The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  Infuriated by the very idea of Vichy France, Taillandier did not yet know that he had caught the attention of Colonel Paul Paillole, a highly placed French counterintelligence commander who saw a chance to hit back at the Germans under the cloak of “cooperation” with the new order. Paillole was impressed by Taillandier’s prowess at interception of German communications, his skill having earned him a reputation as a “pianist,” the highest compliment a radio engineer could garner in the intelligence service. Meanwhile, Taillandier was still wearing the uniform of the French Army, expecting any day to be told that his unit had been disbanded and pondering how he could still fight for France.

  Taillandier soon learned that Article IV of the armistice decreed that a French force dubbed l’Armée de l’Armistice would be installed by the Nazis in the unoccupied zone and in French colonies in North Africa and elsewhere. According to the treaty, “the function of these forces was to keep internal order and to defend French territories from any Allied assault while remaining, in theory at least, under the overall direction of the German armed forces.” Under no circumstance would Taillandier take up arms against the Allies and fight for the Nazis. He prepared to resign from the army.

  There was just one problem: both the new Vichy government and the Nazi victors ordered fifty thousand French soldiers to remain in uniform until sufficient volunteers came forward to fulfill the quotas for the Vichy Metropolitan Army and the paramilitary Gendarmerie were filled. Taillandier received orders to remain at his post at the Château de Brax.

  Chafing at the directive but uncertain of his next move, Taillandier was summoned sometime in early summer 1940 to Vichy to meet with Colonel Paillole. As with everyone in Section Five, Taillandier knew that Paillole was a rising star in the army’s counterespionage unit, or secret service, the Fifth Bureau, to which Taillandier’s unit was attached. The thirty-six-year-old Paillole, whose father had died in action in World War I, loathed the Germans with an almost pathological intensity; he also despised the British and derided de Gaulle as an opportunist. Paillole confided to trusted friends that “although Germany was ‘enemy number one,’ Britain was ‘enemy number two.’” 3 In France, he was hardly alone in his dislike of the British. Many French officers believed that the British had fallen back to Dunkirk too fast, denying France an opportunity to regroup and possibly stop the Nazi advance. The British countered that it had been the Maginot Line that had collapsed, not the British Expeditionary Force.

  In a dreary concrete office building converted into a headquarters of sorts for the Vichy version of the secret services, Taillandier was escorted into a small, windowless office where a man with short, neatly cropped black hair and penetrating brown eyes sat behind a steel desktop crowded with tidy stacks of documents, folders, and photographs. Colonel Paillole, puffing on a cigarette and dressed in a dark blue tunic, a white shirt, and a black tie, did not rise to greet him. He gestured for Taillandier to take a seat in one of the two folding chairs in front of the desk.

  On the drive to Vichy, Taillandier had grappled with the best, most respectful way to decline any order by Paillole that he join the new clandestine unit. Although uncomfortable as the colonel scrutinized him through swirls of smoke, Taillandier met the man’s gaze.

  Paillole was immediately impressed by the twenty-nine-year-old Taillandier’s “clear eyes [and] his bright demeanor . . . his thinking.” 4 Paillole also realized suddenly that he had met the man before—at the town of Montrichard during the retreat from Paris. In his memoir, Paillole recalled: “We reached Montrichard through some smaller and empty roads. Garnier [one of Paillole’s operatives] had set up his files and unpacked the intelligence archives in a requisitioned building. The phone operators tried to reopen the lines and a young warrant officer set up a field telephone in the office. I noticed how exceptionally smart and well prepared that man was. His name was Marcel Taillandier and later, in 1943, he was to set up and lead the Morhange Resistance group.” 5

  The initial reports that the colonel had received about the younger man appeared accurate: Taillandier possessed innate nerve. Two questions Paillole needed answered were whether the “pianist’s” steely demeanor would hold up during dangerous, spur-of-the-moment covert missions and whether he would hesitate to kill a man—or a woman—given the operations Paillole had in mind.

