Shadow Warriors of World War II

by Gordon Thomas

  She had just one last message to send for Dumont-Guillemet. The summer rain was heavy on the roof of the house on the morning of July 22, 1944, as she assembled her set and wound out her aerial. She tapped out the message and completed the transmission.

  When she heard vehicles and shouts outside, she had to wipe the condensation from the window to see what the commotion was down in the street. The view that greeted her was the worst nightmare of every wireless operator at work in occupied Europe. The Germans had tracked her down.

  Eileen Nearne just had time to burn her codes and dismantle her set before there was a loud banging on her door. She opened it to have a plainclothes Gestapo officer step into the house. Immediately, and with great presence of mind, Nearne started to shout at him, appearing confused and angry. The man stared at her before waving a number of armed men to enter. They ransacked the house, quickly found the radio, and bundled Nearne into a waiting car.

  At Gestapo headquarters at 11 Rue des Saussaies, she played the role of a clueless young woman who sent messages on the radio for a mysterious boss who she thought ran some sort of company. She pretended not to care what he did and to be shocked and outraged when her interrogators suggested she was a spy. They beat her and submerged her in a bath filled with water, but her story did not change. They were unable to break her. She was put in a car bound for Frèsnes prison and a concentration camp beyond.

  As the twenty-three-year-old was driven through the streets of Paris, she looked at what she thought was the most beautiful city in the world for what she feared might be the last time, and she said a silent prayer. She remained at Frèsnes until August 15, less than two weeks before the liberation of Paris, when she and hundreds of other prisoners were loaded onto a train bound for Germany.

  At Ravensbrück concentration camp, she met fellow SOE agents Lilian Rolfe, Denise Bloch, and Violette Szabo, whose true identities as spies were known to the Germans. Nearne maintained her pretense that she was a simple shop girl throughout her captivity. It was a decision that saved her life. After periods in work camps, she escaped during a forced march and eventually met up with soldiers of the US First Army when they arrived in Leipzig during April 1945.

  One dark evening toward the end of January 1945, Rolfe, Bloch, and Szabo were executed in the crematorium yard of Ravensbrück by an SS lance corporal with a pistol. A camp overseer who witnessed their deaths stated, “All three were very brave and I was deeply moved.”

  Senior officers at the Gestapo headquarters in the old town hall of Montluçon, where Maurice Southgate had been taken immediately after his arrest three months earlier, always met for an aperitif shortly before 12:30 PM. It was a time to discuss prisoners and plans for forthcoming arrests over a glass of schnapps.

  It was a sunny day in late July 1944, and despite the fighting to the north, those officers, two hundred miles south of Paris, still felt secure enough to have only a basic guard on the door to their building. They were quite unaware of the four cars that were making their way through the streets of the medieval town. Inside were fourteen maquisards, armed with Sten guns and grenades.

  The deadly convoy roared up to the back entrance of the town hall, and the raiders rushed inside, opening fire as they went. In a room on the first floor, the officers put down their glasses in shock. As they stood up, their chairs scuffing on the floor, the door to the room was flung open. They caught sudden sight of a figure in khaki, a beret set at an angle on her head. It was a woman. She had a machine gun over her shoulder and two hand grenades in her fists. She lobbed them forward, shut the door, and two explosions, moments apart, ripped through the room.

  As the Gestapo men lay dying, the woman was already running back down the stairs. It was Nancy Wake.

  The raid on the Gestapo headquarters was the culmination of a period of intense activity by Wake and her comrades.

  After the loss of their base at Chaudes-Aigues, the Maquis had set up a series of independent camps. Wake decided to stay with her band of one hundred résistants in a forest near the town of Ygrande. She chose the location as it was near to the Resistance leader whom she most respected, Henri Tardivat, the man who had greeted her when her parachute had been stuck up a tree.

