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

by Charles Glass

  Wishing you the best of luck in the chase that will follow, but much better luck to ourselves,

  “Bob”

  As John watched Kieffer, he felt that “a terrible battle was going on inside him.” Would he kill or spare them? Kieffer turned to John. The terrible battle was over. He dismissed the firing squad.

  Guards chained John’s hands and feet and hauled him to his cell. During the night, they beat him. One of the guards used the truncheon that Faye had left on the roof, irate that John might have used it on him. In the morning, they moved him into Faye’s empty cell. John lay alone, shackled and defeated, for two weeks. Then Kieffer granted him an audience and demanded an explanation. John, Kieffer later recalled, replied “that ‘Madeleine’ had approached him with the escape plan and that if as a woman she had the courage to escape and had succeeded in doing so she would have made life impossible for him in England had he not displayed the same courage as a man.”

  John’s memory of their first meeting after the escape’s failure differed from Kieffer’s. He said that Kieffer and von Kapri came to his cell ten days into his solitary confinement and asked him to “give his word of honour never again to attempt to escape custody, not only whilst in the Avenue Foch but also whilst in France.” If he did not agree, they would send him to Germany. He agreed. “Two or three days later, he was again brought to the guard-room in order to carry on with the work, and thereafter he was afforded greater liberty than ever before the abortive escape.”

  John added that he said to Kieffer, “So long as you keep me here, I give my word that I shall not attempt to escape. If I should be sent anywhere else, that promise will no longer be binding.” He justified his decision to SOE, which recorded that he “would still have the chance of passing his information to another prisoner who had not been so bound and who might attempt escape with it to London or through any other manoeuvre chance might afford.” Kieffer recalled that they shook hands after John gave his word of honor not to escape. Kieffer had a higher opinion of British than French officers, “since in contrast to the French officers no English officer had broken the word of honour he had given me during my work in France.” He turned deadly serious at the conclusion of their meeting: if John reneged, twelve SOE agents would be shot.

  Unlike John, Khan and Faye had declined to give their parole. Major Kieffer said, “‘Madeleine’ and ‘Faye’ were subsequently conveyed on the same day [November 26] to Strasbourg or Karlsruhe by order of the BDS [Befehlshaber der Sicherheitsdienstes, chief security officer Colonel Helmut Knochen] and assigned to a secure prison.” The “secure prison” for each was a concentration camp, Khan at first to Pforzheim and Faye to Sonnenberg.

  News of the aborted escape reached F-Section in London through the socially prominent Emily Morin Balachowsky. She learned about it from Josef Placke, whom she had met in her endeavor to free her résistant husband, Alfred Serge Balachowsky of the Pasteur Institute, from German custody. The SD had arrested Professor Balachowsky, who worked for Francis Suttill’s PHYSICIAN circuit, in July 1943 and sent him to the transit camp north of Paris at Compiègne. She met Placke first at avenue Foch and later at her home and in public places. When Placke told her about the escape attempt, she sent the information via an escape network to Spain and through Swiss intelligence to SOE in Berne. F-Section could no longer ignore the fact that the Germans were playing Noor Inayat Khan’s radio. Madame Balachowsky’s report confirmed one other detail: John Starr was alive.

  Gilbert Norman, the radio operator John met on his arrival at avenue Foch, had also sworn not to escape from the building. When the SD needed his cell for a new prisoner, guards took him downstairs to a van for transfer to Fresnes. Outside, where his promise was no longer valid, he broke away and darted up the avenue. Corporal Alfred von Kapri took aim and shot him in the leg. The Germans picked him up and drove him, not to Fresnes, but to the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière. In another bed, Norman saw the man to whom he had given his parole d’honneur, Ernest Vogt.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two months of bureaucratic negotiation delayed Maurice Rouneau, Jeanne Robert, and the Duffoirs in Spain. On December 14, they crossed the no-man’s-land from Spanish territory into Britain’s Fortress Gibraltar, and just after midnight on December 29, a Dakota military transport flew them to Bristol. In London, Colonel Buckmaster congratulated them on their work and asked what they wanted to do next. Rouneau and Pierre Duffoir answered with one voice, “Return to France!”

