The Lost Airman

by Seth Meyerowitz

  When World War II broke out, Cleaver’s choice of service was clear. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in the fall of 1940. His preference was fighter planes, but his leadership skills and calm personality led his superiors to believe that he was perfectly suited to lead entire crews into action rather than fly solo in a Spitfire or Hurricane fighter.

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  As Cleaver approached the coastline of France, he and the other bombers increased their altitude to three thousand feet and readied themselves for “the gauntlet”—the gut-wrenching flight above Nazi 88s. Their luck held as they drew closer to the drop zone. Despite the glowing moon, there were no bursts of antiaircraft fire—yet.

  Nearing the drop zone, bomb aimer Sergeant Hindle checked their “payload”—cylindrical C and H steel containers equipped with a parachute. The C’s were sixty-nine inches long and loaded with rifles, pistols, and automatic weapons for the Bir Hacheim unit; each weighed up to 224 pounds. The H’s were the same size, but could be broken down into five smaller sections for the fighters on the ground. Although the H container was easier to carry and conceal for the Resistance, the sections could not hold long items such as rifles. The H type was perfect for ammunition, explosives, boots, blankets, and radio equipment.

  As the Charente River appeared on Cleaver’s left side and the Atlantic on his right, he peered out for the tiny glint of six bicycle lamps, the prearranged signal for the drop zone. Standing in the cockpit right behind him, navigator Flight Sergeant John Franklin checked the distance to the drop zone on his map, using the river as a landmark, and gave Cleaver a report every sixty seconds. If Cleaver did not detect the contact signal or had any doubts about the drop zone, he had the option to abort the mission and lead the formation back home.

  Franklin told Cleaver that the drop zone was directly ahead. From the ground, there was only darkness. Cleaver wondered if the Resistance had not reached the DZ [drop zone] because the Nazis had been tipped off somehow. He decided to scrap the delivery and turn back for England.

  As the squadron banked back toward the coast, flak burst all around the bomber above a German airfield near Cognac. Cleaver immediately yanked the throttle hard to peel away from the 88s, but shrapnel tore into the starboard wing and set it ablaze. The bomber quaked violently and began to lose altitude.

  Cleaver recognized immediately that the Halifax was finished. He ordered his crew to bail out while there was still—barely—enough time and distance between the plane and the ground for their parachutes to deploy. Jumping from three thousand feet meant a hard or even fatal landing, but it was his crew’s only chance.

  Remaining at the controls to allow his crew to escape, Cleaver fought to keep the plane level, but she was losing height rapidly. With all of his men out but the Halifax now at one thousand feet and plunging, he had no chance to jump. His only hope was to crash land. With the bomber packed with the ammunition and the explosives intended for the Resistance, Cleaver figured the Halifax would explode on impact.

  Unfamiliar with the ground, he attempted to put the lurching, flaming Halifax down in a field cloaked in mist. In the darkness, only the shadowy tops of trees were visible as he braced himself for landing. The plane slammed against the ground and skidded to a stop. As flames that would soon bring the Germans to the crash site engulfed the plane, he crawled through the shattered glass windshield of the bomber. He staggered into the brush as German armored personnel carriers swarmed the site. Within minutes the bomber exploded in a column of fire and smoke.

  Several men in black Gestapo uniforms found Cleaver, beat him, and handcuffed him. They threw him into a sedan and headed down a road with several other vehicles. One of the Gestapo agents looked at Cleaver’s RAF identification card. He informed him they were going to make a public example of him and show people what happened to those who aided “Resistance gangsters.” 4

  The Nazis drove him just outside Toulouse and imprisoned him in a stone blockhouse that adjoined a farmhouse and large stone barn that the Gestapo used to interrogate prisoners and store files.

  They stripped him of his clothing, and for the next two days he was interrogated and beaten, either tied to a chair or chained by his ankle to a wall.

  On the third night, April 9, 1944, shouts and small-arms fire broke out from all directions outside the blockhouse. A grenade blast blew open the front door, the shock wave shook the walls around Cleaver and stunned him. Agonized screams echoed above submachine-gun bursts, and pounding footsteps neared the room where Cleaver lay slumped against a wall.