  The schoolteacher, whom she always called Tardi, was a natural leader whose fighters were always well fed and well looked after. In the weeks after D-day, Tardi had revealed himself to be a master of planning and leading hit-and-run attacks on German convoys. Wake always accompanied him on the raids, helping him choose the location—usually a section of sunken road with wooded terrain rising on either side—and instructing the men where to lay the concealed charges.

  Tardi would post a sentry up ahead who would signal with a mirror when the convoy was approaching.

  As the convoy rumbled below them, Wake would signal and detonator plungers would be depressed. The raiders tried to target the escort vehicles at the front and back of the convoys first, trapping the thin-skinned trucks between the burning vehicles. Wake and the others would step out from behind trees and spray Sten and Bren gun fire onto the Germans.

  With the Germans being cut down as they jumped from the trucks and unable to organize their defense, Tardi would signal the withdrawal. He and Wake had agreed never to remain too long at the scene of an ambush. A handful of men stayed behind to cover them as the main band of maquisards disappeared into the forest.

  Now that D-day was here, Wake made no pretense to be a “secret” agent. She did not live a clandestine life in a nondescript flat; she drove through the forests in cars packed with weapons. Twice when she came to roadblocks guarded by the Milice and German soldiers, she rolled down her window and shot them with her Sten as the car sped through. So, when one night Tardi suggested the attack on the Gestapo headquarters, she was a natural choice to lead one of the raiding party’s cars.

  Tardi had given her the key role of attacking the room in which the senior officers met, but the others carried out grenade and machine-gun attacks throughout the building. When the four cars sped away from the old town hall, they left thirty-eight Germans dead or dying.

  The residents of Montluçon came out into the streets on hearing the gun battle, believing that the liberation had arrived. Wake and the others had to lean on their car horns to move the people from the road and make their escape.

  The Germans in central France were searching for ways to retreat east toward the Belfort Gap, a valley between the Vosges and Jura mountains. Tardivat received orders to slow up the withdrawal by blowing up the bridge over the river at Cosne-d’Allier.

  Tardi and Wake went to the cave where they had stashed their explosives. They were joined by two other saboteurs and a small, tight-knit group of Spanish Republicans who had become Wake’s personal bodyguards.

  The bridge was unguarded. Tardi and Wake slung ropes from the barriers and tied them around their waists. With the explosives in backpacks, they climbed down the struts of the bridge to what they had adjudged to be its weakest point. They set the timers on the charges for five minutes, cleared sightseers from the town who had come to see what was going on, and took cover to watch the center of the bridge explode and fall into the river below.

  Despite the German army’s disarray, it needed to hit back at Nancy Wake’s Maquis and sent a force into the forest to track her down. When the camp at Ygrande came under attack, the maquisards were pinned down by a heavy machine gun. Armed with a Colt automatic, Wake led a team of ten men through the trees to outflank the gun. She helped the maquisard at her side with a bazooka, and together they knocked out the gun nest.

  Soon after, she took part in a raid on an armaments store near Mont Mouchet. Wake led a team to take care of the two SS sentries at the building’s west gate. She and her comrades crawled through the darkness in heavy rain. They watched the two sentries meet and then turn. As the two men separated, Wake and another maquisard had to make their way stealthily across thirty feet of open ground and kill them silently.

  She was wi
thin a few feet of her target when he turned, saw her, and began to point his rifle. She saw with horror the glint of a bayonet. Wake’s actions seemed instinctive, but they were based on training drilled into her in Scotland and on a ruthlessness she had developed over her months in France. She leaped at the man and delivered a karate chop to his neck just below his ear. The man crumpled to the ground with Wake stumbling on top of him. She could feel an agonising pain where the bayonet had sliced along her right arm.

  She waved her men on. They stormed the store and laid the charges. Tardi knew a friendly doctor in a nearby village who treated Wake. The wound was deep, but he stopped the bleeding and bandaged her up. She recovered well in Tardi’s new base, an abandoned château, and was there at the end of August when American and Free French troops liberated Montluçon.

