On June 17, Maurice Parisot destroyed a Luftwaffe fuel dump at Mont-de-Marsan and captured one German. One of his patrols then seized eight German soldiers, who had been transporting casks of Gascon brandy to German ambassador Otto Abetz in Paris. The Germans got on so well with their captors that, Escholier wrote, they “became comrades.” Parisot’s liaison officer suggested taking the prisoners to Castelnau, where the sight of them would raise the men’s morale.
An open truck brought the Germans there in the evening. George received them in the orderly room and gave them cigarettes. “At this moment,” he said, “I was called out for something else, and Theodore Levy, a German Jew who had been for a long time [illegible word] with me (I knew in spite of his hate he would not touch them) was left in charge, because he could speak German.” When George returned twenty minutes later, Lévy told him that the German Feldwebel (sergeant) spoke English and French. The sergeant stepped forward and said in English that he had left Paris just before the Allied landing in Normandy “to bring the alcohol from Tarbes to the officers’ mess in Paris.” The sergeant “swore by all the Gods that the only reason he was captured was because there were women and children in the streets of the town where they were captured and he had refused to give the order to fire for fear of hitting them.” George promised to treat him and his men “as prisoners of war.”
Maquisards took the Wehrmacht POWs to the chapel holding their nominal allies of the Milice. The Germans refused to enter and demanded to see the commander. George appeared, and they pleaded, “Imprison us where you like, but not with traitors to their country.” George understood and installed them in a building beside Dr. Deyris’s infirmary.
Operations gathered pace. On June 18, one of George’s patrols spotted a German headquarters car driving toward the village of Fleurance. George dispatched a team to intercept it. The ensuing skirmish left one German wounded and showed again that the Wehrmacht had lost control of the roads.
Later that day, Abbé Boë bicycled from his rectory in Blaziert to Castelnau to say Mass for the Hollywood Brigade and its Catholic prisoners. Anne-Marie Walters wrote, “He had become famous in the region for his patriotic sermons. Already in 1942 he would curse and condemn the Germans from the height of his pulpit, in the simple and outspoken language of the district.” The old priest’s sermon of June 18, attended by most of the garrison as well as some of the prisoners, called the patriots to arms: “So, young men, go forward. God is with you.”
The stirring sermon concluded, “Youth of France, youth of Armagnac, my brothers, remember Joan [of Arc]’s command: Kick them out of France!” At this injunction, wrote Escholier, “even the Reds of Spain applauded.” The congregation burst into La Marseillaise with its refrain, “Aux armes, citoyens!” One of the Germans sang with them. The Milice prisoners, though French and Catholic, did not. Anne-Marie Walters watched as “the traitors turned to the wall in shame and humility and stood gazing at their feet.” Suddenly, out of the summer sky burst a single German aircraft. Its pilot dropped no bombs, but he could not miss the armed men overflowing the ancient church.
June 19 brought another portent that Castelnau would not remain tranquil. George learned that a traitor in his headquarters had given the Germans his defensive order of battle. Escholier wrote that “this betrayal was exposed and punished appropriately, [and] all our security measures were reversed.” George’s military advisers, Commandant Prost and Lieutenant André Herlin, abandoned defense from fixed positions in favor of “a series of small posts and a zigzag at sufficiently long distance with some machine guns and bazookas situated at points as nerve centers.” Castelnau was not impregnable, but George was ensuring its conquest would not come cheap.
THIRTEEN
The Battle of Castelnau
Our job was, at all times, strictly military.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER
On June 6, 1944, as Allied soldiers poured onto the Normandy shore, the SD radio department on the second floor of 84 avenue Foch received a peculiar directive. Berlin ordered Dr. Josef Goetz to send a message, as he recalled, “through on the decoy transmissions then in progress which would reveal the existence of the decoy to the other side. BERLIN gave as a reason for this that the enemy would thus be frightened off.” Goetz thought it was a mistake to tell SOE that the SD had been deceiving it for the previous year and a half, but disobedience was not an option. Major Kieffer drafted a cable for Goetz to send to Buckmaster, spymaster to spymaster:
WE THANK YOU FOR THE LARGE DELIVERIES OF ARMS AND AMMUNITION WHICH YOU HAVE BEEN KIND ENOUGH TO SEND US. WE ALSO APPRECIATE THE MANY TIPS YOU HAVE GIVEN US REGARDING OUR PLANS AND INTENTIONS WHICH WE HAVE CAREFULLY NOTED. IN CASE YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE HEALTH OF SOME OF THE VISITORS YOU HAVE SENT US YOU MAY REST ASSURED THEY WILL BE TREATED WITH THE CONSIDERATION THEY DESERVE.
