That night, few words were said in the Meyerowitz home, everyone lost in their own reveries about Arthur, their own fears.
When David and Seymour trudged with bleary eyes to the kitchen table for breakfast the next morning, they were startled to find that Rose’s striking coal-black hair had turned white. She had no intention of doing anything about it until Arthur came back. David had no choice but to go to work, but when Seymour balked at heading to school, Rose tersely told him to grab his book bag and report to class because there was no excuse for cutting class except illness or a death in the family. No one had died, she emphasized to her silently skeptical younger son. Seymour knew better than to voice his doubts. “I did it [prayed],” he says, “but I did not believe completely, did not accept internally that he would ever come home.” 3
CHAPTER 7
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WAR IN THE SHADOWS
As Arthur continued to languish and wait in the woods near the Barbots’ farm, Marcel Taillandier intended to comply with his orders from London. He was already making arrangements to entrust Arthur to the Brutus Network, a Resistance band whose chief mission was to spirit Allied pilots and crewmen out of Occupied France to safety in neutral Spain. Taillandier was the founder and leader of the shadowy and deadly Resistance group Morhange; his reason for choosing the name was unclear, but various connotations of Morhange mean “unconditional love” and “truth.” Taillandier’s specialties were intelligence, counterintelligence, ambush, sabotage, and ruthless assassination of Gestapo agents, collaborators, and agents of the German military intelligence agency known as the Abwehr (“defense”). Taillandier’s trademark was cutting down enemies in broad daylight for maximum psychological effect. He had little time for Allied escapees even if he wanted to help them, and had done so only a few times for high-value pilots.
Still, Taillandier had noted that despite severe pain from a back injury and a pronounced limp, the American had not hesitated to cram himself into the sidecar and never once cried out as the motorcycle bounced down the road. By the time he left the airman with the Barbots, he realized there was nothing weak about the American. When he had reached for the napkin-covered knife at first sight of Taillandier, the Frenchman strained not to smile—the airman was a fighter.
Taillandier decided he would make sure that Sergeant Meyerowitz would be treated as a high-priority escapee, even if the Frenchman needed to stay involved a bit longer before Brutus orchestrated an escape plan. He had no intention of taking too many liberties with his orders from de Gaulle—at least not yet.
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Marcel Taillandier was born on March 25, 1911, in Condat-en-Combraille, in the central French province of Auvergne, the son of Jean-Baptiste and Marie (Debas) Taillandier. The family moved to the picturesque medieval village of Châtel-Guyon for three years and then to Châteaugay, a town founded by the Romans and surmounted by a fortress once inhabited by the Knights Templar. For an energetic boy like Taillandier, the rivers and ridges flanking the town offered boundless opportunities for adventure.
Taillandier grew up with his two sisters, Margaret and Mathilde, in a France reeling from the carnage of World War I. The region’s male population was composed heavily of boys and old men. Most families in the region had lost men on the Western Front during World War One and harbored a deep hatred of the Germans.
Intelligent, athletic, and a natural leader among his classmates, Taillandier loved military history and was “attracted very young to the profession of arms.” 1 In 1924, at the age of thirteen, he joined the Troupe Billom, a military-style club for schoolboys; he relished the group’s calisthenics, discipline, marching, hiking, and bivouacs and looked up to the troop’s instructors, former officers in the French Army. He especially loved working with military radios, excited to learn codes and to see the ways in which communications and intelligence played key roles both on and behind the front lines.
In 1928, Taillandier had a decision to make. A talented artist, as well as a top student in mathematics and science, he qualified for university study but leaned toward a military career. Knowing that the French Army offered bright young men a course of study in engineering that could provide a career path as an officer and later as a highly paid professional in civilian life, Taillandier made his choice. He enlisted in the 8th Engineers.
After sailing through basic training, he began his engineering studies at the garrison of Versailles, just outside Paris, specializing in radio communications and electronics. His deft drawing ability and his painstaking eye for detail on blueprints and schematic diagrams earned him the attention of his instructors. He had no idea how crucial his artistic skills would prove in the coming conflict.
