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

by Charles Glass

  “He joked like that,” Robert remembered, “but was never, never vulgar.”

  In Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, Mayor Larribeau was doing all in his power to assist George. Having made him deputy mayor, he issued him identity documents to facilitate passage through police and German checkpoints, and applied to the regional government, the Prefecture, for George’s appointment as Inspecteur pour le Ministère du Ravitaillement, inspector for the ministry of supply. This entitled him to the use of a car, rations of gasoline, and permission to circulate everywhere in the region. Under the occupation, cars were restricted to the Germans, Vichy officials, and collaborators. An SOE report noted the post’s advantages: “This was an ideal cover job as a car was put at his disposal and he have [sic] every reason to circulate round the area as freely as he liked, not only in the daytime but also at night, on Sundays, and on jours de fete.” George’s cover and passes were useless, however, without a radio and supplies.

  George was desperate. If London did not supply his basic needs, he would have to abandon his mission and leave résistants in the southwest without means to resist. “The position grew so serious that STARR decided to send Mlle. Denise BLOCH,” commented SOE, “with a report on the situation to LONDON via Spain.” Bloch would be not merely his messenger, but his advocate. London had to understand that the Germans had cut his communications twice. First, the Gestapo arrested Marcus Bloom on April 12, 1943. Then, four days later, German military intelligence lured Peter Churchill, who had only recently returned to France, and Odette Sansom into a trap in the French Alps. Rabinovitch went into hiding. London advised the wireless operator to flee to Spain, but he went to Cannes to warn the new F-Section organizer who had arrived in March to assume Churchill’s duties as liaison to the CARTE circuit. Rabinovitch was now out of reach, and George did not have a third operator.

  Violating his policy against committing anything to paper, George wrote a lengthy situation appraisal and an appeal for supplies, money, and his own radio operator. On April 29, 1943, George gave Bloch the report. They said good-bye at the safe house in Agen. Her departure was hard on them both. Bloch wanted to stay to resist the Nazis, who occupied her country and declared her, as a Jew, unfit to live. George was losing his closest companion. They had lived for four months on the upper floor of Jeanne Robert’s schoolhouse and cycled together over miles of Gascon countryside. One report stated that “she always travelled everywhere with him.” She had willingly risked her life for le patron. Whether they had been lovers, as Paul Sarrette alleged to SOE, the two were close and respected each other. She regretted leaving George in “a terrible mess.”

  George asked Maurice Dupont to take Bloch to the border as Dupont knew the route, having accompanied her on the aborted crossing to Spain in January. The plan called for guides to lead her over the high Pyrenees to neutral Spain and for Dupont to return to Castelnau. When the pair reached the frontier village of Cier-de-Luchon, however, Dupont did not have the heart to abandon her to the freezing mountains. “We were at the end of our strength,” Bloch later told Rouneau. “Our clothes were in tatters. On my own, I’d have just stayed there. But ‘Yvan’ [Dupont] was so admirable. So many times, he said to me, ‘Let’s go, my little sister, have courage! Think of what you can do when you get there.’” Two local men in Cier-de-Luchon helped her to avoid German patrols in the Forbidden Zone. “She left at 12.30 A.M. and walked for seventeen hours in the snow, with bare legs and wearing a thin, half-length coat,” stated a subsequent SOE report. Her ascent of the Pyrenees took her to nearly 11,000 feet above sea level. SOE noted, “Her guides were excellent, one accompanied her and the other went on ahead to see that the way was clear.” The guides built a fire to keep her warm during the night and plowed ahead in the morning. A snowstorm made it so hard to see that she feared wandering back to France. At last, she and Dupont reached the Catalan village of Bausen, where they waited three days for a bus to Lerida.

  In Lerida, Spanish Guardia Civil interned Dupont. “Me, I was recognized as a British subject,” Bloch later told Rouneau, “and, thanks to the Spanish gallantry towards a weak woman, I was not worried.” The Spaniards, however, were not so gallant that they neglected to seize George’s report. Bloch was concerned that the papers “gave information too precise not to be dangerous if they were communicated to the Germans.” Her subsequent SOE debrief report added, “Regarding the loss of her papers in Spain, DANIELLE [Bloch] said that HILAIRE told her that if they were to be taken off her they would be forwarded direct to the British Embassy.” The frontier guards in Bausen who seized George’s report, however, did not send them to the British Embassy. And despite Spain’s official status as a “nonbelligerent” nation, General Francisco Franco was a friend of Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and owed his civil war victory to Germany. Bloch’s fear that the Spaniards would pass the report to the German Embassy in Madrid was well founded, but records don’t indicate what happened to George’s report.

