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This is not a book of moral judgements. The three men’s stories are presented, as far as possible, plain and unvarnished. Ultimately it is up to the reader to judge what to make of them. But if in the process of making those judgements, a more complete and detailed picture of this fascinating period and of some of the people who lived in it emerges, then this book will have achieved its purpose.
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c)
This is a work of non-fiction, based chiefly on primary historical sources. The key details of the story remain disputed even today. With very few exceptions the accounts which form the basis of this work were written shortly after the war, and often by participants whose reputations were at risk – either because they faced accusations of collaboration, or because they were subject to legal action. For instance, a principal source in this book is the unpublished memoirs of Friedrich Dohse, written while he was awaiting trial by a French military tribunal in Bordeaux after the war. These were plainly designed to put the Gestapo officer’s wartime activities in the most favourable light and form part of his defence against the charges he was facing. The same caveat must also apply to the descriptions of events given by others who, while not necessarily preparing for formal court cases, were nevertheless explaining their actions before the court of post-war French public opinion, or simply leaving a record for posterity. There are, in consequence, often radically different versions of the same event. In these cases, difficult judgements of historical evaluation have had to be made. Where an account exists which is substantially different to the one used in this narrative, this fact has been identified in the endnotes.
Sometimes it has been necessary to include some minor speculation in the narrative, where the basic facts surrounding an event have been already established. For example, on 24 September 1943, André Grandclément rode a bicycle through Bordeaux to pay a clandestine visit to the house of Charles Corbin. A visit to the Corbin house for research revealed that the building is very small with a tiny back garden and no back access. Based on these facts and bearing in mind that Grandclément was paying a secret visit to the Corbin family, it seems reasonable to speculate that his bicycle would have been wheeled through the Corbin house into the back garden, rather than leaving it outside.
The dialogue in the Prologue has been reconstructed in a manner consistent with the known facts of the event described. On all other occasions dialogue has only been included where it was either recorded at the time, recorded later by one of the protagonists, or subsequently verified as an accurate representation of what was said.
There are also some important issues regarding terminology. The term ‘Gestapo’ originates from the first letters of the three words used for the Nazi state secret police (GEheimeSTAatsPOlizei). But the ‘true’ Gestapo was only a small element within the overall, highly complex German state security apparatus. However, the Gestapo gained such a reputation during the war that very soon (and with the active encouragement of SOE) the word ‘Gestapo’ became a generic word used to cover all parts of the German security system. In an attempt not to test the sanity of the reader too far with unnecessary complexity, the term ‘Gestapo’ in this narrative is, in almost all cases, used in its wider more ‘popular’ sense, rather than its narrower more technical one.
In the 1930s and 1940s the term ‘spy’ carried pejorative overtones of cheating and underhand activity which it does not have today. For this reason – and perhaps also in the vain hope that their operatives behind enemy lines might gain some flimsy protection from the Geneva Convention provision that spies could be shot – the Special Operations Executive was very particular not to call its operatives ‘spies’, but ‘secret agents’. However, any such distinction was rejected by the German authorities at the time: they ignored SOE’s terminological niceties and treated all their captured agents as spies, liable to immediate execution.
In addition to one or more false identities with which every SOE agent was equipped, each also had a number of aliases or codenames: one which was used under training, another for SOE files and correspondence, and a third for when they were in the field. For example, Roger Landes’s false identities in France were ‘René Pol’ on his first mission and ‘Roger Lalande’ on his second. Under training he was known to his colleagues as ‘Robert Lang’; the internal alias by which he was referred to in SOE papers was ‘Actor’ (all F-Section agents had internal aliases based on occupations) and the nom de guerre by which he was known to his French colleagues was ‘Stanislas’ on his first mission and ‘Aristide’ on his second. In addition, SOE agents often accumulated nicknames while in France: Victor Charles Hayes, codename ‘Printer’, alias ‘Yves’, was more frequently known to his French colleagues as ‘Charlot’ – or, because of his prowess with explosives, ‘Charles le Démolisseur’. Although almost all the participants in this story would have used their aliases when communicating with each other I have used personal names throughout, except where the needs of the story dictate otherwise (for example, when it is appropriate to refer to Roger Landes by the noms de guerre by which he was known to the Gestapo officer Friedrich Dohse – that is, ‘Stanislas’, and later ‘Aristide’).
During the war, the French resistance, diverse and diffuse as it was, was neither referred to nor seen as a single body. It was only after the war that the disparate resistance organisations were regarded as part of a single overarching structure known as the French Resistance (with capitals applied to both words). For ease of reading, I have, in this book, adopted the post-war habit of referring to the French Resistance (with capitals) when referring to the overall organisation, and French resistance when the noun is employed more generally. Latitude and longitude for places of key importance (such as parachute sites and places of execution) are included in the endnotes. For certain military operations, timings are given according to the twenty-four-hour clock and have been converted into Central European Time (Greenwich Mean Time plus one hour from 16 August to 3 April, and GMT plus two hours from 4 April to 15 August) – which was the standard time used throughout all Nazi-occupied Western Europe for the duration of the war.
