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

by Charles Glass

  “Leave immediately, tonight or before dawn.”

  Jeanne Robert protested that she had to teach in the morning. “How will that happen without me?”

  “We’ll have to find something to explain your absence, but you cannot stay here,” George said. “I won’t allow it, because, if you come to harm, I’ll consider myself responsible.”

  Rouneau wrote that George lamented, “You don’t know there are nights during which I cannot close my eyes when I think of poor Jacob, whom I did not force to leave.” Maurice Jacob, head of the Service des Réfugiés et Expulsés, following his arrest at the Château de la Clotte on August 21 with his family and friends, had been tortured in Toulouse’s Saint-Michel Prison. The Germans then sent him, with Fernand Gaucher, to a series of concentration camps in Germany, the last of which was the death camp at Bergen-Belsen. Rouneau called George’s reference to Jacob “pathetic.”

  Jeanne Robert, who would marry Maurice Rouneau, sympathized with both men. “Before Hilaire’s arrival, Albert was the boss. And when he arrived, it was Hilaire who was the boss. It’s necessary to understand that it was a little difficult.”

  While resentful at being sent out of France, Rouneau had no choice. He and George could not work together. Jeanne Robert packed her linen, silver, and personal items to store at the Novarini and Larribeau houses, and Rouneau stole six packs of cigarettes from George’s stock, “over which Hilaire expressed extreme discontent the next day.” They finished emptying the school at two o’clock in the morning. After trying but failing to sleep, Rouneau, Robert, and the three Duffoirs were on their bicycles at six.

  Jeanne Robert said that, as they were leaving, George revealed to her his real name. It was not Serge, Gaston, or Hilaire, but George Reginald Starr. She recalled the poignancy of their parting: “We were almost brother and sister. Yes, because we complemented each other. We were good, never an affair, never anything. He was always content with what he had. Really, I have nothing bad to say about him, nothing but good.” Her lover Rouneau, however, later savaged George in his memoir and in letters to SOE and to Philippe de Gunzbourg.

  Rouneau, Robert, and the Duffoirs bicycled first to the Novarini farm to bid farewell to Pino and Tina, their comrades from Réseau Victoire’s founding at Easter 1942. The Novarinis cried as their friends left to cycle thirty miles south to Auch. There, Robert resigned her teaching post, explaining to an education official that her mother was ill and needed her in the Pas-de-Calais.

  Their underground railroad depended on patriotic comrades to help them from post to post. They went on to Seissan and the house of Marius Sorbé, who had sheltered them in August and was regularly supplying George with civilian clothes for escapees to Spain. The next day it was to Tajan, where they stayed with the mayor and learned that Spanish police were interning all unmarried male refugees under the age of forty. The mayor gave Rouneau false papers under his cover name Martin Rendier that raised his age to forty-one. Pierre Duffoir, also under forty, was exempt from Spanish internment as a married man with a child.

  On Wednesday, October 20, they stopped at the house of Roland Mansencal in Mazères-de-Neste. Mansencal urged them to stay, warning that a blizzard threatened to engulf the mountain. Rouneau refused. As a soldier in a Resistance army, he obeyed orders. Anyway, he believed that George Starr was also leaving France, a charge George confirmed:

  He fell out with me because I sent him home, which was the way to do it. But he thought the place couldn’t run without him. And I got him to go, telling him I’d be following in a short time, which I never did.

  George’s antipathy to Rouneau emerged in the same interview: “In the village they had a funny duck. It wasn’t a normal duck and it walked very funnily. We called it ‘Rouneau run-run.’” When the interviewer asked George whether he considered himself “a martinet,” he laughed and answered, “Oh, by Christ, yes. You had to be.”