As soon as Goetz sent the message, Berlin revoked the order. But it was too late—Buckmaster had read the cable. He was blasé, telling SOE signals chief Leo Marks, “They’re trying to shake our confidence.” He replied to Kieffer in equally jocular fashion:
SORRY TO SEE YOUR PATIENCE IS EXHAUSTED AND YOUR NERVES NOT SO GOOD AS OURS. . . . GIVE US GROUND NEAR BERLIN FOR RECEPTION ORGANISER AND WT OPERATOR BUT BE SURE YOU DO NOT CLASH WITH OUR RUSSIAN FRIENDS.
Berlin’s next curious act was to dispatch military uniforms to avenue Foch’s SD staff, who until then had worn civilian clothes. Ernest Vogt “felt I was putting on fancy dress.” Kieffer assembled his newly uniformed cohort for an outdoor photograph on the steps of 84 avenue Foch. As they posed, someone behind Vogt whispered, “Is this to make sure the British will know us, to hang us?”
John Starr noticed Kieffer becoming depressed as the Allies secured beachheads in Normandy. On June 20, however, Kieffer’s mood improved. Kieffer boasted to John and Maurice Southgate that Germany was unleashing its secret weapon, the V-1 rocket: “We can bomb your cities without sending airplanes, and one bomb is enough to wipe out a whole town.” Corporal Alfred von Kapri added, “We’ve razed London. There’s nothing left but rubble.” John said that was impossible, but the German insisted, “London has been burned down. The Führer says so.” Southgate became indignant.
I got so fed up with their talk that I asked them the number of their secret weapon used against the Russian front. . . . I imagine that this reply rather upset them, so they got rid of me on the spot by sending me to Fresnes. I was put in a cell without permission to read, write, smoke or receive parcels until August of the same year, when I was sent to BUCHENWALD with 36 other agents.
Later, however, while listening to BBC reports mocking Germany’s V-1 rockets over London as “doodlebugs,” John realized that the secret weapon was more nuisance than game changer. It had not destroyed London and was not impeding Allied advances in France. He drew a flimsy, pilotless aircraft that looked like an insect and showed the squiggle to a disconsolate Kieffer. If that was the best Germany could do, its war was lost.
* * *
• • •
The same day Kieffer dispatched Maurice Southgate to Fresnes, the colonel’s Hollywood Brigade in southwest France escalated its assault on the increasingly demoralized Germans. Camilo’s Spaniards ambushed a German column near the village of Francescas, killed several German soldiers, and, in line with George’s tactics, withdrew. The Spaniards lost five men and carried their corpses to Castelnau. As they prepared to bury them, another German reconnaissance plane overflew the village.
On June 20, Maurice Parisot’s intelligence agents came to Panjas to inform him that the Germans were preparing to attack his friend Colonel Hilaire in Castelnau. With no radio to alert George, he ordered two companies to hasten to the fortress village. But Castelnau lay thirty-five miles away over rough country teeming with Germans and miliciens. During the night, a priest from the village of Saint-Martin-de-Goyne came to Castelnau and warned George that German troops were moving in his direction. George put the garrison
of 150 French and 150 Spanish fighters on alert.
The sun rose over Castelnau at 5:45 on June 21. Anne-Marie Walters was slicing bread for breakfast in the Larribeaus’ kitchen when Alberta Larribeau hurried in to say she had heard gunfire on the road from La Romieu. She asked Walters “if the Patron ought to be awoken, this is the first time he has slept for so many days.” Walters went outside, where some of the inhabitants thought the noise came from maquisards practicing their marksmanship. Next, she recalled, “The Patron rushed out, zipping his cycling jacket, and vanished into the PC [poste de commande].” Leslie Brown, his shirt open on the sweltering morning, asked her, “What’s all the fuss about?” Before she could answer, a maquisard told Brown to fetch the Bren gun under le patron’s bed. George then issued “orders that the German prisoners were to be taken to the village school and placed in a back room where the walls were extremely thick for their safety.”
