In these homes, the Jewish children were taught side by side with the Gentiles. They learned the Lord’s Prayer, Christian songs and traditions, and Bible verses. Le Chambon’s inhabitants believed that they were finally getting a chance to put into action what they had been taught all of their lives. One farmer’s wife summed it up for all of them. The war was a blessing in disguise, she said. It was making it possible for Christians to become familiar with God’s chosen people.
As with the rest of France, however, the bucolic peace of the Yssingeaux Plateau was also threatened by the occupiers. Nazis who ventured through Le Chambon found it the perfect location to set up rehabilitation centers for those who’d spent time on the Russian front. They took over two of the town’s hotels for their purposes, one of which was across the street from the headquarters of the armed Resistance. The German presence was a physical reminder of the penalty for hiding Jews: either the hell of the concentration camps or a brutal execution.
Miraculously, the German presence never interfered with the work being carried out by the citizens of Le Chambon. By war’s end they would have aided five thousand Jews to escape Nazi horrors. It was almost as many as the plateau’s entire population. And in the midst of all these good deeds, Virginia was planning to build a formidable Resistance circuit.
16
Aux Armes, Citoyens
The quaint fieldstone farmhouse of Mme Léa Lebrat was near La Suchère, on the road that led from Le Chambon to the nearest town, Villelonge. The house sat at the end of a long drive, nestled among the hills that made up the Yssingeaux Plateau. Mme Lebrat was the same age as Virginia, thirty-eight years old. The Germans had imprisoned her husband in 1943, which left her responsible for their farm and their two sons, aged five and eight.
While she had never formally joined any Resistance organization, her willingness to give anything she had to aid those in need made her a de facto member. And resistance was really a family affair for the Lebrats, since her uncle, Samuel, and her cousins, Pierre and Maurice, had been involved from the beginning of the Nazi occupation.
Men who sought refuge, whether they were French, British, or American, found it at Mme Lebrat’s. Those who came for food to take into the forests to feed the Maquis knew that Mme Lebrat would help them. If conspirators needed a meeting place, Mme Lebrat was happy to accommodate. She was an angel to the rescue on many occasions, taking incalculable risks. And she announced to everyone who passed through her doors, “Whatever you need, I’ll help get for you. Hide a radio transmitter? No problem. But I won’t allow guns in my house.”
On July 20,1944, Virginia Hall became another in the long line of Mme Lebrat’s houseguests. Six days earlier, at the request of headquarters, Virginia had returned to Le Chambon. But when she arrived, Virginia discovered that the letter she had sent to the Resistance leaders announcing her return had been disregarded. None of the arrangements she had asked for had been made, including a place for her to live and work. Hopefully this bad beginning wasn’t a harbinger for the rest of the mission.
It was crucial that Virginia keep up her radio sked so that London was current on any news of enemy troop movements, as well as her whereabouts and welfare. Pierre Fayol invited her to stay with him, his wife, Marianne, and their children; as Jews who had fled Marseille and settled in the Le Chambon area, they were displaced persons themselves. Their little farmhouse had an extra room that they offered to Virginia, and they made their barn available for her radio transmissions.
It was raining the day Virginia arrived with her few belongings, and she had a scarf draped over her head. It struck Fayol that she looked like the Madonna, and much to Virginia’s embarrassment the name stuck. She became known as “la Madonne” in Le Chambon’s Resistance circles.
The day after her arrival, Virginia explained to Fayol that planes with radio detectors were ever present, pasting any building suspected of containing a radio with a fearsome bombardment. He set about finding her new quarters right away. Two days later, Virginia moved to a barn owned by a baker in the village of Villelonge, several kilometers from Le Chambon. She was nearer to the Maquis, which had become known officially as the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI). They were to be, in General de Gaulle’s words, the army of the new France. But the baker’s barn was too far from the areas she needed to survey for parachute drops, so she moved once again, this time to Mme Lebrat’s.
Housing wasn’t Virginia’s only issue on her return to Le Chambon. Some of the members of the Maquis found it unnerving to take orders from a woman. Having her in charge was completely foreign in their world, and they mumbled under their breath, “Who the hell are you to give orders?” Virginia summoned the various officers and gave them a simple choice. If they wanted arms and equipment, she would provide them. But in return, she insisted they follow her orders. Groups all over France would be undertaking the same tasks they were going to. It was essential to have a unified effort against the Germans.
She told them that if they or their men were uncomfortable following her orders, they needed to speak up immediately. They would be released from duty and be free to go elsewhere. As an aside, she let them know she wouldn’t tolerate any double crosses. She had men, she told them, who were looking out for the interest of the group. Any untoward actions directly to her would be reported straightaway.
On the other end of the spectrum, a handful of men would have followed Virginia into hell if she had asked them. And she would have been hard pressed in her work were in not for three of them.
Désiré Zurbach, Dédé, was born in Alsace, a province on the German border. He was eighteen when the Nazis marched into France in 1940, and by 1941 had lost his entire family. His father died when he was a child, and the Germans had deported his mother and sisters. A year later, in 1942, he arrived in Le Chambon and was taken in by Mme Lebrat.
