Das Reich (13 page)

Baker Street soon recognized the quality of the circuit Starr was creating – Wheelwright, as they knew it. In August 1943 a thirty-four-year-old WAAF named Annette Cormeau was parachuted to join him as a wireless operator. She was the daughter of a British consular official who had been educated in Europe and was working as a secretary in Brussels in 1937 when she met and married a half-Belgian, half-English accountancy student. They had a daughter in 1938, and she was expecting another baby when a German bomb struck their flat in London in November 1940. Her husband, by then a British soldier, was killed. She herself was badly injured and miscarried. When she recovered, she joined the WAAF, and was serving in the operations room of a bomber station when she was called to London to see Selwyn Jepson.

She was troubled about leaving her daughter, but very eager to play a larger part in the war. She joined a training course with a group of F Section girls, most of whom were later killed by the Germans. They were worked hard. In their free time, ‘we used to discuss very feminine things – would we be able to carry off wearing high heels after so long in flat service shoes? We spent a lot of time talking to exiled Frenchmen on the course about conditions in France. We had our pub crawls, and sometimes everybody went haywire, but generally the atmosphere was very serious.’ There was a three-week wireless course at Thame Park – ‘Station 52’ – then the tradecraft course in security at Beaulieu in Hampshire, which Annette found less exacting than she had expected – ‘They didn’t want to frighten us off.’ Every few weeks, she took a train to Bristol to see her five-year-old daughter. One day the little girl came to London, to wave her mother goodbye as she got into a taxi. There were no tears, for no one told her that it would be more than a year before they met again, and that from the taxi Annette was to be transferred to a car for Tempsford, and then France.

Much has been written about the dangers of life as a secret agent – and it must be remembered that, statistically, F Section’s men and women fared rather better for casualties in France than a front-line infantry battalion. But little has been said about the tedium and discomfort of living for months in humble surroundings, without personal friends, with only peasant hosts for company. Starr scorned any notion of finding romance in his work, and although it was part of their cover that Annette was his mistress, their relationship was entirely professional. Selwyn Jepson said that when he chose agents, he looked for people who had seen something of the world, discovered their own strengths and limitations, and learned self-reliance. Annette sometimes found the boredom of the tiny hamlet stifling. She helped with the cows and the babies and the housework, and dressed in the same simple peasant clothes. She and Starr were exasperated by a courier once sent from London, a very pretty girl who insisted on wearing high Paris fashion at every opportunity. The most important element in their security was inconspicuousness. Most nights Annette listened to the radio to stay awake until the time came for her own transmitting schedule. She picked up South American stations, and sometimes RAF weather aircraft in the Bay of Biscay. ‘Air temperature L-Love’, they reported cryptically. She never discovered whether this was hot or cold. Then, at the prearranged moment, she tapped out her own message of 100 or 150 words – fifteen or twenty minutes of transmission time. The set, hidden behind her bed, was powered by six-volt car batteries, because the Germans had an irksome habit of switching off power in rotation to every village when their direction finders picked up a transmission. If there was a break in the morse, they had pinpointed their set.

Unlike Annette, Starr seemed to enjoy the long evenings at the kitchen table, sitting with his head in his hands while the soup pot simmered over the huge fireplace, talking about crops, beasts and wine. Sometimes he lent a hand at the back-breaking business of tending the tobacco fields. He had a bottomless stock
of anecdotes about England and earthy jokes that delighted the villagers. Sometimes, when there was urgent work to be done, he tugged insistently at his beret in tension and excitement. But never, even after the fiercest evening with the villagers and their formidable capacity for Armagnac, did he betray the slightest indiscretion. Starr was a natural secret agent.

There is just one other Englishman to be mentioned here – of them all, the agent closest to the heart of the Das Reich Division, indeed the only one who had walked and driven past the lagers and vehicle parks of 2nd SS Panzer Division in the months that they lay around Montauban. One night, Germans interrupted a
parachutage
, and he was compelled to spend hours taking refuge in a tree while they talked and searched beneath him. The troops were very probably of the Das Reich. The agent was a twenty-two-year-old veteran named Tony Brooks.

