Young, Brave and Beautiful

by Tania Szabô

  ‘I don’t know how you do it. He was ready to take you to task for being sullen, then you smiled and he melted on tick. You certainly turned his attention away from me.’

  ‘Of course, dear chap,’ replied Violette, mock-haughtily. ‘By the way, how on earth do the Germans know your cover name in England, that of Charles Staunton? Do you think there’s a leak in London?’

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  ‘It certainly is of concern and noted by a number of agents in the field, too. But that’s for another day.’

  They drank their coffees and Violette said she must leave to get back to her hotel on the other side of the river before curfew.

  ‘Now, you will take care of yourself, won’t you, my girl?’ muttered Philippe, clearly concerned about the safety of his liaison officer. His pride in her endeavours was clear to see. She had given him a great deal of vital intelligence that he, too, would radio back to England.

  ‘Don’t you worry, mon chef, I value my life and limb very highly. I have every intention of getting the teams of Résistants working to harry the Boches at every turn, so you can rest assured I shall be very, very careful. There’s a lot of planning to be done, people to be helped and current intelligence to be gathered throughout the region. That’s my job and that’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Your turn to calm down, old girl!’ he said, laughing out loud at such an outburst. Her eyes were sparking, her cheeks gathering colour, mouth set in determined single-mindedness. ‘Off you go, then, and I’m off to my bed across the road to rest up for whatever tomorrow may bring.’

  ‘Bonne nuit, and you take great care, too,’ was Violette’s earnest farewell. A kiss on the cheek and she was gone, fleet as the breeze.

  She grabbed her bike and rode furiously over the bridge to her hotel.

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  * * *

  69 Auf wiederschauen, local dialect of southern Germany, Bavaria and Austria, equivalent of ‘auf wiedersehen’ = ‘goodbye’; exact equivalent of au revoir and arriverderci.

  70 Cassoulet à la Normandie = a fine bean stew made with sliced saucisse de Toulouse (a lively red-coloured succulent sausage) and ordinary sausage plus loin of pork as the three main ingredients, but includes sliced carrot, onion, tomato, cream, garlic (naturellement), goose fat (or butter and olive oil), wine, bouquet garni, pepper and salt.

  71 DCA, défense contre avions = defence against aircraft, i.e. ack-ack batteries.

  15

  Le Havre

  Friday 14 to Monday 17 April 1944

  Violette needed to reach Le Havre and discover what was happening in the port town and try to get as far as Calais. It was now Friday 14 April. She had to meet Philippe in Paris in eleven days, on the 25th. Since the beginning of April, a number of trains had been sabotaged in their Dieppe depot by a Rouen team with Robert Legoux (Bottes) from the Libé-Nord group. Two more had been destroyed in Auffay, not far from the Auffay rocket site.

  Just the previous day, the 13th, the railway in Préaux had been sabotaged by Lieutenant Pelletier and his team.72 Violette was to pass on instructions that these teams and dozens more should continue their activities and sabotage the same lines again and again as soon as they were repaired. Her additional tasks were to get intelligence on Le Havre and, if possible and if London instructed, Amiens and Calais. Amiens was pretty much out of the question considering the time she had available before returning to Paris.

  Calais, far to the north, was a closed city. The German military administered the entire Pas-de-Calais and Flanders region from the city. Most of the inhabitants, except those essentially employed, had been evicted from the city since it became the main repository for secret weapons and the town was now populated mostly by German nationals. Gestapo and Wehrmacht troops were on full alert and vigilantly guarded the weapons sites. These were principally the V1 flying bombs, stored in well-constructed underground silos from which they could be launched, aimed directly at London and the south of England. South-east England had already been shelled by the Germans from their railway and coastal guns in France. Hitler and his generals remained duped into believing that the Calais coastline would be the site of the Allied offensive, so they had heavily defended the area against Allied amphibious assault. In Calais, German security forces and military pulled people over to verify not only their identity cards but also who their friends and family were, and exactly what they were doing that day.