As is often the case, there are a bewildering profusion of characters who people this historical narrative. In an attempt to make things easier for the reader, I mention characters by their names only if they appear more than once. For those interested in the names of the others mentioned, these, where known, can be found in the endnotes (#u65583872-217c-5a1d-b599-d912a5a39e8c). Even so, the reader may find the number of names challenging. I have therefore provided a dramatis personae (#ufc7278a5-c008-51ba-b374-55cf308639e8) of all the main characters.
(#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c)
PROLOGUE
THE EXECUTION (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c)
The man’s index finger slid forward along the cool metal surface of the Colt in his overcoat pocket and curled gingerly around the trigger. The signal would come soon now.
The young woman walked half a pace ahead of him and a little to his right: she was lithe and pretty with auburn hair. Her wooden-soled sandals clacked on the dry path, and her wedding ring glinted in the last rays of the evening sun. She had dressed for London carefully, before leaving the house: slingback sandals with raised heels, a deep V-neckline green dress, which swung on her hips as she strode lightly along the forest track. She was happy: by the morning she and the husband she adored would be far away from this snake pit of betrayal and treachery.
In a few moments he would have to kill her. He had agreed to this when they had decided on the executions an hour previously. He had not killed before – though he had ordered others to be killed. But he was calm. It had to be done and he was ready for it.
On the woman’s right walked a second man, his hands too plunged deep into the pockets of a heavy coat, though it was a warm summer’s evening.
They strolled along the track, between the fir trees, chatting amiably.
‘When will the aircraft arrive?’
‘After dark I suppose. We’ll hear when we get to the landing site.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘To London? About three or four hours I should think.’
‘Oh! As long as …’
The sentence died in a cacophony of shots and screams coming from the other side of a small copse to their left.
With a flick of the wrist, the Colt was out of his pocket, its muzzle pressed against the back of the woman’s skull. He pulled the trigger. But it wouldn’t yield. In the millisecond it took him to push the safety catch down, the woman, feeling the cold of the muzzle, turned her head. He could already see the flared white of her left eye and the terrified gape of her mouth when the gun fired. She dropped silently to the ground, a crumple of green and red lying incongruously on the forest path, as his shot echoed through the woods, startling a small cloud of evening birds.
They half-carried, half-rolled the woman’s body into a stream, which ran quietly in a nearby ditch. Her fresh blood billowed in the clear water.
They were joined by two men half dragging another corpse, which trailed a wide smear of blood on the woodland path.
‘Both dead?’ the man with the Colt asked.
‘Yeah, but Christian botched the young man. I had to finish him off. He shouted for mercy.’
‘Put him in the ditch and we’ll collect the other. The guys will clear up in the morning.’
Ten minutes later the two men’s bodies lay heaped in an awkward jumble on top of the woman’s. Their blood mingled with hers, turning the little rivulet into a meandering of crimson among the grasses and ferns.
They covered them with branches, walked back to their vehicles in the gathering dusk and drove to Bordeaux, arriving just before the start of curfew.
1
BORDEAUX – BEGINNINGS (#ulink_fee6a4bd-2618-5ba6-be05-5deab78dd2da)
After Paris, probably no French city was more affected by the drama of the fall of France and the early months of the German occupation than Bordeaux.
On 10 June 1940, with the sound of German artillery ringing in their ears, the French government fled Paris. Four days later they set up their new emergency wartime capital in Bordeaux. As newcomers, they were not alone. The city was already bursting with a vast tide of humanity, which the French christened the Exode – the great exodus of refugees desperately fleeing south to avoid the advancing German armoured columns.
Historically this was not a new experience for Bordeaux. Twice before the city had acted as the emergency capital and chief refuge of France: during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and again in 1914. But everyone sensed that this time was going to be different. This time it was going to be not just a military defeat, but a national catastrophe in which all would be engulfed.
The last scenes of France’s tragedy were swiftly acted out.
On the evening of 16 June 1940, General de Gaulle, who had been sent to London to secure the support of the British, flew back to Mérignac airport outside Bordeaux in a plane which Churchill had placed at his disposal. He booked into the Hôtel Majestic and arranged an urgent interview with Marshal Pétain, who was headquartered next door at the Hôtel Splendid. The interview was short and fruitless. De Gaulle promised Churchill’s help and pleaded with the old marshal to begin the fight back. But it was too late; the die was already cast. Later that day the French prime minister resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the First War, began negotiating an armistice with the Germans. Disgusted, de Gaulle returned to Mérignac and, on the morning of 17 June, took off for London accompanied by four clean shirts, a spare pair of trousers, 100,000 gold francs and the honour of France. The day after, he made the first of his great speeches from the British capital, appealing to all French men and women to rally to his cause and rescue their country from the shame of defeat.
Initially, however, the general’s impassioned pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. The mood in France following its rout was predominantly one of stunned apathy. ‘The population was, if not pro-German, at least disposed to do nothing if they were left alone,’ one senior German intelligence officer put it.