  The wooden door was kicked open in a shower of splinters. A moment later several men rushed inside with automatic weapons. Cleaver thought they were about to kill him.

  Instead, a Frenchman with a mustache and a beret pulled low across his brow freed the pilot from the chain with a single pistol shot. Two of the man’s comrades helped Cleaver from the building to a dark sedan near several other similar cars.

  At least ten Germans lay sprawled, bleeding, and motionless in and around the blockhouse. Several single shots from inside the adjacent farmhouse testified that no Nazis had been spared.

  The Resistance group’s leader, the man with the mustache, introduced himself to Cleaver in English as Marcel.

  Arthur’s mission to help the famed RAF pilot attempt an escape that could end fatally for both men was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 20

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  UNLIKELY FRIENDS

  The Morhange sedan carrying the injured RAF pilot sped across the Pont Neuf across the Garonne River and cut from the highway to a series of side streets close to the center of Toulouse. To the south, bright flashes lit the night sky. Concussive shock waves rolled through the city, shaking roads and buildings. The RAF was hammering German positions and railways outside Toulouse.

  As usual, no one stopped the sinister-looking Citroën, the Nazis assuming it was one of theirs. Just a few blocks from the boulevard Deltour, the car stopped in front of a brick apartment house. Two Morhange agents hustled Lieutenant Cleaver inside the building and up to the top floor, where the door was slightly ajar. A slight, sixtyish woman with gray hair pulled back in a tight bun was waiting for them. The operatives led Cleaver into an annex, laid him atop an old, iron-framed bed, and raced back downstairs to the sedan. It vanished down the street seconds later.

  A doctor was waiting inside and examined the Englishman, who was covered with bruises and cuts and whose blond hair was plastered with sweat and dried blood. The physician stitched several gashes and bound up several broken ribs. Then he injected the pilot with a small dose of morphine.

  Although Cleaver was grateful to be in a real bed and safe for the time being, and despite his morphine-induced state, the window-rattling explosions of the RAF night raids pulled him in and out of a restless sleep. His muddled thoughts drifted back to the crash, and he strained to remember how many of his crew’s parachutes he had counted as he fought to keep his burning Halifax in the air as long as possible.

  He was certain that Pilot Officer Norman Wyatt, in the seat next to him, had gotten out. Cleaver thought he had counted five chutes, but was concerned that the jump from such a low altitude could have injured or killed his men. At least he had held the bomber aloft long enough to give them their only chance of survival.

  As Cleaver hovered on the edge of consciousness, his own chances of survival hinged not only on the man named Marcel and his operatives, but also on the diminutive, slightly hunched woman in wire-rimmed glasses. Marie-Louise Dissard was a Resistance member responsible for running the most successful escape line for downed Allied airmen. At the moment that Cleaver had been brought to her, she was a wanted woman by the Gestapo and police. That fact had not slowed down her Resistance activities in Toulouse.

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  Sixty-four-year-old Marie-Louise Dissard was born
in Toulouse in 1880. After the fall of France, in June 1940, Dissard, who burned with a fierce love of her nation and a hatred of the Germans and their Vichy collaborators, joined the Resistance. She would soon find herself working with British Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer Ian Garrow and Belgian naval officer Albert Guérisse in a clandestine escape network dubbed the Pat O’Leary Line. The name was coined by Guérisse, who had told German captors that he was “Pat O’Leary,” a Canadian officer.