  Only then, after liberation, determined to be reunited with her husband, did she make contact with a friend in Marseille. He told her that her husband, Henri Fiocca, who had helped her escape the Gestapo three years earlier, had been executed. He had told friends before his arrest that he had not wanted to leave Marseille, because he knew that one day Wake would come home. He had been tortured by the Gestapo, which had realized in the months after she left that Wake was the “White Mouse,” but he had never revealed she had escaped to England.

  One of the key German garrisons on the France-Italy frontier was at Col de Larche, situated high in a pass above the town of Digne. The fort was manned mainly by Poles who had been forcibly conscripted into the German army. These reluctant troops, the SOE had previously noted, took every opportunity to be made prisoners of war.

  Christine Granville and a local gendarme guide spent two days climbing goat tracks through the mountains to reach the garrison. Once there, she made contact with a guard to assess how dedicated the occupants were to the coming battle. Two days later she returned alone, now with the knowledge that German forces were approaching from the Italian side of the border.

  There were 150 Poles in the concrete and stone garrison, and Granville had taken with her two props to help her win them over: a bullhorn and a Polish flag. A guard let her address the men. Standing with the red-and-white flag draped around her shoulders, she told them that when the time was right they should sabotage the garrison, desert, and join the Free French. She then handed out pretyped instructions on A4 notepaper, telling them how to come down the pass carrying white flags, which would grant them safe passage as prisoners of war if they preferred not to join the Resistance.

  Less than a week later, a group of maquisards arrived at the fort to find the garrison commander, who was unprepared to surrender, trying to control dozens of mutinous soldiers. The Maquis issued him an ultimatum and then looked on as the Poles removed the breechblock firing pins from their heavy weapons and deserted en masse, bringing mortars and machine guns with them. The SOE attributed the complete surrender of the garrison to Granville’s “own personal efforts.”

  But, on the very day of the surrender, Granville learned that Cammaerts had been arrested. Having been informed that the Allied landings on the south coast of France were imminent, Cammaerts had been touring the résistants of his circuit with a new agent, Xan Fielding, and a maquisard named Christian Sorensen. All carried fake papers, and if they were stopped, they planned to say they were hitching rides from a driver they did not know. The driver was Claude Renoir, grandson of the Impressionist artist.

  As they made their tour, Fielding realized he was carrying a lot of money on him, having brought it into France for use by the Resistance. For safety, he divided it up with Cammaerts and Sorensen. This act, designed to be cautious, in fact put all three in great danger.

  All went well until they were on the return leg of their journey and almost home safe. Just outside Digne they came upon a roadblock on a bridge across one of the rivers that met in the town. Cammaerts was not concerned as it was manned by eastern European soldiers who did not speak French and who gave only a cursory glance at their papers.

  Then, as Renoir was moving off, another car rushed up. Cammaerts hissed, “Gestapo!” A Milice officer got out, approached the men’s car, and scrutinized their papers. Fielding’s work permit had not been stamped, and he was escorted at gunpoint to the Gestapo car. Cammaerts and Sorensen, who both claimed not to know Fielding, looked uninterested as the officer searched through the items taken from their pockets. He then noticed that the banknotes in their wallets were from the same series. A strange coincidence to happen among strangers.

  Cammaerts and Sorensen were arrested, too. Renoir, whose papers were in order, was permitted to drive off. He rushed to report the arrests.

  As part of their D-day operations, the SOE and OSS created special three-man sabotage teams known as Jedburghs. One team, code-named Jeremy, joined Virginia Hall’s fighting force in central France during the middle of August. Hall had paved the way for their arrival, having organized twenty-two parachute drops of supplies in four weeks. One package contained tea and new stump socks for Hall. It had been sent by Vera Atkins; Hall might have been working for the OSS now, but to Atkins she was still one of her agents.

  Jedburgh Jeremy based itself at Le Puy and organized three battalions of Forces Françaises d’Intérieur, numbering fifteen thousand men. Together with Hall’s guerrilla fighters, the Jedburghs harassed retreating Germans and cut communication lines.