Under the terms of the armistice signed by Pétain, France was divided by a demarcation line – in practical terms, an internal frontier – running from the Lake of Geneva to the Pyrenees. This separated the northern, occupied zone – a virtual annex of Germany – from the zone non-occupée, governed by Pétain’s Vichy government in the south. In the Bordeaux region the demarcation line ran along a north–south axis forty kilometres east of the city, and encompassed in the German zone not just the great port itself, but also the entire Atlantic coast south of the Médoc peninsula. Security along the Atlantic coastline was further supplemented by a ten-kilometre-deep zone interdite from which all French citizens were banned, unless in possession of a special pass.
The Germans acted swiftly to take control of the occupied zone, not least by requisitioning a number of key addresses in the French capital, most infamously 82–84 Avenue Foch (soon rechristened by Parisians ‘Avenue Boche’). Here they established the headquarters of the main state security organisations – the Abwehr (officially the spy service for the German army); the Gestapo (which from mid-1942 would be responsible for all intelligence-gathering on Resistance movements in occupied territories); the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), the police arm of the Abwehr; and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler at his headquarters in Berlin. The SD was originally tasked to root out domestic dissent in Germany, but it soon also expanded its activities into the occupied territories, establishing a strong intelligence presence in Paris and Bordeaux, where it would increasingly use the Gestapo as its action arm for arrests and interrogation.
At 11 a.m. on 28 June, less than a fortnight after de Gaulle left the city, the newly appointed German commandant of Bordeaux and its region, General von Faber du Faur, entered his new residence in the city, an imposing townhouse on the Rue Vital Carles. Here the préfet of the Gironde presented him with a magnificent welcoming bouquet of flowers in a fine cut crystal vase.
The city which formed the heart of the general’s new command was – and still is – one of the most beautiful and venerable in all France. Lying along a crescent-moon-shaped curve of the Garonne river (from which the city gets its nickname, the ‘Port de la Lune’), Bordeaux had been a port since Roman times, shipping iron and tin from its quays; in later centuries, slaves, coffee, cotton, indigo and agricultural products were added to the trade. But the most valuable of all Bordeaux’s commodities – and central to the region’s wealth and dignity – was wine. From the great clarets of the Médoc, to the Graves and Sauternes of the Garonne valley, to the cognac grapes of Charentes – Bordeaux’s rich hinterlands of vineyards made the city affluent, proud, and uncompromisingly mercantile in its outlook.
In the pre-war years the entire port area had been rebuilt and renovated, from the working district of Bacalan at the northern end, south along the sweep of the Quai des Chartrons, to the elegant parks and apartments near the city centre. The most modern cranes were installed, a small-gauge railway was constructed, new warehouses were established, tarmac was laid in place of cobbles and a brand-new tram system was inaugurated to link the port to the rest of the city. Bordeaux was, at the fall of France, not only one of the most beautiful, but also one of the most modern ports in the whole of Europe. On still days a thin diaphanous haze, caused by the incessant bustle of the great port, hung over the city. In stormy weather, the wind funnelled down narrow streets, whipping the harbour into white-topped rufflets and sweeping fallen leaves from the city’s plane trees into drifts along the gutters and neat piles in the sheltered corners of alleyways and squares.
Back from the waterfront, the city of 1940 was little changed from the previous two centuries. Its imposing centre, dominated by the town hall, the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville, boasted impeccably manicured tree-lined squares, fine restaurants and elegant frontages. These led to broad boulevards radiating out towards the port’s trading and residential quarters. Beyond the main roads, this was a city of little restaurants, cafés, scurrying markets and narrow cobbled streets, lined with shops and first-floor apartments. Here a cacophony of humanity jostled with a jumble of cars, vélo-taxis, bicycles, lorries, barrows and horse-drawn carts.
The city’s political landscape was also one of contrast. During the 1930s, communism found a strong foothold amongst France’s intellectuals and working classes. Most of the dockworkers, who lived in the city’s crowded Bacalan quarter – where the restaurants were as rough as the wine they served – were, if not communist, then communist sympathisers; as were the cheminots (the railway workers) and the post office workers. In the countryside, too, especially in the Landes region lying between Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, communism and socialism had strong roots. Many of the Bordelais, however, regarded communism with a fear amounting almost to paranoia – seeing it as some kind of modern reincarnation of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. A secret British wartime report observed that ‘[amongst] the upper bourgeoisie [there is] an apprehension of Russia and a real fear of the former French Communists and of the mob … [they believe that] only evil can come to France from the disorder which would follow the coming to power of the extreme left’.
Those in charge of mercantilist Bordeaux were above all pragmatists. What was good for trade was good for the city. Foreigners came and foreigners went. But if trade (and especially the wine trade) went on, the city prospered, whoever was in charge. The city’s bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie embraced the politics of conservatism and of ‘order’. Among these classes, right or centre-right views were dominant, extreme right nationalism not unusual, and anti-Semitism commonplace.
‘England’, regarded by some in France as the centre of modern Jewry, was often thrown into this mix of political foes. ‘The English, the yids, the capitalists, these are the true enemies of France which is threatened, like every other country, by the Bolshevik sword of Damocles,’ declared one local right-wing activist of the time. When it came to anti-Semitism, Bordeaux was by no means unusual in the France of the 1930s and ’40s. ‘The Jewish question was a subject of lively discussion in France at the time,’ one respected French commentator wrote. ‘There was a strong resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment in the period before the war and during the years of the Vichy government.’
