All the King's Men (5 page)

The creation of the Z Organization was by any standard a remarkable feat, though apart from having provided a springboard for Dansey’s own ambitions it achieved very little else – except in one particular respect. It was an exceptionally well-kept secret. Its inner workings mirrored ‘Z–1’ himself, utterly mysterious and impenetrable. Nevertheless, by the end of 1939 he was arguably the most powerful individual in the British intelligence community. It remained to be seen how he would wield that power.

III
The Fall

During August 1939, as the last few weeks of peace slipped away, there was in France an unsettling mood of ambiguity. Had there been an obvious threat to the nation, her citizens would have risen up as one. Instead she was taking up arms because of her commitments to other countries. There seemed nothing clear about any of the issues, and to the average Frenchman it made no sense at all. ‘Was not the plight of Poland no different than Czechoslovakia – and what had we done for Czechoslovakia?’
¹

Throughout France scenes of farewell were played out in homes, at hotels and at railway stations. Twenty-five years before, open displays of emotion had been considered unmanly or a disgrace to the family, but in August 1939 men and women embraced and wept openly at the prospect of separation. The only comfort was that at least it would be for only a few months. Twenty-five years earlier, when the French soldier last marched through the streets to war, his brass buttons glinted in the sunlight, there was a red slash down his trousers from his belt to his puttees and the sight of that sea of uniform blue invariably evoked a great cheer from pavements choked with waving tricolours. Now the army was a sea of muddy khaki, the colour that blended so well with the harvest. The buttons were green; the scarlet slash, such an excellent target for the enemy, was gone; and the pavements were now empty but for the odd group of veterans who had stirred themselves for the occasion.

Many civilians questioned the usefulness and even the
legality of the mobilization, while many commanders complained of a lack of patriotic ardour amongst the junior officers. In fact, throughout the military hierarchy there were doubts about morale.

On the day that Germany invaded Poland, Nicholas Bodington watched a parade of the uncommitted and complaining new army, from his window at the Hotel Philadelphia. His only preoccupation, and that of most journalists, was what exactly was France going to
do
about Poland? The French established a ‘general formation of strength’ around the Alsace-Lorraine border, and Bodington received permission to travel up to where they appeared to be making their first move.
²
On 9 September he reported the movement of a number of French Army groups into the Saar district of Germany, effectively straightening a number of sinuous kinks in the frontier and taking some thirty-six German villages in the process. The Germans retaliated by firing a few exploratory artillery rounds and then retreating to pre-determined positions, behind concrete defences. The whole performance was conducted exactly as French military planners had hypothesized months before and was intended as simply a warning manoeuvre. As this charade was taking place, in Poland thirty-five Polish divisions were being chased across the open countryside by an apparently omnipotent military juggernaut.

Despite the news from Poland, the French seemed pleased with the disciplined, though limited, manoeuvre in the Saar. Press reports were full of how the French Air Force had dealt with twelve Messerschmitts in one day. But the public were indifferent. The average peasant, now barracked and clothed in khaki, was thinking of his fields and who would deal with the ploughing and the planting. What would become of his family if the work was neglected?

When Bodington returned to Paris he learnt that Déricourt too had been swept away in the preparations for
war. They were not to see each other again for another three years. Paris now seemed populated with an ever-expanding Press Corps straining to get news from the east. But the atmosphere of war, or the promise of war, made him feel out of place just reporting it. He felt a particular sense of wasted potential, especially after a humiliating incident that had occurred in April. Using his father’s contacts at the British Embassy, Bodington had managed to get an interview with one of the officers at the MI6 station and made a formal application to join the secret service. The secret agent
manqué
wanted to make an honest man of himself. Bodington’s application was sent to London, but to his utter amazement London was not interested.
³
His big mistake was in having told Déricourt about his intentions so that after his rejection he had to laugh the whole thing off: ‘Who knows what London wants these days.’

