Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  When she failed to respond, Navarre shrugged and said that if she wasn’t strong enough to take the job, he would do it himself. After hesitating for a moment, Fourcade decided she had no choice but to give in.

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  AT HIS MEETING WITH PÉTAIN, Navarre had persuaded the marshal to authorize and pay for the establishment of a reception and rehabilitation center for the many thousands of former servicemen who were still roaming the country after their sudden demobilization. Under the armistice, Vichy was allowed an army of just one hundred thousand men, which meant that the vast majority of France’s wartime forces were no longer needed.

  The idea of the center, Navarre told Pétain, was to provide meals, medical care, rest, recreation, and job advice, which hopefully would ease these young men’s transition back to civilian life and keep them under control. What he didn’t reveal was that the real purpose of the center would be to identify and enlist a select few as spies for his and Fourcade’s new operation, to be known as Crusade. It would be, he told Marie-Madeleine, “the first stronghold of the interior resistance.”

  With Pétain’s blessing and Vichy funds, Navarre and Fourcade leased one of the few hotels not appropriated for government offices and hired a small staff to run it, with Fourcade as its manager. Radio Vichy, meanwhile, announced the center’s opening, inviting all former servicemen to come and take advantage of its programs.

  From its first day, it was packed with former officers and enlisted men, lured by the promise of comfortable rooms, good food, a clinic, and recreational facilities. The place was so crowded that few of its guests noticed the intense conversations that Fourcade struck up with various individuals on the ground floor. Nor did they pay attention when some of those men disappeared up the stairs to the second floor, where the real work of recruitment went on.

  This venture of Fourcade’s and Navarre’s was a rare phenomenon in France so early in the war. As the historian Julian Jackson observed, “The hackneyed phrase ‘he or she joined the Resistance’ is entirely inappropriate to 1940–41. Before it could be joined, resistance had to be invented….Resistance was a territory without maps.”

  In the fall of 1940, most French citizens were still in a state of shock, not sure how to react, much less fight back. As one Frenchman remarked, “The French have no experience of clandestine life; they do not even know how to be silent or how to hide.” At that point, too, the German occupiers seemed all-powerful. For most of the French, the paramount aim was simple survival.

  Further complicating the issue was the fact that France’s own government was actively cooperating with the Nazis. For many in the country, disobeying the dictates of Pétain and his men would have caused a greater crisis of conscience than obeying them. That was particularly true for most current and former members of the armed services, for whom unquestioning obedience to their superiors was an inviolable rule and who, in any case, revered Pétain perhaps even more than did the general public. In addition, the armistice explicitly prohibited members of the French military from engaging in any form of anti-German activity.

  Yet it’s also important to note that Navarre and Fourcade were not alone in plotting resistance within the confines of Vichy. Indeed, many of the earliest resisters in France were followers of Pétain, and a substantial number of them could be found in the Vichy government. Such facts fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which advances the theory that everyone in Vichy marched in lockstep with Pétain and agreed with his policy of collaboration with the Germans. In reality, Vichy was far from being a monolithic regime. It was made up of competing factions, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and with different objectives.

  One of those factions, albeit small, was populated by former and current military officers who revered Pétain as a great hero but who also were violently opposed to cooperating with the Germans. Prominent among them were Navarre and other members of the military intelligence community, who had been responsible for warning successive French governments in the 1930s about the growing threat of Hitler.