Von Faber du Faur did not waste time imposing his rule on the city. He laid on a grand military parade through the streets of Bordeaux, designed not just as a spectacle, but also as a show of force. The salute was taken by, amongst others, Erwin Rommel (who requisitioned a nearby château for holiday use). On 1 July 1940 a curfew, enforced by armed soldiers with dogs, was imposed between 2300 and 0500 hours, with curfew-breakers risking long terms of imprisonment or forced labour. All clocks were advanced one hour to match German time. All firearms, including hunting weapons, had to be handed in to the local mairies; all official notices (including street signs and administrative requests) had to be in German as well as French, and the swastika emblazoned on a red banner was hung outside all principal official buildings. Controls were introduced on traffic in the Gironde estuary and on all major road intersections and railway stations. In time, German oversight would be extended to cover the postal service, telecommunications, newspapers, cinemas, cultural events, agriculture (including, inevitably, wine), commercial transactions, the refining and distribution of petroleum products and the passage of goods and people over the demarcation line into Vichy France. Laws were passed to require farmers to give up a percentage of their produce to the German occupiers – though in most cases, thanks to peasant cunning, these were honoured more in the breach than the observance. German soldiers were under strict instructions to behave politely towards the French, and mostly did. But the terms of occupation were clear. On 10 October 1940 the city’s military administration published a decree stating: ‘Anyone who gives shelter to a member of the British Forces will be condemned to death.’
Almost overnight, it seemed, the German authorities also established an iron grip on the region, turning the whole of the Gironde estuary and the Médoc peninsula into one gigantic military base. Concrete pens were constructed in Bordeaux harbour to house the German submarines engaged in the deadly business of cutting the Atlantic lifeline on which Britain depended to save it from starvation. Italian submarines also had a base in the city. The Bordeaux quays were fortified with concrete pillboxes, a system of interlocking trenches and underground bunkers. This would soon also become the base for a small fleet of converted merchantmen which – fast, lightly armed and German-crewed – acted as blockade-runners, bringing in vital raw materials from Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East.
The Atlantic beaches running south from the mouth of the Gironde, considered a likely place for an Allied invasion, were fortified with a network of defences, including heavy coastal guns in thick concrete casemates; searchlights; numerous machine-gun nests, and a small fleet of riverine patrol vessels. Some 60,000 German troops were stationed in and around Bordeaux. By the end of the war, this would include two infantry divisions, a Panzer division and an army headquarters. A Luftwaffe force of 150 aircraft was assembled at Mérignac airport and on small local airfields. Kriegsmarine units were brought in to protect the Gironde and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Aquitaine.
The city itself was soon crammed full of German troops and dotted with a profusion of headquarters for the major military units, which jostled with buildings housing the German harbour authorities, civil government and the various security organisations charged with keeping order. A requisitioned passenger liner, the Baudouinville – last used by the Belgian cabinet when they took the fateful decision to surrender – was brought to Bordeaux and tied up along the quay at the Place des Quinconces as overflow billeting for German and Italian troops. There was also an array of soldiers’ brothels and watering holes: the Lion Rouge nightclub was specially reserved for Wehrmacht officers, the Côtelette for Abwehr intelligence officers, and the Blaue Affe (the Blue Monkey) for ordinary soldiers.
For most citizens of Bordeaux, shortages now became a way of life. The price of baby milk rose by fifty per cent; fish was limited to one tin of sardines per month and sugar was almost unobtainable. Even saccharine tablets were rationed to a hundred pills per person for every six months. Shopkeepers had to accept the Reichsmark at an exorbitant fixed rate of exchange and butchers were prohibited from selling meat on Wednesday and Thursday, with Friday reserved for horsemeat and tripe only. Most metal came from recycled stock. Leather was only available on the black market, or with an official authorisation; gloves and belts were difficult to find and most shoes had only wooden soles. There was a severe shortage of elastic (though this did not affect the availability of ladies’ suspenders, one British secret agent noted, cheerfully). German soldiers had priority on public transport, and horses were used extensively. Real coffee was such a valuable commodity that it became an article of barter, with most cafés and restaurants serving a roasted acorn substitute christened ‘café Pétain’. Unsurprisingly – and very quickly – a flourishing and all-pervasive black market was established, as the French population in both town and country tried to find ways round these new discomfitures in their daily lives.
Despite this – and contrary to the early hopes of the intelligence community in London, who claimed that ‘occupied Europe was smouldering with Resistance to the Nazis and ready to erupt at the slightest support or encouragement’ – secret feelers put out by the British and the Free French reported that the ‘spirit of Resistance’ in the city was depressingly frail. ‘Bordeaux was not a town for Resistance. It was more a town for collaborators. Most of our activity was outside Bordeaux,’ one early British agent concluded.
