Das Reich (12 page)

One of the most remarkable of these
résistants
was Poirier’s professional neighbour in the Dordogne, known throughout the countryside as ‘Edgar’, but in reality Baron Philippe de Gunzbourg. The de Gunzbourgs were a Russian Jewish family, bankers and landowners who acquired a Hessian title and moved to Paris in the early years of the century. Philippe’s grandfather achieved an enormous coup by taking a founding interest along with the Rothschilds in the Dutch Shell company. His father consolidated the fortune by marrying an immensely rich bourgeois wife. Philippe himself, born in 1904, grew up rich, spoilt and essentially rootless, torn between his French and Jewish loyalties. There was a procession of family tragedies: his brother died, a sister was killed in a riding accident in England. Philippe was destined for Eton, but after a family change of heart went to a Paris
lycée
, and later spent a few terms at Oxford. In his early twenties he married a
demi-mondaine
twenty years older than himself, an absurd alliance which was quickly terminated. He explored all the traditional extravagances of rich, reckless young men, flying aircraft and racing cars between bursts of high living. He married a second time, more happily, a French Jewish girl with whom he went on a prolonged round-the-world honeymoon and had four children. Then he began to lead a more settled existence, with a Paris house and a large ugly mansion which he bought in the Lot-et-Garonne because he felt a growing sympathy for the countryside and its peasants.

But as he approached forty, he felt no closer to achieving an identity. The most consistent strand in his life was his feeling for England. He had been reared by an English nanny, taken constantly to England on visits, bought all his clothes in London, and
had been taught by his father ‘to believe that England, and the British Empire, were the greatest institutions in the world’. He was living in the Lot-et-Garonne – in the Unoccupied Zone – when the Germans swept across France, and the rest of his family prudently fled to America. One of their English nannies remained defiantly at their Paris house throughout the war on the grounds that she had to protect the family’s possessions, and twice defied arrest and interrogation by the
milice.
In the south, the de Gunzbourgs listened reverently to the BBC each night, and shared the house with ‘the living embodiment of the British Empire’, their own nanny Alice Joyce who regarded all Germans with withering scorn, and throughout the war declined to speak any tongue but her own.

As the months passed, de Gunzbourg reflected more and more deeply about his own position. He became convinced that he must play some active role in the struggle against the Germans and Vichy. He contacted like-minded friends in Toulouse, and one day in September 1942 one of them telephoned and asked him to come down: ‘There’s somebody here that I think you should meet.’ In the back room of a scruffy little bar in Toulouse, he was introduced to an intensely English young man lolling back in his chair who asked him simply: ‘Why do you want to help?’

‘Because for me, England is the only country in the world,’ said de Gunzbourg, ‘above all the only one fighting the Germans.’ He talked of his own horror of the French elite – the politicians, the magistrates, the generals. Two weeks later, he heard that he had been successfully ‘checked out’ by the Englishman, one of SOE’s early agents in the region, Maurice Pertschuk, ‘Eugène’. De Gunzbourg entered the secret war, carrying messages and seeking out recruits. Eugène began to visit de Gunzbourg’s home. He loved to eat Yorkshire pudding made by Nanny, and beyond this it became rapidly apparent that the young Englishman was obsessed with de Gunzbourg’s beautiful wife, Antoinette. The Frenchman was less disturbed by this than by the agent’s reckless lack of security. They began to hear stories of the leaders of the
réseau
sharing noisy tables at the best black market restaurants in Toulouse, of Pertschuk’s wireless operator living with his girlfriend in a château outside the city. It was an operational style which could lead to only one conclusion: Pertschuk, his wireless operator and several of their key colleagues were betrayed, captured, and killed in a German concentration camp.

De Gunzbourg survived, but he was now a fugitive. He dispatched his wife and children to safety in Switzerland, and began a life that was to continue until the Liberation as a gypsy without a home, without possessions, whose only life was that of Resistance. This playboy who before the war had driven only the fastest cars that money could buy began to travel south-west France by bicycle, covering 15,000 miles before the war was over. In the first months of 1943, he could achieve little amidst the wreckage of Pertschuk’s circuit. But one evening in May, in the house of a little railway worker in Agen, he met French Section’s new agent in Gascony. This was a man of utterly different stamp from Pertschuk, the extraordinary George Starr, ‘Hilaire’, who by the Liberation controlled a vast sweep of Gascony. A chunky former mining engineer from north Staffordshire whose false teeth gave him a permanent twisted grin, Starr inspired immediate confidence despite his atrocious French accent.