  While waiting in Lerida, Bloch met the British consul from Barcelona, Sir Harold Farquhar, who was visiting. They had dinner together, and Farquhar issued papers enabling her to travel on to Madrid. Farquhar may have also had a hand in the release of Dupont, who was reunited with Bloch for the rest of her journey. After five days in Madrid, Bloch and Dupont went to Gibraltar, where they saw Sevenet and Sarrette. The two Frenchmen, furious to be kept waiting so long for transport, were determined to reach London to lodge complaints against George. Bloch spent three days in Gibraltar before flying to Lisbon and then, on May 21, to England. Bloch’s entire journey took twenty days.

  The next day, Vera Atkins, Buckmaster’s intelligence officer, debriefed Bloch in F-Section’s London Reception Center. Bloch pleaded for George: “He needs someone to help him as soon as possible, because he is now the only one left to control five departments (he is taking on LYONS and TOULOUSE), and if he is arrested there is no one else.” Atkins’s account of the interview provided insights into the circumstances confronting George: “Apparently his position is almost desperate as he is quite out of touch with London. He asks most urgently—hoping that it might still be done during the May Moon—for a W/T operator and for funds.” Bloch told her that George enjoyed the cooperation of many pro-Allied mayors and officials in the Gers and had established reliable reception committees among local peasants. But not all was positive, as Atkins noted: “It would appear, however, that HILAIRE himself is in great danger owing to the many arrests all round, and he may also be gravely endangered by the loss of his Report.”

  Bloch urged F-Section to send to George, in addition to military equipment, basics the region lacked: “3 shirts, 3 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of pyjamas, socks, handkerchiefs, toothbrush (they are unobtainable in France, and nail brushes, etc., are very acceptable), soap (wanted very badly) . . . [and] leather to sole shoes and extra shirts for the other men.”

  F-Section chiefs were unsure what to do with the young Frenchwoman, but she convinced them to train her for another deployment in France.

  The last part of the message Bloch gave SOE from George was that he “would like his Mother to be informed that he is well, and he would like to have news of his family—also whether his sister-in-law’s baby has arrived.”

  * * *

  • • •

  John Starr’s wife, Michelle, gave birth to their son, Lionel, on January 17, 1943, in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. John, now back in France, decided to tell his in-laws about their grandchild and traveled to their home in Rouen, more than 250 miles from his base in Burgundy. He hazarded a personal journey, something his brother, George, would not have done. Although George’s wife and children were just across the border in Spain, he never attempted to visit them, send them a message, or tell them where he was. John took a series of trains all the way to Rouen, which, as the capital of the Normandy region beside the English Channel, was under heavier German supervision than either George’s Gers or John’s Burgundy and Jura. He
evaded German surveillance to tell Michelle’s parents about Lionel’s birth and to stay overnight with them. On his return to Dijon, he stopped in Paris and saw friends. If anything characterized the difference between the two Starr brothers, it was John’s flagrant personal contravention of SOE procedures. John also visited his apartment in Issy-les-Moulineaux, something that had an operational justification: if he or another agent needed a safe house in the capital, it would be ready.

  * * *

  • • •

  George Starr sent London a follow-up message, via a courier link through Irun and Madrid, to confirm he had sent Denise Bloch and Maurice Dupont to England. The dispatch also requested that a plane fly over a site designated as “London T25,” a farm belonging to a family named Coulanges, relatives of courier Pierre Duffoir, “to speak with me by S-Phone.” George asked that the plane “drop me a radio-telegraphist with set so that we may maintain constant contact,” and pleaded that he had no funds to support his “vast organisation” and needed “at least 200,000 French francs a month and supplies to keep his circuits going.”