It was not long before a climate of suspicion began to infect Bordeaux city life. People tended not to speak to each other in the streets and tried to avoid speaking at all to those they did not know for fear of agents provocateurs and collaborators. One commentator said, ‘Neighbours reported confidentially on one another. People were denounced for anti-German sentiments and for listening to foreign news broadcasts.’ Another, describing the attitude of the average Bordelais, reported, tartly: ‘[They believed] their duty as patriotic Frenchmen was more than adequately fulfilled by listening to BBC London in their slippers in front of the fire,’ adding, ‘influenced by German propaganda [the Bordelais] were terrified of Communism and of losing their money’.
Though they found German rule irksome, the people of Bordeaux were, for the most part, content to continue with their lives quietly and as best they could in the circumstances. The great biannual spring and autumn fair took place as usual in the Place des Quinconces. Photographs from 1940 show unarmed German soldiers mingling with local crowds on the fairground rides. That year, as every year in the past, the Amar Circus – complete with lions, elephants, tigers and clowns – made the journey from Paris to play to full houses on the Bordeaux quays. La Petite Gironde, a broadly collaborationist Bordeaux daily newspaper, advised that the proper attitude to the occupation should be to ‘understand and be resigned’ – a proposition which many in the city followed.
Even when the Germans began a drive against the city’s Jews, sentiment in the city remained largely unmoved. On 27 August 1940, a Jewish man, Laiser Israel Karp, was summarily condemned to death for raising his fist at a German parade. On 17 October a notice was issued requiring all Jews and Jewish enterprises in the city to register. Five days later, 5,172 Jews and 403 Jewish businesses had complied. Early in 1941, Jews were banned from seventeen public places in the city, including all parks, theatres and cinemas and many schools. A year later the Vichy authorities in Bordeaux hosted a travelling exhibition with a strong anti-Semitic theme. Entitled ‘The Jews and France’, it proved a huge success in the city, attracting 60,000 local citizens through its doors.
During the course of 1941, however, as the German occupiers reacted to provocations and attacks with increasing ferocity, the mood in Bordeaux – as across the rest of France – began to shift. On 20 October the German military commander in Nantes was assassinated and the following day the weighted-down body of Hans Reimers, an officer in the Wehrmacht, was discovered in Bordeaux harbour. Hitler insisted on responding to these ‘outrages’ with maximum severity, overruling appeals from German military commanders in France for a more restrained response. In Bordeaux, fifty civilian hostages, most of them suspected communist sympathisers, were taken to the old French military camp at Souge, fifteen kilometres west of the city, and executed. They were the first of 257 ‘Resistance martyrs’ who would die before German firing squads at Souge before the war was over. More attacks were followed by more reprisals and, as French outrage grew, the ranks of resistants began to swell.
In November 1941, a special French police brigade under the command of a ruthless pro-German Frenchman called Pierre Napoléon Poinsot, was established in close cooperation with the German authorities to tackle the new threat. His first act was to launch a major drive against the communists. In sweeps, notably in the Bacalan quarter of the city, and in a number of rural communities in the Gironde region, hundreds of suspects, men and women, were arrested and incarcerated in an internment camp at Mérignac.
By now executions and deportations had become an established part of the German system of control and repression. According to secret British estimates, across France a total of 5,599 people were executed and 21,863 deported in the last quarter of 1942 alone. Resistance organisations started to spring up in Bordeaux and its hinterland. Some of these were small, personal and informal. Others were part of larger information-gathering networks. Many were under the control of foreign intelligence services, notably the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – also known as MI6), the Free French in London and the Polish secret service. By the end of 1941 there were no less than nine of these foreign-controlled spy networks tripping over each other in Bordeaux and the Gironde. In addition there were also numerous smaller ‘private’ Resistance fiefdoms, such as the one run by Raymond Brard, the head of the Bordeaux port fire brigade, whose network was based on the membership of a weight-lifting and ‘Gironde wrestling’ club in a city backstreet.
One of the first of these ‘private’ initiatives was established at the end of August 1940, just ten weeks after de Gaulle left France. Its founders were two neighbours who lived on the Bordeaux waterfront.
Jean Duboué, a strikingly handsome man of imposing build with a strong face and a direct, challenging gaze, was already an established figure in Bordeaux. Forty-three years old when the Second World War began, this was not Duboué’s first conflict. He had been wounded in one of France’s bloodiest calvaries of 1914–18: the battle of the Chemin des Dames. A self-made man, Duboué had left school in Bordeaux aged twelve to work down the coal mines of the Basque Country. Returning to Bordeaux, he began a new career as a restaurateur, managing the Grand Café du Commerce et de Tourny, one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious restaurants. From here he branched out with his own businesses. One was the Café des Marchands, a modest restaurant and boarding house frequented by dockers and travelling salesmen on the Quai des Chartrons. By the end of the 1930s, Duboué’s businesses were doing well enough for him to purchase a country retreat southeast of Bordeaux, where he, his wife Marie-Louise and daughter Suzanne spent every weekend and most holidays.
His co-conspirator, Léo Paillère, recently demobilised and an ex-captain of infantry in the First World War, was, at fifty, older than Duboué. A man of distinctly right-wing tendencies, Paillère lived with his wife Jeanne and their five sons next door to the Café des Marchands.