  Using the code name “Françoise,” Dissard operated out of her Toulouse apartment. There, she and Garrow set up a complex web of safe houses and couriers in Toulouse, Marseilles, and Perpignan, at the approaches of the Pyrénées Mountains between France and Spain. Both Garrow and Guérisse were eventually arrested, in 1941, and both escaped with the aid of “Françoise.” Dissard took command of the O’Leary network. Her age and appearance worked to her advantage and to that of the more than 250 airmen she helped to escape. World War II historian Michael Grant writes: “Because of her relatively advanced age, the Gestapo did not suspect that she was a member of the Resistance. This gave her considerable freedom to travel throughout France, arranging escapes for airmen. Her customary procedure was to escort airmen to Toulouse, where, through the network, she arranged lodgings. From here, they were moved to Perpignan and transferred to the care of local guides for the trek across the Pyrenees.” 1

  In the Toulouse annex, the injured pilot had no idea who the woman was and no idea that she was in even more trouble than he was. Cleaver assumed the apartment was hers, but she was, in fact, also hiding out there, several blocks from her own home. The Gestapo had seized one of the network’s guides in Perpignan in January 1944 and found a notebook on him even though the guides were never supposed to write down any operative’s name. Several pages contained Dissard’s name. When a Morhange plant in the Toulouse Gestapo alerted Dissard that the Nazis had her name, Resistance leaders urged her to go underground.

  For “Françoise” Dissard, keeping a low profile contradicted her very nature. Described as “an old woman with a very loud voice” 2 by one of the airmen she rescued, she had yelled at and cursed the Gestapo and police on a regular basis in the streets of Toulouse. Often, she walked up to German soldiers and especially Gestapo agents, wagged a finger in their faces, and unleashed a torrent of insults and swears at them.

  Always, she went out with her cat, which led neighbors and Nazis alike to dub her as the cat lady. Because of her aged appearance, the Germans believed her to be eccentric or outright crazy and left her alone. Normally, they would have immediately arrested anyone else for such defiance. The Gestapo had never suspected that the verbally abusive cat lady was the main safe-house keeper and organizer for the Pat O’Leary Line in the south of France.

  A British airman whom she helped to escape wrote: “Due to her efforts the line stayed open. She often gave abuse to the enemy, who thought her eccentric. She stood no nonsense, trusted no one. Her cat Miff went everywhere with her, and he lived to 18 years of age.” 3

  Much of that changed when the Nazis seized the guide’s notebook. Dissard went into hiding, but on her own terms, which meant she refused to abandon her work to help Allied airmen to safety. Taking refuge for several weeks in attics, cellars, and garages in and around Toulouse, she still ventured out from time to time with forged photo identification cards and papers. She correctly calculated that her appearance was that of any number of aging widows in the city, her features and manner of dress common and unremarkable. She made subtle changes to her appearance, arranging her hair in a bun instead of the coiled braid she wore in her original photo identification card. She donned wire-rimmed glasses that were absent in her original photo as well and let her hair go completely gray. The Gestapo was hunting for her, but she remained one step ahead of them.

  Taillandier, who visited Cleaver several times during the pilot’s first week in Toulouse, told Arthur to be ready to meet the Englishman soon. Arthur asked Taillandier about the man, wondering if Cleaver was one of those upper-class British officers whose air of superiority, even haughtiness, so grated on Americans who had grown up with little and worked hard for everything they had. At first, many raucous 8th and 15th U.S. Army Air Corps crewmen and pilots, reacting to the extreme manneredness and reserve of the British blue bloods, had mistakenly thought them effete. They quickly came to realize that many of those “lads of the finishing schools” had climbed into the cockpits of rugged Hurricane and sleek Spitfire fighter planes and bested the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Others, such as Cleaver, controlled the throttles of RAF bombers pounding Axis Europe with their Allies or running dangerous supply drops to the Resistance.

  In Thoulouse’s parlor, Taillandier described how Cleaver had stayed with his plane to make sure his entire crew had gotten out. Arthur’s eyes met Taillandier’s through the usual swirl of smoke from the cigarette in his hand. The fact that Cleaver had made sure his crew escaped first earned Arthur’s respect instantly, sight unseen.