  Rouneau’s escape route took his small group to Loures-Barousse in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, other men and boys were waiting to leave the country with them. At nine that night, a guide led them to the tiny Saléchan-Siradan train station. The stationmaster took them into his house, where more men were desperate to depart. They took stock of their weapons: one Tommy gun and a few pistols to face well-armed German border patrols. The friends who had accompanied them thus far said tearful good-byes and went back to Mazères-de-Neste. Rouneau’s party set out on foot at one in the morning. Rain beat down on them as they followed the rail line south toward Luchon.

  The refugees ascended the mountain, and rain turned to snow. The freezing trail became treacherous. They climbed all night and morning, resting only at noon. Their bread was frozen, but Jeanne Robert shared her few cans of paté. One of their guides urged them to tread quietly at the summit; a German border post was close by. The same guide picked up the nearly frozen eleven-year-old Josette Duffoir and carried her over the top. As they descended the other side, Paulette Duffoir collapsed in the snow. A few of the party went ahead to reconnoiter, while the rest remained with Paulette. She pleaded with them to abandon her, but they refused. An hour later, the two groups reunited at the edge of an abyss. It was so steep that there seemed no alternative but to return to France. A red-haired young Alsatian declared he would never go back. He forged ahead, the others following along the edge of the chasm. Rouneau recalled, “The slightest misstep, a little snow collapsing underfoot and we were finished.” One of the local guides said, “This is the worst crossing I’ve ever made.”

  Rouneau slipped in the snow, which brought a laugh from little Josette Duffoir. This broke the tension, and they became hopeful as they trudged through the ice. Finally, on Wednesday, October 27, they reached Spain.

  In Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, George was rebuilding his organization brick by brick. He had disposed of Rouneau, as he had his nominal commander, Henri Sevenet. None of the colleagues left in the Gers could challenge his authority. Indisputably le patron, George moved from the empty school into the house of Roger and Alberta Larribeau. His office remained in the kitchen of the shuttered school, while Robert’s students transferred to classes in a hotel room in Condom. An SOE report for October 18, 1943, the day of Rouneau’s departure, noted that George arranged for Roland Mansencal to replace Rouneau and for Gunzbourg to assume Duffoir’s duties.

  His untested fighters were growing impatient. They had joined the Resistance to harass German troops, destroy railways, cut telephone lines, and demolish bridges. What was SOE waiting for? In other areas, communist partisans were attacking the German troops. Yet provoking the Germans before D-Day brought retaliation, the capture of résistants, seizure of arms, murder of hostages, and loss of fighters who would be needed to support the Allied troops when they landed.

  On November 10, 1943, George was promoted to captain. This did not alter his status in the field, where he did not wear a uniform or answer to a chain of command. The promotion made little difference to his résistants, who regarded him as their chief already, but it showed SOE’s trust in its man in southwest France. Much, however, remained to be done.

  The winter was one of the coldest on record. One night in December, while George’s résistants were waiting for an arms drop in a field south of Vic-Fezensac, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. The containers floated down and crashed deep into hard snow. The men cracked the ice to break them free. As they carried the heavy metal cylinders, they stopped every twenty steps to catch their breath. When they finished, one of them, Georges Dumont, said, “These are the days.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Late December was also hard on the Allied forces in Italy, whose offensive had stalled in the face of German reinforcements and strong defenses. The Wehrmacht kept the American beachhead at Salerno under artillery bombardment, delaying a breakout. Behind the lines, Italian guerrillas, many supported by SOE, were attacking the Germans and cutting their co
mmunications. The exploits of Italy’s partigiani, like those of anti-Nazi partisans on the Russian front, set precedents for résistants in France.

  * * *

  • • •

  Toward the end of 1943, Captain George Starr, like the men and women he commanded, was spoiling for action. Preparation was no longer enough. The résistants did not want to wait for the invasion. George asked London on December 13, SOE recorded, “for permission to make concentrated attacks on all Gestapo headquarters in his area, to take place after attacks on locomotives which were timed for the morning of the 1st January [1944]. This permission was granted on 14th December.” London seemed willing to let him risk reprisals against civilians so long as he crippled German supply lines.