  At the end of May, word came from F-Section via a BBC announcement on its Messages personnel: “Les giraffes sont les canards.” Giraffes are ducks. This coded message meant that F-Section operations officer Major Gérard “Gerry” Morel was taking off for London T25 with an S-Phone. Morel had trained with George and knew his voice. The plane circled, as the two SOE officers spoke to each other. George recalled, “They said there was no mistaking me, and I started cussing them up and down. ‘There’s no doubt about it, it’s him all right.’” Morel went back to London and confirmed George was alive and all too well. F-Section promised a radio operator and a courier at “the next moon or the moon after.”

  Meanwhile, George absorbed stranded members of Pertschuk’s PRUNUS and Churchill’s SPINDLE circuits and expanded his area of operations. One of the first to join him was Pertschuk’s fellow operative Philippe de Gunzbourg. “He was a very brave man,” George said. “He did a wonderful job.” Gunzbourg similarly admired George as “a professional . . . a great leader of the caliber of Lawrence [of Arabia].” George put Gunzbourg in charge of the southern Dordogne and northwest Garonne, where he prepared reception grounds, recruited partisans, and instructed young men in the use of modern weapons.

  The infiltrations and betrayals that had destroyed VENTRILOQUIST, PRUNUS, and SPINDLE forced George to reassess WHEELWRIGHT’s security. “Then I started taking a leaf out of the communists’ book,” he said. “Cells, so if one gets caught, they don’t know where the others are. That’s the only good thing I ever got from the communists.” His seven-member cells were not permitted contact with one another. He appointed Captain Fernand Pagès, chief of the gendarmerie in Condom, to run a new security section. His counterespionage agents kept watch on the Gestapo and SD. The subprefect of Bergerac provided George with information on Gestapo movements, imminent arrests, and radio detector van routes. Aldo Molesini, a landowner in Montréal-du-Gers whom George met through Mayor Larribeau, also gave George intelligence. As the engineer for a big public works company that undertook projects for the Germans in the southwest, he had access to German military installations. Lastly, two Gestapo typists, a man and woman, kept George abreast of impending rafles, or raids.

  In late spring 1943, Gunzbourg took George to the village of Vic-Fezensac, famed in the region for its bullring and springtime toreador festival. They walked along the village’s narrow, dark streets to the home of Marie-Louise Lac, who was sheltering Louis and Théo Lévy. Gunzbourg introduced his friend, whom Madame Lac described:

  The English colonel was a little chap, sporting a little blond moustache, three hairs on one side and two on the other; he had a beret; when I saw him for the first time, he wore a beige pullover, without a jacket; his sleeves had holes at the elbows, having been darned—certainly by him—with green wool. No one could have believed he was an English colonel endowed with courage and a will of iron.

  “From that moment,” she felt, “the Resistance was well organized.” Madame Lac continued to hide résistants and began locating parachutage sites for George, but he still needed a radio.

  In the spring of 1943, George made his courier Pierre Duffoir, code name “Félix,” responsible for his communications with Switzerland. Duffoir’s wife, Paulette, was the sister of Madame Hélène Falbet, landlady of George’s safe house in Agen, and most of the Duffoir family participated in Resistance activities. Duffoir made frequent trips to the border zone and to the British Embassy in Berne with George’s reports for the SOE station. Rouneau recalled, “The devil of a small man went everywhere.”

  During one of Duffoir’s missions to Annecy on the French side of the Swiss border, Rabinovitch emerged from hiding. “After the RAOUL [Peter Churchill] affair (his arrest and the break up of his circuit),” stated an SOE report, “ARNAUD [Rabinovitch], his W/T operator who escaped arrest, got in touch with HILAIRE.” Rabinovitch remained free thanks to the heroism of the woman George had dismissed as “a dreadful lady,” Odette Sansom. Despite brutal torture at the Fresnes Prison south of Paris, which included having her toenails ripped out with pliers, she refused to disclose Rabinovitch’s location. George’s reports and interviews did not mention this debt to her. After Rabinovitch saw Duffoir, he transmitted from Annecy for George while Duffoir continued to take messages to Berne.