Soon after his return to Paris, he had been informed by his editors that he could either stay in Paris as long as he wished or be transferred to the UK. London at least offered the opportunity of some kind of involvement in the war, whereas Paris promised intrigue. He was in two minds about what to do.

As the last few embers of resistance were being stamped out in Poland, Karl Boemelburg received a message at his office in Prague. The message, from SS Sturmbannfuhrer Horst Kopkow at Reich Central Security in Berlin, invited Boemelburg to consider a position in Warsaw within the next few months. Boemelburg had been in Czechoslovakia since the end of 1938, where he was Head of the Political Department and had been operating a campaign against communist partisans and foreign intelligence networks, most notably MI6’s. He was of an age and reputation, if not rank, where he could almost decide his own posting. He declined Kopkow’s offer, having decided to stay in Prague until something a little more conducive came along.
⁴

*

Meanwhile, in France, the British Expeditionary Force was renewing old acquaintances. For months they marched back and forth, presented each other with medals and kissed each other fraternally on the cheek. Déricourt’s role during what the French came to call the ‘
Drole de Guerre
’ was equally uninspiring. He had been dismissed from the Air Corps reserve in January 1937 for another of his unaccountable absences, and so on 3 September he was disappointed, but hardly surprised, to be ordered to report to the
Séction Aérienne de Transport
(SAT) at the military airfield at Étampes. There would be no combat flying for him.
⁵

But before his war officially started, he too received a signal. On the following day, his birthday, he was about to get into his little car and drive out to the airfield, when the vehicle was destroyed by a heavy truck that collided with it. He was not hurt. That evening, while he was in a restaurant, a fight broke out between some people at the next table, one of whom pulled out a gun and fired a shot. The bullet passed clean through Déricourt’s hair, and again he was not harmed. He noted these events in a diary, perhaps some time afterwards, describing them as a premonition that the war would spare him.
⁶

Promoted to the rank of sergeant, Déricourt was thrown into a squadron with the Air France pilot Rémy Clément – now a captain, and given the task of flying any of a dozen different craft that had been commandeered to transport men and equipment up to the line. They were a support unit for a fighter group, accompanying it to the border each day where they would take up battle stations, and then flying back again at dusk to Étampes.
⁷
Déricourt tired of this job very quickly and managed to get transferred to a position as a test pilot with the Lloret Olivier company in Marseilles. The French aircraft industry had been nationalized in the 1930s and then broken up into geographical divisions. In Marseilles, Déricourt was employed by the
Société Nationale de Construction Aeronautiques de Sud Est
– or SNCASE, of which the old Lloret Olivier company was now an anonymous member. They were about to commence a long series of trials of their new Leo 451, a high-performance bomber, and a strange new craft called an Autogyro.

In April 1940 Déricourt began familiarization sessions on the new Leo, at about the same time as reports were being received in Paris that the Germans were planning an attack across the river Meuse, sometime between 8 and 10 May. A column of armour, sixty miles long, was snaking its way towards the Meuse, but despite all the visual proof, the French High Command refused to believe the Germans would attack at that spot.

In London, MI6 had more than sufficient intelligence of what was to come, some of it passed on through secret links with the Vatican. The Deuxième Bureau was equally well informed, but despite peppering the French High Command with reports during the first week of May, tens of thousands of men were either sent on leave or were already absent.

On 10 May, Déricourt took the gleaming new Leo up for the first time. The testing schedule was a modest one: climb to 10,000 feet, which he did in less than ten seconds, and then cruise out over the Mediterranean at a blistering 300 miles an hour.
⁸
The Leo 451 was one of the stars of the French aircraft industry. It had a range of over 1600 miles and could carry up to 2400 lb of bombs. The flight lasted eighty minutes and was a great success for both aircraft and pilot. Back in the wardroom, watching the sunset glistening on the wings of the Leo in the distance, Déricourt listened to the radio from Paris announce that massive German armoured divisions had attacked Holland and Belgium that morning. It seemed to Henri as though the war was on the other side of the world.