Brooks was an Englishman brought up in Switzerland and living in the Jura at the outbreak of war. Like Jacques Poirier, he became involved in an escape line, in his case in Marseille, and himself walked over the Pyrenees in the autumn of 1941, reached England and offered himself to SOE. In July 1942, just turned twenty, he was given a crash course in French trades unionism and parachuted into France with instructions to explore the creation of a
réseau
based on the railway workers of southern France, He spent the next two years – an extraordinary lifespan for an agent in Occupied territory – establishing a marvellously successful network among the
cheminots
who, all over the country, provided some of the most dedicated recruits for Resistance.

The Germans fought unceasingly and unsuccessfully to stop the railways being used for the transport of fugitives on engines and as centres of sabotage. Every rail yard in France bore signs: ‘
ADVERTISSEMENT
:
PEINE DE MORT CONTRE LES SABOTEURS
.
POUR LE PAYS
,
POUR TA FAMILLE
,
POUR TON RAVITAILLEMENT
,
POUR TOI
,
CHEMINOT
,
IL FAUT ENGAGER ET GAGNER LA LUTTE CONTRE
LA SABOTAGE
.’ The rail workers were the most valuable saboteurs of all, because they knew exactly what to hit to achieve most damage without permanently wrecking the railways of France, as opposed to the Allied bombings ‘which did more harm than good’, as their official historian remarked acidly. They were also exasperated by the extravagant, irrelevant demolitions of the FTP, which destroyed viaducts and installations which would take literally years to rebuild. They believed there was a better way.

Brooks was blessed with a natural sense of security, working with small cells each of which remained unaware of each other’s existence. He preserved one refuge for himself in Lyon of which he informed not a single soul. ‘So English, so careful,’ said a respectful French officer who met him in 1944. Weeks before D-Day, Brooks had established that the key to the movement of heavy armour from southern France by rail was the limited stock of flatcars capable of passing under the nation’s bridges laden with tanks. He had pinpointed the whereabouts of most of them. In the days before 6 June, he and some of his enthusiastic
cheminots
spent many hours of many nights working on their axle bearings with abrasive paste supplied from London. They were now incapable of travelling more than a matter of miles before seizing. Like Starr and de Gunzbourg, Brooks had also briefed his saboteurs in great detail about
Plan Vert
. At his safe house in Toulouse in the first days of June 1944, Brooks felt tolerably confident that if German reinforcements were moving north in the wake of D-Day, it was most unlikely that they would be doing so by train.

Within hours of the Allied landings on the morning of 6 June across the Lot and Corrèze and Dordogne, as across the rest of France, men were streaming on foot and by car and truck and bicycle to collect their arms and take to the
maquis
. Odette Bach was in the hairdresser’s in Souillac when she heard the news, and bicycled thirty miles home to Figeac, bursting with exhilaration. Her husband abandoned his job as a cashier at the local Crédit Lyonnais – with a doctor’s certificate to enable him to continue to be paid – and joined his group. Jean Sennemaut, commanding the AS detachment at Bellac, north-west of Limoges, took his wife, Sten gun and grenades, left their nine-month-old daughter at her grandmother’s, and abandoned their home for the farmhouse seven miles into the countryside which he had designated weeks before as the group’s rendezvous on mobilization. In the Corrèze, especially, men began to flock to the various rendezvous of the
Armée Secrète
. Many of them had no previous connection with Resistance, and there were not remotely enough weapons to arm them. When Deschelette, De Gaulle’s
Délégué Militaire Régional
, heard of the great concentrations moving to join Vaujour and Guedin’s companies, he was deeply concerned, for he feared the consequences of massing more men than they could possibly arm and control. But it seemed unthinkable to turn them away, and their leaders were that day a little drunk with the exhilaration of the moment. Deschelette, whom some of his subordinates found an ineffectual figure, was soon much preoccupied with reports of a major FTP action around the town of Tulle, and an even more alarming AS concentration developing around Bergerac in the
Dordogne. In the Corrèze, Marius Guedin’s AS companies deployed as he and Vaujour had arranged weeks before, on the bridges across the Dordogne and the key junctions west of Brive.

