While basing his WHEELWRIGHT circuit on the 150th Infantry Regiment’s remaining veterans, George also welcomed untrained civilians, many from networks the Germans had broken up. Although deprived of weapons and communications, he set out to forge a guerrilla and sabotage force to support the Allied invasion of France. No one knew the date of D-Day, Jour-J to the French, but George’s network had to be ready whenever it took place.
In late 1942, the liberation of France was barely a dream. The American and British armies were struggling to secure their hold on North Africa. The British were moving forward from Libya in the east, while the united Anglo-American forces had a long way to go from Algeria to squeeze the Germans out of Tunisia. Until the Allies secured the southern shore of the Mediterranean, they would be in no position to take the war to Europe. The Resistance in France organized and trained, but it had to be invisible until the real armies arrived to drive the Germans back into Germany.
To keep his network intact until the invasion, George reduced the risk of betrayals that had destroyed WHEELWRIGHT’s predecessors. His method, he said, was to recruit only those known to people he trusted and to work slowly: “You build a step and you stand on it. And it holds. Then you jump on it, and it still holds. Then you jump on it again, and it still holds.” When the ladder was complete, he would stop. “Then you protect your people that way. People begin to have confidence in you.”
George’s other precaution was to relay messages only by word of mouth. If a German roadblock stopped a courier, there would be no written evidence. “I never wrote anything,” George said. “It was strictly forbidden. You had to learn it by heart. As soon as they get it [the message], forget it. No passwords at all. I didn’t believe in passwords.” Raymond Escholier observed George at work: “No paper. No pen. No pencil. He did not want to be tempted to write.” George’s security rules were strict but necessary, requiring an agent or courier, in his words, “never to find out more than he was told, never to try to find out who a contact really was, what he was doing or where he was living.” He prohibited his operatives from using their real names and talking to anyone they did not know. “There was a very strict code of discipline with the severest penalty always for disobedience.”
George allocated sectors of his realm to trusted deputies. He began with the former noncommissioned officers of the 150th Infantry Regiment, placing Sergeant Fernand Gaucher in charge north of the River Garonne. Gaucher would receive arms drops there, when they took place. He moved to the village of Fieumarcon, while his wife and children lived in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Maurice Dupont, “Yvan,” became a WHEELWRIGHT courier. Circuit members met from time to time in a commercial building with multiple exits that George had rented in Agen. A trusted few gathered in Castelnau around Jeanne Robert’s kitchen table, usually by candlelight over a bottle of Armagnac, to provide George with intelligence or to receive instructions. George presided at the table with stories, true or imagined, from his prewar life.
“Some days,” wrote Rouneau, “the schoolhouse was transformed into a veritable command post.” Henri Sevenet and his twenty-two-year-old deputy, Paul Sarrette, paid frequent visits for “councils of war.” Sarrette, who earned the Croix de Guerre for his courage as a frontline sergeant resisting the German invasion of 1940, began work for SOE at Sevenet’s urging in Lyon in September 1942. Under the pseudonym Amédée Gontran, the handsome young Frenchman worked as Sevenet’s courier between Marseille and Lyon and often accompanied him to meet George in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. “The school had become the command post of the ‘terrorists’ who were going to take the hard life to the German,” Rouneau commented.
In the weeks after the failed parachutage of November 27, George stayed close to the hamlet. He sent verbal orders via courier to operatives miles away. His agents established dead letter drops in Agen and other Gascon towns, where they left coded messages for one another. One of Fernand Gaucher’s more imaginative spots was the poor box in an Agen church. George did not use dead letters, preferring “live letters,” intermediaries with oral communiqués to pass along and forget.
As Christmas 1942 approached, Sevenet came to Castelnau to tell George that the Gestapo was hunting for a former Lyon courier, Denise Bloch. The twenty-six-year-old Frenchwoman was vulnerable both as a résistante and because she was Jewish. Having fled the Nazi anti-Jewish regime in Paris in June 1942, her family had taken refuge in the Unoccupied Zone. Bloch joined the Resistance in Lyon as a courier for the DETECTIVE circuit. Sentenced in absentia to ten years’ hard labor, Bloch had evaded capture during the Vichy police arrests of radio operator Brian Stonehouse and courier Blanche Charlet just before George’s arrival. She had watched in silent impotence as the police marched a bloodied Stonehouse through Lyon’s streets. Paul Sarrette rescued her on October 26, taking her on a train two hundred miles south to Marseille and then to the Mediterranean fishing village of Villefranche-sur-Mer. There, Sarrette left her in a safe house that belonged to the mother of his cousin’s wife.
