They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France

by Charles Glass

  Jeanne Robert tried to raise George’s morale that January morning by offering him a bottle of vin de Noa, dry white wine from American vines planted after the mid-nineteenth-century phylloxera blight destroyed the native varieties. Robert recalled that George told her, “I believe that today I’m going to drink.” She said, “Listen, serve yourself. It’s yours.” George remembered that one of Robert’s students had brought the wine, not just one bottle but three, strong enough to “kill about 2,000 mules.” He “began to feel on top of the world.” When he finished the wine, he needed coffee, “but there wasn’t any coffee in the rations.” Thinking Mayor Larribeau had coffee, he proceeded to the Larribeaus’ house. The chicory-flavored, ersatz coffee of the German occupation tasted foul, so the mayor gave him homemade Armagnac. “A superior Armagnac,” Rouneau wrote, “but rough, like they drink it in the country. A bottle went, then two! Hilaire spoke a little too much, for him.”

  George was on a roll. Rouneau recalled Gaston the Belgian leading a procession through the village: “He went out, invited everyone to a house he had never entered, Monsieur Maupomé’s. More white wine, more Armagnac, and our man became more and more talkative.” Robert urged George to be quiet. From Maupomé the cattle trader’s, George paraded to the Novarinis’ farm. “And the libations continued,” Rouneau wrote. Rouneau feared the alcohol was making George too talkative, yet admitted that “the agent never lost his sense of reality or himself. When he felt the game had gone on long enough, he went to sleep at Larribeau’s.”

  In George’s telling, though, he did not go to bed so quickly: “So, then I decided to ring the bloody church bells, pull the ropes. So, I climbed up the outside and started pulling the bloody bells.” The Germans had banned the ringing of church bells, but they were too far away to hear. “They fed me with black coffee and then I suddenly got up and went straight to my own bed. Nobody saw me [leave], and they found me fast asleep in the bed. But that made me in the village. I was a human being.”

  George became so popular that Roger Larribeau named him the village’s adjoint du maire, deputy mayor.

  FIVE

  A Cursed Day

  You had to use your head.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  By the beginning of 1943, the war was turning against Germany in French North Africa and the Soviet Union. British and American forces that landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 were pushing into Tunisia, Germany’s last foothold on the African continent. The German siege of Stalingrad, begun in July 1942, was collapsing as Soviet forces encircled the German Sixth Army. By January, German dreams of defeating the Red Army were freezing on the banks of the Volga.

  The Allies held a conference at Casablanca in French Morocco on January 14 to plan the next phase of the war. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conferred for ten days with a French leadership then divided between Generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud. Joseph Stalin was absent, due to the fighting around Stalingrad, but the other Allies felt the presence of the dictator whose country was bearing the heaviest burden in the war against Germany. The leaders agreed, despite American misgivings, to invade Sicily and the Italian mainland before attempting an amphibious landing in France. Roosevelt declared at the conclusion of the Casablanca Conference on January 24, “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.” This was the first enunciation of “unconditional surrender,” a term Roosevelt borrowed from Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s war on the Confederacy. Unconditional surrender meant no negotiated armistice of the kind that ended the First World War and led to the Second.

  In late January 1943, good fortune was favoring the Allies in Africa, Russia, and, at last, George Starr’s corner of southwest France. A break in the weather allowed lumbering RAF Halifax bombers to deliver a load of weapons and explosives to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. George’s reception committee hid the matériel in a medieval dungeon under the ancient village church, the chapel of Abrin. The successful operation raised le patron’s prestige among wary Frenchmen, and résistants from other areas sought him for arms. WHEELWRIGHT was becoming a force in Gascony.

  While clear skies and Marcus Bloom’s diligent radio transmissions altered George’s fortunes, every minute on the air exposed Bloom to the Germans’ ubiquitous radio detector vans. Disguised as laundry trucks and other civilian vehicles, the vans patrolled urban and rural roads to pinpoint the radio waves’ source. Bloom proved ingenious at finding inaccessible sites, sometimes posing as a fisherman with a rod for an aerial. He helped to receive 35 tons of heavy weapons, light arms, and ammunition and bury it under the vegetable garden at Château d’Esquiré. “Urbain [Bloom] never missed a radio transmission or reception for us,” wrote Rouneau. A French intelligence report stated, “He assisted in many acts of sabotage, notably the destruction of an enemy train in January 1943.”