  Before the colonel even got to those questions, he had to gauge the depths of Taillandier’s patriotism. Paillole himself planned to operate in a way that would reassure Vichy officials of his loyalty to the fledgling regime; at the same time, he intended to hamper the Nazis in every way possible without arousing suspicion. His approach would lead many historians to brand him as a collaborator, others to revere him as a friend of the Resistance, and others, more accurately, to view him as something between a pragmatist and a patriot. He espoused the view that “the work of [his] services was to defend [Vichy] sovereignty and to prevent unauthorized individual acts of collaboration [with the Nazis] on the part of ordinary French citizens.” 6 Playing his dual roles deftly, Paillole would be tapped by Vichy to command the government’s top counterespionage body, the Service de la Sécurité Militaire.

  In Taillandier, Paillole hoped to find a man who, wearing the Vichy Army uniform, could use his position and his wits to root out collaborators and Nazi spies. As the colonel hurled rapid-fire questions designed to elicit information and test Taillandier’s ability to “think on his feet,” Taillandier sagely realized that blunt answers were his best approach because the intimidating intelligence professional would see through any attempt to mask his genuine beliefs. He did not hold back expressing his hatred of the Nazis, his desire to find a way to fight them, and his contempt for the puppet government that Paillole now served.

  The colonel did not change expression when Taillandier affirmed his intent to help the Allies—including the English—in every way he could. Most importantly, he confirmed a key point that Paillole’s inquiries had suggested: Taillandier was willing to sacrifice his life without hesitation for a free France.

  Paillole, who had wanted to be a field officer but whose superiors judged his photographic memory, icy demeanor, and ruthlessness as the ideal traits for intelligence and espionage, now revealed what he wanted from Taillandier. The colonel wanted to maintain a veneer of collaboration with the Germans to prevent occupation of the Vichy zone; however, he wanted to use handpicked clandestine operatives in the Vichy military, police, prisons, courts, and government to arrest or sometimes “eliminate” German agents and French collaborators. That was why, he told Taillandier, he needed men willing “to hide in plain sight,” in Vichy uniforms, and ferret out spies and traitors. 7

  Taillandier agreed to take on the mission, but insisted on one condition. Refusing to perform any duties that could aid the Nazis or Vichy collaborators in any way, he would only take on a role that would secretly undermine the Germans and traitors.

  Paillole suppressed a smile at the warrant officer’s courage in the presence of France’s “chief spymaster.” He nodded.

  As Taillandier rose from the chair and saluted, everything changed for him. Pierre Saint-Laurens writes, “So began his second life in Toulouse, his war in the shadows.” 8

  CHAPTER 8

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  “CRAZY-MAD”

  On January 1, 1944, Taillandier’s delivery of Staff Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz to the Barbots reflected the minute-to-minute danger of the Frenchman’s “war in the shadows.” Speeding off on the Gnome through the dissipating mist, Taillandier was plotting the last-minute details of an ambush set for later that afternoon. This planned strike against the Gestapo was one of the most audacious and important of his lethal career in the Resistance.

  Taillandier’s path from his first meeting with Colonel Paillole to his first glimpse of Arthur stretched nearly three and a half years. In that span, Taillandier had risen from a gifted radio “pianist” to one of
France’s most ruthless, brilliant, and feared Resistance leaders. All that the Germans and the Vichy police knew about him were his code name, “Ricardo”; his unit’s name, Morhange; and the unit’s lethal daring and efficiency, which prompted another Resistance leader, Pierre Saint-Laurens, to write: “Morhange group members were deemed to be ‘crazy-mad’ [slang meaning “afraid of nothing”]. It is to them we assigned the most hazardous and dangerous missions, including infiltrating groups in collaboration and German institutions (Gestapo), because the group did not hesitate.” 1

  Taillandier remained in the uniform of a French Army warrant officer in and around the Château de Brax from June 1940 until December 1940, when the Vichy government officially disbanded his unit; during that time, he sized up and recruited fellow soldiers to help him amass and hide stockpiles of small arms, explosives, and radio equipment for future use against the Nazis and their Vichy allies. Taillandier and his men concealed the materials in the forests between the Château de Brax and Toulouse. From the castle tower, he used the powerful transmitter to monitor, or “strum,” Nazi transmissions from the occupied city of Bordeaux, secretly passing on messages for Paillole to send to de Gaulle and the Free French intelligence service in London. By the end of 1940, de Gaulle and his staff were well aware that the warrant officer at the Château de Brax was a huge intelligence asset.