  At the end of December, London ordered George to destroy scores of railroad locomotives in Gascony. He could not wait for demolition expert Claude Arnault, who was still recovering in England from his crash injuries. With little time to undertake the sabotage himself, he taught others. George’s knowledge of explosives was so thorough from his years in the mines that he claimed he could have taught his SOE instructors. This may have been what prompted one examiner to call him a “know it all.” “I chose New Year’s Eve, when the Germans would be celebrating and too drunk to pay too much attention,” he said. Yvonne Cormeau claimed that he even sent the Germans in one train station a case of champagne to help them along. “We found out where all the locomotives would be, in roundhouses and sidings, and just blew them all up,” George said. “In some places the railway workers helped. In others, they would not. On that night, we blew up 320 locomotives.” Yvonne confirmed that sympathetic railroad workers, including a train inspector, assisted the saboteurs. The men placed the charges in the same place in each engine “so they couldn’t take out a spare part from one engine to put it on the other.”

  By New Year’s morning 1944, more than three hundred engines were useless. “It was a veritable New Year’s Eve bash of locomotives,” wrote George’s security chief. “They danced like they never had; it was something monstrous, like the Elephants’ Ball of which Kipling spoke; 28 machines [in one location] were left lying on the ground.” In Bergerac, the saboteurs rendered twenty-five of thirty train engines inoperable. Despite the sweeping success, George regretted not doing it himself: “It’s very difficult to send people away on dangerous jobs and wait there, wondering and hoping they’re all right. I think it’s more difficult than going and doing it yourself.”

  The destruction of the engines began a series of operations that would escalate in the new year with the arrival of Claude Arnault. There was no evidence, however, that the “concentrated attacks” George planned on “all Gestapo headquarters in his area” and for which London gave him permission on December 14 took place.

  On January 4, 1944, Claude Arnault and Anne-Marie Walters made their second attempt to parachute into southwest France. George’s ground team, led by a master carpenter named Gabriel Cantal, was standing by at the designated drop zone. The Halifax missed it and dropped Arnault and Walters a few miles off target. Cantal and the other résistants from the village of Gabarret found the pair caked in mud and burying their parachutes in marshland beside an irrigation channel. Scattered on the ground were fifteen containers and six boxes of supplies that the men collected before guiding the arrivals to a safe house. One of the reception committee later described Anne-Marie Walters:

  Colette looked like a Father Christmas in her flying suit, a shovel at her side, a knife on her sleeve, a [Czech .32 caliber] revolver in her pocket, lozenges, tablets, rum, food, maps of the area, compass, identity cards and ration coupons, well printed in England, [that] look better than those of many in France.

  At sunrise, Walters and Arnault walked over frozen fields to Gabarret, and a day later drove to Condom to wait for George.

  Walters was asleep the next morning when George’s motorcycle sped into Condom. “Le patron is here,” her hostess announced to the sleeping young woman. Walters’s description of him at their first meeting was not flattering:

  He was practically bald with a little moustache (the moustache was an irregular ornament, being shaved off when he visit
ed certain parts of the region) and about forty-five. [George was thirty-nine.] He had a sly look, his eyes quickly avoiding yours when he spoke. He appeared to be in a frayed state of nerves as he bounced about the room and spoke in broken sentences. He spoke French with a strong foreign accent, not specifically English, but undefinable to German ears in the mix-up of regional accents.

  To Walters, embarrassed to be seen in her blue pajamas, George was businesslike rather than friendly. “First,” he said, “I am very strict on discipline.” He would forgive a mistake once. “To put things plainly, you have to do what I tell you and we’ll get along all right. If you don’t, I shall have to shoot you.” He advised her to remember her training, but to forget her cover story. No cover stood up to scrutiny. He advised her to deal only with people she knew by sight or through someone she trusted. “Passwords are poisonous traps,” he said. He told her also not to smoke in public, because women in the region didn’t. She noticed that “he couldn’t spend five minutes without smoking. His fingers were stained with nicotine.”

