Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  The landscape became less manicured, wilder. Phillip had arrived in Brittany, where strangers were distrusted, the Germans detested, and the resistance a fast-burgeoning and effective force—a region of ancient hatreds and passions, with its long, craggy shoreline, mist-laden moors, sunken fields, gorges, and pollarded oaks. In the glow of full moonlight, Lysanders landed here regularly to drop off agents who knew the locals could be trusted not to betray them. Allied submarines often lurked off sheltered coves, ready to pick up returning SOE agents and others carrying secret documents.

  In Phillip’s favorite books, boys were often transported to other worlds where their mettle was tested, where they became heroes. Perhaps in Brittany, far from his parents, he could finally do something that mattered—maybe even take some pictures that might help the Allied cause.

  —

  AT THE American Hospital, Sumner met with Joe Manos in his office. Marchal proposed that Sumner hide Joe among a group of retired British veterans who were being cared for in a nearby building.

  Sumner was not keen on that at all. It was far too risky. “That’s a crazy idea,” he said.

  Instead, knowing that Phillip would be in Brittany until the end of the summer, Sumner suggested Marchal leave Manos with him for a few days. She could pick him up again once she had found him false papers and send him along one of the escape lines run by the Libération network. In the meantime Sumner himself would hide Manos, not in the hospital’s basement or in a safe house, but at his home at number 11, Avenue Foch.

  —

  PHILLIP’S TRAIN pulled into the station in Nantes. Thankfully, German guards did not ask to search his suitcase. Possession of a camera was outlawed anywhere inside the “Forbidden Zone,” which stretched fifteen miles inland all along the Atlantic Wall, Hitler’s coastal defenses built from Norway to the Spanish border. Phillip was met at the station and then went to the home of Marcelle Le Bagousse, a friend of the Jacksons, who lived in Pontchâteau, some twenty miles north of the port of Saint-Nazaire.

  Marcelle’s husband, a large and affable man, worked for a railroad company and, because he had a special pass, was able to come and go as he pleased in the Forbidden Zone. One day he invited Phillip to accompany him on a day trip. He owned a house in Saint-Nazaire, which had been heavily bombed by the British. “I’m going to show you my house,” he told Phillip, “or rather what is left of my house.” From the central train station in Saint-Nazaire, they took bicycles to get around the port city. Phillip had hidden his camera in a panier on the back of his bicycle.

  Saint-Nazaire was then the largest port in Europe, six miles up-stream from the mouth of the Loire River, and of great importance to the Germans—large enough to harbor the Kriegsmarine’s biggest ships, such as the Bismarck and Tirpitz. It had already been the scene of a heroic commando raid by the Allies in 1942 that had failed to destroy twenty-one U-boat pens, which the RAF and Eighth Air Force had since bombed repeatedly, but with little success.

  When no one was looking, including Monsieur Le Bagousse, Phillip pulled out his camera. Seizing his chance to be something of a teenage spy, he snapped several photographs of bomb damage at the central train station and near the docks. Had the Germans spotted him, he would have been immediately arrested, interrogated at length, and handed over to the local Gestapo. And who knew then? By this stage of the war, youths in the resistance were being executed regularly.

  Phillip returned from Saint-Nazaire to the Le Bagousse family’s home, an old farmhouse that had a large basement with a workshop. He got on well with the Le Bagousses’ son. They both liked to play around in the workshop, sharpening knives, making things using an excellent vise. Phillip enjoyed using his hands, just like his father. The basement had a small slit of a window at street level. One day that August, a German armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the farmhouse. Phillip was in the basement. He noticed the vehicle. Phillip couldn’t help himself: he pulled out his camera and took another photograph. Fortunately, yet again, the Germans did not notice.

  —

  GLADYS MARCHAL walked to one of the two doors by which she knew she could enter number 11, Avenue Foch. Manos was waiting, dressed in his ill-fitting civilian clothes, looking remarkably French because of his dark Greek complexion, more than ready to get out of Paris and then France, as had been planned. He would never forget the kindness of Sumner, “clearly an undercover guy,” and his equally brave wife. It was around August 20 when he left Avenue Foch with Marchal, headed for a train station, bound for southern France.