  The dissolution of his unit, Section Five, in December 1940, freed Taillandier to pursue more aggressive action against the Germans and Vichy collaborators with the team he had assembled. All of them were chafing to hit back at the Nazis and collaborators. To Taillandier’s surprise, Section Five’s radio transmitter and equipment were simply abandoned at the Château de Brax. With several high-ranking Toulouse police officers and officials in his evolving network, Taillandier felt comfortable enough to establish his fledgling operation at the remote castle. If his planted operatives in the Vichy forces could not persuade officers to ignore the Château de Brax, Taillandier would simply kill them.

  Colonel Paillole was ready to turn Taillandier loose on the Abwehr, the Gestapo, and collaborators. In a January 1941 meeting with Captain d’Hoffelize, Paillole’s head of counterintelligence in the Toulouse Station, the two officers discussed undercover operations. Paillole said, “I have more important news. I’m in contact with Taillandier again.”

  The captain responded, “He’s [Taillandier] the man we need in my area. He wants to work with us [the Toulouse police and Vichy counterintelligence] on condition that he not be tied to a desk and can slug it out with the Krauts and their friends. Do you agree?” 2

  Paillole concurred. They were about to unleash a nightmare named Marcel Taillandier upon the Nazis and their Vichy minions.

  Throughout 1941, Taillandier donned a suit and tie and toted a briefcase each weekday to his new “job” at a Toulouse purchasing bureau for engineering equipment—which included explosives. As he walked past brick buildings whose hue had earned the ancient city its nickname, la ville rose, the pink city, Toulousains saw just another young businessman making his way to work in the Vichy regime. He strode into his office, along the Garonne River and the Canal du Midi, and went to work for a Nazi operative named Otto Brandl. Brandl, duped by Paillole into thinking that Taillandier was a fervent collaborator, entrusted him with procuring building materials and explosives that were to be used for the construction of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Nazis’ vast defensive complex to blunt any Allied invasion. Taillandier’s mission for Paillole was to gather intelligence on the German defenses and to siphon off any and all materials that could be used in sabotage operations. At night, Taillandier stole up to the Château de Brax to monitor Vichy and German communications and report them to Paillole.

  Taillandier’s position with a Nazi company allowed him to travel with few restrictions between Vichy France and the Occupied Zone. This allowed him to cultivate contacts through whom he obtained front-wheel-drive Citroën sedans, gasoline, explosives, small arms, and forged documents. With wartime gas rationing in effect, few people could use their cars; however, Taillandier not only hoarded large amounts of gasoline, but also planned to use the black Citroëns for Resistance business.

  Using his position, his charm, and his fluent German, Taillandier applied another of his talents to gain access to Atlantic Wall construction sites. Morhange member Pierre Saint-Laurens, in Conte de faits, X15, Réseau Morhange, writes: “In addition to his professional qualities and his extraordinary courage, Taillandier had a talent for drawing and such manual dexterity that it was possible for him to reproduce any official stamp [Vichy or Nazi] with paper, cork, rubber, and ink and to counterfeit the most complex documents.” 3

  It was impossible to distinguish between Brandl’s signature and Taillandier’s forged version. That signature proved to be the entry point for Taillandier’s boldest counterintelligence gambit yet.

  In January 1942, he was dispatched to Solomiac, a town in the Midi-Pyrénées foothills, to set up future Resistance supply and escape routes across the mountains into Spain. He received a message there from two of his radio operatives, known as “strummers,” that they had intercepted Nazi communications about a large, heavily guarded blockhouse outside Paris. Inside the bastion were blueprints for the intricate bunkers, tunnels, minefields, beach obstacles, garrisons, and gun emplacements for the entire Atlantic Wall. Taillandier did not hesitate for a moment.

