Das Reich (22 page)

The hangings had begun at around four in the afternoon. At about 7 pm, Schneid was dispatched to the arms factory courtyard to report that if there were many more to come, there would not be enough rope. He looked about him, at the score or so of condemned men remaining, and the 300 almost equally terrified captives still under guard. Ninety-nine men had been hanged. The Germans decided that enough was enough.

It has never become clear why the Germans suddenly decided
to halt the executions and reprieve the remaining twenty-one condemned men. Some witnesses have claimed that the pleas of the Abbé Espinasse for the Germans to show mercy were granted. Others suggest that the secretary-general of Corrèze, Maurice Roche – who possessed the priceless asset of fluent German – persuaded the divisional staff to desist. In any event, the last twenty-one men were sent to join the 300 captives now incarcerated in the arms factory. Later that evening, they were all loaded on to trucks and taken away. They were told that they were merely being driven to the Hôtel Moderne for further identity checks.

The
chantiers de la jeunesse
were ordered to cut down the bodies of the ninety-nine hanged men and load them on to lorries. French officials persuaded Major Kowatsch that if the SS carried out their promise to throw the bodies into the river, they would pose a threat to hygiene that might ultimately affect the garrison as well. Instead, they were tossed on the town rubbish dump on the Brive road, and later buried there. Thirty-six years later, Major Wulf said that ‘French officials expressed their satisfaction that the business had been correctly and cleanly carried out’.

It is interesting that every single officer of the Das Reich interviewed in the researching of this book, including several who had no part in the extravagances of the division if only because of technical responsibilities, approved the action at Tulle as a correct and proper response to the FTP’s actions. Major Wulf was mystified by the energy with which war crimes charges were later pursued against himself and others for that day’s work. ‘We let them have a priest,’ he said. ‘Where else have you heard of people being hanged in the war who were allowed a priest before they died?’ It was Himmler who had given them their cue. ‘One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man,’ he said. ‘We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, doesn’t interest me in the slightest.’

Lammerding transferred divisional headquarters to a villa on
the road out of Tulle towards Clermont-Ferrand. A series of urgent conferences began, to discuss the division’s next movement. Stuckler was still scheduled to drive himself to Clermont-Ferrand to hold a liaison meeting with 66th Reserve Corps, but with the road threatened by
maquisards
it was unthinkable to proceed without a strong escort. Perhaps they should conduct a major operation to clear the route to Clermont-Ferrand? Wulf was sent for. He was instructed to prepare his companies to advance eastwards at first light on 10 June.

Half an hour later, the order was cancelled. OKW and Army Group B had come to their senses. As the battle in Normandy consumed its appalling daily toll of tanks, guns and men, it had at last dawned upon their commanders that it was madness to deploy an SS Panzer division to pursue terrorists across the Corrèze. The OKW War Diary reported:

The signals hastened from OKW to Army Group G, from Toulouse to 58th Panzer Corps, even as the hangman in Tulle was doing his business:

In other words, Von Rundstedt was in desperate need of the Das Reich’s heavy armour. But his orders were much more easily issued than executed.

Before following the Das Reich Division onwards north and west, there is one further piece of unfinished business concerning the movement of the armoured columns on the eastern axis from Cahors, which did not bring even the leading elements into Tulle until late on the evening of 9 June. At almost exactly the moment that the first companies of the Der Führer regiment were crawling wearily into Limoges on the night of 8 June, above a dropping zone in south Corrèze a few miles from Aurillac three parachutes blossomed from a Liberator bomber. They began to drift slowly earthwards to add modestly to the difficulties of 2nd SS Panzer Division.

A few moments later, an excited
maquisard
ran across the field proudly leading his newly arrived charges, and shouting to the rest of the reception committee: ‘We’ve got a French officer and he’s brought his wife with him!’ The officer was introduced as ‘Aristide’ – Aspirant Maurice Bourdon of the French Army. His real name – which none of them learned until after the war – was Prince Michel de Bourbon, nephew of the Pretender to the French throne. His ‘wife’, however, was the commanding officer of the team, the splendidly kilted Highland officer Major Tommy Macpherson, among the most single-minded warriors that the war can have produced. They were accompanied by a British wireless operator, Sergeant Brown, and a load of arms and explosives with which to equip the local
maquis
. Their orders were ‘to assist Resistance teams in the Lot, to stimulate guerilla action along the lines of communication between Montauban and Brive, and to cut the RN20’, along which the Das Reich had been pouring all day.
Two nights later another team, led by Captain Macdonald Austin of the American Army, parachuted into the Dordogne 100 miles further west, with orders to carry out the same mission from the opposite flank. Unlike French Section’s agents, Austin had been specifically informed of the presence of the Das Reich and instructed to do everything possible to impede it.

These were the first of the inter-Allied ‘Jedburgh’ teams, of which ninety-three were to be parachuted into France before the Liberation. Their arrival acknowledged the new phase of Resistance, open guerilla war. They were dispatched in uniform, and while they had been trained in some of the skills of clandestine war, they were sent to serve as commando officers in the field, not as secret agents. Their arrival in uniform was intended – as indeed it succeeded – to boost the morale of the
maquis
.

The origins of the Jedburghs were, however, overwhelmingly political rather than military. The Free French and above all the Americans were seeking a larger share in behind-the-lines operations in Europe. General Donovan and his American OSS had been disappointed, and indeed infuriated, by the reluctance of the British to see its men dropped into France.