  Bloom, however, violated security by inviting his wife, Germaine, to stay in the château. Informing her of his presence in France, as well as of his base, risked exposing PRUNUS to the Gestapo or the Nazi’s intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Philippe de Gunzbourg was already concerned about the Château d’Esquiré, because of the many résistants who were hiding there. Gunzbourg wrote, “The place was spotted by the Germans, who were based nearby and it was obvious that Michel [Bloom], encouraged by his wife, preferred to spend this honeymoon in a setting more luxurious than that in [the town of] Auch.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The French called the battle of wits between the Resistance and the German security services la guerre des ombres, the war of shadows, where treachery reigned. Men and women met in dingy alcoves, conspired to sabotage Germany’s occupation, and gambled their lives in a contest few of them understood. A rendezvous with a fellow résistant could lead to surveillance, arrest, and death. An agent’s most trusted source might be working for the other side. The Gestapo had agents in the Resistance, and the Resistance had its people in the Gestapo. This was the dark realm in which George operated, an environment that bred suspicion and fear.

  Dangers came in unexpected forms. While waiting to meet a contact in a Toulouse café, George heard someone say to the cashier, in a strong British accent, “Nous, officers RAF, pouvez-vous nous aider?” The speaker and his companion were wearing RAF blue battle dress uniforms. A startled waiter dropped his tray of drinks, crashing the glasses onto the floor. Undercover résistants hustled the airmen out. It was not long before George was asked to smuggle the two aviators to Spain, which he did.

  WHEELWRIGHT also facilitated the escape to Spain of two American pilots. Rouneau wrote that an official of the French government tobacco monopoly, who was also “our first recruit in this little city of the Gironde,” came to tell him that two American airmen shot down over Saint-Nazaire had made their way to him in La Réole. “I went to see them,” Rouneau recalled. “They did not know a word of French.” Rouneau photographed the men and forged identity cards for them at his old print factory in Agen. For intelligence on the Spanish border, he consulted a Resistance leader in Agen named Antoine Merchez. The forty-six-year-old Belgian told Rouneau that his daughter, Maguy, had already scouted the safest passes for escaping undetected through the Pyrenees and could guide the two men to Spain. Two days later, Fernand Gaucher delivered the airmen to the prohibited zone astride the frontier, and from there, local guides led them through dense forests and mountain trails to Spain.

  While securing the Spanish escape line, George recruited new members to his network and acquired more weapons from London. However, the work exposed him to capture every time he left Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. In early 1943, after a rendezvous with Pertschuk in Toulouse, George met up with Rouneau. “At the agreed day and hour,” wrote Rouneau, “I found myself in front of the station in Toulouse at the Café Regina.”

  George ran past, giving Rouneau a sign to go in another direc
tion. When Rouneau walked to the corner, George stepped behind him and whispered, “You have the tickets?” Rouneau had two tickets for the train to Pau, about 120 miles east of Toulouse. “Good,” George said. “Let’s go to the café and wait for the train.” In the café, George expressed doubts about Henri Sevenet. Rouneau remembered George accusing Sevenet of “playing a dangerous game. He frequents constantly a Gestapo agent from whom he hopes to get interesting information.” George claimed that Sevenet wanted to introduce him to the German, but he refused to meet him. He was sure the Gestapo was trailing him.

  From Toulouse, George and Rouneau took the train to Pau for a rendezvous that evening with a résistant from the lower Pyrenees. The operative was suspicious and demanded proof that George was a British agent. George wrote a few words on a piece of paper for him to verify. When the three separated, each left in a different direction. The next day, the résistant asked Rouneau, “Are you sure about the man you were with yesterday?”

  “Absolutely. Why?”

  “But he had a strong German accent.”