Taillandier spent many of his off-duty hours wandering through the Louvre to study the paintings and drawings of masters from the Renaissance to the Impressionists and Modernists, from da Vinci to Chagall. He also loved to walk along the Left Bank to view and often admire the works of the artists clogging the walkways adjoining the Seine River. A dashing figure in his uniform, he evoked admiring looks from women of all ages.
Taillandier became a full-fledged engineer over the next several years, was promoted to chief warrant officer, and was assigned to the French Army’s prestigious Counter-Espionage Unit, in the Department of War’s Radio Service. Only the toughest and most capable engineers were chosen for the unit, for if war broke out, Taillandier and his unit would be deployed behind enemy lines to gather and relay intelligence on everything from mass troop and armor movements to the names of suspected spies and infiltrators.
In 1935, Paris offered vibrant distractions for a single young officer on the rise despite the ongoing hardships of the global Depression and the ominous rearming of Germany, especially since Hitler’s blatant, belligerent disavowal of the Versailles Treaty in 1934. Paris teemed with musicians, artists, sculptors, writers, playwrights, poets, foreign journalists, and thrill-seeking expatriates from all over the world. On the surface, the city still throbbed with the pulse of the Roaring Twenties and the jazz age, men and women of all ages embracing a live-for-today philosophy and straining to push away the encroaching shadows of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Spain, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Japan. Somehow, in some way, Europe would pull back from a second conflagration, millions believed. Hitler or Mussolini might posture and threaten, but they would back down on the brink of any repeat of World War I.
Taillandier and his friends immersed themselves in the city’s nightlife and reveled in its jazz clubs, cafés, restaurants, and seemingly infinite parties. Many of France’s military leaders swallowed whole the notion that not even Hitler craved another ruinous conflict with France and Great Britain.
War was likely the last thing on Taillandier’s mind at the moment that he was introduced at a Christmas dinner party in 1935 to a beautiful young Parisienne named Simone Dupontheil and was immediately smitten. Never a man to hesitate and acutely aware that Simone had a veritable legion of suitors, the courtly, confident young warrant officer, sous-officier, proposed within a few weeks. To the surprise of no one who knew Taillandier, Simone said yes, and after a spring wedding in 1936, the couple settled in Paris, where he was stationed at the famed nineteenth-century fortress Mont-Valérian.
Even among the thousands of men in uniform in the French capital, the dashing, dark-eyed engineer, still clean-shaven and yet to grow his trademark pencil-thin mustache, stood out in his visored Foreign Legion–style képi, tan tunic with shoulder bars and insignia, and cavalry-style jodhpurs, or riding pants, tucked into knee-high, polished black boots. The covered holster on his right hip held a .32-caliber MAB-D semiautomatic pistol. If war did come, he would also carry a 7.65-mm MAS modèle 38 submachine gun.
Within a few years, Taillandier and Simone had two daughters, Monique and Christiane. Then their run of nearly five idyllic years and the lives of everyone in the nation
were shattered with the Nazi invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939.
France and Great Britain soon declared war on Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and Taillandier was ready. As with most of his fellow officers, he remained confident in the state-of-the-art Maginot Line, a vast network of linked fortresses, tunnels, and bunkers that stretched along the entire border between France and Germany and ended where the dense, supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest began in northeastern France and stretched into Luxembourg and Belgium. Deployed behind the allegedly impregnable defenses were French aircraft, armored divisions, and artillery ready to blunt the Nazi onslaught. With the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) pouring into France, Taillandier did not envision any prospect that the Nazis could win.
What neither Taillandier nor his fellow officers could anticipate was the new form of warfare that Hitler’s generals had devised. No one in the French and British high command was ready for the coming blitzkrieg—“lightning warfare,” coordinated and rapid assaults by armor, mechanized infantry, aircraft, and artillery. The Allied strategy was mired in the past, a repeat of World War I’s trench warfare—static defense lines along the Western Front. France and Britain were about to pay for that approach.