  It seemed a well-nigh impossible assignment for any SOE agent to infiltrate Calais unless they posed as an essential worker. An agent disguised as a German clerk or labourer was in constant danger. Perfect German and an intimate knowledge of the regions, cultures and everyday German life was indispensable. Such agents would be constrained to minimal operational activity. Violette clearly did not qualify for this; her German and Dutch were minimal. She could have passed as one of the few essential French national workers, petite fonctionnaire or even a collabo horizontale.

  She decided to concentrate on her first task – to discover whether Résistance groups in Le Havre, Rouen and Dieppe were ready to receive arms and follow instructions from London, to be co-ordinated from London and Algiers73 in the run-up to D-Day. She would wait for further instructions from London if the promised use of the wireless were possible.

  SOE were misled in believing that Hitler would take his forces out of France and other European countries to concentrate on the Eastern Front against the Russians. They did not heed or properly grasp that Hitler would not countenance any withdrawal. Where SOE had got things right was to seize the moment, knowing French civilians were increasingly prepared to take up the fight to oust the Nazis.

  The Germans had seized scores of arms dumps comprising countless tons of Allied supplies; two such raids being in the Rouen area and during the Grandclément disaster in the south. It was now imperative for the Maquis and Résistance groups to do battle during April and May, so SOE with the Tempsford-based RAF Lysanders and Hudsons, as well as the Harrington-based American OSS74 modified B-24 Liberator bombers, started in earnest to parachute in thousands of tons of weaponry and supplies all over France. It was part of Violette’s mission to find relatively secure drop zones and security-minded groups to organise reception committees, while also gathering intelligence on links, organisations and activities – co-operative or individual – of groups in upper Normandy.

  The Gestapo were particularly active in this forbidden red zone, especially in the militarised river and seaports of Rouen, Le Havre and Calais. At every point of exit and entry into, and at many points in the streets of the two Channel port towns black-uniformed Gestapo stood guard or their patrols goose-stepped in unison, revolvers loaded and rifles at the ready. They were on high alert throughout Normandy and the Pas-de-Calais.

  Roger Mayer had taken over Guénot’s75 l’Heure H group, only to be arrested and tortured before deportation on 11 March when the Gestapo, assisted by the Vichy Police and the Milice, cast a systematic dragnet from Calais all the way to Morlaix at the western tip of Brittany.

  To carry out her instructions in Le Havre, Violette needed to discover what remained of groups like l’Heure H and who was left to continue the battle. She was beginning to understand that there were far more Résistants than London was aware of. It seemed to her that they were seriously underestimating the potential and actual strength of the Résistance and the Maquis. Among the untrained braves were Frenchmen and women with considerable strategic planning skills implementing security measures by setting up cells of Résistants and Maquisards where only the leader of each cell knew the leader of one or two other cells. London supplied every type of explosive material and ancillary equipment – but, to the constant irritation of the cells, not very much in the way of weaponry.

  This had been the express design of the War Office and related services, like SOE. They now deemed it the right time to drop weapons, as the Allied offensive was fast approaching. The moment to fight the German military, not just obstruct it, had come. Violette was instr
ucted to find appropriate sites for huge parachute drops of arms, agents and paratroopers. She had heard of ideal terrain near Buchy, north of Ry and east of Rouen.

  Another two groups that Violette was meeting were Vagabond Bien-Aimé, named after a little dog, and the FTP, strongly Communist. In the two previous years these groups had sabotaged, demonstrated in the streets, used grenades in street battles against Reich soldiers and thrown bombs into cafés frequented nearly exclusively by the Germans. The reprisals they suffered consisted of arrests, deportations, torture and death.

  A third group was Libé-Nord, whose leading member was Raoul Leprettre, editor of the Journal de Rouen newspaper, who in February was instructed from Algiers to bring the Rouen groups under the newly formed Comité départemental de Libération nationale (CDLN) to co-ordinate sabotage and intelligence gathering within the Seine-Inférieure (today the Seine-Maritime). Now there were links between groups; it was that very linkage between cells that weakened the security of each person in that group.