De Gunzbourg became his principal organizer in the Dordogne, while the Englishman concentrated his efforts on the Gers and the Landes. He learnt to assemble
plastique
charges, and arranged the first of many major sabotage operations against locomotives at Eymet, Bergerac and other key rail centres on New Year’s Eve 1943. He taught dozens of eager little groups of
résistants
the techniques of receiving
parachutages
, lighting bonfires to a prearranged pattern on a receipt of a
message personnel
from the BBC (and by now each night scores of unarmed
résistants
the length of France lit bonfires whenever they heard an aircraft, in the hope of intercepting a silken bounty). Maurice Loupias, ‘Bergeret’, a local official in Bergerac who became one of the key AS leaders of the region, has vividly described ‘a farmhouse with
twenty silent peasants listening in religious silence to Philibert explaining
parachutage
drill, puffing their pipes by the fireplace as he described the method of folding the canopies’. Bergeret called de Gunzbourg ‘the principal artisan of our victory’.

De Gunzbourg also believed from what Starr had told him that they could expect parachute landings by Allied troops within days of the main invasion. Whether or not his understanding was correct, in his own mind the importance of seizing and holding a perimeter on D-Day became as dominant as among the
maquisards
of the Vercors. Like most Allied agents, de Gunzbourg found his recruits willing enough to listen to any man who could influence the coming of arms and money. Some were irked by his open devotion to the English – after the invasion, there were some sour jokes about his appearance in British boots. There were still many Frenchmen who wished to keep the British at arm’s length. Despite his codename, de Gunzbourg was obviously an aristocrat and a Jew, and there were many
résistants
who loathed both. Some also felt that he was too assertive in giving orders. But it is a remarkable tribute to his dedication and personality that he was able to coordinate Resistance in the western Dordogne so effectively, without training or military experience.

Some regarded the latter as a positive merit: ‘We’ll follow you because you’re less of a “
con
” than the others,’ shrugged one group of peasant recruits, but they added – ‘if you start using the
naphtalinés
, we will never go with you!’ One of the strongest prejudices among many French
résistants
was that against the ‘mothball brigade’, former French officers who sought to take belated command of
maquis
now that the tide had turned decisively towards the Allies. The ORA, the Resistance movement founded by former officers, never achieved much support or success, and survived until the Liberation only because the Americans developed an unfounded faith in its future. It is also worth remembering that not all
résistants
in early 1944 were enthralled by De Gaulle, and many did not even know what he looked like. But some did. De Gunzbourg never forgot a
résistant
’s wife declaring
to him passionately one night, ‘
Oh, M. Philibert, je suis amoureuse, je suis amoureuse de Général De Gaulle!
’

For all its discomforts and dangers, and the months spent in peasant cottages and workmen’s flats without even a passing encounter with a man or woman with whom he might find enough in common to relax socially or mentally, de Gunzbourg enjoyed his war: ‘I had thought that I was incapable of doing anything with my life, and I discovered that there was something I could contribute. It gave me a purpose.’ He developed great respect for the peasants of south-west France, and above all for their wives, whose discretion and influence were so formidable. By the spring of 1944, de Gunzbourg was in touch with
réseaux
from Bergerac in the west to Sarlat in the east, and south towards Toulouse and Auch. It is a measure of the isolation in which most circuits worked that, although he was sometimes within a few miles of Jacques Poirier, neither man was aware of the other’s legitimacy. Each simply heard reports of another alleged agent operating in what he considered his own territory. Starr told de Gunzbourg laconically that if the mysterious ‘agent’ who was said to be causing difficulties over-reached himself, it might be simplest to have him killed. By the same token, Soleil was enraged to hear that de Gunzbourg was ‘poaching’, and swore that he would shoot him if they met. The only relevance of these mildly silly exchanges is that they show the fog and confusion in which Resistance existed. Each group was an uncharted island upon an ocean. It was safer so, but it caused much bewilderment.