Dédé headed up a group of about thirty maquisards when Virginia met him. She liked him immediately. He was young and ambitious and serious about his work. She had the kind of confidence in him she had had in Pep in Lyon. Dédé became her second in command on the Yssingeaux Plateau and she affectionately referred to him as her “man Friday.”
While she was living in the baker’s barn in Villelonge, she became acquainted with a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman, whom everyone called Lieutenant Bob. His real name, he confided to her, was Lieutenant Raoul Le Boulicaut. Virginia sensed from her first meeting with him that he was steady, sincere, and hard working.
Bob had wanted to be in the military from the time he was thirteen, and he joined the French navy in 1939. His ship, the Paris, was in England when France fell. A month later, he enlisted in the Royal Marines, knowing that was the only way he could help his country. He participated in the Egyptian campaign in 1942, and then entered the Intelligence Service when he returned to England in August of that year. He had a battery of classes in radio, parachuting, and espionage, and because he spoke French, he was sent to Lyon in April of 1943.
A budding career in espionage came to a screeching halt in a car accident in Lyon. Bob had been riding with other Resistance members when they collided with a tree. Gendarmes took him to the hospital half conscious, but not before they found a gun on him. They decided he was dangerous and sent him to a prison hospital where he made the acquaintance of the cleaning lady. The Nazis had killed her son not long before, so one day she brought Bob some wine, a drugged cake, and a twelve-meter length of rope. He plied his guards with the wine and cake, and after they’d fallen asleep, he and several other prisoners exited through a second-story window with the rope. He’d been on the Yssingeaux Plateau for about a year when Virginia met him.
Shortly after Virginia’s arrival, she asked Bob if he and some of his men would become her reception committee for the upcoming parachute drops. Bob agreed without hesitation. While she was scouting out new parachute reception fields the next day and reflecting on her good fortune at having discovered such solid gold indiv
iduals as Lieutenant Bob and Dédé, a memory from her childhood came to mind. Her father had always said that what a person was far outweighed what a person had. She had met a number of people over the past several years who proved that adage true, despite the danger and destruction they all faced at every moment. Without a doubt, her friends in Lyon and the group close to her here were worth more than all the world’s millionaires.
Virginia also began to rely heavily on Edmond Lebrat, another cousin of Léa’s. He, too, led a Maquis group, and in addition to doing courier work for her, he was a man who knew how to find things. Bicycles, pumps, vehicles, fuel, whatever Virginia needed to carry out her mission, Edmond could locate.
Virginia had planned to make her daily radio transmissions from Mme Lebrat’s barn. It had no electricity and Edmond came up with an ingenious way of creating power without having to rely on the radio’s battery. An old bicycle with pedals but no wheels provided the power. The bicycle’s chain was attached to a generator. When someone pedaled, usually Edmond, the electricity created by the generator fed an automobile battery connected to the radio. Virginia had uninterrupted power to make and receive transmissions. From here, she reported to headquarters that she had four hundred Maquis members in five groups and was ready to receive arms for them.
The first of many long-awaited parachute drops on the Yssingeaux Plateau took place near Villelonge, on one of the fields that Fayol and the others had shown Virginia on her first visit. As she had done throughout the war, Virginia listened closely to the BBC broadcast for several evenings around the full moon phase in July, sometimes alone, sometimes with others from the group. She was waiting for the code phrase that would give her all the necessary information. She finally heard on July 21: “Les marguerites fleuriront ce soir” (The daisies will bloom tonight). This was followed by the phrase “Je dis trois fois” (I say three times).
When Virginia heard it, she told Lieutenant Bob, Dédé, and Maurice Lebrat that the drop would be that night, in the field south of Villelonge, reconnaissance letter R. There would be three planes. She had trained Lieutenant Bob’s Maquis group of thirty men how to receive parachute drops. The majority of them were with her on that first night when twenty containers arrived, each holding precious cargo. Weapons were the most plentiful: machine guns, rifles, ammunition, daggers, bayonets, detonators, and explosives. Documents came too, with detailed instructions for acts of sabotage, along with hundreds of thousands of freshly printed French francs. The Maquis needed clothing, so London had sent boots, all British army issue. There were vitamin-fortified chocolates and pills of all sorts: some to keep them awake, some to put them to sleep, and cyanide for the obvious usage.
As they were unpacking the cylinders, Lieutenant Bob came across a package marked “DIANE” and he handed it to her. Since the containers were packed by SOE personnel in London, Vera Atkins was still making sure her agents were taken care of. It mattered little to her that Virginia was now with OSS. To Vera, Virginia was still one of her agents and she guessed that a few personal things, like tea and additional stump socks, would be most appreciated. As usual, Vera was right.
There were so many stores that they had to work until about 3:00 AM. But the Nazis had recently decided to advance Greenwich Mean Time two hours throughout France. It meant sunrise was two hours later than it previously had been. The group would be able to load their waiting hay wagons and have everything stowed away before daylight.