  Although Violette was not aware of individuals’ names, she understood that from the north down to Rouen and further afield, the groups continued to replace those who had been captured or injured with new and equally determined Résistants.76

  French communists had made it difficult, sometimes impossible, for London or de Gaulle to monitor, influence and work with them, but from early 1944 the French Communist Party (PCF) and its armed section, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), were starting to welcome SOE and OSS help against their common enemy. Violette was thus able to accumulate intelligence on their whereabouts and activities to pass on to London.

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  Violette understood that should the Gestapo discover her presence, whether she remained in this area or ventured further north, it could only help in the deception of where exactly the Allied landings would take place. She had heard some strange stories about agents being inexplicably caught even as they landed; some said it was betrayal pure and simple, others that it was a diabolical plot of leading lambs to slaughter designed to throw the Germans off the track. She had no intention of being captured, revealing what she knew or being dead. And she was definitely no lamb.

  Life and personal freedom were what mattered to Violette. They gave her the opportunity to fight the enemy with everything she had. She hated their destructive regime and that they had killed Étienne. Although she had lost him, she had her daughter safe in England and her families in England and France to live and fight for.

  Having received no directives with regard to Amiens and Calais, Violette continued making plans to get to Le Havre and discover the state of the French Résistance groups there, the damage done to Philippe’s Salesman and Hamlet circuits in that town; and to rebuild them.

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  That Friday morning, Violette met Marcel in the station café. ‘Marcel, I still need to get to Le Havre and pass on my instructions. Can you help? I’d like to do that before going to see other groups in this area. That way I can co-ordinate plans with yours when I get back.’

  ‘It’s damned dangerous there. You say you have papers, but even if they’ll do here, in Rouen, they may not work, not there. I’ll see if one of the chaps with a truck can take you. Perhaps even bring you back. How long do you want to be there?’

  ‘Only a couple of days. I don’t have many contacts, sadly, and I’m pretty sure the circuit is irretrievable. Just hoping I can persuade others to take on the work that needs to be done. Or perhaps they’re already expecting instructions. And London needs to know.’

  ‘I’ve one or two contacts. I’ll see what I can do,’ smiled Marcel, who knew far more than he would let on. He was fully aware of how much the presence of this young woman would affect anyone she met. She was willing, and he would use that willingness to give fresh impetus to the Havrais people.

  That afternoon he met Violette again in his workshop. After ushering her into his office, he said, ‘Well, there’s a young lady who will lend you her German pass and identity card. You’re about the same height, dark-haired and similar features. She’ll need it in three days though, so make sure you’re back by then. You will first meet Madame Mayer, Roger’s wife. She will introduce you to the leaders of l’Heure H and Vagabond Bien-Aimé groups.’

  ‘That’s great, but I don’t really need it as my papers say I live in Le Havre, but please thank her. London has asked me to ensure that the Barentin viaduct, central to Dieppe, Rouen and Le Havre, is blown. It seems that a combined operation might be the best. Or a shadow one to ensure that it’s done. Would you like me to discuss this while I’m there with the two I meet, and bring you back their response?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll give you my thoughts to pass on. It’s extremely powerfully built and well-guarded night and day. Built by an Englishman, it collapsed from weak concrete so he rebuilt it at his own expense and set the norm for a strongly reinforced structure. But if we can at least weaken its supports on each riverbank then perhaps the Allies can do the rest in a bombing raid.’