SOE in their turn pointed out that while OSS had sent a handful of American-controlled Frenchmen into France, the prospective agents of American nationality all spoke French with an instantly recognizable accent, and few showed much aptitude for living a cover story successfully. Although most of the British liked and admired Colonel David Bruce, the elegant OSS chief in London, they were unimpressed by General Donovan, whom they judged an ambitious empire-builder. ‘The British kept tactfully reminding us that they had been in the intelligence business since Queen Elizabeth’s day,’ said the British-educated American Henry Hyde, who joined the intelligence branch of OSS in April 1942. ‘ “Those naive Americans,” they said, and by and large we were a naive lot. Americans are naive. But I felt that the American Army was entitled to its own sources of information. We said: “We’re
not that much stupider than you. If we’re taught properly, we can do it.” ’

After much discussion and argument, a compromise was agreed. On the intelligence side, OSS would continue to build up its modest network of French agents reporting to SI – there were twenty-seven of them by D-Day. At the suggestion of the British SIS – frankly desperate for joint Allied projects which would not interfere with their existing networks in France – a project codenamed Sussex was created, to drop fifty two-man SIS/OSS teams into northern France from May onwards, to provide tactical intelligence for the Allied armies. But once again, the OSS agents would have to be Frenchmen.

Americans could only take their part in France, the British insisted, after the transition from secret to open guerilla war, when they would no longer be compelled to live a cover story. The Jedburgh training programme would be established under the auspices of SOE. A mixed group of 250 American, French and British trainees was assembled, to be parachuted to support Resistance in rural areas that lent themselves to guerilla war. ‘The Jeds’, said one of their British recruits, ‘plainly represented the enormous power and interest of America in the European war.’

Tommy Macpherson reached the organization after a war that would already have sated most men. He was the youngest of seven children of a judge. In May 1939, at the age of eighteen and before he had even technically finished at Fettes public school, he took a commission in the Cameron Highlanders. In June 1940 he joined the Scottish Commando, and after training went to the Middle East with Layforce. He took part in two raids on Crete, and was then detailed to reconnoitre the landing area for Major Geoffrey Keyes on his famous mission to kill Rommel at his headquarters in North Africa. Macpherson had already developed a low opinion of the staff work for commando raids of the period, ‘. . . and it stuck out a mile that this was an absolute disaster’. Rommel was not even at the headquarters, Keyes was killed in the attack, and
Macpherson was captured soon afterwards, attempting to walk back to the British lines through the desert.

He was sent to Italy, to one of the ‘naughty boys’ ’ establishments, Camp 5, which he found ‘quite an enjoyable place to be, because there was so much going on’. He escaped, was recaptured and sent to a camp in Austria. He escaped again with two New Zealanders, and made his way to northern Italy before being recaptured. This time he was sent to ‘a very nasty sort of interrogation centre’ in East Prussia, and thence to the Polish–Silesian border. He and a New Zealander exchanged identities with two private soldiers in order to be able to join an outside working party, and crawled away under the wire of the commandant’s rabbit farm. They caught a train to Danzig, where they arrived in the middle of an air raid one night in October 1943. They hitched a lift to Gdynia from a sympathetic Pole, and hid up all day until they were smuggled aboard a Swedish ship carrying coal dust. They lay deep in the cargo while German guards and dogs searched the ship, and surfaced when they were safely at sea. The Swedes briefly detained them, but they were finally allowed to catch a Liberator to England. On 4 November, two years to the day after his capture, Macpherson landed home. At his debriefing, he was asked if he would like to join SOE. It seemed that General Gubbins, a family friend, had suggested him. He toyed briefly with the idea of a quiet holiday in a staff job, then took the SOE job. Early in December 1943, a captain with the Military Cross, he reported to the Jedburgh training centre at Milton Hall, the Fitzwilliam stately home in Northamptonshire.

Many of the Frenchmen who joined the Jedburghs were also veterans, or had escaped from France after desperate adventures. But Prince Michel de Bourbon had been taken to America in 1940, and was still there in 1943 when he ran away from school to enlist at the age of sixteen and a half. The French Military Mission in New York had an arrangement by which their nationals could be trained by the US Army, and de Bourbon (or Bourdon, as he should henceforth be called) was sent to an officer training school at Fort
Benning, Georgia. From there he was plucked out by OSS recruiters, who sent him to their spy schools for three months to learn the usual routines of shooting, sabotage, unarmed combat and morse. After so many changes of environment, he found that he had ceased to think as a Frenchman, and identified more easily with Americans or Englishmen, although he was disconcerted by those American trainees who admired the Germans and were naive enough to say so. They seemed to possess an engaging, innocent enthusiasm for adventure ahead, rather more so than the other Frenchmen on the course, most of whom had been recruited from exiles in North and South America and seemed happy to remain as far as possible from the war.

On 23 December 1943, Bourdon landed in Glasgow from the
Queen Elizabeth
, and was promptly assigned to spend Christmas with a local suburban family who owned a circus. They found this obscure French teenager somewhat uncouth, and gave him stern advice about the proper use of a knife and fork. Early in the New Year, he was sent on a British-run selection course to assess his suitability for commando or clandestine operations. To his utter dismay, he was rejected as too young, and had to launch a furious campaign to change the authorities’ minds. At last he succeeded, and was one of only two Frenchmen from his course in the US who were accepted for operations. The rest of the French Jedburghs were recruited from Free French officers in England.