  In what may have been a deception to frighten the young woman, George said the Gestapo had captured and tortured him. To prove the point, he showed her scars on his legs. Asked years later why he had lied to her, George said, “That was to impress the little bitch.” Walters believed the story, as did many others.

  He examined the identity card and ration coupons that London had issued her. The chits for food and clothing were first rate, but he spotted a flaw in the identity card: “London makes mistakes sometimes. This card shows that you’ve crossed the demarcation line illegally last year. It has the wrong stamp on it.” He took the card with him when he left, saying he would bring her a replacement. She was indignant: “It seemed monstrous that I should stay any time at all without papers.”

  George returned seventy-two hours later with a new identity card. She asked when she could leave for northern France, where London had assigned her. George said, “You’re better off here.” Having initially resisted a courier from London, he said he needed her:

  I’ve had to go everywhere myself all this time. Four or five months ago, the Boche put a heavy price on my head and it’s been getting more difficult every day. The other day I came on a Gestapo barrage. I had a transmitter set in the back of my Simca car and my canadienne [coat] thrown over it. Fortunately, they didn’t search the car.

  The following Sunday, Walters accompanied George on rounds of senior agents to whom she would be his liaison. Her cover story was that she was “a student from Paris who just couldn’t get on with her studies because Paris was so expensive and so difficult and who had come to seek refuge with the farmer who was supposed to be a friend of my father in the last war.”

  On the night of January 27, 1944, RAF Flight Lieutenant Maurice Southgate parachuted into George’s area of operations on his second mission. His first assignment had concluded the previous November after ten months, during which he sabotaged factories and fought a pitched battle with French police. Buckmaster wrote of him that “he stuck to his job without any thought for his own safety or welfare. He worked long hours—sometimes as many as twenty a day—and he inspired the fiercest enthusiasm in all who worked with him.” George sent Gabriel Cantal, who had received Walters and Arnault three weeks before, to meet Southgate and put him on a bus to Tarbes to resume his work with the STATIONER circuit.

  Anne-Marie Walters traveled by train with Arnault, whom she called “Jean-Claude” in her memoirs, on missions for George. George, concerned that young Arnault “was in love with that Anne-Marie Walters,” asked Gunzbourg to employ him north of the River Garonne. George and Gunzbourg told Walters that “suspicious people who claimed to have come from England” were poking around the Gers and Arnault would be safer elsewhere. She missed the handsome young Frenchman “for many weeks.”

  Walters came down with a cough and high fever that confined her to bed. George sent a young physician and résistant, Dr. Jean Deyris, to treat her, and during her four-day illness, George “came almost every day,” bringing her English tea and chocolate from a parachute drop.

  While convalescing, Walters heard rumors of a mass breakout from the Maison Centrale d’Eysses. The former Benedictine monastery-turned-prison lay on farmland about forty-five miles away. On January 3, 1944, the day before she and Arnault parachuted into France, fifty-four inmates—led by SOE organizers Philippe de Vomécourt of VENTRILOQUIST and Major Charles Hudson of HEADMASTER—had escaped.

  Vomécourt and Hudson, along with thirteen other escapees, took refuge not far from Eysses. Vomécourt needed help from the underground to reach Spain. He wrote, “The message was passed down to the patron of the Gascony circuit, who set about arranging our passage.”

  When George, le patron, visited them, he tallied their needs: civilian clothes, false identity cards, transportation to the Spanish frontier, and guides. He sent Walters to Roland Mansencal, George’s representative in Mazères-de-Neste near Montréjeau, for information on the best escape route. Walters took buses from Condom to the market town of Tarbes, where Mansencal was waiting for her in an electricity shop owned by his nephew. While they ate lunch upstairs, Mansencal moaned about the obstacles—heavy snow, avalanches, German border guards. Walters held her tongue, recalling that George had told her Mansencal “fumed over everything but got things done better than anyone else.”

  Mansencal took her by train to Montréjeau and on foot about three miles through rolling meadows to his house in Mazères-de-Neste. To her delight, she found Arnault there. The young people, who had not seen each other since George sent Arnault north, argued and reconciled in the manner of young lovers. Mansencal left to seek the guides and, after bicycling up and down hills for thirty miles, returned at sunset. He told Walters the guides were leaving for Spain in the morning with thirty-five American airmen. They would not be back for two weeks. “This is the best I can do,” he said. “The other guide working for us was caught by the Gestapo six weeks ago. I don’t know anyone else I can trust.”