Every day for the rest of that week, Déricourt took the Leo up to put her through her paces, and every day the German forces punched their way deeper into the south
and west. On 11 May the Germans crossed the Albert Canal, overwhelming the Belgians. On the 13th Rotterdam surrendered and on the following day, when Holland capitulated, the Germans crossed the Meuse. Déricourt took the Leo up for two separate tests that day and by the time he brought her down for the second time
⁹
the Germans had forced a breach in the French line fifty miles wide and were pouring Panzer divisions across the country. On the 15th Déricourt took the aircraft up for an unprecedented two and a half hours,
¹⁰
during which time the French Prime Minister telephoned the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, ‘We are beaten. We have lost the battle.’

Cruising well above 12,000 feet in the late spring sunshine, in the specially sound-proofed cockpit, Déricourt was insulated from the carnage below. Life continued as though he were travelling on a different stream. On the 19th, the day he took the Leo up three times to solve a transmission problem, he met an attractive married woman in the foyer of his hotel.
¹¹
Mme Jeanne Gamerre was in fact the telephonist at the Hotel Noailles and was just leaving for the day as Déricourt was coming in. Henri’s reputation had gone before him and at first Mme Gamerre was not interested. ‘Most men would take a guitar and serenade a woman from beneath her window,’ Rémy Clément once said; ‘Henri used to take the guitar up into her bedroom.’
¹²
But within three weeks she had moved into Henri’s room.

As May became June, nothing seemed to stem the rush of the catastrophe in the north. The remnants of the British Expeditionary Force plus a few thousand French were evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk and France felt the first pangs of abandonment. Mute and stunned, citizens stood in the streets and watched the columns of Germans march deeper into their country. On the day the enemy paraded down the Champs-Élysées, many of the staff at
SNCASE got drunk and cursed their soldiers, their commanders and their government. The latter was at that time scattered in various châteaux in the Tours area and trying to regroup at Bordeaux. Having done so, they swiftly brought the first part of France’s war to an end.

On 22 June Déricourt climbed into a brand new Leo 451, just off the production line.
¹³
Its bright silver fuselage trembled as he started each of the Hispano-Suiza engines and slowly began the process of running them in. Gradually building up compression, keeping an eye on the oil pressure and temperature, he opened the throttle. He could feel the strain on the aircraft frame increase and double checked that the brake pressure was high enough – he didn’t want the aircraft rolling down the runway. A bit more throttle and then he let it idle until he received the signal from the ground crew that they were satisfied with the sound of the engines. Once he got the thumbs-up, he switched off the engines and waited for all the noise and trembling to stop.

That evening they learnt that an armistice had been signed with the Germans, in the same railway carriage at Compiègne that had been the scene of Germany’s humiliation at the end of the last war. Compiègne was not far from Déricourt’s home, but it would be months before he knew his parents were safe.

All activity at SNCASE came to a temporary halt. The staff were stood down, but not dismissed. That evening Henri waited for Mme Gamerre to come off duty and they walked down oddly silent streets to their favourite restaurant. It was closed in mourning, so they went back to their room. Jeanne Gamerre was separated from her husband, who was one of the humiliated ranks of khaki choking the roads of France. She had not seen him in over a year, and as far as she was concerned he was lost. Now there was Henri, a few years younger than herself and very glamorous with it.

Jeanne’s small frame and childlike features contained an
infectious spirit that could at once be overwhelmed with joy or the darkest despression. She was a simple individual who knew nothing about why the war had been fought and understood even less about why her country had been thrown into this situation. All that really mattered at that moment was that Henri was a pilot, incredibly brave and knowing by her standards, who preferred to call her Jeannot and who seemed to care for her. In the coming months, when there would be little news of any comfort, they were insulated. Even when the management of the hotel, scandalized by their flagrant cohabitation, asked them both to leave, it was of no consequence at all.
¹⁴