and even ate rats but had to keep up the same intense volume of work. Latour sent 135 messages in the months before and after the invasion.
The detection vans did not stop their search with the coming of the D-day beach landings. Three were still actively searching for Latour, and the Resistance had to destroy one van. They used a grenade, and a German woman and two children were killed. Latour felt responsible for their deaths and attended their funerals.
The three were finally forced to move when German soldiers actually requisitioned their house. Lise was there alone when they arrived. She went upstairs to her room to try to rescue her sleeping bag—which was made from parachute silk—and she found an exhausted Wehrmacht soldier was already asleep in it. She did not make a fuss and left quickly.
As the Germans retreated from the Normandy coastline, the Maquis increased its attacks and Lise de Baissac became an inspiration to Resistance groups on the Orne, leading several armed raids on retreating columns. She was proficient at setting tire-bursters and laying mines in roads.
On July 8, a seven-man team of the SAS dropped from a Tempsford-based Halifax between Mayenne and Le Mans, to be met by de Baissac. Over the next four weeks she accompanied the soldiers, who were led by Captain Mike Blackman, as they scoured the area to report on enemy troop movements and identify potential targets for air attacks.
The team established a routine in which they spent one or two nights looking for targets before returning to base to code and transmit a signal. They then immediately moved to a new location. The operation, code-named Haft, was extremely successful, passing on information on forty targets before the battlefield overran the area. Blackman later recommended de Baissac for a medal for her work with his team.
Dublin-born Paddy O’Sullivan had not only an exceptional knowledge of languages but also the most tremendous gall and courage.
When her co-organizers, brothers Percy and Edmund Mayer, whose network was based in Angoulême, discovered she could not ride a bicycle, they instructed her to learn. Some German soldiers saw her efforts and laughed as she kept falling off. She told them if they were gentlemen they would come and help her; some of them came over and did just that.
Having learned, she cycled about forty miles a day, carrying messages between Limoges, Montluçon, and Châteauroux. Once, while carrying a radio through a checkpoint that she had been unable to avoid, she smiled and laughed with a German soldier, so charming him that he asked her out for a drink. She agreed and cycled on but never kept the date.
On another occasion she was challenged as to what was in her suitcase and answered with a laugh, “Oh, a wireless, of course!” The German waved her away.
Throughout D-day she had remained at her wireless day and night. Her network, Fireman, was one of those that had been tasked with helping to hold up Das Reich.
Later, as the Germans retreated eastward toward Germany, O’Sullivan helped organize attacks on them near Limoges. The Germans were delayed so successfully that tens of thousands of them were captured by the advancing American army.
After the liberation, O’Sullivan would return safely to England.
Polish-born Christine Granville had been marking time in North Africa, reading reports of the invasion and of the fighting in France.
Then, on July 7, she was driven to an airfield in Algiers and dressed in a shirt, skirt, and jacket cut to the French pattern by a tailor in London’s Margaret Street. A FANY gave her some sandwiches and a flask of tea for the journey; Benzedrine to keep her awake, should she ever need it; and a cyanide pill coated in rubber so that it would not melt in her mouth unless bitten in the most desperate of circumstances. Granville’s destination was the Jockey network, where its leader, Francis Cammaerts, had been working without his own wireless operator since the arrest of Cecily Lefort the previous September.
Her mission was twofold: to work with Cammaerts, a tall, loose-framed and deep-thinking Englishman whose network included a substantial force of résistants that had made a base high up on the Vercors plateau; and to try to subvert Polish units known to be fighting for the Germans in the region.
Granville parachuted onto the Vercors in high winds, was blown off course, and landed so heavily that she not only badly bruised her back and ankle but also smashed her revolver. She waited until morning when she was discovered by a search party of maquisards and taken to Vassieux-en-Vercors, the largest town on the plateau. Soon after, back out in the wild countryside, she met Cammaerts for the first time as they went to gather canisters of supplies. She was suntanned, slim, and alert following her training in North Africa, and Cammaerts was immediately impressed by her. She found him handsome too.