  He dyed his hair and eyebrows blond and put on a pair of rimless, nonprescription “Heinrich Himmler–style” glasses for a fake identification photo. Then he crafted false papers with both a Vichy and an official Nazi eagle-and-swastika seal, placed two large valises and a bulky briefcase in the trunk of his Citroën, and drove to Paris. At the Vichy-Occupied Zone border, Nazi guards scrutinized his papers, and he was quickly allowed to resume the drive to Paris. In the Tourville section of the city, he handed counterfeit identification cards to the two strummers and told them to head to Toulouse and lie low until he came back.

  On the following day, Taillandier strode into the offices of the Todt Company, a contractor with access to both the blockhouse and Atlantic Wall construction site. Easily able to pass himself off as an engineer and collaborator with impeccable references, he was hired. He worked as a supplies procurer for the company for several weeks, and when he was sent to the blockhouse for a three-day inventory of items that the architects and engineers had on hand or needed, he was given a tour of the building. As he was escorted past two massive, reinforced steel doors, his guide explained that all of the plans for the outfit’s projects were stored on several tables inside. He led Taillandier to a small, windowless office near the doors.

  Taillandier noticed over the next day or two that security outside the blockhouse and at the building’s sole entry and exit was tight, with armored cars, soldiers, and attack dogs ringing the structure. Inside, however, proved another matter. Engineers, architects, and clerks moved around at will, unchallenged. When Taillandier saw that each night at twelve, the third shift replaced the second and the steel doors to the planning room were left open for the midnight-to-8 a.m. employees, he knew what his next move would be.

  On his third and final night at the blockhouse, he waited in his office for the planning room to clear, put on his coat and hat, picked up his briefcase, and walked over to the steel doors. As he had hoped, they stood slightly ajar.

  He pulled one open a little more, his heart pounding, and peered inside. It was empty. He slipped into the low-ceilinged room. His breath caught at the sight of three long tables flanking the concrete walls. Neatly stacked blueprints covered the tabletops. Without the slightest hesitation Taillandier quickly scooped up as many papers as he could and stuffed them into his briefcase. He left just enough piles on the table to try to buy a few minutes before anyone realized that a batch of blueprints was missing.

  He hurried back to the doors, stopped, and listened. There were voices, but still down the hallway. Under
no circumstances could he let himself be spotted exiting the room. He waited and froze as footsteps came closer. Holding his breath, he flattened himself against the wall next to one of the doors. As soon as the footsteps faded, he exhaled, slipped out the doors, and forced himself to walk at a normal pace to the exit, where two steel-helmeted sentries awaited him. His luck held. One of the Germans recognized him and waved him through without even asking for his identification card.

  Taillandier walked quickly to his car, started it up, and drove to the final checkpoint at the gate. Again, he was not challenged. He drove down several streets and pulled into an alleyway where a man in a dark overcoat and low-slung fedora waited next to a small car, a Peugeot. Paillole’s man was right on time, as planned. Taillandier climbed into the Peugeot, removed the rimless glasses, and drove to a safe house on the outskirts of the city.

  Once inside, he washed out the blond dye and slicked his hair down. He burned the papers and identification card he had used to dupe the people at the Todt Company and get into the blockhouse, and drove out of Paris. At several checkpoints, German guards studied his new photo card and papers and opened the trunk of his car, where his two large suitcases were packed with clothes and hidden compartments containing the blueprints for the Atlantic Wall. Only once did a soldier order Taillandier from the car and make him open the suitcases. After a cursory glance at the meticulously folded shirts, pants, undergarments, and socks, the sentry grunted at Taillandier to close his luggage and get moving.

  When Paillole’s network smuggled the blueprints through Spain and to London, Taillandier’s reputation soared not only in French but also in British intelligence circles. De Gaulle now viewed the former “pianist” as an indispensable asset behind Nazi lines. Taillandier’s daring and opportunistic theft of the plans for the Atlantic Wall set off a frantic Nazi manhunt for a blond man with glasses. He was long gone, though, having pulled off one of the greatest counterintelligence coups of the war.