  Rouneau laughed. “Don’t you know how to tell an English from a German accent?”

  “He wasn’t English,” the man insisted. “He was German!”

  Later, Rouneau repeated the conversation to George, who smiled and said, “They want to do great things, but they do not want to run any risk. The two don’t go together.”

  After the rendezvous, Rouneau and George waited for the next train to Toulouse in the café of Pau’s Hotel Continental. Glancing toward the entrance, George said, “There he is! The Gestapo man from Toulouse.” A tall, trim German in a dark suit was standing with an equally sinister companion. “We looked relaxed,” Rouneau remembered. “I slowly put my hand on the revolver in my pocket.” Rouneau did not say what type of revolver he had, but George always carried a semiautomatic German Mauser pistol. The two Germans walked over to George and Rouneau’s table and sat down. No one spoke. “Ten minutes,” Rouneau wrote. “Ten centuries!” Unable to bear the tension, Rouneau decided to go to the men’s room. “Excuse me, monsieur,” he said to one of the Gestapo agents. “Would you let me pass?” The agent followed Rouneau to the lavatory and back to the table. The four men resumed their frosty silence. At last, Rouneau turned to George and asked, “Shall we go?”

  They walked outside, Rouneau gripping the weapon in his pocket. “This time,” he thought, “it’s going to get hot.” A cat and mouse game began. The Gestapo agents paused to speak with German soldiers on the terrace. George led Rouneau away from the café, employing countersurveillance techniques that SOE had taught him in Britain. Normally, the walk from the Continental to the train took fifteen minutes. Instead, George led Rouneau in another direction, ambling along the sidewalk and feigning nonchalance. “We stopped at shop windows,” Rouneau wrote, “and we seemed to be discussing the things in the windows. In reality, we were observing [in the reflection] what was going on behind us.” Putting distance between themselves and their pursuers, they turned onto a side street. When the Germans were out of sight, George and Rouneau ducked into a tea shop called La Minaudière. George, eating cakes that “were not bad at all,” kept a discreet eye on the street outside.

  An hour later, they paid and walked toward the station. No one followed. They boarded a train to Toulouse, but disembarked early at Lourdes. At a hotel there, they saw “some fat Boche officers who were feasting and making a lot of noise. We felt we had escaped a great danger, but we were not so sure.” The next day, they returned to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon.

  * * *

  • • •

  That spring, George installed Eureka homing devices in the church steeple and along a line of trees to help guide planes directly to the drop zones, whatever the visibility. In early April, RAF Halifaxes made two more deliveries to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. The nine containers and two packages included machine guns, ammunition, and a replacement for the S-Phone that failed in November.

  Sevenet and Rouneau expanded their networks of résistants north and west of George’s area in Gascony. An SOE field report criticized Sevenet:

  RODOLPHE [Sevenet] went to pick up the threads of the old set up in LYON and LE PUY, while Hilaire carried on in the southwest. While he was building up an excellent circuit, Rodolphe did little or nothing at his end, as witness a very disgruntled report from the local leaders, ETIENNE, ROLAND and HUBERT. Hilaire himself saw RODOLPHE during this period only two or three times.

  The enmity between George and Sevenet was boiling over. Sevenet reported to F-Section that George visited him in Toulouse to warn that “he had seen at Agen a warrant for source’s [Sevenet’s] arrest on which was his name and photograph.” F-Section questioned George’s credibility, noting that “it was difficult to understand how HILAIRE could have seen a warrant in the Gestapo office at Pau. Source does not think that HILAIRE deliberately lied, but rather exaggerated certain suspicions in order to make sure source leave the country.” George, it appeared, was trying to frighten Sevenet out of France.

  The capture of one of Sevenet’s Toulouse contacts, the owner of the Hôtel de Paris, and of his deputy, Paul Sarrette, only added urgency to George’s desire for his departure. If either man succumbed to torture and revealed Sevenet’s location, Sevenet was finished. The police had shot Sarrette while he resisted arrest and had taken him to a prison hospital in the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. Before anyone could interrogate the Frenchman, he escaped. German border patrols blocked his way into Switzerland, so he slipped back to Toulouse to see Sevenet.