The Resistance made no direct assault on the German garrison of Bergerac in the days following 6 June, but the entire countryside surrounding the town rose in open insurrection. De Gunzbourg took command of the
résistants
south of the Dordogne river, and Bergerac – Maurice Loupias – of those to the north. They reckoned that they had some 2,800 Stens, 450 rifles, 100 Brens and twenty anti-tank weapons. With these arms, they believed that they could cut off the Germans in Bergerac and control the eastern Dordogne until the expected Allied parachutists arrived. In the area he had chosen as a landing ground, de Gunzbourg was directing hundreds of men who had arrived in trucks from all over the department to distribute weapons, clear obstacles and cut down trees on the field, then set up an all-round defence to cover it. There was one predictable disappointment when the local FTP, whom they had armed, refused to have any part in the AS uprising. But Soleil arrived with sixty of his
maquisards
and took up position at Mouleydier, on the direct route between Bergerac and Brive-la-Gaillarde. ‘Barricades are a great tradition in France,’ said de Gunzbourg. Barricade fever seized the area, and he wrote:

It was Bergeret’s proudest hour – he himself publicly proclaimed the Fourth Republic. From a distance, Poirier at Belvès was horrified to hear of all these events. The
résistants
of western Dordogne had created a static threat to German control which it seemed
impossible for them to ignore. The ingredients were assembled for a tragedy which could have been as horrific as that of the Vercors, where 2,000
maquisards
died in the hopeless attempt to defend a ‘redoubt’ against the Germans in July 1944. This was not at all what London had in mind.

As Starr’s men assembled and armed in the Gers and the Landes, the first rail demolitions were taking place. Brooks’
cheminots
cut the vital line north from Montauban to Brive-la-Gaillarde. Starr and de Gunzbourg’s team hit the lines westwards to Bordeaux, and Peter Lake several of those in the eastern Dordogne. At Brive, a taciturn, soberly Catholic SNCF engineer named Jean Marsat directed his
cheminot
resisters in cutting the lines to Tulle and to the south and west. In the first week following D-Day, 960 of 1,055 rail cuts scheduled under
Plan Vert
were carried out.

It is essential, however, to keep a sense of perspective about rail sabotage. Even SNCF’s official historian remarks that ‘in spite of the active help of the
cheminots
, the execution of
Plan Vert
was only partial on D-Day . . .’ The Allied commanders’ objections to dependence on sabotage had partly stemmed from the knowledge that explosions on stretches of main line could be repaired within sixteen to forty-eight hours. More sophisticated attacks on points and turntables by
cheminots
could do much more damage, but these accounted for only a minority of D-Day targets. The greatest weakness in the execution of the sabotage plan was that it placed insufficient emphasis on repetition at almost daily intervals. Contrary to the assertions of many
résistants
and Resistance historians, the Germans continued to run some trains on the lines that they considered vital across most of France after D-Day. A group of Guedin’s
maquisards
was in action against a German armoured train which arrived to repair a line cut at Noailles, south of Brive, on 7 June. Two were killed and one was captured. He was burnt to death in the furnace of the locomotive.

But the evidence is overwhelming that, from 7 June, it was impossible to move the Das Reich Division at any speed by direct routes north or north-west from Montauban. A little of the credit
for this undoubtedly belongs to the Allied air forces, as do all of the laurels for their difficulties north of the Loire, but it was principally the achievement of Brooks, Starr, de Gunzbourg and other SOE officers, together with the Frenchmen whom they had equipped and instructed. Without SOE, Resistance could have achieved nothing.