The Cost of Courage

by Charles Kaiser

  Even as a teenager, Christiane is already a person of tremendous self-control. One night in Paris, she is in a secret apartment with four confederates, waiting for an important phone call. One of her comrades, a boy who has just been parachuted in from England, soothes his nerves by downing one cognac after another. Christiane is quietly disdainful. She thinks to herself, At least I am courageous — even though I am a girl!

  When the phone finally rings, they are all ordered outside. Christiane is carrying their radio equipment. Suddenly her suitcase bursts open, and all of the electronic contraband spills out into the street. Christiane scrambles to put everything back, then disappears into the night as quickly as possible.

  Christiane is also responsible for coding and decoding the telegrams that go to and from London. It is exacting work, and her least favorite task. Sometimes she delivers weapons to assist in sabotage missions. Whenever possible, London prefers to get things blown up in France on the ground, rather than bombed from the air, because it reduces the chances of civilian casualties.†

  She continues to follow all the rudimentary rules of spy craft that the British have taught her brother. She particularly loves the “Métro trick”: In the first car there is a conductor who controls the doors. “You put yourself in the first car, close to the conductor. The Métro stops, and you don’t move. And then when you see he is about to push the button to close the doors, you jump out. Then you can’t be followed.”

  She always chooses a secret apartment with two exits, and she never waits more than ten minutes for someone to show up for a rendezvous. She trains herself to be suspicious of everyone, all the time: That is the hardest part of her job.

  She has to memorize dozens of addresses and telephone numbers, because she is not allowed to write anything down. Once, when she is carrying important telegrams in her purse, she is stopped at a Wehrmacht checkpoint. The German soldier who searches her never recognizes what she is carrying, even though the telegrams don’t look like normal documents, with their coded, disjointed letters. “He looked at them. He saw them. And he let me go.” She rode her bicycle two hundred yards from the checkpoint — until her legs didn’t work anymore. Her terror had paralyzed her. She knew she had “been incredibly lucky,” and she “couldn’t count on that kind of luck all the time.”

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1944, the Germans are starting to feel threatened on all fronts. In January, the German siege of Leningrad is finally lifted by the Soviets, almost nine hundred days after it began. That victory comes exactly one year after the Germans lost the crucial battle of Stalingrad, where the Soviets encircled nearly all of the German 6th Army under General Friedrich Paulus. The Germans and Soviets suffered gigantic losses there: nearly two million military and civilian casualties. The historian Ian Ousby argues that the Reich’s failure on the eastern front was a main impetus of the French Resistance. The other was the Reich’s brutality in France.

  In July 1943, more than three thousand ships had arrived off the beaches of Sicily, and almost half a million Allied soldiers invaded — a larger force than the one used in the initial stages of the assault at Normandy eleven months later. By July 22, American troops had entered Palermo, the major city of western Sicily. On July 25, the Italian king summoned Mussolini and dismissed him as prime minister. His successor, Pietro Badoglio, announced publicly that Italy would stay in the war on the side of the Germans. Privately, he immediately opened negotiations in Portugal with the Allies to switch sides.

  At the end of the third week of January 1944, the Allies launch Operation Shingle. Fifty thousand American and British troops land at Anzio, south of Rome. The Allies will finally enter Rome on June 4.

  Meanwhile, the Germans occupying France are nervously awaiting the main Allied invasion, still not knowing where it will occur, as the American and British air forces continue a brutal bombardment of Germany. The Americans carry out their first raid on Germany on January 27, 1944. Three and a half weeks later, 823 British bombers attack Leipzig, and 73 British planes are lost in the raid. The next day, 200 American bombers continue that attack, as the British make a massive assault on Stuttgart.