  Taillandier explained to Cleaver that because the Gestapo knew his face and identity, the Englishman could not be allowed to go about the city. “They cut my hair a bit and dyed it black,” Cleaver wrote. “[Taillandier] provided me with an ID card with the name Antoine Broussard, with the words ‘slow witted’ on it. If the Germans or police ever entered Mrs. Dissard’s home, I was told to speak French with a stutter, that my command of the language was ample enough to pass.” 4

  Since January 1944, when she’d been identified as a member of the Resistance, Dissard had curbed her confrontational demeanor toward the police and the Nazis, not wanting to call so much attention to herself. If any neighbors did recognize her despite her changed appearance, they kept silent—they knew that a “visit” from Morhange awaited anyone who informed on her. For Marie-Louise Dissard, lying low to help American and British airmen remained her mission. It has been estimated that even after her name appeared in the captured notebook, she planned the escapes of at least 110 airmen through the Pyrénées. In April and May 1944, Lieutenant Cleaver was one of the Frenchwoman’s top priorities.

  Every time that she brought Cleaver his meals or simply entered the annex to chat with him, she took her cat, Miff, with her, either carrying the animal or letting her walk along on a leash.

  Unlike Arthur, who came and went from 96, boulevard Deltour every day, Cleaver’s confinement meant that he could only move around the annex and Dissard’s apartment beneath it. As Cleaver would write in an addendum to his RAF debrief, his stay there mirrored Arthur’s in one way: “During my weeks at the house of Francoise [sic] Dissard, men and women of all ages came and went from the address. I assumed that they were couriers and other Resistance agents and fighters. Mrs. Dissard, while always friendly and solicitous of me, took great pains never to mention any of their names when I was in the same room or even within earshot. I understood the necessity of strict secrecy for the protection of myself and others.” 5

  Cleaver recalled Taillandier explaining to him that “because matters had become more hazardous since the German occupation of Toulouse, every Resistance band had necessarily become more organized and security conscious. In arranging escapes, many pilots and airmen never knew the real names of our handlers and couriers. We simply were handed off to the next link in the Escape Line chain. Many never even knew the name of their safe-house keeper.”

  Cleaver was never allowed outside, spending “most of my days and nights in a comfortable but Spartan bedroom in the attic annex of the house. Always the sound of sirens was outside.” 6

  The wailing sirens were not just air-raid alerts. With the rumors of the Allied invasion swelling every day and with increased sabotage and executions by the Resistance, the police and the Gestapo stepped up efforts to arrest suspected Resistance fighters and their supporters. At any time of the day or night, the Germans and the police stormed into apartment houses and single homes to mount room-by-room searches.
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br />   Cleaver wrote, “Numerous times I heard the pounding of Gestapo agents on Mrs. Dissard’s front door and harsh German shouted at her. She spoke some German, as well as English, and did not back down from Gestapo men’s challenges. They always left her house without searching upstairs, though at those times I was always certain they would rush upstairs and find me.” 7

  On the streets of Toulouse, Gestapo and police stop-and-checks turned from routine to incessant. Arthur had never been ordered to produce his photo and papers so often, and each time the Nazis or police hurled question after question at him before they finally accepted that he was deaf and dumb. As with virtually everyone in Toulouse, Arthur was constantly looking over his shoulder. Even though he knew that the Gestapo agent who had trailed him had been removed, he sometimes stiffened when he caught a glimpse of large Gestapo agents who, for a moment, resembled the man who had arrested him.

  When he shaved at Thoulouse’s house, he saw the strain in his own face, where there were furrows that had not been there before. He could not help asking Taillandier when an escape could be arranged. Every time, Taillandier’s only answer was that Arthur needed to be patient and that the moment was coming. As always, it could not come soon enough for Arthur. He got out of bed each day, tucked his photo identification card and papers into his coat pocket, caught the bus to the city center, reported to work at the paint store, and retuned to 96, boulevard Deltour. He worried that with so many stop-and-checks, the odds were increasing that his luck would run out.

  In mid-April 1944, Taillandier appeared at Thoulouse’s house and told Arthur to come with him to meet Lieutenant Cleaver. Arthur scrambled to put on his coat and follow Taillandier out the door, the American’s spirits rising with the possibility that an escape might be in the works if Taillandier was introducing him to Cleaver now.