Camilo told Walters that his Spaniards were delaying the Germans along the road from La Romieu. He ordered her to assemble the village women for evacuation along the only route the Germans had not blocked, toward Condom. Castelnau’s defenders took up their positions. It was nine in the morning.
“And this then,” wrote Escholier, “would be the first great battle of Armagnac.”
Sentries crouching in their outposts watched as more than 1,500 SS troops with artillery, mortars, and machine guns approached the hamlet from two directions. An eyewitness reported:
Some [units] of the Das Reich Division numbering several hundred came from Agen. 1,500 Germans from Auch began an all-out attack on Castelnau. Commandant PROST, Lieutenant [André] HERLEIN [Herlin], [and] PONCELET had arranged a series of little posts that stopped the Boches for a moment some three kilometers from Castelnau.
The Germans pushed through the outer defenses and, instead of encircling the village, “attacked only from two sides, from the east and from the south.” German artillery shelled a post on the village outskirts and made a direct hit on George’s headquarters in Larribeau’s house. The accurate fire indicated that the Germans had local informers. One was the peasant whom gendarmerie Captain Fernand Pagès had chastised the previous September for accusing Jeanne Robert, Maurice Rouneau, and George of being spies. The turncoat, according to Rouneau, “took his revenge by informing the gendarmerie and the Milice who the patriots were. During a fight between the maquis and the SS, in which he did not fight, a German shot him in the head.”
George asked Walters, “Evacuation going all right?” The village women were leaving in good order, but she insisted that she, Cormeau, and the Spanish women would stay to fight alongside the men. George did not object.
“At 9:30 A.M.,” wrote antitank commander Captain Henry Solal in his hourly log of the conflict, “the encirclement seemed complete, except for the road to Condom which would permit an eventual retreat.” George issued orders “to resist and to defend the village house by house.” Solal rushed to plant grenades in every building “to assure the resupply of ammunition.”
Five SS companies stormed the village. Abbé Boë, Anne-Marie Walters, and radio operator Lieutenant Dennis Parsons fired on them from windows and rooftops. Leslie Brown, assisted by Mayor Larribeau’s eighteen-year-old son, positioned his Bren gun to protect the village water well. Firing the twenty-three-pound automatic weapon with single shots, he pinned down a whole German platoon. “What a sharpshooter and so calm!” wrote Escholier. “He fought the Boche methodically shot by shot.”
Solal’s diary picked up the story: “At 10:30, the situation was very critical.” Castelnau’s Forces Mobiles blew up a truckload of German troops and killed another twenty German infantry. German casualties were mounting, but reinforcements arrived in an attempt “to encircle Castelnau completely.”
Escholier, in characteristic Gascon fashion, wrote the most colorful account of the Battle of Castelnau:
The unrelenting sun roasted the defenders, yet they fired on the green silhouettes advancing quickly in assault formation. A Gascon summer day, humming with insects, full of the cicadas’ song. Pastoral harmony, bucolic, serene, brutally shattered by gunfire and explosions. . . . For the rest, the wheat of France finished the assailants. The Boches fell there like flies under the bullets of the maquisards, like green flies, those that gorge on garbage and are the most vicious.
He praised George, Dr. Deyris, Prost, Parsons, and Poncelet, as well as Anne Marie-Walters and the Spanish women, who “fought bravely with their rifles.” Most impressive, he felt, was Yvonne Cormeau, who, “with admirable calm, assured under a hail of bullets the evacuation of her radio sets.”