  Sevenet and Sarrette decided to flee together to Spain and on to England. Sevenet paid a final visit to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. “Before he left,” recalled Rouneau, “he had an unusually violent discussion with Hilaire. Their points of view were totally divergent, and it was impossible for Sevenet to accept Hilaire’s aid.”

  Their first attempt to leave in February failed, because the Germans had just broken up the Pat Escape Line. The Pat Escape Line was operated by the SOE’s French escape network, DF Section, and was made up of safe houses and guides to smuggle agents, downed aircrews, refugees, and Resistance volunteers to Switzerland, Spain, and coastal sites where ships could pick them up. On April 22, with anti-Franco Spanish guides and a party of French refugees, they made their way over the high Pyrenees in blinding snow. Their trek took thirteen days. Their first stop in Spain was Manresa, where the SOE contact was Pilar Starr, though records do not show whether Sevenet used her safe house or sought her help to go on to Barcelona.

  Sevenet was now out of the way, but it became clear George should have been more concerned about PRUNUS organizer Pertschuk. Pertschuk was living at Gunzbourg’s château at Pont-du-Cassé near Agen with Gunzbourg’s two children and his beautiful wife, Antoinette Cahen d’Anvers. Gunzbourg sensed the young man was falling in love with Antoinette, and he detected that the young organizer had changed since they began working together in November 1942: “I was worried, because Eugène [Pertschuk] was physically exhausted.” Exhaustion could lead to mistakes, mistakes to capture.

  George needed Pertschuk to send messages through Bloom to London, above all for supplies to begin sabotage operations. By April 1943, other Resistance networks were launching more than one hundred attacks a month on the rail lines. WHEELWRIGHT needed to play its part.

  London had radioed that in addition to arms containers and supply parcels, the next parachutage would carry a French Canadian sabotage expert named Lieutenant Charles Duchalard, code name “Denis.” Rouneau wrote, “Lieutenant ‘Denis’ would turn would-be fighters into ‘résistants et maquisards.’” A maquisard was a guerrilla who operated in the maquis, from the Corsican word macchia, for scrubland. SOE planned to parachute Duchalard into PRUNUS territory to assist the overworked Pertschuk and to help George with sabotage.

  Born in Saskatchewan on June 3, 1915, to French immigrant parents, Duchalard moved to Paris as a teenager, wher
e he became an electrician and joined the French Army. After the defeat of June 1940, he fled to England and joined SOE. His instructors had reservations about him, noting he had a “decided English (or Canadian) accent” in French, an obsession with women, was “too fond of talking,” and exhibited an “anti-Semitic bias.” They reported none of their misgivings to Pertschuk and George.

  SOE informed George that Duchalard would parachute into Pertschuk’s region in the Lot-et-Garonne on the night of April 11. Needing a reliable résistant to receive the Canadian and guarantee his security, George contacted a heavyset brewer from Montréjeau named Pierre Labayle. Forty-seven-year-old Labayle had worked for PRUNUS with Pertschuk from the early Resistance days. His duties for George included hiding gasoline in beer casks and assisting downed fliers to escape. Along with four men he trusted, Labayle went to the drop site and welcomed Duchalard to France. Duchalard hid in one of Labayle’s safe houses to await George’s order to move him. However, April 11 was a dangerous time to arrive.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maurice Pertschuk, while organizing his PRUNUS circuit, receiving arms drops, and relaying supply orders to Bloom for his and George’s circuits, rarely slept. His restless expeditions throughout the Lot-et-Garonne and Landes departments under threat of capture could not but affect the young man. The strain was evident when he met Denise Bloch for their regular Monday rendezvous at the Café Riche in Toulouse on April 12. She recalled that he looked “rather worried.” They planned to meet again at the same café the following Thursday, April 15. Pertschuk did not know, as a French military investigation later concluded, “PRUNUS’s days were numbered in all ways, because an enemy agent had infiltrated it.”