  SOE promised to send a demolition specialist, Lieutenant Claude Arnault, to replace the unfortunate Charles Duchalard. Arnault was coming with a courier, although George had not requested one. Yvonne Cormeau recalled, “We had our courier service established.” The new courier would be a young Englishwoman named Anne-Marie Walters. Arnault and Walters were both twenty years old and spoke fluent French, Arnault because he was French and Walters because she had grown up in Geneva. Walters’s field code name was “Colette” and Arnault’s “Néron.”

  A Halifax bomber took Walters and Arnault to France on the night of December 16, but severe weather prevented the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Stanley Nicholson Gray, from reaching the drop site. On the return to RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, Gray’s aircraft crashed in the Tangham Forest. Gray and two members of his crew were killed. An internal SOE document of December 17 noted Walters and Arnault “suffered shock and concussions” and had abrasions and sprained ankles. The medical officer recommended “complete rest.” George would have to wait for his explosives expert.

  As Christmas approached, George asked London for English 555 cigarettes and Scotch whisky. SOE could not commandeer special transport for luxuries, so it added George’s presents to one of his regular parachutages. But the RAF “made a mistake and shoved it all down into a German barracks.” George was mortified that the German soldiers were enjoying his cigarettes and whisky, until a few days later when a plane dropped the Christmas package in the right place. George stashed the whisky in a beehive.

  Soon afterward, a radio message from London informed George that King George VI had awarded him the Military Cross for “exemplary gallantry.” He decided to celebrate: “I went out in the dark, got the bottle of whisky, opened it and said, ‘What muck!’ I’d completely lost the taste, having drunk so much Armagnac. I put it back in the beehive. As far as I know, it’s still there.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On November 19, 1943, Major Kieffer sent Ernest Vogt and interpreter August Scherer to arrest a French SOE wireless operator in an apartment in a suburb south of Paris. Master Sergeant Josef Stork drove them there at 11:00 P.M. and waited in the car with another SD man while Vogt and Scherer went up to the third floor. They broke into the flat and saw André Dubois, code name “Hercule,” sending messages from a radio on the kitchen table. The Frenchman jumped up and fired his handgun at the intruders. His first shot killed Scherer. Vogt, a civilian who had never used a weapon, pointed his revolver at Dubois and fired. He wounded Dubois, who shot back and hit Vogt in the chest. Both men kept firing. Vogt described the scene of two bleeding adversaries trying to kill each other at close range: “When both our pistols were empty, we stood looking at each other, across the table, weaponless, since all our bullets were in each other’s bodies. Then I felt myself fainting.” Josef Stork and the other SD man, whom Stork called only “Untersturmführer X,” heard the shooting and ran up to the flat. Vogt lay unconscious and bleeding. Dubois, though seriously wounded, “ran as quickly as he could with a weapon in his hand to the door and down the staircase and outside.” The Germans chased him until he collapsed about one hundred yards away. They took both men to the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, where surgeons cut seven bullets from Vogt’s body, including one over his heart.

  While recovering, Vogt managed to get out of bed and stagger to the next ward to find Dubois. He sat on Dubois’ bed and said to the bandaged prisoner, “You should not have fired. When you fired, I fired.” Dubois answered, “I hoped to kill you and escape.”

  Vogt was still in the hospital on Thursday night, November 25, when John Starr decided the time had come to leave 84 avenue Foch. “After [a] three months stay,” he said later, “I knew exactly the names of our agents, grounds, dumps, etc., known to the S.D. I also had all the dope on the [General Henri] GIRAUD and DE GAULLE organisations. In possession of this knowledge, I attempted my escape.” He worked late in the guardroom on his oil portrait of Kieffer, while Faye and Khan were locked in their cells. To mask the sound of iron spars scraping their walls, John chatted with the guards and made a racket with his paints. When all seemed quiet, he asked a guard to take him to his cell. The door closed. The guard locked it, as always. John put the tissues with intelligence on the Funkspiel in his pocket and a letter for Major Kieffer on the bed. He switched off the light and, with the chair perched on his mattress, reached for the loose bar and slid it out. He strained not to make a sound as he climbed through the shaft to the skylight. Faye was waiting for him on the roof. Khan, however, was not there.