  Walters walked in darkness early the next morning to catch the 5:20 train to Toulouse and connected to another for Auch. She retrieved her bicycle and went to the farm of a family called Castagnos. Henri and Odilla Castagnos, along witht their son, André, were providing her a room in their house at great risk to themselves. She rested there for a short time before cycling on to meet George. He told her to hide the ex-prisoners in Fourcès until their departure. Anne-Marie proceeded to Agen to relay le patron’s orders to Albert Cambon, who promised to arrange everything.

  Cambon drove off in an old truck, picking up gendarme Raymond Aubin and handing the vehicle over to résistant Francis Peyrot to drive. The Eysses fugitives climbed under the tarpaulin on the truck bed. Peyrot drove them to Walters in Agen. She opened the canvas flap and climbed into a dark, five-by-seven-foot enclosure with fifteen sweaty men. Vomécourt remembered, “Just outside the town of Agen, a charming newcomer joined our cramped party in the back—an English girl called Anne-Marie Walters, who had dropped into Gascony and was operating under the code name of Paulette [sic]. She had cycled ahead to make sure the way was clear of Germans.” F-Section Major Hudson introduced himself as if at a garden party and asked about SOE colleagues in London. He casually mentioned that he and the other men had broken rocks for fourteen hours a day in the prison, all the while dreading transfer to Germany.

  The truck, running on wartime gazogène charcoal that produced less power than gasoline, struggled up the hills. At a steep incline, Anne-Marie and the fifteen men got out and pushed. They were trundling through the town of Nérac, when armed miliciens at a narrow bridge over the River Baïse ordered them to stop. “My heart was beating fast and I hoped no one could hear it,” Walters wrote. Gendarme Aubin barked at one of the miliciens, “French police.” He produced documents from his chief, clandestine résistant Captain Raymond Cosculuella, stating that he was on official business. When the miliciens tried to search
the truck, Aubin nodded to Peyrot to drive on.

  The miliciens screamed at Peyrot to stop. Aubin shouted to his passengers, “Lie flat!” The miliciens fired, but Peyrot made it over the bridge and drove as fast as his gazogène-powered engine could manage. When they were out of range, Major Hudson commented, “Boy, that was a neat job.”

  They settled in for the night inside a barn near Fourcès. Anne-Marie cycled back to the Castagnos farm the next morning. When George arrived, she told him what had happened. “You need not have been there at all,” he said. “I don’t want you to run any unnecessary risks. . . . It would bring awful trouble to us if you were caught. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.” She felt his response “was a bit of a cold shower.”

  The escapees waited for the guides to return from Spain. “For a few days, we were able to relax,” wrote Vomécourt, “eating well at the farm and enjoying freedom from alarms. All of us were fitter at the end of it.” Finally, the fifteen men traveled to the border where passeurs were waiting to take them to Spain. The climb was grueling, but they made it over the Pyrenees through Spain to Gibraltar and, on March 8, to England. They said that they would not have made it but for the help they received from George Starr and his résistants.

  ELEVEN

  John’s Cousin

  Europe was not yet ablaze, but it was beginning to smoulder.

  MAURICE BUCKMASTER

  While George Starr’s domain expanded across the southwest, his brother John’s world was contracting. The sole liberty he enjoyed was walking unescorted “between the guardroom and the lavatory.” Worse, he had forfeited the prisoner’s only hope: escape. His breakout on the night of November 25 might have succeeded if he had gone alone. The hours that he and Léon Faye spent extricating Noor Inayat Khan doomed his plan. Until that night, he had survived on the belief he would bring proof of the Funkspiel to London. Major Kieffer admitted, “Had the three managed to escape then it is to be assumed that all the radio plays which were in full swing would have been finished.” That prospect vanished when he gave his word to Major Kieffer not to escape. Instead of a hero, John was a trusty of his German captors.