During late 1940 and early 1941, Duboué and Paillère set about recruiting a number of friends as agents. They gathered intelligence on German positions, troop movements, weapons and ships in the port – especially the blockade-runners and submarines. The intelligence was smuggled out of Bordeaux by Suzanne Duboué (sixteen years old at the time and known in the family as ‘Mouton’, or ‘lambkin’ in English). She took the secret reports to a restaurant owner called Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, 140 kilometres south of Bordeaux. Hèches then passed them along a clandestine escape route he controlled, over the Pyrenees to the SIS representative in the British consulate in Barcelona. When this route was closed, or too dangerous, Suzanne carried the intelligence hidden in a basket across the border to the Spanish Basque coastal town of San Sebastián, where the British consulate doubled as the gateway to another escape line and courier service to Madrid, Gibraltar and London.
The Duboué–Paillère reports on German activity first began to reach London early in 1941, the year which was, for Churchill and the British, the annus horribilis of the war. The heady days of solitary defiance and the Battle of Britain were over. Now British forces were engaged in a long struggle of retrenchment and attrition, and losing on all fronts: in the Atlantic, in the deserts of North Africa, on the plains of Russia and against the Japanese in the Far East. Churchill knew that after Dunkirk it would take time – probably years – to turn the tide. He knew too that if Britain was not to retreat into passive defence, then apart from RAF attacks on German cities, his only means of carrying the war to the enemy was through clandestine and unconventional warfare.
In 1940 he created three new organisations to wage this secret war: Combined Operations, charged with conducting commando raids on the European coastline; MI9, tasked with helping escaped Allied prisoners and downed pilots to get back to Britain; and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in July of that year and ordered, in Churchill’s inimitable words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
Staffed mainly by amateurs in the spying game, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ (as SOE swiftly became known, after their headquarters near Marylebone station) were regarded by Britain’s professional spies in SIS with a sniffy disdain, bordering, when occasion arose, on murderous enmity. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself an SIS officer, commented: ‘Though SOE and SIS were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the Abwehr was to either of them.’
Operationally, SOE was run by a regular army brigadier, Colin Gubbins, and was an autonomous organisation which, for cover purposes, pretended to be part of the War Office. It was divided into country sections for each of the occupied countries of Europe – except for France which had two country sections: F (for France) Section, staffed mainly by British officers, and RF (République Française) Section, staffed mainly by the French. Both sections sent their own agents into France, but their approaches were entirely different. The British-run F Section favoured small discrete spy networks built on independent ‘cells’, which had no contact with each other. This, they hoped, would limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. The French-run RF Section acted mainly as a logistics organisation for de Gaulle’s Free French spy service in London, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action). Unlike F Section, it preferred large, centrally controlled networks, more akin to an underground army.
SOE was nearly a year old and under considerable Whitehall criticism for delivering little of value to the wider war effort at the time that Jean Duboué’s intelligence started to arrive in Baker Street. Up to this moment almost all the secret agents SOE had dispatched to France had been sent to the Vichy zone non-occupée. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to get involved in the spying business, not just in the occupied zone, but also, given Bordeaux’s role as a submarine base, in an area of real strategic importance to the battle of the Atlantic.
SOE decided to send a secret agent of their own to Bordeaux to see what was going on.
Robert Leroy was in many ways an unsuitable person for such a pioneering and precarious mission. A former marine engineer from the Brest area, Leroy’s SOE training reports describe him as ‘shrewd … [but] suffering from the weaknesses of his class – a proneness to alcoholic indulgence and women’ – and add, in a comment which tells us more about SOE’s snobbery than it does about Leroy’s table manners, that he was ‘out of place in an Officers’ Mess’.
Under the codename ‘Alain’, Robert Leroy was landed from an SOE ‘ghost ship’ on a beach at Barcarès near Perpignan on the night of 19 September 1941. His orders were to make his way to Duboué’s contact, Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, and thence to Bordeaux, where he was to liaise with Jean Duboué, get a job in the port and assess the possibilities of attacking the German submarine pens. Unfortunately, the explosives Leroy was supposed to take with him somehow got lost during the landing, leaving him with no option but to set off on his mission without them. His journey to Bordeaux appears to have been both leisurely and bibulous, for he did not reach the city until mid-November, leaving behind a trail of debt and unpaid bar bills.
Arriving in Bordeaux, Leroy contacted Duboué, who used his influence to get the newcomer a job as a tractor driver in the docks. The new arrival quickly established a relationship with the director of warehouses in the Port de la Lune, to whom Leroy hinted that he was involved in black-market operations which could be of mutual profit to both of them. In return he had his card stamped ‘Indispensable pour le Port de Bordeaux’. This meant that Leroy, provided he wore his docker’s blue blouse, could roam anywhere he liked, safe from German checks and roll calls.
Other early information came from a fellow Breton marine engineer, who furnished Leroy with intelligence on the blockade-runners. These merchantmen were using Bordeaux in increasing numbers, unloading the precious raw materials (tungsten, molybdenum, rubber) needed by the German war machine and reloading their holds with blueprints and examples of new German technology – such as radar and proximity fuses – for the Japanese. In early 1942, Leroy sent back ‘detailed reports on the shipping and also a map of the docks’ to London. They arrived at a most propitious moment. On 9 May that year, the head of SOE and Minister of Economic Warfare, Lord Selborne, wrote to Prime Minister Churchill drawing his attention to the Bordeaux blockade-runners and their ‘most vital cargoes’ and proposing that it was now crucial to the national interest to ‘[stop] the trade altogether’.