A messenger from Panjas stole through the German lines to tell George that Maurice Parisot’s relief force would arrive within the hour. An hour, though, would be too late. The guerrillas could not hold for another fifteen minutes. George ordered a retreat. A sentry brought word that the imprisoned German sergeant wanted to speak to him. George ran to the Germans’ cell, dodging “heaving shell and mortar fire.” He said later,
I went and the Feldwebel sprang to attention and said to me that they all felt they would soon be released by their own people and he requested that I should allow him and his men to come up in turn and salute me. They then did so. He also said that if he had the good fortune to be rescued he would not fail to tell the officers of the attacking party how well they had been treated. . . . At the last minute when we were leaving the village I was able to stop two French hotheads from throwing grenades into the church where the [Milice] prisoners were.
“They freed their prisoners, who were terrified, and the miliciens,” wrote Escholier. “Despite the pressing exhortations of certain maquisards, Colonel Hilaire and Poncelet observed the laws of war.”
George abandoned all his personal possessions to lead one of the convoys out of Castelnau. A rear guard stayed to blow 400 pounds of high explosives and weapons that the maquisards could not carry. Nothing would be left for the Germans to use against them, as Solal reported: “At noon the Germans infiltrated the village. We thought about all the ammunition they would find in the houses, and after deliberating we decided to blow up the village.”
Camilo and his Spaniards stayed to guarantee the withdrawal of their comrades in arms. The Germans burst into the hamlet, where they fought hand to hand with the rear guard. In their fury, they demolished Jeanne Robert’s school, the Larribeaus’ house, the church, and the rest of the village. Solal wrote that “the Germans used their artillery to erase completely all that was saved after the explosion of the munitions.” With sadness, he added, “Castelnau is destroyed; a large part of the livestock perished during the combat; the farms are devastated. . . . The small population of the commune (around 300 souls) has been left and no protest has been raised.”
“No matter!” wrote Escholier. “The Gallo-Roman settlement played its great role of defense. It broke the advance of the barbarians. Castelnau of the Wolves fell on the field of honor.”
The battle had lasted six hours. Casualty figures, difficult to assess in the confusion of combat, varied. One Resistance report stated, “On that day, the Germans suffered 380 losses, of whom 247 were killed; while the Maquis lost 160 men, of which 19 were killed.” Raymond Escholier wrote that George’s losses were “very light,” 17 killed and 29 wounded to the Germans’ 239 killed and 350 wounded. One of the wounded on the French side was radio operator Lieutenant Parsons. “The number of German losses may seem excessive,” Solal wrote, “but it is correct, and the Germans acknowledged it in their verbal testimony.”
The Germans fired on the Hollywood Brigade as it retreated north, wounding Commandant Prost in both legs. Captain Solal carried him to the Château de Jansac, where they camped overnight. At sunrise, they left and, after passing by Condom, went another six miles west to the small hamlet of Larroque-sur-l’Osse.
Most of the Castelnau maquis regrouped in Condom before moving on to Parisot’s headquarters in Panj
as to treat their wounded and count those who died on the retreat: seven Spaniards and four French. For the eleven dead maquisards killed on the retreat, George’s officers estimated that they had killed only five Germans.
The Spanish fighters paused long enough at La Romieu to destroy eight German trucks with hand grenades. When some of the force reached the village of Cazaubon, a physician named André Pitou treated the wounded from Castelnau in the local mayor’s house. Although Dr. Pitou belonged to the Milice, he tended to Resistance patients without demur. This did not prevent the maquisards from arresting him afterward.
Many of George’s combatants criticized him for sparing his prisoners. However, his fair treatment may have had a positive result. “After the battle of Castelnau,” George said, “it was generally rumoured that a few of our wounded left behind had been spared by the Germans because the Feldwebel had intervened on their behalf pointing out the treatment he and the other German prisoners had received.”
While the fighting was still under way in Castelnau that June 21, Philippe de Gunzbourg was fighting for his life eighty miles to the north. The Germans launched a surprise attack on his two thousand maquisards in the ancient Gascon town of Bergerac. The partisans lost the battle and retreated in disarray. While not as destructive as the Castelnau encounter, the engagement at Bergerac caused more French casualties—in Gunzbourg’s accounting, “fifty partisans killed or finished off and more than 150 civilians, men, women and children.” He added:
That day had huge repercussions on the morale of the whole region, which was especially trying when I had no arms and ammunition to distribute. A state of panic and veritable mutiny stayed for a number of days, augmented by German [propaganda] tracts that were particularly well written.
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 21