  The Jacksons had taken an extraordinary risk in allowing Manos to stay in their home for even a few hours, let alone a weekend. They would never have done so had they known about Maurice, the foolhardy resistance agent who had stupidly paraded Manos around Paris. They had no idea that Maurice was a loose link in the Libération network, a bigmouth quick to boast about his work with de Gaulle’s army of the shadows. Sooner or later the Gestapo were bound to track him down, for they had informers seemingly everywhere, and many Parisians, hungry and desperate, were only too happy to claim a reward on “Avenue Boche” for turning over the young men who were bombing France by day and night.

  Gladys Marchal also knew far too much: where Sumner worked and where he lived. If the Gestapo caught her, would she talk when tortured? Those resistance members who survived longest moved address regularly and changed codes and their names as often as possible. Then they might stand a chance of staying a step ahead of Knochen and his men. But the Jacksons were not about to move. They would continue to live at number 11. And they were known by their real names. They were in fact extremely vulnerable, especially given their location so very close to Knochen’s headquarters.

  Hopefully, neither Marchal nor Maurice, nor any of the others who had helped Manos get as far as Avenue Foch, would be betrayed and taken to one of Knochen’s torture cells at number 84. But what if Manos was apprehended trying to escape to Spain? Would he talk, giving them away, when Knochen’s professionals attached electrodes to his testicles and yanked out his fingernails with a rusty pair of pliers? There was no way of telling how anyone would react when finally run to ground by the Gestapo, let alone the degenerate psychopaths like Henri Lafont, who would stop at nothing when it came to pleasing “Dr. Bones” at number 72, their paymaster and protector.

  —

  LATER THAT summer, once Manos was on his way south, Phillip returned to Paris by train. Again when he made his way through the Gare Saint-Lazare, he was not stopped and searched. After his exploits in Brittany, Phillip was more fascinated than ever by what his parents were doing, but they still kept everything from him, never discussing their secret lives. Strangers continued to turn up at odd hours at Avenue Foch. One day Phillip showed some of his holiday snapshots to a man who had visited a few times. Perhaps they might be useful? The man said they might be and took them from him. Phillip would never know if they were seen by British intelligence. One thing was certain: had his parents discovered that he had been playing the teenage spy, they would have been furious.

  Phillip’s images might not have made it to England, but plenty of other intelligence did pass through his home and did end up in London. By the fall of 1943, when Phillip returned to his school to study hard for his baccalaureate, his home was a critical “drop box,” labeled “P2” by Goélette. When couriers could not be found to relay documents and photographs, Toquette may have carried the intelligence herself to Goélette contacts, some of whom operated in Brittany. According to Goélette records, information was regularly taken to a small village called Lannilis, where a priest called Père Lucq passed it on to an SOE contact. The SOE agent then arranged for the photographs and documents to be taken across the Channel, most often by motor torpedo boat.

  One of those thought to have used 11, Avenue Foch, as a drop box was a remarkable forty-five-year-old engineer called Michel Hollard, one of the most effective spies of the war as far as the British were concerned. A senior Allied intelligence chief
would describe him as “the man who literally saved London,” because of the secrets he passed on about Hitler’s “wonder weapon,” the V-1 rocket, responsible for the destruction of more than 80,000 British homes.

  British intelligence had learned that a pilotless plane was being developed at Peenemünde, Germany, in an underground testing facility. But no one had been able to work out where the weapon would be fired from or at whom. That summer of 1943, one of Hollard’s many contacts, a young draftsman in a builder’s office, managed to steal a blueprint from his boss’s coat. The blueprint was for a launch site for the V-1 rocket to be built in northern France at Bois-Carré. London was clearly the target. The discovery was among the most critical for Allied intelligence of the war.