Suddenly SOE found themselves, through the unlikely person of the ever-convivial Robert Leroy, with a ringside seat on what had just become a national strategic war target. London immediately recalled their secret agent to make a full report. It seems probable that Leroy returned to Britain via San Sebastián with Suzanne Duboué acting as his guide, for one of his first acts on reaching London on 29 May 1942 was to send a message back to Bordeaux through the BBC French Service, announcing his arrival with the words: ‘Bonjour à Mouton’.
After a full debriefing and a few days’ leave, Leroy was sent back to Bordeaux with instructions to continue his work and prepare for reinforcements. Bordeaux was about to become, along with Paris, SOE’s most important centre for spying and sabotage in occupied France.
2
ROGER LANDES (#ulink_80568fd9-ddd1-5296-a49c-af3bf49c1268)
The piece of paper that changed Roger Landes’s life appeared on the noticeboard of No. 2 Company, 2nd Operations Training Battalion of the Signals Training College in Prestatyn, North Wales, sometime during the last week of February 1942.
It was brief and to the point: Army Number 2366511 Signalman Roger Landes to report to Room 055 of the War Office in Whitehall on Wednesday 4 March 1942. A military rail warrant for a return journey to central London could be collected from the company office.
Given the vagaries of wartime travel it is likely that young Landes (he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday just before Christmas) went down to London the day before his interview, and spent the night at his parents’ apartment at 48 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16. Although the crescendo of the London blitz had passed by mid-summer 1941, the city’s overground rail system remained in many places unrepaired and everywhere prone to breakdown and delay. Most Londoners used the Underground to get around.
No one would have paid much attention to the small man in the ill-fitting serge uniform of a private of the Royal Signals, making his way this cold grey March day on the Piccadilly line towards central London. If he had spoken, they would have noted his heavy accent, and concluded that he was just another foreigner in a city full of foreigners – from the ‘exotic’ to the ordinary, from kings and queens to commoners – all taking refuge from the German onslaught across the Channel.
Born in December 1916 and brought up in Paris the son of a family of Jewish immigrants of Polish–Russian extraction, Roger Arthur Landes had inherited his British citizenship from his father, Barnet, a jeweller in the French capital, who, through an accident of fate, had been born in London. Sometime in the early 1930s, Barnet Landes was bankrupted by the Great Depression. Roger was forced to leave school at the age of thirteen and start work in a firm of quantity surveyors, while attending technical classes at night school. His parents emigrated to London in 1934, where they rented a small flat off Stamford Hill, an area much favoured by the Jewish community. Roger stayed on in France where, despite not having taken his baccalauréat, he managed to obtain a place at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On graduating (with the École’s Prix d’Honneur, among other prizes), he took furnished rooms in the French capital and set about learning the practical aspects of his trade as an architect and quantity surveyor.
By 1938, however, it was clear to all that war was coming. Landes knew that if he stayed in France he would soon receive his call-up papers for the French army, which, even half a century after the Dreyfus affair, still had a reputation for anti-Semitism. He left for England, moved in with his parents in Stamford Hill and secured a position as a clerk in the architectural department of London County Council. Later he was to say that his time in the LCC was one of the most enjoyable of his life.
On the outbreak of the war, Landes signed up immediately and was posted to the Rescue Service in Islington, where he used his architectural skills to assess bomb damage during the blitz. Two years later he was redeployed to the miserable, windswept, wintry conditions of Prestatyn holiday camp in North Wales for training as a radio operator. It was here in 1942 that the mysterious note on the No. 2 Company noticeboard found him and ordered him to attend the War Office on this March Wednesday morning.
Short (five foot four), slender and unprepossessing, Roger Landes was olive-skinned, with a narrow heart-shaped face, a rather sensitive (even feminine) mouth, oiled black hair carefully coiffed in the fashion of the day, and heavy eyebrows jutting out above eyes which combined humour and cunning in equal measure. He spoke English imperfectly and with a strong French accent, overlaid with the distinctive guttural ‘r’ and nasal cadences of the Jewish community of Stamford Hill. Though proud of being a Jew, he wore his religion lightly and was a rare practicant. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this slight figure amidst the press of wartime Londoners going about their daily business was that he was unusually unremarkable. A fellow British agent later observed: ‘his smallness and … particular facial features’ gave him an uncanny ability to vanish into the crowd, making him, even when undisguised, ‘a difficult man to track’.
The early months of 1942 were the coldest in northern Europe since 1895. The ground remained frozen solid under a carpet of thick hoar frost, which persisted into the early weeks of March. The scene that would have greeted Landes as he emerged from the London underground and walked along the Embankment would have been a sombre one. The parks by the river’s edge had long ago been dug up for vegetable allotments and air-raid shelters. A leaden Thames, indistinguishable from its mud banks, flowed sullenly under a blanket of freezing fog. The trees lining the north side of the river appeared as a row of ghostly mourners emerging from the mist, their lopped branches raised like stumps in supplication to a vengeful sky. Thin drifts of unswept snow still lay in gutters and along the sheltered edges of buildings.
