Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (8 page)

His second spell in the war began in Tangier after the Allied invasion of North Africa. With the rank of captain, he commanded a band of Tunisian nomads who could, as neutrals, move freely through the desert collecting intelligence on German dispositions. Accompanying them on a mission, he was wounded a second time during an encounter with a German patrol. No less a person than Major Gen. William J. Donovan, director of OSS, wrote of this exploit:

While on reconnaissance on the Tunisian front, Captain Peter Ortiz U.S.M.C.R. was severely wounded in the right hand while engaged in a personal encounter with a German patrol. He dispersed the patrol with grenades. Captain Ortiz is making good recovery in hospital at Algiers. The P[urple] H[eart] was awarded to him.
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After a spell of convalescent leave, in July 1943 Ortiz was posted to London and parachuted by OSS into France with Thackthwaite’s party on 6 January 1944. Once on the ground, Ortiz donned his USMC uniform and became the first Allied officer to be seen openly wearing a uniform in south-east France since 1940.
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Thackthwaite once said, ‘Ortiz knew no fear.’ The allegation was denied by the man himself, who insisted that he carried out this display of bravado to raise the locals’ morale. It also enabled informers to track the mission’s movements and relay them to the Germans and Milice.

The Union mission spent four months visiting Maquis groups, conferring with Resistance leaders and prospecting suitable sites for airdrops, not only of arms and ammunition but also blankets, clothes and food. Like other Allied missions, they swiftly picked up the friction between the Resistance networks of different political persuasions, and passed warnings of this to London. On completion of the mission in late May 1944, Thackthwaite and Ortiz returned safely to Britain, but Fourcaud was arrested and held for two months by the Gestapo before being released.

Ortiz’s citation for his award of the OBE included the words:

For four months this officer assisted in the organisation of the Maquis in a most difficult département where members were in constant danger of attack … He ran great risks in looking after four RAF officers who had been brought down in the neighbourhood, and accompanied them to the Spanish border. In the course of his efforts to obtain the release of these officers, he raided a German military garage and took ten Gestapo motors which he used frequently. He also procured a Gestapo pass for his own use in spite of the fact that he was well known to the enemy.
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Back in Britain, Ortiz was decorated with the first of two Navy Crosses he was to earn. The citation read in part:

For extraordinary heroism … in connection with military operations … in enemy-occupied territory. Operating in civilian clothes and aware that he would be subject to execution in the event of his capture, Major Ortiz parachuted from an airplane with two other officers of an Inter-Allied mission to reorganise existing Maquis groups and organise additional groups in the region of Rhone [sic]. Although his identity had become known to the Gestapo with the resultant increase in personal hazard, he voluntarily conducted to the Spanish border four Royal Air Force officers who had been shot down in his region, and later returned to resume his duties. Repeatedly leading successful raids during the period of this assignment, Major Ortiz inflicted heavy casualties on enemy forces greatly superior in number (and) upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
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In the confusion of missions on the ground, with some officers taking orders from SOE, some from OSS and some from the Gaullist BCRA, Section F’s most important agent in south-east France was Francis Cammaerts, son of a Belgian father and a British mother. His height of 6ft 4in earned him the local nickname ‘Big Feet’ and made him embarrassingly tall when trying to lose himself in a crowd of much shorter southern French people. Uniquely among those who had the sheer unrelenting courage to volunteer as an agent in occupied France, he had started the war by registering as a conscientious objector. He later explained this:

My generation grew up in the shadow of the horror of the trenches, millions of men killed pointlessly trying to gain two or three hundred yards of ground. Like many of my peers, I thought, this must not happen again. There was only one thing we could do: not take part. If everyone did that, we reasoned, there would be no one to go to war.

There were many people in Britain equally innocent in 1939. Working as a teacher in London at the time of Dunkirk, Cammaerts saw his pupils taking drinks and food to wounded soldiers whose trains were halted in sidings near the school. Realising that the parents must disapprove of their children being taught by a man who refused to fight, he then took work as a farm labourer, as approved by the Conscientious Objection Tribunals. After getting married, he came gradually to understand that his moral stance was dubious when his country was involved in a total war. The final straw came when, three weeks after the wedding, his brother was killed flying with the RAF, after which Cammaerts called an old classmate from Rugby school who was known to be ‘something to do with intelligence’ and asked what he could do to help the war effort, stressing at the time and afterwards that he would refuse to obey orders to kill anyone.

Speaking French as fluently as English, he was rapidly put in uniform and posted to Scotland for commando training. On the moonlit night of 22 March 1943 he was one of two passengers in an RAF Lysander, camouflaged green and grey to make it difficult to spot from above against a background of low cloud, and with a long-range tank slung like a huge bomb below the fuselage. Trying not to think about the dangers that awaited him on the ground, Cammaerts found it an unreal experience, keeping a keen eye out for any attack from astern in the pilot’s blind spot:

As we flew I could see night fighters – friend or foe I could not tell – swishing past so fast whereas the Lysander moved so slowly. This strangely was an advantage – fighters move fast but take miles to turn around and by then we’d gone elsewhere.
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But not always. The pilot of the Lysander recalled that they were pursued by a night fighter and shot at with tracer bullets. Taking evading action, he executed a series of very violent steep turns, at the end of which he had lost his bearings, but later found them again, landing to deposit his two passengers in a field near the major German concentration camp at Compiègne. The drill after the aircraft had turned, ready for take-off, was for one passenger to remain aboard to heave the baggage out of the cramped rear compartment of the little aircraft and load that of the passengers for the return trip.