  By the fall of 1943 the Gestapo had begun to penetrate Hollard’s network. He lost several of his sources, one of them tortured almost to death by Kieffer’s accomplices at 84, Avenue Foch. Hollard’s oft-repeated journey from France to Berne, Switzerland, where he handed over diagrams and photographs to a British embassy official, was ever more hazardous. Instead of crossing the border, it is believed he began to use drop boxes in Paris instead, including the one at 11, Avenue Foch.

  Just as daring as Hollard was a young Austrian aristocrat, Erich Posch-Pastor von Camperfeld, the son of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s last ambassador to the Vatican. Thin, dark-skinned, and according to one contemporary, “physically and socially supple,” the twenty-nine-year-old spy had fought against the Germans in 1938 in opposition to the Anschluss. For that crime he was sent to Dachau, Hitler’s first concentration camp. As further punishment, he was forced to join the Wehrmacht and serve on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded in late 1941. Through connections high up in the German command, he then managed to wheedle his way into a job with the German Purchasing Agency, headquartered in Paris, which acquired food and matériel to be sent back to Germany.

  One of von Camperfeld’s cousins worked for the Wehrmacht in Paris, and von Camperfeld was able to persuade him to pass him details of the V-1 rocket project: drawings of the rockets and maps of where they were going to be based along the Channel coast in anticipation of an Allied invasion. Von Camperfeld wisely avoided being seen anywhere near Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo might recognize him, so that fall he apparently began to visit the American Hospital, where he had several appointments with a certain Dr. Sumner Jackson, who knew him only by a code name, “Étienne Paul Provost.”

  From October 1943 onward, according to an official British report, von Camperfeld passed on “economic and military information of the highest importance, including some of the first designs of the V-1 rocket.” Allied supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower later stated that this and other information about the most worrisome of Hitler’s weapons was crucial to victory in World War Two. Without it the planned invasion of Europe—code-named Overlord—“might have been written off.”

  —

  ACCORDING TO his identity card and other papers, he was thirty-five-year-old Victor Burnier, an architect living at 7, Rue du Lac, in Annecy. In fact, he was Squadron Leader Frank Griffiths, a thirty-one-year-old dark-haired Welsh pilot who had dropped SOE agents and supplies to the resistance for much of the war. Since August, he had been on the run from the Gestapo after he crashed his Halifax bomber in southeastern France after suffering engine failure. His crew had been killed, but although he was badly wounded and burned when the plane split in two on impact, Griffiths managed to get free of the crash site before the Germans could arrive. He then made contact with the resistance, who had helped him get to Switzerland. From there he made his way to Toulouse and the safe house, patrolled by a very large black cat called Mifouf, where he was now, late in October 1943, seated at a table eating his petit déjeuner.

  A strange figure walked into the room. The man looked like a swarthy French peasant. Maybe he was the gardener? He walked over to Griffiths and grabbed him by the hand. His name was Joe, he said, and Griffiths was the first “English guy” he had set eyes on in months. His mother was Polish, Manos added, but the reason he looked like a local was because his father was a dark-skinned Greek.

  Manos and Griffiths were in the home of an extraordinary sixty-two-year-old six-foot-tall woman called Louise Marie Dissard, more commonly known as “Françoise.” She had joined the resistance in 1940 and ran an escape line from her home, the Villa Pamplemousse, in the city of Toulouse. By war’s end she would help more than seven hundred evaders like Manos to safety. Her task was to feed downed airmen and prepare them for the arduous journey across the Pyrenées to Spain. It was no easy task and she was a tough disciplinarian, making Manos exercise before each meal, refusing to feed him until he had climbed a set of stairs twenty-five times on his toes.

  Manos had been with “Françoise” for several days by the time Squadron Leader Griffiths arrived. They soon became friends and Griffiths would later recall Manos with great affection: “He was an amazingly relaxed person. Nothing ever disturbed him except, as I was to discover, rats and dogs. Germans, the Milice [Vichy anti-resistance paramilitary force], gendarmes worried him not at all. He was supremely confident in their company and was thoroughly enjoying his ‘tour of Europe’!”