  Four days after that, bombers from the U.S. 8th Air Force attack the German cities of Augsburg, Stuttgart, Regensburg, and Braunschweig. On March 4, the Americans make their first attack on Berlin. Two days later, British bombers attack the French national railway complex at Trappes, southwest of Paris, and inflict enormous damage without losing any planes. These are the opening salvos of the Allies’ Transportation Plan, designed to disrupt German reinforcement routes prior to the Normandy invasion. By the time of the final attack of this campaign on June 2 — once again at Trappes — the Allies have launched 9,000 sorties in 69 attacks, with a loss of 198 planes.

  At the end of the third week of March, Hitler makes one of his most accurate predictions. He tells his commanders in the west that if they are able to prevent a successful Allied landing, that will decide the outcome of the war. At almost the same moment as Hitler’s prediction, the Allies cancel Operation Anvil, which would have meant an invasion in southern France at the same moment as the onslaught at Normandy in the north.

  On April 17, the British government suspends all diplomatic pouches leaving Britain, except those going to the United States and the Soviet Union, to try to prevent a leak of the location of the forthcoming invasion at Normandy.

  CHRISTIANE AND JACQUELINE are aware of the general course of the war, through the broadcasts of the BBC and the stream of new confederates who continue to arrive from England. The life of one of the sisters is about to take a dramatic turn, with the arrival of a dashing confederate, another fresh graduate of Patriotic School.

  His name is Alex Katlama. He is thirty-three years old when he is parachuted into a secret reception area, northwest of Dijon, on the night of March 15, 1944. A strapping young man with elegant, delicate features, he reaches Paris two days later. His mission is to teach others how to carry out sabotage.

  Born in Moscow in 1910, Alex is the third and last child of Russian-Estonian parents. His father had been a well-known owner of racehorses, an “elitist” avocation that made him conspicuously unwelcome in Russia after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution.

  In 1918, the Katlamas escaped Russia through Odessa, the southern Ukrainian port on the Black Sea. Then they spent eighteen months in Constantinople, waiting for the revolution to fail. When the Bolsheviks prevail, the Katlamas move on to France in 1920. Alex is homeschooled until the age of thirteen, before attending the Lycée Russe in Paris. He is brought up by a French governess, who teaches him that Alsace is part of France, and that it was a scandal when the Germans “stole” it in 1871.‡ He studies higher mathematics at the Lycée Louis le Grand for two years. There he also becomes a star of the basketball team. Just shy of six feet, Alex is much taller than most of his contemporaries; before the war, the mean height for Frenchmen is closer to five foot six.

  In 1933, he graduates from the Ecole Supérieure Aéronautique, with an aircraft engineer’s diploma. Two years later, Alex becomes a French citizen, which makes him immediately eligible for military service. He is drafted as a corporal and sent to the air base at Rheims. After the Germans reoccupy the Rhineland in March 1936, Alex is thrilled when bombs are suddenly put on the wings of French airplanes. But the bombers never take off. He assumes the inertia of the French is due to a fear of repeating the catastrophe of World War I.

  Because of his knowledge of Russian and of aeronautics, he is promoted to sergeant and transferred to the Air Force intelligence bureau in Paris. There he translates the Russian technical press on aircraft topics, until his army service ends in 1937. Upon his return to civilian life, he gets a job as a sound engineer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Paris. He remains there until war is declared in 1939, when he is mobilized again.

  He is assigned to Air Force intelligence, where he alternates between studying aviation developments in the Soviet Union and choosing targets there for future bombardment
, since the Soviets are still in a nonaggression pact with the Nazis when the war begins.

  When he hears Pétain’s surrender speech in June 1940, Alex has exactly the same reaction as André Boulloche: He is determined to find a way to continue the fight against the Germans. As a Russian immigrant who chose French citizenship, he is especially patriotic.

  First he tries to commandeer a plane to fly to Britain, but his superior officers prevent him from taking off. Then he and a friend convince a captain to fly them to Oran in North Africa. But — again like André — he discovers there is no way to fight the Germans in Europe from the French colony, which has remained loyal to the collaborators in Vichy.