The initial intention of Section F was for Cammaerts to replace the flamboyant Peter Churchill, head of the network code-named CARTE in southern France, which had got badly out of control. Churchill’s only briefing as they brushed past each other beside the Lysander was, ‘Be careful to take some newspaper in with you when you go to the toilet. They’re very short of toilet rolls.’

Driven through the night to Paris and along the grim darkened streets of the capital under curfew, Cammaerts was horrified by the over-confidence of his guides and the general poor security in the DONKEYMAN network. Cutting all contact with it, he travelled south to Provence, where Peter Churchill had been living openly in a luxury hotel with his lover, fellow agent Odette Sansom, in flagrant defiance of their training, in which it was stressed that an agent should have no permanent ‘home’ or even regular movements, by which French or German counter-intelligence could home in on him or her.

To Cammaerts’ mind, Peter Churchill’s permanent headquarters for the CARTE network was a fatal error, as indeed it proved to be. Each day, numerous members of the network came and went quite openly, without precautions. Worst of all, he learned from Sansom that Churchill and she were in negotiations with an Abwehr officer who called himself ‘Colonel Henri’ – real name Sergeant Hugo Bleicher. Both she and her lover seemed to think they could arrange for Bleicher to be flown to London, where he would shortly end the war by serving as a direct link between OKW and the British Cabinet. Cammaerts was horrified to hear this. He had already been distressed at the lax security of some of Section F’s officers in London:

… who allowed their agents, who were supposed to be kept apart, to bump into each other and learn each other’s real names, while files were left on desks as the officer dealing with the agent left the room for whatever reason.
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Such sloppiness was dangerous even in the relative safety of London, but the lack of security procedures of the CARTE network on the ground in France was far more reprehensible – as was proven after Peter Churchill’s return, when Bleicher pounced and arrested him, Odette and many of their agents.

Deciding to have nothing to do with any of the existing networks, Cammaerts relocated to the Rhône valley, passing himself off as a refugee schoolteacher from the north, where people were generally taller than the locals. His reason for coming south was given, to those who needed to know, as to convalesce from an attack of jaundice. Like all the best cover stories, this was as close to the truth as could be, since he had suffered from jaundice shortly before Christmas. Using whatever identities seemed most plausible to justify his constant travelling throughout Resistance zones R1 and R2, usually on a motorbike, he set up his own sabotage and espionage network.

London gave it the code name JOCKEY. It stretched 300 miles from St Etienne in central France to Marseille and Nice in the south. With not a single member recruited before Cammaerts had kept him or her under surveillance for several days, JOCKEY was organised in watertight cells of less than fifteen people, so that any one member could betray under torture only the others in his or her cell. When 40-year-old Irish yachtswoman Cecily Lefort, who had been acting as his courier, was arrested in Montélimar and tortured by the Gestapo, this damage control system ensured that she could give away no one except Cammaerts, for whom the Gestapo was already searching all over France.

Starting from scratch, after six months’ hard work by Cammaerts, JOCKEY comprised fifty cells, which he visited at irregular intervals, never telling anyone where he was going or when they would see him again. He refused to stay in hotels because they were under routine surveillance and made a point of never spending more than a couple of consecutive nights in any of the safe houses recommended and checked out in advance by a trusted member of his network. These hideaways ranged from mountain refuges to farms, middle-class town houses and luxurious châteaux. After the war, one of his typically modest understatements was:

Individual agents were dependent for every meal and every night’s rest on people whose small children, aged parents, property and livelihood were continually put at risk by our presence. Their contributions involved a much greater sacrifice than ours.
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Their houses could be burned down or blown up, fields of crops set afire and whole families subjected to torture and transported to concentration or death camps, never to return – and the helpers were well aware of this.

For security, Cammaerts never made a phone call or wrote a letter all the time he was in occupied France. Learning of the birth of his second daughter from a BBC message, ‘
Joséphine ressemble à son grand-père
’ – Josephine looks like her grandfather – Cammaerts gave way for once to the loneliness of his clandestine existence with no home and no one to confide in or share the news with. ‘For the first and only time in my life,’ he said, ‘I sat down on my own and got drunk.’

How close he came to disaster time after time is illustrated by the night when the car in which he was travelling was stopped at a roadblock near Senas manned by Waffen-SS troops. Getting out of the car, he realised that it was heavily overloaded and visibly weighted down on the rear suspension by all the weapons and ammunition hidden in the boot. His travelling companion was a German-speaker, who overheard that the roadblock was part of a hunt for the crew of an American bomber shot down nearby. When one of the SS men started sticking his bayonet through the rear seat cushions, he made a joke: ‘You surely don’t think we’ve sewn the crew of a bomber into the seats, do you?’ He laughed, the SS men laughed and sent them on their way, the boot unsearched. ‘It was,’ said Cammaerts, ‘my closest piece of luck.’
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That sounds very swashbuckling, but Cammaerts usually avoided obvious risks. He was also very sanguine about the tensions between his own people working for SOE, other networks owing allegiance to BCRA and those with their own agenda, like the communists, who acknowledged neither. The stress of the clandestine life was such that agents were flown back to Britain at intervals for debriefing but also for a short period of home leave. In November 1943 it was Cammaerts’ turn after nine months in the field. As he remembered:

Virtually every day was a working day, catching the tube from South Harrow to the blacked-out offices in Baker Street. There were frequent debriefings. I talked to a few future agents about rationing, identity permits. I went on a course for S-phone use,
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which proved useless. I was invited to meet about a hundred aircrew who were going to be used on special operations. They needed to hear someone who had been there to tell them what it means to be down on the ground as opposed to being in the aircraft.