A few days before her arrival the Resistance had declared the plateau to be the “Free Republic of the Vercors.” On July 14—Bastille Day—a fleet of seventy-five American Flying Fortresses dropped nearly nine hundred containers carrying almost ninety-five tons of arms and munitions onto the Vercors. This daylight drop was followed by a bombing raid on the Luftwaffe base at Chabeuil.
While gathering in the huge drop of arms on July 14 several maquisards had been wounded by two Focke-Wulf 190s that had strafed the drop zone. The planes returned later that day to attack Die, just south of the plateau, where a Bastille Day parade was taking place. But these were only minor indicators of what was about to happen. German forces were gathered around the base of the vast plateau. An all-out attack was coming.
Within days of her arrival, Granville and Cammaerts were lovers, falling into each others arms in a hotel that had been attacked by aircraft and partially destroyed. With tension so great on the plateau—Cammaerts knew the uprising and the daylight drop was something the Germans could no longer afford to ignore—both agents were, as Cammaerts later said, “absolutely certain we were going to die the next day.” He knew that, despite the recent parachute drop, his men did not have the heavy artillery, mortars, and antitank weapons to repel an attack.
The following morning they were standing at a window when a German fighter with a single bomb slung underneath, came directly at them. The pair stood transfixed as the bomb left the aircraft and hurtled toward them. It slid across the roof above them and buried itself in the ground behind the hotel. Granville laughed and gripped Cammaerts’s hand. “They don’t want us to die,” she said.
As they waited for the German onslaught, Cammaerts sent Granville on missions across the plateau, carrying messages and warnings to groups of résistants defending different areas. On July 18 three divisions of German soldiers—a force of ten thousand—attacked the plateau. Supported by the Luftwaffe, they quickly took the northern part of the plateau. Three days later crack SS troops landed by glider in the south and attacked Vassieux. Despite their courage, the Maquis was being overwhelmed by a superior and heavily armed enemy.
Cammaerts, Granville, and a friend made their escape from the Vercors on July 22, traveling first by car and then stumbling down through the undergrowth on the steep sides of the plateau on foot. It was a desperately difficult journey. They knew the Germans were in the area en masse and were unlikely to take prisoners. They were tired, worried for their comrades, and carried heavy radios, gear, and their personal equipment—everything they needed to continue the fight elsewhere.
They reached the road west of Die and watched from the bushes as a Wehrmacht column led by three tanks moved in. They managed to slip past the German cordon before heading south to join up with the Maquis in the Drôme.
German revenge on the Vercors was complete and ruthless. As well as the 639 maquisards killed, it is estimated that more than 200 civilians died. Doctors and nurses working in a makeshift Resistance field hospital were executed, as were their patients.
The two SOE agents, who had become lovers during the heady days of Vercors “independence,” had had a lucky escape. But within weeks Cammaerts would be facing a German firing squad—with Granville his only chance of survival.
While Jacqueline Nearne was being debriefed in England—the officer who interviewed her described as “a very capable, intelligent, and highly reliable woman”—her sister had been waiting in the outskirts of Paris. Without her circuit leader Savy, Eileen Nearne had few messages to send, and she was delighted when London transferred to a new network, Spiritualist, which was active in the east of the French capital.
Spiritualist was led by a thirty-six-year-old former ski resort playboy, René Dumont-Guillemet. He had been briefed by Buckmaster to recruit those left without leadership following the arrest of Suttill, from the Prosper circuit, and others loyal to the Farmer circuit in Lille, whose leader had been killed in a gun battle with the Germans.
At Lille the Resistance had one of their greatest single successes on D-day itself, creating a traffic jam of fifty-one trains that were then picked off by RAF bombers.
Using the cover of his own haulage company, Dumont-Guillemet proved hugely successful in his task, ensuring Nearne became very busy with the radio. By late July 1944 she had sent more than one hundred messages to London. Her chances of being caught increased with each “sked.” When the Germans increased the number of direction-finding vans in the area around her house in Bourg-la-Reine, she decided it was time to move with her radio.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 28