  Alex Katlama was a star of the French national basketball team. He is second from the right in the back row.(photo credit 1.13)

  Demobilized in August, he rejoins his family in France. At the beginning of 1941, he redoubles his efforts to reach England. He learns that the easiest way to escape to England is from North Africa, but he needs an excuse to return there. Opportunity knocks when he is invited to join the French national basketball team, which is about to play in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

  But during the basketball tour he fails to find a passage to England, and so once again he returns to France. In November 1942, he finally decides to go over the Pyrenees to Spain.

  Katlama meets three Jews in Osséja, on the eastern border with Spain, and persuades them to accompany him to Spain. In a café, he finds two guides, who are Spanish Republican refugees. Alex and his Jewish companions agree to pay the Spaniards 7,500 francs to lead them across the border.

  They set off at nine P.M. on November 11, 1942.§ The guides take them over the Pyrenees, and they arrive in Berga twenty-four hours later. From there, Alex takes the train to Barcelona, where he is immediately arrested.

  Alex pretends that he is an American named Glen Boylen, who was born in Bedford, England. His English is excellent, thanks to his regular visits to the American church in Paris before the war — first to play basketball, and then to listen to jazz. He also happens to love being with Americans. And before the war, he had spent six weeks in England with a family he found through an ad in the Times of London.

  Somehow, he manages to get his identity papers mailed to George Favre, a Spanish reporter who had accompanied the Catalonian basketball team to France, and to whom Katlama had confided his plan to escape.

  Favre has friends at the British consulate in Barcelona, who forward Alex’s papers to the British military attaché in Madrid. In January, he is imprisoned at the camp at Miranda, where foreign prisoners are mixed in with Spanish Republicans from the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Alex is shocked that Republicans are still being executed in the camp, three years after Franco’s Fascists defeated them.

  The foreigners at Miranda are assigned their nationality on the basis of their birthplace, and Alex continues to insist that he was born in England. After five months, British diplomats finally convince his captors that Alex really is a British citizen. At the end of May, he is put on a train from Barcelona to Gibraltar, the ancient British colony on the Mediterranean coast. On May 30, he sets sail for England, where he arrives one week later.

  After a month of vetting at Patriotic School, he is given the alias of Lieutenant Alex Daniel. In August, he begins training to become a secret agent in France. Because he is still recovering from the harsh treatment he received in the Spanish prison camp, the initial assessment of his British handlers is mixed:

  A quiet intelligent intellectual type with ideas of his own, but these are not always very practical … Conscientious and serious of purpose. His mind works slowly and he has shown a lack of self-assurance under stress. Is at present in a poor state of mind and body, which has probably spoilt his performance. He is … abnormally slow, lacking in physical assurance, nervous and worried about his shortcomings. Under these conditions the board has failed him but strongly recommends that he should receive treatment and be reconsidered at a later date.

  Four months later, he has regained his strength and impressed his trainers. They have noticed that Katlama is “motivated by gratitude to the country of his adoption.” He is the kind of man who works hard to succeed at every goal he sets for himself, and by now, the British understand that. His affection for the British also helps with his rapid adjustment.

  His new evaluation is much more enthusiastic:

  Intelligent, both practical and academic. He is quick, clearheaded, logical and has plenty of common sense and imagination. He is keen and worked hard, took great pains, and was neat and accurate. He is determined and conscientious. He has plenty of self confidence but is not conceited nor over sure of himself. His personality is pleasant but not very forceful. He is a good mixer and has a good sense of humor. He was generally popular. He should make a competent and loyal assistant.

  Alex receives his final training certificate on March 3, 1944. Twelve days later, he is parachuted into France. Two weeks after that, he is in Paris. He carries with him the vital Plan Vert, which he will deliver to Rondenay. The plan details how the Resistance is supposed to disrupt the French railroad system when the invasion at Normandy begins.

  As soon as he reaches the French capital, Alex is spared by another accident of fate — the kind that rescues so many of the Resistance members who are lucky enough to survive the war. For Alex, it is an Allied bombardment near Paris that halts the Métro train he is traveling on, for half an hour.