  John and Faye walked in silence along the rooftop to her skylight. Khan was inside, struggling to remove the bar at the base of the shaft. The two men reached in and took turns with the screwdriver. Faye, who had the longer reach, did most of the work. After two hours of strenuous effort, he pried the bar out of the plaster. Khan joined them on the roof, and Faye kissed her. They tied their shoes around their necks, lest their footsteps give them away, and tore blankets into strips and tied them into rope for the perilous five-story drop. Descending to a flat roof about halfway down, they realized their plan was succeeding. John recalled Faye exclaiming, “We’ve done it!”

  All of a sudden, the three escapees froze. Searchlights scanned the sky. Allied aircraft screeched overhead to bomb the industrial suburbs of Paris. John recalled that “as the R.A.F. came over, the flak started and woke everybody up.” The guards inspected the cells as usual during raids and found John’s and Khan’s rooms empty. Flashlights from inside 84 avenue Foch scanned the exterior walls. The three fugitives lay flat. When the lights passed, Faye led the way to a cast-iron fire escape. Below, guards were running from street to street. The escapees lowered themselves again with their rope blanket and clung to the side of a mansion behind avenue Foch, 9-bis Square du Bois de Boulogne. Fearing imminent capture, Faye abandoned the truncheon John had given him. John hid his papers for London in a flowerpot on the ledge. He later wrote, “I went back to the protecting wall which hid me from the Gestapo windows and there got rid of my papers while Madeleine and Faye lay flat on the roof as the light shone from the rooftop windows.”

  Inside 84 avenue Foch, Major Kieffer was asleep. Guards woke him at about three o’clock to tell him that Bob and Madeleine were gone. Kieffer took charge. A check of all cells revealed that Colonel Faye was also missing. Kieffer recalled, “All three had broken through the iron bars in their cells leading to the windows of the ceiling and they climbed up on to the flat roof and by means of strips of blankets and sheets knotted together they let themselves down on to the balcony in the third storey of a neighbouring house and there smashed a window and entered the apartment.”

  Faye used his elbow to break the windowpane and the three clambered inside. With the lights off, they felt their way around the furniture to the stairway. They rushed downstairs and opened the front door. The street was a cul-de-sac with a high wall at one end and SS men at the other. Faye saw his only hope: a bold sprint into the dark. He made it past the guards, and they unleashed a flurry of automatic weapons fire.

  John and Khan bolted back into the mansion and up two flights of stairs. They rested on a sofa. Khan erupted in tears, knowing their bid for liberty w
as ending. From the floor above came the voice of the owner of the house, Madame Esmerian, “Who are you? What are you doing? Are you thieves?” John looked up at the woman, who was peering back through the banister. Before he could answer, the Germans burst through the door.

  The would-be escapees faced an irate Major Kieffer in the entryway of 84 avenue Foch. “You’re all going to be shot!” Kieffer shouted. Guards hauled John, Khan, and a badly wounded Faye to the fourth floor for their summary executions. “I have only done my duty,” Faye said. An SS soldier punched him in the face so hard that blood gushed out. The guards frisked the prisoners. In John’s pocket was the photograph Kieffer had given him for the portrait. “A little souvenir,” John explained, adding, “I left a letter for you. You’ll find it in my cell.” Kieffer sent a guard to fetch it, while the three awaited execution. The guard gave the letter to Kieffer, who read:

  As you will have realized when you get this, we are trying to escape. Now that I hope we shall not be meeting again, I should like to thank you for the good treatment we have received here, and to say that we shall not forget it.