Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  After recruiting the Jacksons to the resistance, Francis Deloche de Noyelle returned to Grenoble, where he continued to expand the Goélette network. He was able to report to his seniors that they had a superbly located “drop box” in Paris—on the Avenue Foch, no less—right under the Gestapo’s noses. Early that June, Toquette got to work, turning her home into a place of maximum use to the resistance; placing potted plants in windows or a mop as signals to resistance members approaching along Avenue Foch; making it appear as if Sumner was again receiving patients. It wasn’t long before Phillip began to notice strangers sometimes entering his father’s office. One night he also accidentally saw a man placing banknotes into a briefcase in the hallway. The more he saw, the more fascinated he became by the secret goings-on in his home. He had an active imagination, which Toquette had nourished by reading him adventure stories every night as a child. Soon he yearned to become fully involved, to do something truly significant, yet he knew his parents would never allow it.

  Toquette was the main liaison with Goélette, not Sumner, who still spent most of his time at the American Hospital in Neuilly. As her code name, she chose “Colombiers,” the place where she had been born in Switzerland. She was fully aware of the enormous dangers she now faced, every moment of every day, by turning her home into a hub for the resistance. At any time, she knew, there could be an urgent knock at the door. When she answered it, would the man standing on the doorstep be a Goélette agent or one of Knochen’s men? One thing was certain: nothing would ever be the same again.

  —

  THE JACKSONS had chosen the worst possible moment to join the resistance. The lights in the Gestapo offices all along Avenue Foch blazed late into the night all that summer as Knochen’s men sought to crush the French resistance in Paris and beyond. Incidences of sabotage, particularly of critical railway lines, and of bombings had increased steadily as more and more French abandoned their “attentisme”—waiting game—and took up arms. Hitler ordered a swift and brutal response. By year’s end, more than 80,000 people would be arrested. Thousands would be tortured and hundreds shot without trial.

  Two hundred yards from the Jacksons’ home, at 84, Avenue Foch, Knochen’s head of counterintelligence, Hans Kieffer, worked tirelessly to destroy the French sector of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, an outfit formed by Churchill in 1940 to “set Europe ablaze” by carrying out sabotage, espionage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe and to help local resistance movements such as Goélette, which the Jacksons had just joined. Kieffer’s first major break-through came on June 18. That night, a Westland Lysander plane came in low over the Norman fields, engine throttled back, and then touched down, bouncing across the rough pasture. Two SOE agents stepped down from the plane. They had not gone far when they were arrested.

  The Gestapo had been waiting. The agents were escorted to Avenue Foch, unaware that a double agent had betrayed them, and not just any run-of-the-mill traitor—arguably the greatest of the war in terms of the damage caused to British intelligence and the French resistance, especially in Paris. He went by many aliases but was known to both his wife and the Gestapo as thirty-four-year-old Henri Déricourt, a brilliant actor and suave former French airline pilot logged in the Avenue Foch files as agent BOE/48. It was due to Déricourt that Knochen soon learned, as he put it, of “all [SOE’s] landing sites and the means necessary to decode BBC messages” sent to the French resistance. Thanks to such treachery, hundreds of French resistance workers and dozens of British agents would be apprehended and tortured. Many would be executed in the dying days of the war.

  The British continued to send new agents to fill out the ranks of a network known as Prosper. On June 20, 1943, two more landed in France. Again Knochen’s men had been tipped off about their arrival and they were followed. As they tried to escape their tail in an underpowered Citroën driven by a female radio operator, the Gestapo gave chase in fast Ford cars, quickly closed to within a few yards, and then opened fire. Bullets smashed the windshield and tires exploded. The radio operator fell forward on the dashboard, hit in the head and shoulder, and the Citroën crashed. Inside the Citroën, later that day, Knochen’s men found radio crystals and notes, one of which was titled “Pour Prosper.” Three days later three more key members of the Prosper network were caught and also hauled to Avenue Foch by the Gestapo.