  Hall led or organized attacks on bridges, freight trains, and telephone lines. The rail line between Langogne and Brassac was cut four times. A railway bridge at Chamalières was destroyed, sending a locomotive careering into the gorge below. A group of maquisards, carrying bazookas, destroyed a convoy of trucks and a tank on the road between Le Puy and Langeac.

  Hall’s force killed an estimated 150 German soldiers and forced a further 500 to surrender. She also captured nineteen members of the Milice. As the Germans themselves had noted, she was indeed one of the most dangerous of all the Allied agents at work in France during the occupation.

  After twenty-four hours in Digne prison without food or water, Cammaerts, Fielding, and Sorensen were taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Villa Marie-Louise.

  There, in elegant surroundings, they received a brutal interrogation in which they were punched in the face and kidneys. All three said they were smugglers. The Germans were not convinced, but with fear high about a possible invasion on the south coast, they decided to condemn the men to death.

  Christine Granville was working as a guide to Jedburgh teams too, and while visiting one local Resistance team she tried to persuade them to rescue Cammaerts. They decided the priorities of supporting the imminent invasion must come first, and that anyway, in the event of a commando raid, the Germans would probably execute the prisoners.

  She learned that Cammaerts was to be shot on the night of August 17. She knew instantly that she had to rescue him, and if necessary, she would do it alone. Her reasons were personal and practical. Although the Germans did not know it—they had not even guessed that he was English—they had in their cells one of the SOE’s leading operatives in France, a man who knew everything about the Resistance network, which would be so helpful to the Allies as their armies moved inland from the Mediterranean coast.

  Two days before Cammaerts was due to be executed, the daily crowd of prison visitors shuffled inside the walls of Digne prison. Among them was Christine Granville. She was tired after cycling twenty-five miles but filled with determination that she would succeed in the job ahead. As she wandered around the inner walls, she whistled the tune “Frankie and Johnny,” a tale of deceit and murder that she and Cammaerts liked to sing together. Inside his cell, he heard her and took it as her telling him she loved him.

  She meant much more than that. Granville went to the Gestapo office at the prison and asked to see a man named Schenck, an extremely dangerous thing to do. She not only risked exposing herself—there was a price on her head—but by showing interest in Cammaerts, she risked tipping off the Germans to his importance.
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  She told Schenck the prisoner was her husband, adding that she was related to Field Marshal Montgomery and therefore knew that the invasion was on its way. She told Schenck he would be added to a list to be “handed over to the mob.”

  Uneasy, Schenck said he would talk to an interpreter from the Milice named Waem—the man who had arrested Cammaerts and the others. Schenck said he would need two million francs to persuade him. Granville agreed and told him that if he reneged on the deal she would shoot him.

  She cycled out of Digne prison, and the Resistance radioed the SOE in Algiers. The SOE agreed to send the money immediately.

  By the time she returned to the prison the Allies had launched Operation Dragoon, with thousands of French and American troops landing on the Mediterranean coast of France. Schenck had so far done nothing, but fearful of French retribution after the liberation he arranged a meeting with Waem. Granville gave him ten bundles of rolled banknotes.

  That afternoon she went to Schenck’s apartment and waited. There was a screech of tires, and her heart missed a beat as Waem came through the door, his revolver pointed at her chest. But he wanted to hear what she had to say and put the gun down on the table. Over cups of coffee made by Schenck’s wife, Granville began to tell him that the Allies would soon be in Digne and when they got there he would be handed over to the Resistance authorities. He would then be treated as what he was—one of the Gestapo’s chief torturers.

  She admitted to him that she was a British agent and told him she could protect him. Waem listened, knowing there was little in the way of German defenses protecting him from the advancing Allies. Ensuring the safety of the three prisoners, she told him, was the only way he and Schenck could save themselves. If they helped they would receive safe passage to the nearest Allied base outside of France.