Denise Bloch’s beauty and stature of five feet ten inches made her easy to recognize. She bleached her auburn hair blond in a Nice beauty parlor and changed her cover name from “Danielle” to “Catherine.” Sevenet went to Villefranche in early January to tell her that she was brûlée, burned, known to the Gestapo. Sarrette soon brought her by train to Toulouse.
Sevenet conferred with George about Bloch, warning him that she was jeopardizing their security. A telegram she had sent to her mother enabled Vichy police to identify her and some of her contacts. Sevenet added that Bloch’s indiscretion was responsible for the police learning about George’s presence in France, as well as his code name. If he had gone to Lyon as ordered the previous November, they would have arrested him the moment he stepped off the train. Bloch’s SOE file contains the note “Sevenet not impressed by her,” but another SOE report further underlined the severity of the situation:
After discussing the matter HILAIRE said that the only solution was to liquidate her. Source [Sevenet] made no reply and the affair was arranged by HILAIRE. At the last moment, however, source felt that he could not allow her to be killed just because she was a nuisance, and decided to pass her over into Spain.
In early January 1943, Bloch and Maurice Dupont traveled by bus to the town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie on the Spanish border. From there, they climbed the Pyrenees. “But DUPONT was stopped twice as he was reconnoitering for her,” an F-Section report noted, “and the snow was much too heavy for her thin shoes, so he took her back to Toulouse.” Hélène Falbet gave Bloch a room in her safe house in Agen, and from there, Bloch went to Toulouse to meet the man who had been prepared to liquidate her.
Speaking with the attractive young woman for the first time, George decided not to send her away. Instead, he made her his courier, and Bloch moved into the school in Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. “I installed her in a little bedroom on the first floor,” recalled Robert, who gave another room to Sergeant Dupont, while she slept on a sofa in the kitchen. Dupont taught gymnastics to her students, giving Robert an hour off each day. The patriotic sergeant erected a flagpole in front of the school and, in violation of German dictates, raised the French tricolor every morning for the children to salute.
Most evenings, Robert made dinner in her kitchen for George, Bloch, and Dupont as well as, on occasion, the Larribeaus and Novarinis. George adapted to the Gascon diet:
The only thing about the Gascons, they don’t eat vegetables. I mean if you were invited to a Gascon dinner, it’s an insult to have vegetables of any description, even a chipped potato. No, a Gascon dinner is separate pieces of meat, different sauce, but no vegetables at all, not even salad.
Bloch’s discipline and undoubted bravery made her an effective résistante. Obeying George’s instruction never to write messages, she memorized every word she carried to his people in the field. A later SOE assessment concluded:
An exper
ienced woman with a knowledge of the world. She has courage and determination and hatred of the Boche. Has complete self-assurance and is capable of handling most situations.
Sevenet disapproved the appointment, but George trusted Bloch more than he did Sevenet. The two men were becoming rivals. George, though a lieutenant, bridled at taking orders from Captain Sevenet, and Sevenet for his part suspected George’s motive for retaining Bloch. An F-Section debrief of Paul Sarrette contains the note: “SARRETTE says that soon after ‘HILAIRE’ had been introduced to ‘DENISE’ she became his mistress.” If true, George was violating his own order against agents becoming lovers. Bloch, whether mistress or colleague, became George’s dependable link to the operatives in his expanding realm. Sarrette described Bloch as an “unscrupulous adventuress,” and his debrief added, “DENISE disliked both ‘RODOLPHE’ [Sevenet] and himself and, having HILAIRE’s ear, persuaded him that the true story of her recent activities was wholly to her credit and their discredit.”
George’s lack of wireless contact with London forced him to rely on couriers to deliver his messages to the SOE stations at Britain’s embassies in Spain and Switzerland, which sometimes took weeks. A breakthrough came in January 1943, when Sevenet turned up in Castelnau to tell George that another SOE organizer had moved to Toulouse, only sixty miles away. The organizer was the head of the PRUNUS circuit, Lieutenant Maurice Pertschuk.