  Ever since the late 1800s, France’s intelligence services had viewed Germany as the country’s most dangerous enemy and had directed most of their spying efforts against the Germans. In doing so, they had cooperated closely with their British counterparts, particularly MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence gathering agency. For more than fifteen years before the war, MI6 had maintained a significant presence in Paris, with British and French agents sharing information on Hitler’s regime, including the activities of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence and counterintelligence department, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which collected intelligence for Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

  The most notable anti-German rebel was General Gabriel Cochet, a senior officer in the French air force and a former head of the Deuxième Bureau. Two hours after Pétain announced the country’s capitulation to Germany, Cochet called his staff together and told them that the marshal was wrong and that collaboration with Hitler would be a catastrophe. “We must learn to hide what we are doing, to camouflage our movements and our arms,” he added. “We must at all costs continue the struggle against the enemy.” Three months later, Cochet issued a public proclamation calling on the French people to “watch, resist, and unite”—and followed it with a succession of new tracts advocating resistance that began to attract small, uncoordinated groups of followers. Cochet could get away with such activities because for the first few months after the armistice, the Vichy government did little to stop such expressions of rebellion.

  As it turned out, the Deuxième Bureau itself was a hotbed of anti-German activity. Its current head, Colonel Louis Baril, had sent a message of support and solidarity to MI6 shortly after the armistice. Baril’s deputy, Colonel Louis Rivet, insisted to his staff that “the fight must go on, whatever happens,” adding, “No other attitude is acceptable. Suspending hostilities for us is worse than an unforgivable mistake; it would be tantamount to infamy.”

  Under Rivet’s aegis, military intelligence officials set up an undercover organization to track down German spies who had infiltrated the free zone in violation of the armistice. Called the Société des Travaux Ruraux (Society of Rural Works), this counterespionage outfit disguised itself as a private company whose job was to maintain and build rural sewage and drainage systems. Its real mission was to identify, arrest, and prosecute German agents.

  According to the terms of the armistice, the only German officials allowed in the free zone were members of the so-called Armistice Commission, an organization whose mission was to monitor French compliance with the armistice. In fact, the commission was riddled with agents from the Abwehr and Gestapo. Dozens of other operatives from German intelligence and counterintelligence services also flooded the free zone, using various false identities. Among their tasks was to gather information on anti-Nazi activists who had found refuge in Vichy France.

  Of all the covert anti-German activities carried out by Vichy military officers, however, none was as crucial as a secret codebreaking operation at a secluded château in the countryside of Provence. Its head was Captain Gustave Bertrand, the director of the Deuxième Bureau’s radio and cryptography department.

  In the early 1930s, Bertrand had acquired from a German informant top-secret documents related to the Reich’s fiendishly complex Enigma code. When his government showed no interest in his coup, Bertrand passed the material to Polish cryptographers, who had long given top priority to breaking the military codes of Germany, Poland’s hereditary enemy. As a result of Bertrand’s largesse, the Poles in 1934 became the first to crack the Enigma code.

  After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, several of its top codebreakers fled to France, where they worked with Bertrand and his subordinates at the French military’s radio intelligence and cryptography center, housed in an elegant château about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. Bertrand’s departm
ent cooperated closely with the British government’s codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park, which, just before the war began, had received from the Poles a copy of the Enigma machine, along with detailed information on how to use it.

  When the Germans marched into Paris, Bertrand evacuated his French and Polish codebreakers—not to a safe location outside France but, in an audacious and breathtakingly risky move, to the Provençal château in the free zone. The cryptographers rarely left the château, whose ground-floor windows were barred and kept shut, making working conditions distinctly unpleasant in the hot, sultry summer of 1940. As a further precaution, three cars were ready, day and night, to whisk the team and its equipment away in case of a sudden German or Vichy police raid.

  For all their difficulties, the codebreakers in France never lost contact with Bletchley Park. Both operations continued their work of cracking the various Enigma military codes, with the Provence-based group providing the British with decrypts about the movements, locations, and equipment of the Reich’s air, ground, and naval forces in France and other occupied countries.

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  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Bertrand’s operation, few of the early Vichy resisters had a clear idea in the first weeks of the armistice about how to translate their resolve into action. Like the others, Fourcade and Navarre were feeling their way. How would their new network function? Who would pay for it? How would they get the information collected by their agents to the British? And for Fourcade, the haunting question remained: How would these operatives react to a woman as their leader? Would they obey her?