  “Françoise” had soon arranged false identities for Manos and Griffiths. They then set off for Perpignan, where they met guides who would take them across the Pyrenées until they were within striking distance of Spain. Crossing the actual border would be the most dangerous part of the journey. Manos and Griffiths would do it alone. “However tired you are, never take the easy path and walk on a road,” one of the guides warned Griffiths. “You’re bound to be challenged there.”

  One evening in early November, Manos and Griffiths set off to hike the last few miles into Spain. It was so dark that Manos had to hold on to Griffiths’ coat so they would not be separated and get lost. Near the border, they heard the sounds of a German patrol. They hid amid bushes and listened intently. Did the Germans have dogs? Luckily they did not, and after a few tense minutes the patrol moved away. Manos was wearing size eleven GI boots, which sounded terribly loud to Griffiths—“like a tank going over a corrugated iron shed”—as they walked on, finally making it to the Col du Perthus, high in the Pyrenées, where they rested amid some boulders. “It was thrilling,” recalled Griffiths. “There below us were the lights of Spain.”

  Manos and Griffiths stumbled on through the darkness, crossed into Spain, and then headed to the town of Figueres, where they went their separate ways. Manos arrived in Gibraltar on November 28 and the next day left for Britain by plane. He was then extensively debriefed in London by the escape-and-evasion organization, MIS-X. He was hugely relieved that he had not been caught and tortured by the Gestapo. He had not had to betray any of those who had risked their lives to help him, including Sumner and Toquette Jackson.

  TWELVE

  THE LAST METRO

  IT WAS A somber Christmas along Avenue Foch, the fourth the Jacksons had experienced under German occupation. Many in the resistance had hoped that by now the Allies would have landed in France and that Paris would have been freed. It was bitterly disappointing to contemplate another cold, seemingly endless winter under the Nazi yoke. Paris was gray, depressed, and increasingly tense. The weather felt especially cold, perhaps because ordinary Parisians had less and less fat for insulation. Families like the Jacksons huddled together in one room around a single fire if they were lucky enough to have found a source of wood or coal. Others, like the writer Colette, simply dressed in several layers and stayed in bed.

  At the American Hospital, Sumner and his colleagues were determined to keep their patients’ spirits up. The hospital’s ingenious cooks made a superb Christmas dinner after slaughtering pigs that had been kept hidden from the Germans. At the Christmas party, General de Chambrun and his wife, Clara, mingled with doctors and staff. The festivities were cut short, however, because everyone had to leave by 10:00 p.m.: the strict German curfew began at 11:00, and it was crucial not to miss
the last metro.

  Clara de Chambrun recalled that she and the general walked quickly through the cold, empty streets of Neuilly that night to the nearest metro station, either Pont de Neuilly or Anatole France, having stayed too long at the hospital. Clara was scared that if they missed the last metro back into central Paris, they would be arrested and then be forced to spend the night in jail. It was widely known that the Germans took “curfew violators” to the headquarters of the Feldgendarmerie (Military Police). A common punishment was to spend the night shining Fritz’s shoes. But if a German soldier had been shot or stabbed to death, as was increasingly the case, those caught in the roundup after midnight might suffer much worse. The Germans often selected curfew violators to be among “hostages” to be shot as a reprisal measure.

  The Chambruns managed to get to the metro station in time to board a train. They crossed Paris, sharing their carriage with all manner of Parisians, rich and poor, the train rattling past the many stations that had been closed. They then walked through deserted streets in Saint-Germain, three blocks in all, to their home on the Left Bank, at 58, Rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Jardin de Luxembourg. It was a frigid evening. Near her home, Clara saw a German soldier. He was standing under a streetlight, his sallow features illuminated by its pale blue glow. Clara felt panic surge inside her. Were they going to be arrested?

  The German approached and, instead of arresting her, asked her directions to a nearby hotel set aside for German soldiers. He had lost his way. He was clearly scared to be alone on the streets of Paris at night. Clara indicated that the hotel was nearby. The German looked relieved and made his way quickly toward safety. Clara would remember the incident vividly. It had left her deeply troubled and she began to wonder what would happen to her and her kind, those with close connections to the Vichy collaborators, if the Germans lost the war.