From September 1939 through April 1940, the armies stared each other down in a stalemate dubbed the “Phony War.” The French and British expected that the Nazis would attempt to skirt the Maginot Line and flank it by striking through the Low Countries, the Netherlands and Belgium, to the north but above the forests, ridges, and hills of the Ardennes. The British Expeditionary Forces were dug in along the French–Belgian border, but only a few French and British divisions were emplaced along the Ardennes.
On May 10, 1940, the Germans unleashed Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the expected strike through the Netherlands and Belgium. The French and British surged into Belgium to meet the Nazi onslaught. Awaiting his orders to the front, Taillandier was still stationed in Mont-Valérian, but now as a member of the army’s top Special Services unit, Counterintelligence Section Five Office, monitoring both Allied and German radio transmissions crackling along the Maginot Line. Unexpectedly, flurries of messages started to come in from the lightly defended Ardennes sector.
For the next forty-eight hours, Taillandier had a front-row seat to a catastrophe unfolding hour by hour. He and his fellow operatives could not believe what they were hearing at first. German panzers, tank columns, were pouring out of Ardennes forests so thick that French and British reconnaissance planes had been unable to spot them through the tangled canopy of towering pine and fir trees over the previous weeks. No one had even considered sending foot patrols into the woods despite distant, muffled rumbles within the Ardennes for several weeks. According to German general Erich von Manstein, commander of the attack through the Ardennes, “through strenuous maneuvering and planning, the forest was selected as the primary route of mechanized forces of Nazi Germany . . . for the Invasion of France. The forest’s great size could conceal the armored divisions, and because the French did not suspect such a risky [Nazi] move, they [the French commanders] did not consider a breakthrough there [the Ardennes].” 2
Now the impossible erupted with every message streaming through the transmitter of Section Five. Taillandier and everyone else in the unit’s air-raid bunker deep beneath Mont-Valérian’s massive granite walls and floors knew that only two French divisions stood behind the Meuse River and Manstein’s tanks. If the panzers overran the defenders, the Germans would cut the Allied forces in half and trap hundreds of thousands of British and French troops between Manstein’s armor and the German forces bearing down through Belgium.
Taillandier monitored radio traffic without sleep and for two days was heartened that the badly outnumbered French divisions in the Ardennes put up a savage fight, desperately trying to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. The Luftwaffe’s brand of blitzkrieg destroyed hundreds of Allied fighters and bombers before they even got off the ground, and the Germans seized near-complete control of the skies as Stuka dive bombers and Junker Ju 88 high-altitude bombers tore up French and British airstrips from the Belgian border to fields just outside Paris. The bunker in which Taillandier agonized over the disheartening messages from every front shuddered from the wallops of heavy Luftwaffe bombs pounding airfields just a few miles away.
On May 12, Section Five fell silent for a long minute or two. Taillandier and the others were receiving the first communiqués the unit had been dreading. The 7th Panzer Division was crossing the Meuse in force and rolling into northern France. Leading the armored columns that plunged Section Five into momentary shock and despair was Major General Erwin Rommel, who would later command the Afrika Korps and earn military immortality as the “Desert Fox.”
Taillandier quickly recovered his composure, readjusting his earphones and listening in to the messages coming in with heightened urgency. No matter what, he was certain that the fight was far from over and equally certain that Section Five would soon be ordered north to operate behind the German lines. He was wrong in both assumptions.
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On June 3, 1940, the drone of hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers reverberated above the spires and rooftops of Paris. Bombs poured down as the Nazis pounded the French capital for the first time. As explosions rocked Mont-Valérian, deafening vibrations tossed chairs, tables, wireless radio sets, and the men of Section Five in all directions. Although Taillandier’s first thought was to get Simone and the girls out of the city as soon as possible, he forced himself to tamp down his emotions and focus on his duty.