  Knochen’s interrogators worked hard on the captured agents, and on one occasion Knochen himself “engaged in the breaking” of their network. One of the agents, Francis Suttill, seemed most likely to talk and was tortured for several days. Finally he agreed to provide details of ammunition dumps on the condition that the men and women guarding them would not be killed. The Gestapo meanwhile had started to play what would be known as the “Funkspiel,” a sophisticated “radio game.” Knochen’s radio expert, a bespectacled former schoolteacher called Dr. Josef Goetz, began to impersonate some of the seized agents, using their radio sets to communicate with SOE handlers, sending false messages, luring yet more agents to their eventual deaths.

  Then came another remarkable victory in the war against the resistance. Through informers, Knochen’s agents in Lyon were able to locate the whereabouts of the legendary forty-four-year-old resistance leader Jean Moulin, code-named “Max,” who, under de Gaulle’s orders, that spring had succeeded in unifying several resistance groups and thereby formed France’s first coordinated “army of the shadows.” Seized on June 21 at a meeting with other resistance figures, Moulin was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, where he was brutally tortured. A week later, Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie transferred Moulin to Paris. But it was too late for Knochen to profit from any information that Moulin might be able to provide. Barbie had, it was alleged, lost control when beating Moulin in a cell in Lyon, and Moulin was no longer in a fit state to talk. In fact, he was barely alive. A fellow member of the resistance who was being held in Paris recalled his terrible condition: “Jean Moulin was lying on a reclining chair, and did not move. He showed no signs of life, seemed to be in a coma.”

  Knochen’s colleague, fifty-eight-year-old Major Karl Bömelburg, who had been part of the group to arrive with Knochen on June 14, 1940, was present when Moulin was brought to his offices at 43, Avenue Victor Hugo, in Neuilly, a few hundred yards from the American Hospital. According to one source: “Barbie clicked his heels very loudly in front of Bömelburg, who stood chain-smoking. Bömelburg told Barbie in German: ‘I hope he comes through this; you’ll be lucky if he does.’ ” How on earth could “Max” be useful if he could not even communicate?

  Moulin never did talk. It is thought that he died in custody, en route to the Third Reich, later that month. Although he had given nothing away, his arrest nevertheless dealt a body blow to the resistance movement, which the Jacksons had joined earlier that summer. The legendary “Max” had been eliminated—de Gaulle’s underground army had been decapitated. All along Avenue Foch, Knochen and his Gestapo colleagues had cause indeed to celebrate.

  ELEVEN

  THE LAST SUMMER

  PHILLIP COULD REMEMBER before the war when Bastille Day had been a joyous holiday and tens of thousands had lined the nearby Champs-Élysées, waving tricolors to commemorate the start of the French Revolution—the bloody storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. There had always been a great show of national pride and fantastic fireworks. But since the Germans had arrived, there had been no parade, no fireworks. Celebrations had been banned.

  On this day, July 14, 1943, for the first time under the occupation, there would at least be a national holiday, with stores closed. However, due to “national circumstances,” the Vichy government of Pierre Laval had decided that there would still be no official ceremony. The German authorities could do without a second storming of the Bastille.

  That morning Phillip pulled out his bicycle and set off to see his father at the American Hospital in Neuilly, five miles of hard pedaling to the northwest. The massive chestnut trees along the Avenue Foch were heavy
with leaves, casting shade onto the manicured lawns and flower beds. Paris looked more than ever like a city in the Orient, all of its avenues and streets filled with bicycles and elaborate velotaxis, some pulled by teams of four, among them Tour de France veterans who made sure, on the Avenue Foch, to get out of the way of the fast Hotchkiss cars that swept up and down, carrying Knochen and his colleagues to meetings, and the black police vans that delivered resistance workers and spies to number 84 for interrogation.

  As Phillip pedaled north toward Neuilly, around the world there were celebrations by patriotic Frenchmen. In Algiers, de Gaulle reviewed a military parade. In London, thousands gathered at the statue of Field Marshal Foch, where a wreath was laid on behalf of de Gaulle. Then Phillip made his way onto the Boulevard Bineau, joining a steady stream of other bicyclists. He was carrying some hard-boiled eggs for his father. As usual, his father was busy, so Phillip decided to wait for him on the terrace of his office on the hospital’s fourth floor, which afforded fantastic views of central Paris and the Eiffel Tower rising above the grandeur of Haussmann’s boulevards.