Over most of the south-west, George Starr had fewer such problems because he was unchallenged overlord, with half a dozen British-trained couriers and instructors, and a much greater degree of control over local Resistance than most of F’s agents achieved. He was also an exceptional personality – ‘
un homme du métier
’, de Gunzbourg called him, ‘
un grand chef, de la classe de Lawrence
’.

Starr was the son of an English mother and American father who owned a circus which travelled the length of Europe. He was
educated at Ardingly public school, and studied mining at London University. He was a cosmopolitan, but he retained the accent and earthy hardiness of northern England. Through the 1930s he travelled Europe as a mining engineer, providing occasional reports to British Intelligence as a sideline. On 10 May 1940 he was down a mine near Liège when the Germans invaded Belgium. He beat a hasty retreat to England through Dunkirk, joined the army, and spent a year as a sergeant commanding the carrier pigeon section of Phantom, the GHQ Reconnaissance Unit based in St James’s Park in London. It was there that he received a summons to Selwyn Jepson of SOE, who asked if he would go to France. ‘Only if I choose where I go,’ said this dour little man. He refused to work in an area where he had friends, and might be recognized. After the usual training in the black arts, one night early in November 1942 he landed by felucca on the Mediterranean coast of France, near Marseille. On the beach to meet him he found his own brother, John, who was already an F Section agent, and who presented him with a ration card and other essential forged paperwork.

George Starr had been ordered to go to Lyon, ‘. . . but I didn’t like the look of it. The whole situation had the wrong smell about it.’ His instincts were correct. The network to which he had been assigned was extensively penetrated by the Germans, and was crumbling rapidly. At the suggestion of Peter Churchill, Starr instead moved west, into the Lot-et-Garonne. These were still the most dangerous days of the Resistance, when agents were compelled to feel their way through France ‘by guess and by God’. Each man embarked on a process of exploring initial contacts, as sensitive and dangerous as dismantling an unexploded bomb. An agent’s most priceless gift was luck, as again and again he exposed himself to men and women of unproven loyalty. To touch the wrong connection was usually fatal. There were occasional sabotage operations and spasmodic arms drops, but most of the work in 1942–3 was a long, unglamorous struggle to turn a thousand
isolated groups of Frenchmen hostile to the Nazis into a coherent underground movement.

Starr’s luck held. He reached Lot-et-Garonne with one contact address, which proved welcoming. He began to meet potential local helpers. His first priority was to gain radio contact with London – he had brought with him only an S-phone, by which he could establish short-range voice communication with an overhead aircraft. With some difficulty, he passed a message to London through another, distant agent, giving a rendezvous. Gerry Morel, F’s operations officer, flew in person over the dropping zone and talked to Starr on the S-phone. When he asked for some evidence of identity, the blast of Staffordshire blasphemy satisfied him. Starr got his radio, and soon began to receive arms.

One of the key rules of clandestine life was ‘Keep moving’. But Starr broke it successfully when he set up his headquarters in the little corner house by the church in the hamlet of Castelnau-sur-l’Avignon, some twenty-five miles west of the Das Reich Division’s cantonment area. Gascony had a deep-rooted tradition of resistance to authority, even from Paris. The peasant smallholders who farmed their tobacco among the gentle hills, living in villages without paved roads or piped water, were intensely hostile to the Germans. Starr’s host, the taciturn, moustachioed Roger Laribeau, was mayor of Castelnau. He made Starr, in his cover as Gaston, a retired Belgian mining engineer, deputy mayor. This chiefly gave him access to the immense range of permits needed for the smallest action or movement in Occupied France. The Englishman began to travel the countryside by train, bicycle, and ‘
peut-peut
’ motor bicycle, as far eastwards as Toulouse, west into the coastal forests of the Landes, north to Bergerac. When he met
résistants
, he tried to convey an impression that he merely bore orders from a senior officer, but they knew him always as ‘
Le Patron
’. He had a strong streak of peasant cunning himself, and the maturity and judgment gained in twenty years of directing mining operations. ‘Building a network,’ said Starr, ‘is like making a ladder. You fix
one rung. You stand on it. You jump on it. If it holds, you build the next one. It takes time. The people who wanted to do it in five minutes got caught. I was bloody lucky.’