The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (5 page)

Some
réseau
organizers had no fixed address, and, for reasons of security, the members of an organizer’s Resistance group were unable to contact him.
He
contacted
them.
Such extra security precautions were probably the reason ‘Roger’, who was tracked by the Germans for eight or nine months, was able to evade capture for so long, only to
be caught at the eleventh hour through a very simple oversight.

Each organizer was assisted by a radio operator and a courier, both SOE-trained. Occasionally, the organizer had a lieutenant, but that was not the norm. A lieutenant was sometimes
‘dropped’ when heavy arms were parachuted in. A machine-gun, for example, could not drop as it was and had to be sent in kit form, and if there was no one on the ground who knew how to
assemble the kit, it was useless. So an instructor, or ‘lieutenant’, was dropped with the material to teach the members of the local
réseau
how to put the weapons
together.

Sometimes, their mission accomplished, lieutenants had to wait for a considerable length of time before they could be picked up and flown back to London. One of them remarked upon his return,
after having been obliged to spend several weeks with a
réseau
before he could be repatriated, that he had always admired the courage of those agents who were dropped from the night
sky into enemy territory, but until he had actually shared their life he had been unaware of the dangers and the permanent psychological strains to which they were subjected. And a pilot, who had
been in the same position after his Lysander had become bogged down in the waterlogged field in which it landed, in spite of the efforts of a local farmer who brought a pair of bullocks in an
unsuccessful attempt to free the plane’s wheels from the mud, said exactly the same thing. This pilot finally had to abandon his aircraft and remain as a ‘guest’ of the
réseau
until another plane could be sent in to rescue him.

The second member of the team, the radio operator, or ‘pianist’, as he was known in house, was really the lynchpin of the
réseau.
He was the focal point of the group,
the pivot on which the whole
réseau
turned, its umbilical cord, and as such was treated rather like a prima donna. He was rarely allowed to take part in sabotage operations, or
accompany the reception committee receiving drops, although, as always happens, there were exceptions to this rule, because should anything happen to the radio operator the organizer no longer had
any means of communicating with HQ in London. Even if there were another
réseau
operating nearby, they could not call on them for help. Security was so strict that each
réseau
was kept in ignorance of the existence of others in the vicinity. Every
réseau
was watertight and self-contained so that should a group be ‘blown’
(the code we used when a network was infiltrated or captured by the Gestapo), being ignorant of its existence, they could not, even under torture, reveal that there were other
réseaux
in the area. Such information in enemy hands might have a domino effect.

The radio operator, being indispensable, was possibly the most important of the three agents, since it was through him that contact with London was made to request supplies or replacements,
instructions and also calls for help. As far as was possible, considering the dangerous conditions under which he worked, the radio operator was kept hidden. But all the same he was the one member
of the team the most exposed to risk. An organizer or a courier could ‘lie low’ if they suspected that they were being watched. A radio operator could not.

Before leaving, every radio operator was given what was called a ‘sked’, a specific time during the day when he was to contact London, not to ask for news of Grandma or little Willie
or the latest cricket scores, but so that the organizer, through the radio operator, could send details to HQ of enemy movements and report sabotage operations which the
réseau
had
carried out, or which were scheduled for the days ahead, and also to request a drop of men, munitions, food, money or clothing. During the war, in France alone, as well as agents, SOE dropped arms
to equip 425,000 résistants, plus hundreds of radio sets, pairs of combat boots and other items of clothing, all requested during the radio operator’s daily transmission.

The time allotted to the pianist was personal. It could be midday, midnight, ten to five, half past eight, or a quarter to three. If the radio operator missed a ‘sked’ it
wasn’t taken too seriously. He could have had a problem finding a ‘safe house’ from which to transmit, or he might think that the Gestapo had learned of, or suspected, his
existence and were watching out for him. So we waited for his sked the following day. But if after six or seven days there was still no news, we knew that there was little chance that we would hear
from him again. He was either dead or in hiding, or had been captured and probably would not return.