As the Luftwaffe pummeled Paris throughout the day and the air-raid sirens blared endlessly, grim news from the Northern Front filled Taillandier’s headset. Operation Dynamo, the desperate effort to rescue Allied troops trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, was over. The last boatloads of more than 100,000 French and 224,686 British Expeditionary Force (BEF) troops were on their way to England, miraculously evacuated by every available ship from battlewagons to fishing boats and even yachts in late May and early June. The Luftwaffe had turned the shoreline into a slaughter pit, but strangely, Hitler had held his panzers behind Dunkirk. Among the Frenchmen who had escaped to fight another day against the Führer was a tall, haughty colonel named Charles de Gaulle, who was determined to drive the Nazi invaders from France and restore the nation’s shattered pride.
Taillandier told Simone to drive the following night with their daughters from Paris to Toulouse, some four hundred miles south, where the couple had family. Taillandier soon followed them, ordered to abandon Paris with Section Five and set up a new communications and listening post just outside Toulouse. The counterintelligence unit hastily loaded their equipment onto Chenillette Lorraine 1937L supply carriers and piled themselves into Renault UE trucks for the retreat south. The convoy rattled toward Toulouse with headlights off at night to evade Luftwaffe sorties similar to those that had turned the roads to Dunkirk into a tangle of debris and dead or wounded soldiers, civilians, and animals. To Taillandier’s relief, Simone and the children had made it to Toulouse safely.
On June 13, Hitler’s legions marched triumphantly into Paris, their jackboots’ rhythmic thumps echoing along the Champs-Élysées as massed Parisians watched in silence and tears. Shame and rage seethed jointly in many. The seeds of resistance were already stirring. With several hundred thousand Frenchmen remaining under arms, Taillandier expected that a final, desperate battle for the rest of the nation loomed. He relished the chance to fight until the end and knew that many of his comrades embraced that same resolve.
Taillandier was now stationed with Section Five at the Château de Brax, an abandoned thirteenth-century castle with jutting turrets perched atop a thickly forested ridge some ten miles southwest of Toulouse. The fortress offered a perfect spot for the powerful radio transmitter that Taillandier helped install, the reception strong enough to pick up Allied communicati
ons from London and intercept Nazi messages anywhere in France.
At 1:35 a.m. on June 25, 1940, Taillandier felt as though someone had landed a thunderous blow to his chest and stomach. For a few moments, his vision seemed to swim. The official news that France had just surrendered to Germany overwhelmed Taillandier and the other counterintelligence operatives at the Château de Brax with feelings of fury, betrayal, and despair. All they could do for the moment was to wait and wonder what would happen next, and as the next few weeks passed, Taillandier resolved that no matter what, the war was not over for him. He would never accept the surrender or forgive the politicians and the military leaders whose cowardice had shamed France.
For Taillandier, any French citizen who collaborated with the Germans would be judged a traitor. He did not yet know how, but he did know that he would never accept German rule or anyone who did. If not for his wife and children and his determination to protect them, Taillandier might have envied his countrymen who had escaped Dunkirk and would keep fighting under the command of the recently promoted General Charles de Gaulle, now commander of the Free French forces in Britain.
The effects of the Franco-German Armistice of June 22, 1940, washed over Taillandier and the rest of the nation in the following weeks. The pact divided France into two “zones”: the German military would fully occupy the nation’s north and west, but not central and southern France, including Toulouse. Instead, Vichy France, as the zone was named for the town selected as the capital, would be governed by French officials and military working with the Nazis. On the surface, Vichy France retained a level of self-government; however, the Nazis would pull the proverbial strings, especially with the ominous presence of Gestapo, Abwehr (counterintelligence), and a horde of spies and collaborators salted throughout the zone. The division of France into two sectors made sense for the German military, which was marshaling every possible resource for the unfolding Battle of Britain and for the eventual Operation Barbarossa, the ill-advised invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The Lost Airman Page 7