  Sometime during those thirty minutes, the contact he is supposed to meet is arrested. Thus, when Alex reaches the location of his rendezvous, there is no longer anyone there to greet him.

  If Alex had been on time, he too would certainly have been seized by the Germans.

  The next day, Alex’s other contact in the Resistance in Paris is arrested. After that, he loses all contact with the underground for a month. In the third week of April, he goes to an emergency address he has been given to use in case of such a catastrophe: a clothing store on rue de Flandre.

  Rondenay is always worried about sending Christiane into a trap. Concealing his habitual anxiety as well as he can, he dispatches her to the clothing store, with a password to identify herself to the clerk. When Christiane says the secret word, she has a moment of panic: At first the saleswoman doesn’t seem to recognize the code. After Christiane repeats the password, the clerk finally leads her into a back room, where Alex Katlama is waiting for her.

  CHRISTIANE likes the handsome Alex “very much — but no more.” She feels too consumed by her duties to pursue a romance with him, or anyone else. But when Alex meets Jacqueline, sparks begin to fly quickly.

  It is Jacqueline who becomes Alex’s “precious collaborator, the only person in my service on whom I could count completely” — and, soon, his lover. Even if Christiane is a bit jealous, Jacqueline’s romance does nothing to diminish the sisters’ extraordinary closeness.

  About a month after making contact with Christiane and Jacqueline, Alex begins a secret course on sabotage for a cell of Résistants on rue des Entrepreneurs.

  On May 19, Alex leads three confederates on a sabotage mission. Their target is a ball-bearing factory, and they are so successful, production there is never resumed. For some reason, the twenty Germans responsible for guarding the factory never engage them during the attack.

  By now everyone knows the Allied invasion is imminent, but the Germans still have no clear idea of when or where it will occur. On May 8, Dwight Eisenhower secretly chooses June 5 as the tentative date for the attack at Normandy. The next day, the British bomber command makes its first attack on German coastal batteries near Pas de Calais.

  CHRISTIANE AND JACQUELINE know that their brother has been shipped off to Germany. But they don’t know which camp he is in, or what it really means to be in a concentration camp. They bury themselves in their clandestine duties to distract them from a debilitating terror about what could happen to him in Germany.

  Meanwhile, their boss, Ro
ndenay, is leading sabotage missions against many factories outside Paris. To prepare for the Allied invasion, he meets with Resistance members working for the national telephone company, to plan how to blow up underground long-distance telephone lines (code name: Plan Violet) and with railroad workers, who are supposed to blow up strategic railroad lines (Plan Vert).

  * Two months before Rondenay got there, on March 28, Lübeck was subjected to a horrendous attack by the RAF, when 234 British bombers dropped 400 tons of bombs, including 25,000 incendiary devices, which created a firestorm that burned one-third of the city. The intent was to demoralize the civilian population. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “The damage is really enormous, I have been shown a newsreel of the destruction. It is horrible. One can well imagine how such a bombardment affects the population.”

  † On April 20, 1944, an Allied bombing raid on Paris leaves 651 dead and 461 wounded, provoking a minirebound in the popularity of General Pétain, the collaborationist chief of state. (Jackson, France, p. 535)

  ‡ Alsace became French again at the end of World War I, reverted to Germany after the conquest of France in 1940, and then returned to being part of France in 1945.

  § Which happens to be Christiane’s nineteenth birthday.

  Thirteen

  Rather than just being liberated by foreigners … France herself would rise up to take an honorable part in her own liberation. That, really, was what resistance was all about.

  — Ian Ousby

  I opened the window [in London on the morning of June 6] and the noise became deafening … It was possible to see the aircraft flying in massed formation above the sleeping capital. They flew over in a never-ending stream. Holding my breath and looking steadily in the direction of Nazi Germany, I could see, beyond the barbed wire sealing the frontiers, beyond the prisons, the dawn that was bringing to our enslaved friends the first glimmer of their victory.