  Among her first recruits were a young air force pilot named Maurice Coustenoble and two of his colleagues, who had fetched up at the center after weeks of wandering around the country. Friends since flying school, they had fought in the battle for France and were furious when the armistice was announced.

  Fourcade was initially doubtful about Coustenoble because of his unprepossessing appearance: slicked-back hair, waxed mustache, large dark eyes, and slender, slight frame. What could he have been in civilian life, she wondered. A professional ballroom dancer, perhaps, or some little clerk? But she was soon won over by his passion and directness.

  Coustenoble told her that when his plane crash-landed near Bordeaux, he set fire to it and swore he’d find another way to fight. With his two friends, he had traveled throughout France trying to persuade other pilots, as well as anyone else they happened to meet, to join their effort. When they met Fourcade and discovered the real purpose of the center, they pulled from their pockets countless scraps of paper with names and addresses of would-be resisters scribbled on them.

  Like most of the young men Fourcade enlisted, the three new recruits wanted to challenge the Germans right away. She told them that was impossible. The only way they could fight back now, she said, was by gathering intelligence. She offered to put them to work immediately. Their first task would be to recruit couriers for the network—people who had jobs like driving trucks or working on the railroad, which allowed them to travel unhindered throughout the country.

  If they thought the job was too much for them, she said, they should say so. They looked at her pityingly, and she guessed what they were thinking: “It’s odd that she should want to tell us what to do.” For a moment, she feared they would back out. But after a brief pause, Coustenoble announced that they were ready.

  As the weeks passed, this initial trickle of recruits for Crusade became a small stream. Most of the newcomers were former members of the French army and air force; almost none had served in the navy. Like their counterparts in the other two services, naval personnel believed strongly in unquestioning obedience to their superiors, almost all of whom strongly supported France’s capitulation to the Nazis. But they also had a very personal reason for abhorring the thought of working with Britain against Germany. On July 3, 1940, the British navy, under Winston Churchill’s orders, had destroyed much of the French fleet, then based in North Africa, to keep it out of German hands. In a matter of minutes, British shells had blown up the battleship Bretagne and destroyed or badly damaged several other ships. During the bombardment, more than twelve hundred sailors were killed.

  The French people were outraged by what they saw as a deliberate massacre by the British—but none more so than the victims’ naval comrades. After the British attack, Navarre grumbled, the odds of recruiting former navy personnel for Crusade had dropped to zero.

  HENRI SCHAERRER

  For a couple of months, it appeared he was right. Then Henri Schaerrer appeared on the scene. Swiss by birth, the twenty-four-year-old Schaerrer had been a mechanical engineer in France’s merchant marine before enlisting in the navy in April 1939. Assigned to the Bretagne at the beginning of the war, he was stationed on a destroyer at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940 and barely escaped death when the ship was torpedoed and sunk.

  From the moment they met, Fourcade recognized Schaerrer as a force of nature. Fun-loving and boyishly handsome, he exhibited a passion, energy, determination, and taste for adventure equaled by few of the other recruits she had signed up. To her and Navarre, Schaerrer promised to rally naval and merchant marine crewmen to the cause. He proposed to start in Marseille, the free zone’s only major port, more than two hundred miles southeast of Vichy.

  Along with Maurice Coustenoble, Schaerrer would prove to be one of the most valuable first links in the Crusade chain. Keeping his pledge to the network’s leaders, he soon would add another crucial link—a naval officer who had almost died aboard the doomed Bretagne.

  In the late afternoon of July 3, 1940, Lieutenant Jean Boutron, a thirty-five-year-old gunnery officer aboard the Bretagne, stood at his battle station—one of thousands of men doing the same on more than a dozen French warships moored at the North African port of Mers-el-Kébir.