Pertschuk offered what George needed most: a radio operator. His was Captain Marcus Bloom, the former businessman who had come ashore from the Seadog with George in November. Bloom, son of Orthodox Jews from Poland and Russia, was born in Britain on September 24, 1907. His father sent him to Paris in the 1930s to run the French branch of the family’s mail-order textile firm, and in March 1938 he married a Frenchwoman, Germaine Février. When the business collapsed in early 1940, he returned to London, but the German invasion trapped Germaine, who had been visiting her family in France. Bloom volunteered for the Royal Artillery in 1941 and received an officer’s commission, but his fluent French soon attracted the notice of SOE. He was recruited, and then sent to Thame Park, Oxfordshire, where he trained in Morse code and secret cyphers in order to be a wireless telegrapher. His instructors, despite one who described the five-foot-eight-inch recruit as “this pink yid,” placed him near the top of his class. Bloom’s assessment after the combat course in Scotland stated, “He has plenty of guts and is an extremely able man.” Bloom used two code names, “Urbain” and “Bishop.”
His original assignment had been to work with Anthony Brooks, code name “Alphonse,” of the PIMENTO circuit near Lyon. Twenty-year-old Tony Brooks was F-Section’s youngest British field operative and was bilingual in French and English. Brooks had expected Bloom to meet him the moment he arrived in Toulouse, but it was only three days later that, in Brooks’s words, “a chap wearing a nice sort of hairy tweed suit and a pork pie hat with a pheasant’s feather in the ribbon and smoking a pipe came breezing in.” Brooks greeted him in French, but Bloom replied in English, “’Ow’re you, mate?” Brooks berated him for smoking pungent Balkan Sobrani pipe tobacco with an aroma unknown in wartime France, and claimed that when Bloom was asked where he had been for two days, he answered, “I’ve been staying with a friend who wants to meet you, chap called Eugene.” Bloom took Brooks to a black market restaurant called the Trouffe de Quercy to meet Pertschuk, code name “Eugène.” George Starr, whom Brooks described as “one of the finest guerrilla leaders SOE had in France,” was also present. Pertschuk asked Brooks whether he could borrow Bloom for occasional transmissions. Brooks, relieved to be rid of Bloom, said, “Look, I don’t need a wireless operator. You, Eugene, can have Urbain as your wireless operator. I will clear this with London.”
“While waiting for a radio,” French Resistance archives summarized, “Starr recruited, mainly in Condom, where he met PRUNUS [Maurice Pertschuk], [Philippe de] GUNZBOURG and Louis LEVY, ‘CHRISTOPHE.’” Pertschuk, Philippe de Gunzbourg, and Louis Lévy, together with Lévy’s younger brother Théo, were destined to become George’s most valuable allies. All were Jewish, although from different backgrounds. Twenty-one-year-old Pertschuk, born of Russian Jewish parents in Paris and raised in England until age twelve, was one of F-Section’s youngest agents. Denise Bloch described him as “about 5’ 10” or 5’ 11”, very thin, looks half dead, face as if cut in wood, filthy dirty hair falling over his nose, could easily pass as French, looks like an artist’s model.” Bilingual in French and English, he had undergone SOE training in England with Sevenet and returned to France the previous April to organize the PRUNUS circuit.
A judicious recruiter of top agents, Pertschuk found Gunzbourg, code-named “Philibert” and “Edgar,” through Gunzbourg’s cousin, whom he knew from childhood summers in the Boy Scouts. Gunzbourg was a dashing, dark-haired, French Jewish aristocrat. Rejecting the chance to escape to the United States as his younger sister Aline had done in 1941, Gunzbourg bought the Château de Barsalou at Pont-du-Cassé near Agen to use as a Resistance base. His clandestine work began with the homegrown Combat network in January 1942, but he transferred his allegiance to George. A French Resistance report on Gunzbourg stated:
He regarded two groups as serious: the Communists and the English. He did not want to work with the Communists, not that their ideas were not very advanced, but because nothing in his origin or his education had prepared him to work with them, then that he had more points in common with the English.
A Resistance colleague wrote that Gunzbourg “was a Frenchman, although due to his bearing, he was sometimes taken for an Englishman.”