  ‘It’s a prime rail link from Calais and the north to Rouen, Le Havre, Paris and Brittany. Will I be able to leave tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Yes, Corinne. Crack of dawn. You’ll meet a supplier, Jean Marais, with a truckload of produce for Le Havre, at place Cauchoise, where the route for Le Havre can be accessed. Your code will consist of hail and harsh wind while his reply will include won’t see much more of that, let’s hope. You should be at Madame Mayer’s no later than midday. You will stay at her friend’s place – a five-minute walk – and you will meet the two leaders. I then suggest you come back on Monday morning, again at dawn. Coming back, Jean will be waiting for you in rue Thiers, under the trees – he will wait one hour, from six to seven. You’ll have Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday in Le Havre.’

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  The next morning, Saturday, having retained her room, Violette put a few essentials in the canvas hold-all and cycled to the agreed pick-up point. The thought of new meetings and travelling to Le Havre excited her, tempered by the certain knowledge of entering the most dangerous zone in France, apart from Calais. She crossed the square to a beat-up old lorry idling under a tree and greeted the driver.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ Violette said with a slight smile. ‘Got caught the other day in that hail and harsh wind. Today looks better.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Jean Marais. ‘Won’t see much more of that. Let’s hope so anyway,’ he mumbled, opening the cab door for her. He hoisted her bike into the back, then climbed in behind the wheel and they were off – direction Le Havre on the D982.

  Violette settled in the seat as the truck rumbled along. She was very satisfied with all she had learned and was finally on her way to Le Havre. She asked the farmer to take a route close to the viaduct carrying troop and provision trains between Rouen and Le Havre. She needed some idea of its construction and the lay of the surrounding land so that if Allied bombers were to strike they could keep civilian casualties to a minimum.

  The viaduct was huge; her recommendation would be for an air strike as well. She believed that sabotage could only be incomplete but the Maquis would put together one of their specialist teams to do their best to at least weaken the structure ready for an air strike, she hoped.

  She and Jean chatted aimlessly all the way to Le Havre. At three intersections they were stopped and their papers checked. The truck and her canvas bag were searched on each occasion. As they arrived at one of the main arteries leading into the town, they were stopped yet again. This time, after their papers were checked and the truck thoroughly searched, they were asked by the officer, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Home,’ replied Violette.

  ‘I gave the young lass a lift from Rouen,’ interjected Jean, looking bored. ‘Look, got to move off and deliver this stuff to your headquarters.’

  ‘In a minute,’ ordered the officer. ‘First, what were you doing in Rouen, mademoiselle.’

  ‘Oh, my whole Easter was spoilt. Had to look for a distant
uncle. Think he got caught in one of the British bombing raids. I’ll tell you, they’re bastards. I’m sure my uncle’s dead. Couldn’t find any trace and spent days looking for him.’

  ‘So, you haven’t been to work, young lady?’

  ‘Will do tomorrow, unfortunately. I’m a secretary in a department store.’

  ‘Very well. You can leave. Be careful how you go.’

  Sweating, they both said thank you to the officer, climbed back in the truck and Jean drove on in the direction of the town centre. She’s cool, he thought.

  ‘You did well, lass. I’ll drop you on the corner of rue Thiers after passing by Madame Mayer so you know where she is. Not far, then you can cycle back. Looks as if I’ve driven you home. Okay?’ Rue Thiers was Violette’s fictitious address in Le Havre.

  ‘Thanks very much. And I’ll see you on Monday, at the end of rue Thiers. Is that correct?’

  ‘Absolutely. Now you be very careful. Don’t take any stupid risks. Not worth it. Not for you. Not for us.’

  ‘I will. I really appreciate your help. Bye.’

  As they arrived, she jumped down, Jean got out and helped her pull the bike from the back and she pedalled off as he had directed.

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  She found the apartment building easily. Madame Mayer, still deeply traumatised by the horrendous treatment meted out to her husband, welcomed her quietly and led her into the salon.

  Madame Mayer presented Violette to an air force lieutenant, Alain Phillipeau of the FFI – Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – which had recently taken the Deux Léopards group under its command. They exchanged pleasantries and then Violette got down to the business of what they could all do to help after the awful decimation of the Salesman circuit and the arrests.