And many of them did not return.

The loss of life among radio operators was 25 per cent higher than with the other members of the team and it was estimated that they had a one in ten chance of surviving. Their missions were
also the most stressful. They needed a cool head and nerves of steel in order to cope, since they were always ‘on the run’.

They had orders from London never to transmit for more than fifteen minutes from the same place – because the Germans had a very sophisticated detection system and could tell after twenty
minutes where a transmission was coming from anywhere in France, down to the very street and even to a specific house in that street – and never to transmit more than twice from the same safe
house. So radio operators were continually seeking a safe house. This was not easy, because it put anyone who sheltered them, even for the short time it took to set up their material and transmit,
in a difficult and dangerous situation. If ever the radio operator was discovered by the Gestapo while he was transmitting – and it was usually the Gestapo who did the tracking – it was
not only the operator who was arrested, tortured and sent to a concentration camp but every member of the family that had sheltered him.

Sometimes a householder agreed to take in a radio operator for the duration of a transmission, and then denounced him to the Gestapo. So the pianist was constantly on the qui vive, forever
moving from place to place, often with the Gestapo on his heels. They had to live on their nerves. And they had to be very disciplined and have a strict routine because they not only had to
transmit to London daily, often under great pressure, but had to code the organizer’s messages before transmitting, decode incoming messages, then burn any incriminating papers. All this as
well as maintaining and carrying out repairs on their radio sets and, if necessary, dismantling and hiding their equipment, often in a barn or outhouse, and then assembling it again once the danger
was past. It is not surprising that a radio operator’s training was two or three months longer than that for other agents selected for missions as organizers, couriers or saboteurs.

Ideally, the ‘radio’ had a ‘lookout’ when transmitting. But if that were not possible, they tried to operate behind a curtain, near a window, where they could watch for
any suspicious person loitering in the street below or entering the building. They would never transmit with their backs to the door either.

Although the pianists usually transmitted from a safe house, some preferred to work outside a town or village. One young radio operator, Henri Diacono, had a horror of transmitting inside a
house since he was haunted by the idea that the Gestapo might burst through the door and surprise him. So he used to go out into the open country, throw his antennas over the branch of a tree and
transmit from there, in what he considered to be relative safety. But he always took two armed résistants with him, who stationed themselves in strategic positions ready to warn him and, if
necessary, open fire should the enemy suddenly appear.

These precautions enabled Henri to continue transmitting when the people he was working closely with, a Frenchman and his son, were surrounded, together with other members of the group, taken
away and shot, almost before his eyes. Henri, who had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday ‘in the field’, escaped to the countryside and continued transmitting despite the fact
that the Germans were searching for him. At one point he was almost surrounded by a group of German soldiers, all firing in his direction, but he managed to shoot his way out and escape.

I later asked him if he had been afraid when facing, alone, a battery of German guns.

‘When I was in training the mere thought of it happening terrified me,’ he replied. ‘But once I was actually faced with the situation, no, I didn’t feel at all afraid. It
was more a feeling of exhilaration. It was their life or mine.’

Henri and I met again after the SOE files were opened in 2000, and we discovered that we had been living in adjoining villages outside Paris for the previous forty years without either of us
being aware of the other’s existence. Henri also told me that the training he had undergone was so intense that symphonies still rang in his head from morning to night: ‘We learned
Morse code by listening to recordings of such classics as “The Wedding March”, da-da-di-da, and Beethoven’s Fifth, di-di-di-da. We even dreamt in Morse, and when we woke in the
morning the birds outside the bedroom window were singing in Morse. It was in our interest to listen intently and cram as much knowledge into our heads as possible, considering the huge losses
amongst radio operators.’

The pianists weren’t always denounced by their so-called hosts. Sometimes, they were betrayed unwittingly. Young boys were occasionally used as intermediaries between the courier and the
radio operator, because a youth rarely attracted suspicion. But it was through a boy of fifteen that Yvonne Baseden, code-named ‘Odette’, was betrayed.