The Lévy brothers joined George’s organization without hesitation. Louis, code name “Christophe,” was thirty and Théo twenty-seven. German by birth, they had fled Nazi persecution at home only for it to follow them to France. When George needed agents to pose as Germans, the brothers filled the roles in stolen German uniforms. They lived in hiding, as Jews and as résistants, in the village of Vic-Fezensac, about twenty miles south of Condom, with the family of an ironmonger named Lac and his wife, Marie-Louise. One leading résistant, Henri Monnet, wrote of the Lacs that from the end of 1942 they “established contacts, housed agents and the radio transmitters with their operators and rendered innumerable services to the cause.” Marie-Louise Lac, though, concealed many of her activities from her husband. With her typewriter, she forged identity cards for the Lévy brothers and other Jewish exiles, and one of her neighbors lent Pertschuk his meadow for the first parachute drop of arms to PRUNUS.
When Bloom attempted to operate his radio for Pertschuk, it failed to transmit. As with George’s S-Phone, it may have left London without being checked. Pertschuk asked another radio operator, Captain Adolphe Rabinovitch, an Egyptian-Russian-Jewish W/T, to fix it. Rabinovitch was both a multilingual scholar and, at 180 pounds, a former light heavyweight boxer. The twenty-five-year-old stood five feet nine inches in his bare feet and had a build that his SOE file called “solid.” John Starr had studied with him at Wanborough Manor, where his trainers noted his popularity and determination. Rabinovitch’s friends called him Alec, and his code name was “Arnaud.” Since parachuting into France on August 28, 1942, the same night John Starr jumped on his first mission, he had been transmitting for Peter Churchill. Rabinovitch repaired Bloom’s radio at the Château d’Esquiré near Fonsorbes, about twenty miles south of Toulouse, where Bloom had based himself.
On Mondays and Thursdays, George and Bloch took turns bicycling twenty-two miles to Agen and taking the train to Toulouse to see Pertschuk. The young agent met them at the Café Riche, where he provided funds for George’s circuit, and picked up Bloch’s and George’s shopping lists to pass on to courier Jeanine Morrisse. With the messages sewn into the lining of her clothes, Morrisse bicycled twenty miles to the Château d’Esquiré to give them to Bloom. Bloom transmitted George’s requirements, drop sites marked with code numbers like “T-25,” and meaningless sentences in French for the BBC t
o broadcast when the planes left England.
This was the communication connection that George needed in order to fund, equip, and arm the secret army that would play its part in the Allied liberation of France. His recruits, however, doubted that he could deliver. In the absence of tangible support from Britain, his résistants were susceptible to blandishments from the communists and other Resistance groups that were not part of Allied planning. If George could not pay and arm his networks, he had little leverage to keep them under the military discipline necessary to fight the Germans at the decisive moment. Thankfully, Bloom’s radio transmissions, coinciding with German defeats in Tunisia and Libya, were strengthening George’s hand, and résistants began to believe that the Allies could win and George could deliver. No weapons, however, arrived.
Maurice Rouneau expressed his comrades’ bitterness: “Winter, that awful winter, which with its rain, its snow, its fog, blocked every operation.” The strain on George emerged in the form of psoriasis, patches of red and itchy skin over much of his body, rather than insomnia or nervousness. His three closest colleagues, Rouneau, Robert, and Bloch, feared he was also succumbing to depression. Robert attempted to console him, saying, “Listen. You can tell me when you are worried, when you have problems, when you miss your family. You can speak to me, and I won’t tell anyone.” However, George did not complain.
On Sunday morning, January 10, 1943, George woke in a dark mood. Rouneau assumed he missed his wife and children, who, while just over the border in Manresa working for SOE, were unaware he was living only 260 miles north of them. Before George departed for France, F-Section had asked him about his wife, Pilar, “Do you think she’ll help us with a safe house in Manresa?” He answered, “I’m sure she would if you just asked.” With the help of an uncle whom George called “one of the biggest bloody smugglers in Spain,” she passed messages between France and London, provided papers to escapees and helped them to reach Gibraltar. SOE, which called her network the Stutz Line, did not tell her that some of the messages she relayed came from her husband. George said, “She never dreamt that I wasn’t very far away.” It was hard for him to be so close to his family, but unable to communicate with them.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 6