  After a few minutes, air raid sirens sounded. There was a piercing wail and then the bark of antiaircraft fire. Phillip heard the steady throb of Allied planes’ engines in the distance. The sound got louder and then he saw American bombers approaching. He watched in awe as the silver-winged planes got closer and closer. Then there were smaller dots in the sky. They, too, got closer. They were yellow-nosed German fighters. Phillip watched as they began to attack several of the B-17 American bombers. Soon there was a full-scale air battle raging in the skies above. Pieces of shrapnel started to fall onto the hospital’s roof.

  A door leading onto the terrace sprang open. Phillip’s father stepped onto the terrace.

  “Don’t stay here!” he cried. “There’s shrapnel falling everywhere.”

  Phillip did as he was told and quickly scurried inside.

  Meanwhile, twenty thousand feet in the air, a lanky and dark-haired nineteen-year-old New Yorker called Joe Manos was seated at the tail of a B-17 bomber. A wisecracking, utterly unworldly machine gunner, Manos wasn’t as dumb as he sometimes pretended to be to get laughs—he knew now he would need all the firepower he could get, and he had in fact loaded the tail gun cans so full that he had not been able to fit the covers on.

  Manos waited. Any second they would come for him, the bandits with their yellow noses, screaming down in almost vertical dives, streams of bullets fizzing toward him. Any moment they would come to test his nerve. He and the other nine men in his crew were especially vulnerable. Their plane had lost its position in the formation. It was alone, ready to be picked off, the weak straggler sacrificed by the herd.

  Planes were in the distance. Manos aimed and pulled the trigger on his .50-caliber machine gun. It clattered as it fired. He soon had a good view of the battle. Black puffs were exploding all around from antiaircraft fire. Then he saw them: the German fighters, swooping down, screaming out of the sun. He shifted in his turret, tracking one of the fighters. It was in his sights. It had a black and yellow checkered pattern on its fuselage, tail, and engine cowlings.

  Manos gave the bandit a burst but then his gun jammed. The bandit opened up with cannon fire, hitting two engines on Manos’s plane. The right wing caught on fire. Manos stepped over to a small plywood compartment door. He opened it and saw two waist gunners trying to get an escape hatch open. A bell was ringing: the signal to abandon ship. Cut off in his tail turret, he had not heard it. Then a 20mm German cannon shell exploded, smack between the two waist gunners, blowing both their heads off. In great shock, Manos managed somehow to keep his wits about him. He grabbed a small oxygen bottle, placed it in the lower left pocket of his flight coveralls, attached it to his flight mask, and then pulled the release cable for the tail escape hatch. But only one of two pins came out of the hinges, leaving the door stuck. In exasperation, Manos tried to force it by sitting on top of it. That worked. The door gave way and he felt himself falling into space.

  Manos pulled the ripcord on his parachute as soon as he was clear of the plane. The silk chute billowed from the pack on his chest. There was no jolt as it caught the air. He scanned the skies and saw three other parachutes. He guessed he was at around 16,000 feet. He watched his plane peel off, bank slowly to the left, then dive toward the ground, where it burst into flames, exploding near railway tracks.

  He drifted down. He could see people in a village’s streets. Then the ground was rushing up to greet him. He landed in a field of beetroot. His training again kicked in and he gathered up his chute, rolled it into a ball, and then quickly buried it in the soft soil along with his Mae West life preserver, glad that he had not landed on rocky ground.

  He looked around. He was alone. He ran across a nearby road, down a steep embankment and into another field, along a hedgerow, and toward woods, hoping to find some of his fellow crew members. Before he reached the woods, he came across two Frenchmen who were trying to start a motorcycle.

  One of them, his eyes wide with excitement, pointed down the road.

  “Boche!” yelled the Frenchman.

  Manos jumped into some nearby bushes and hid. A few seconds later he saw a German soldier on a bicycle, rifle slung across his back. The German passed by Manos but then stopped to look around. He was searching for downed flyers. He was no more than a hundred yards away.