  Ten miles away, an armada of British ships—a battle cruiser, two battleships, an aircraft carrier, and several destroyers—lay in wait outside the port’s entrance. Just three weeks before, the two countries’ navies had been allies. Now the British threatened to open fire on the French fleet unless its commander surrendered or scuttled his ships. The deadline for his decision was 5:30 P.M.

  Throughout the day, messages flew back and forth between the two fleets. The French commander, Admiral Marco-Bruno Gensoul, repeatedly rejected the British demands, declaring that he and his men would resist to the end. Confident that their former ally would not attack them, many of the French seamen read magazines or chatted idly with each other at their battle stations as the minutes ticked by and the deadline came and went.

  At 6:00 P.M., British guns opened fire. The Bretagne was hit almost instantly; flames and smoke poured from its stern as sailors scrambled to control the blaze. A minute later, the ship’s torpedo magazine exploded with an ear-splitting roar, enveloping the harbor in acrid clouds of smoke.

  The Bretagne trembled, then listed sharply. Jean Boutron watched in shock as his shipmates began leaping into the water, struggling to stay afloat and trying to dodge the flames dancing on the oil-covered surface of the waves. Frantic cries of “Help!” and “Save me!” filled the air.

  Then, as the ship slid beneath the water, Boutron himself was swept overboard. Unable to see anything in the oily blackness, he fought for a moment, then gave up the struggle. “An immense and complete indifference took hold of me,” he recalled. “A quick thought of my mother and my son—that was all.”

  Several minutes later, he was pulled unconscious from the water, so covered in oil that a friend was able to identify him only by his wristwatch. Of the forty-five officers aboard the Bretagne, just Boutron and six others survived. Overall, 1,079 members of the ship’s crew lost their lives, accounting for eighty-five percent of the deaths at Mers-el-Kébir.

  JEAN BOUTRON

  As they recuperated, the Bretagne’s survivors raged at the Bri
tish for committing what they viewed as mass murder. Boutron was equally infuriated—but not at the British. For him, France’s main enemies were Germany and the Vichy government. An outspoken critic of France’s capitulation to Germany, he had erupted in anger in late June when Admiral François Darlan, the head of the French navy, ordered the fleet, the fourth-largest in the world, to accept the armistice, even though most of it was still intact and safely anchored in North Africa. “But we are not beaten!” Boutron shouted at the Bretagne’s captain when given the news. “Is the Bretagne beaten? The Provence, is she beaten? And the Dunkerque and Strasbourg—brand flaming new and full of guns and shells—are they beaten? And the rest of the navy? In any case, I am not beaten! And I’m not going to go along with this!”

  The admiral agreed that the armistice was a catastrophe but said it was their duty to accept it. Boutron scornfully replied, “And now on behalf of this sacred discipline, we are chained to a defeat for which we are not responsible.”

  In the days before July 3, the dark-haired, quick-tempered lieutenant continued to skate dangerously close to insubordination, advising some of his shipmates at one point that the fleet should be scuttled. When they protested, noting that such a move would violate the terms of the armistice, he exclaimed, “This bloody armistice—we haven’t finished paying for it! It’s only just beginning.”

  After Mers-el-Kébir, most French sailors, including Boutron, were demobilized. Returning to his native Marseille, he agonized over his future. He was desperate to resist France’s occupiers but had no idea where to go or what to do. And then one chilly afternoon, he ran into Henri Schaerrer on a Marseille street.

  Several years before, Boutron, as an officer in the prewar merchant marine, had trained Schaerrer, then an officer cadet; the two had developed a close relationship as mentor and protégé. Delighted to see each other again, they had a few drinks at a Marseille bar and caught up on their lives. Although he had great affection for Schaerrer, Boutron was unsure about how far he could trust him. Yet as the conversation continued, he began to open up, acknowledging his anger over the armistice and admitting he was looking for a way to continue the fight, perhaps by joining the Free French in London. Schaerrer said he might do the same, although he hadn’t quite decided. He wrote down Boutron’s address and said he would be in touch.