She had been parachuted into France with ‘Etienne’(Gonzague de Saint-Geniès), organizer of the Scholar
réseau
near Lyons, in March 1944, to act as his pianist.
Three months later, on 25 June, two days after receiving the first massive daylight parachutage (codenamed ‘Cadillac’) from a fleet of US Flying Fortress aircraft, Yvonne and
Saint-Geniès went to a safe house they used, La Maison des Orphelins, a cheese factory outside Dole, to celebrate with a slap-up meal the safe receipt and storage of thirty-six consignments
of arms. Yvonne had a locally recruited courier, Denise, but for some reason that day a sub-agent, a teenage boy, was entrusted with Yvonne’s radio set. He was carrying it to the Maison des
Orphelins and had almost arrived at the factory when he was stopped by the local police, questioned and searched. When the gendarmes found the set, he was arrested and taken into custody. He was
then interrogated, under torture, by the Gestapo. Terrified for his life, he told them where he was taking it.

Yvonne and Saint-Geniès were in the middle of dinner when a lookout announced that a number of German soldiers were approaching the house. The group of résistants at the table
scattered, most of them to the attics, and when the intruders arrived they found only the caretaker. They were about to leave when one of the soldiers noticed the table, set for eight, with the
remains of a half-finished meal. An NCO, impressing on the terrified caretaker that he meant business, fired a shot in the air, unfortunately hitting both Saint-Geniès and a member of his
réseau,
who were hiding in a false ceiling, which had been specially constructed for use in an emergency.

The Germans made a cursory search but, discovering no one, were on the point of leaving when one of them noticed blood from Saint Geniès’s wound dripping through the ceiling’s
thin partition. He alerted the others, who then made a thorough search and found the rest of the group hiding in the attics between the large wooden blocks used to separate the cheeses which were
stored there. In order not to be taken alive and risk giving information under torture, Saint-Geniès, who had experienced the German treatment of prisoners before he had escaped from a
Stalag and arrived in England for training, swallowed his L (suicide) pill and died immediately. The other members of his
réseau
were arrested and taken to the prison in Dole.

Yvonne was later transferred to Dijon, where she was tortured, but did not give away any information, and then to Fresnes, near Paris. Luckily, the Gestapo thought she was just a young French
girl romantically attached to the Resistance; they did not connect her with the radio set, and none of the fellow résistants arrested with her gave away her true identity. From Fresnes she
was transferred to prison in Saarbrücken. Eventually, though, the Gestapo discovered their mistake. Realizing that Yvonne was not the starry-eyed girl they had believed her to be, but an SOE
agent and the radio operator they had been searching for, she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she remained from September 1944 until the liberation of the camp in
April 1945. In spite of her toes having been broken during torture, she was put to hard labour, probably hewing stones, and kept on a starvation diet. She developed tuberculosis and was not
expected to live, which probably saved her life. She was not executed with the other women SOE agents in the camp before the Allies’ arrival. The camp commandant probably thought it was not
worth wasting a bullet on someone who was about to die anyway. (Both Yvonne and her locally recruited courier, Denise, are still alive, Yvonne living in England and Denise in France.) A few years
ago, at a commemoration ceremony at the F Section Memorial in Valençay, they were joyfully reunited for the first time since Yvonne’s arrest in 1944. Each had believed the other to be
dead.

In 2008 I was asked to lay the wreath on Remembrance Day at the SOE memorial in Westminster Abbey. There was already a crowd gathered in front of the plaque when suddenly Yvonne inched up next
to me. ‘I heard it was you laying the wreath,’ she whispered, ‘so I asked my son to bring me to the ceremony.’ I was very touched, since she now rarely ventures out alone
and never without her walking stick. Sometimes it is difficult to imagine the tremendous acts of bravery these now frail old ladies once performed.