  Manos took off, crawling from under the bushes and then scrambling across a wheat field.

  A young Frenchman ran into the field. “Comrade!” he cried.

  Manos considered running away. The man reached him and began to pull him toward thick woods. Then he was in a clearing. The young Frenchman gave Manos a shirt to throw over his A-2 leather jacket and gestured for Manos to get into a truck parked close by. Soon he was passing through a town some five miles north of the outskirts of Paris. The truck stopped at a small house near some railway tracks. Inside, a middle-aged man took almost everything Manos was wearing or carrying, leaving him with only his underwear, two pairs of socks, his GI shoes, and dog tags. The Frenchmen with the truck provided Manos with some old clothes and told him to stay put. Manos decided to do as he was told.

  Two days later Manos was taken in another truck to an office in a northern suburb of Paris where he met with a distinguished-looking man called Lucien Cazalis, who spoke English, to Manos’s huge relief, and who soon took him to the apartment of a wine merchant and explained that Manos was to stay there for a few days until he could be moved again. The few days lasted almost exactly a month. Several times a young man called Maurice visited Manos with Cazalis. “I was taken to various places to be shown off or to make contact with the people who would be able to get me false papers,” Manos remembered. He even visited several bars. One had a statue of Joan of Arc outside. He wasn’t much of a drinker but Frenchmen insisted on placing large glasses of wine and spirits in front of him and he could hardly refuse. On another occasion Manos was driven around Paris in a small car. “The driver drove like he was half-crazy. I was worried and asked if [others] were concerned, and one of the men sort of nodded to the back seat and a fellow back there flashed one of those small machine guns that the Allies had made up for cheap and fast use by the troops.” The gun was far from reassuring.

  Manos’s stay with the wine merchant ended abruptly on August 16, 1943. Someone in the apartment building where he was staying forgot to pull down the blackout shades and left a light on at night. The local gendarmes soon turned up and began to search the building. Before they got to Manos, an attractive English-speaking woman called Gladys Marchal hurried to the apartment, told Manos to accompany her, and then took him via the metro across Paris. Manos was feeling paranoid, as if he was “sticking out like a sore thumb” amid the other passengers. The dark-haired Marchal had divorced her French husband and described herself as a telephoniste—a telephone operator. In reality, she was a courier for an escape line and worked for the Libération resistance network.

  The m
etro journey ended in Neuilly. Marchal calmly led Manos along a tree-lined street to the American Hospital and then to the fourth-floor office of one of the doctors. Manos looked around. The office was well furnished, “a nice place,” he thought. He noticed a citation for bravery. It was framed on a wall. He thought it was the French Legion of Honor. There was a name on it: DR. SUMNER JACKSON.

  —

  THE STATION was busy. There were German soldiers everywhere Phillip looked. As usual, there was also tight security. Bags and parcels were routinely checked. At the entrance to the Gare Saint-Lazare, hundreds of bicycles were parked in long ranks. Men were using pushcarts to carry people’s luggage to the velotaxis waiting where once cars had idled.

  It was an August day, a couple of weeks after the Bastille Day raid, and Phillip was on his way to Saint-Nazaire in Brittany. His parents had decided he should spend some time in the country. Phillip boarded a train and took a seat. He was ever more eager to help his parents in some way and just as frustrated that he could not be involved in their resistance work. The train was full. There were German soldiers aboard. In the very seat beside Phillip there was a German soldier. Phillip did not hate him personally. But the man’s presence right beside him was rather unfortunate, because Phillip had brought a camera with him, which was strictly forbidden.

  The train was ready to leave. Then they were moving, out of the station, through the suburbs. The train was soon steaming through Normandy, past the ancient bocage, and through small towns and villages. Phillip looked at the rich Normandy fields as the train headed toward Chartres and then Brittany. Before the war he had vacationed in Normandy with his parents, spending precious days on the beach with his father, learning to fish, to swim, and to sail. Phillip had rowed with his father, each with one oar; combed the beach with him for driftwood; and watched him relax as he carved miniature boats and other objects from wood with the skill of a surgeon who had, for such a big man, surprisingly nimble hands.