  The two avenues of communications produced a sea change in George’s fortunes. “Then it literally rained containers,” Rouneau rejoiced. Arms, ammunition, and explosives poured onto drop zones all over Gascony, constituting what Rouneau called the “embryo of the arsenal that would allow us to arm the groups we had been supervising.” Fernand Gaucher’s reception committees collected the containers on balmy, moonlit nights in the Gironde, Gunzbourg received them in the Landes, and George attended drops in the Gers. In June, SOE finally sent him two radio transmitters, though one smashed as it hit the ground.

  “The partisans understood that the war matériel had arrived,” Rouneau wrote, “but they had completely ignored where they would hide it.” Maurice Jacob, who ran Vichy’s Service des Réfugiés et Expulsés, offered to conceal the weapons at Château de la Clotte near Agen. The château, which Jacob had rented as a home for French people banished by Germany’s annexation of Alsace, became a weapons storehouse. Another Vichy official in Agen’s Prefecture lent George a truck to carry the equipment from drop zones to the Château de la Clotte and other caches.

  Moving the equipment required not only trucks, but also fuel to run them. George said he had little option but to steal it from the Germans, sending résistants disguised as Wehrmacht troops to the fuel depots: “I wanted at least two German officers’ uniforms, I said, to be complete with the pistols and everything.” SOE dispatched captured German clothes and sidearms. “I kept the pistol, and my German-speaking boys put the uniforms on.” The résistants who went to steal the fuel were those who spoke the language. “We had a German section, the Alsatians. Théo [Lévy] and his brother [Louis] were German Jews . . . ,” remembered George. “We had quite a gang who spoke German as their mother tongue, so they were the ones who did that.” WHEELWRIGHT was coming together with vehicles, fuel, disguises, a radio, and tons of equipment.

  Raymond Escholier wrote that George, Théo Lévy, “and some hardy Gascons, transformed Castelnau into an arsenal.” Escholier imagined George’s thoughts as he “inspected the treasures in the old square dungeon of Castelnau.”

  If the parachutages accelerate at this rate, we’ll have enough to arm several divisions. Yes, but these arms, what can they do? Not politics! Nothing but war . . . Yes, but these arms, to whom shall we give them?

  * * *

  • • •

  One Resistance leader in need of weapons was Claude Joseph Maurice Parisot, a former French Army officer. Captain Parisot, code name “Caillou,” or “Stone,” had organized nearly a thousand résistants under the banner of
the Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (ORA). The ORA comprised military officers who, while seeking to expel the Germans, did not answer to Charles de Gaulle. Parisot’s base was in the village of Panjas, about sixty miles from Castelnau. A tall, handsome agronomist with dark hair and a clipped moustache, Parisot was, in Escholier’s words, “an ardent Catholic, but a freethinker” and a “chief among chiefs.” His father had been a professor of ancient history and his mother a French colonist from Algeria. During the First World War, he followed his older brother into the army and ended as a lieutenant. He studied farming after the war and worked for the Ministry of Agriculture until 1938, when he rejoined the army as a captain. The military based him in Corsica. When the Germans invaded northern France in May 1940, he demanded a transfer to the front. Instead, his superiors sent him to Algeria. He wrote from there to Raymond Escholier when Pétain announced his armistice with Germany, “I refuse to be complicit in this infamy.” He planned to join de Gaulle’s Free French in London, until Britain bombed the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir, Algeria, on July 3, 1940. Although Britain’s objective had been to prevent Germany from using the French warships, Parisot and other French officers condemned an “ally” that killed more than twelve hundred of their comrades. Parisot left the army and returned to France to manage farms in the southwest’s wine country.

  After Germany occupied Vichy’s Free Zone and disbanded its Armistice Army, Parisot, Captain Maurice Moureau of the 2nd Dragoons, Captain Henri Monnet, and an Armagnac distiller named Abel Sempé established an underground unit they dubbed the Armagnac Battalion. Its rank and file were réfractaires, men whose refusal to work as conscripted laborers in Germany under Vichy’s Service du travail obligatoire (STO) forced them to live underground. Raymond Escholier wrote that volunteers included “the men from Flanders, the Belgian and the Alsatian réfractaires who had found refuge in Saint-Gô.” Saint-Gô was a small village about forty miles southwest of Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon. Parisot’s Armagnac Battalion, lacking any connection to SOE, received no British arms.