Not all receptions progressed without problems, however. Sometimes Virginia and her group would hear their code phrase and then wait for hours for planes that never arrived. Worse still, some drops were so far off course that they had to tear all over the area, trying to account for the number of cylinders they guessed had been dropped. To leave one behind meant it could just as easily be found by the Germans or the Milice and lead to arrests. Incompetence infuriated Virginia, and she would spew out a chain of expletives that shocked her French compatriots. They may not have understood the words, but they certainly understood the meaning.
The timeline designed by the allies for troop advancements after D-Day showed that by June 15, they would be sixteen miles inland. But the plan had fallen far behind schedule. The Germans were tenacious in holding on to their conquered territory, and in addition to using their armaments to the fullest potential, they also made clever use of the French terrain. Normandy was famous for its bocages—thick hedgerows of hawthorn, brambles, vines, and trees that were practically impenetrable. The vegetation was planted on earthen mounds several feet tall, and enclosed small fields, each one resembling a little fort. Defenders who were dug in behind a hedgerow were almost untouchable, and yet were able to position snipers and machine guns that could mow down advancing Allied soldiers. The strain of this kind of fighting on already fragile nerves was enormous.
But the toll on the population of northwest France was just as horrific. In the province of Normandy, those who survived the fighting—many were killed simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time— found themselves among the 356,000 who were displaced amid the ruins of their former homes and cities; 135,000 buildings were demolished in the province, with another 187,000 damaged.
Just as they had in 1940, men, women, and children took to the roads, hauling what few belongings they could collect in horse carts, wheelbarrows, or on their backs. And no matter where they went, they faced the constant threat of harm. In addition to flying bullets, the roads and fields were laced with German mines, while Allied planes flew overhead, firing on anything that moved.
There was nowhere for them to stay, so they crammed into wine cellars, caves, tunnels, and cemetery crypts. There was nothing for them to eat, so they butchered the livestock that had been killed by falling shells. Hospitals were filled to overflowing and often had no gas, electricity, or water. Orphaned children wandered aimlessly, as did the elderly. Some of the French were so shell-shocked that when the liberators finally did arrive, they were unable to celebrate the day they had looked forward to for four years.
Like pennies from heaven containers packed with everything the Maquis and Resistance of the Yssingeaux Plateau needed continued to float to earth. Virginia had realized from the very first moment she saw it that this area would be key in thwarting the Nazis’ fight against the Allied advance. The terrain was mountainous and isolated. Very few Germans, save for those at the hotels in Le Chambon, had given it a second look. Unlike Lyon, a city crawling with Gestapo, the plateau had far fewer threats. It was the perfect location to build a Resistance force. But it was not completely secure.
There were several members of the Milice, as well as collaborators, in Le Chambon. And in the city of Le Puy, about thirty-five miles away, plenty of Germans would be only too happy to round up a Resistance group the size of hers. Furthermore, there was still a price on her head, and Klaus Barbie and Lyon were only seventy-five miles away.
Virginia, therefore, took care in her travels. She had moved again, not wanting to put Mme Lebrat at any greater risk than she was already taking. An abandoned house belonging to the Salvation Army was about three kilometers away. It had three bedrooms, two of which Virginia figured could accommodate incoming personnel, and a large barn that could serve as both radio room and meeting place. Mme Lebrat supplied Virginia with food, sending over hot meals when she was too busy to remember to go to the farm to eat.
Virginia’s work was grueling. The Yssingeaux Plateau is a part of the Massif Central, known as the “roof of France.” It consists of volcanic mountains and plateaus, and is the most rugged and geologically diverse region in the country. Virginia spent her days bicycling up and down the mountains in search of parachute fields, contacting her circuit members, and gathering other intelligence for the sabotage and guerilla attacks. Traveling the rutted dirt roads would have been exhausting for anyone, but Cuthbert made it all the more arduous.
When she wasn’t on her bicycle, she was sending or receiving radio transmissions, ever w
atchful for the German direction-finding trucks. It was vital that Allied commanders receive up-to-the-minute reports on German troop movements, supply depots, and headquarters locations. One day, Virginia and Edmond bicycled into the city of Le Puy to do a little reconnaissance and were amazed at what they saw. Virginia counted eight German trucks parked in the center of town at city hall. Next to them were the flag-bearing limousines she knew carried Nazi officers.
Virginia urged Edmond to find out what was happening. He left and sidled up to a French shopkeeper standing in his doorway. After a few minutes he returned to report that the German General Staff was moving in. Virginia was incredulous. Their headquarters was in Lyon. Could they really be moving to Le Puy permanently?
Edmond said that the shopkeeper had heard they were there to stay, preferring the more central location. Virginia had a different take. It was more likely, she told Edmond, that they couldn’t stand the harassment of the Resistance in Lyon. What a feather in their caps this was. They had driven out the General Staff.
As soon as she returned to her barn, she radioed London with the news. It would most certainly call for a change in course of the advancing Allied armies. To capture the German General Staff, the largest field concentration of officers in France, would handicap the Nazi defenses and severely demoralize them.
Virginia’s nights were as full as her days. She spent a great many of them out in the fields, waiting for drops. She was very particular about attending every one, to make sure that the supplies were handled properly and arrived at their appropriate destinations.
The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy Page 25