Set back from the Thames, Whitehall, grimy from two centuries of coal fires, now also bore the pockmarks of the recent blitz. Every window was white-taped against bomb blast and curtained with condensation from the human fug inside; every door was protected by a tunnel of sandbags manned by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The War Office building itself had been hit and some of the great buildings of state had been turned into bombsites, which now sprouted young buddleia bushes, stalwart against the cold, and withered mats of brambles whose tentacles reached out across the rubble, hoping for the spring.
Landes made his way to Whitehall Court and the back entrance to the War Office building, where a sentry barred his way. He showed his orders and was passed on to a reception desk. From there an escort took him down long ill-lit corridors with black-and-white mosaic floors and brown panelling to a large room used only for interviews, whose grimy windows looked out onto the inner courtyard. The space, carpeted in linoleum which peeled back in one corner, was empty of ornament or furniture, save for a bare desk behind which sat a forlorn, out-of-place-looking secretary. Landes produced his letter and was ushered into a second, smaller room. Here seated at a desk facing him was a cadaverous-looking man in the perfectly cut uniform of a British major. A small coal fire glowed bravely in the middle of one wall but made little headway against the entrenched cold of a room which had been inadequately heated all winter.
The major rose, extended his right hand and – waving the other at the upright chair positioned opposite him – said: ‘I am Major Gielgud. Do sit down.’
The interview did not last long, for the major’s speech was terse and his manner brusque in the fashion of these urgent times. ‘We are sending British personnel into France who can speak fluent French and use wireless sets – radio operators who will be able to pass for French people. From the report I have on your skill in wireless communications, and as you have lived in France for so long, you are the perfect man to send, should you be willing to go. There are three ways to send you to France; by parachute, by motor-boat, or by fishing boat from Gibraltar. The danger is you may be caught, in which case you will probably be tortured and sent to a certain death. The fact that you are a Jew is not going to make life easier for you, as I am sure you understand. Will you accept? Yes or no? You have five minutes to think about it.’
Landes thought about it very little, before saying yes.
‘Good,’ said Gielgud, who was the brother of the great actor, John. ‘Then return to your unit. Say nothing to anyone, even your parents, and we will be in touch.’
Some days later Landes received another order: he was to report on 17 March to a flat in Orchard Court, Portman Square, and introduce himself as ‘Robert Lang’.
The door at Orchard Court, a 1930s mansion block, was opened by a man in butler’s uniform, who welcomed him with a butler’s smile. His name was Arthur Parks, and he spoke perfect French, having worked for Barclays Bank in Paris before the war. Parks led the new recruit to a grand room where he was introduced to Captain André Simon, who in peacetime had been a wine merchant. Simon was also brief, informing Landes that he was now formally a member of the Special Operations Executive, with the rank of temporary second lieutenant. He was, henceforth and for the rest of his life, subject to the Official Secrets Act and would receive an initial salary of five guineas a week. Captain Simon then gave Landes £10 with which to buy two khaki shirts and ordered him to report back to Orchard Court with a small overnight bag the following day.
Arriving the next morning at Orchard Court, Landes found he was not alone. He and another nine students, all young men and all of them looking equally uncomfortable in ill-fitting army uniforms, were swiftly introduced to each other using the aliases by which they would be known throughout their period of training. They were a hybrid collection, whose only common feature, as far as Landes could see, was their ability to speak French as a native. Most had dual identities, having been brought up in France as the children of mixed French–British marriages. Some had British parents who had chosen to educate their children in local French schools. One was the son of a well-known Francophone family from Mauritius; he was the first, but by no means last, SOE recruit to come from the tiny British colony.
Introductions over, they were bundled into a small bus and driven out of London, along the A30 through Guildford to the little village of Wanborough, close under the northern flank of the Hog’s Back. Here they turned up a small farm track to a brick-built three-gabled Elizabethan house set about with outhouses, sheds and workers’ cottages.
Wanborough Manor (known by SOE as Special Training School No. 5) was in many ways an odd choice for a spy school. Plainly visible from the road only 200 metres away, and famed for having one of the largest medieval wooden barns in southeast England, it sat right in the middle of the small hamlet of Wanborough. The house had a cellar, used for indoor instruction, a kitchen, a substantial sitting room and a dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms on the top two floors dedicated to staff accommodation and a small church in the grounds, where interdenominational services were held to cater for the needs of SOE’s wide variety of students. Physical training was held on the two lawns, back and front, which during fine weather in the summer months were also employed as occasional outdoor classrooms.
SOE’s trainee agents were not the first unusual visitors to Wanborough. Gladstone’s parliamentary secretary had lived there and the Grand Old Man wrote his resignation speech in the Manor’s study. During Gladstone’s time as prime minister, Queen Victoria had also paid a visit to Wanborough, accompanied by Bismarck. The two marked the occasion by planting two giant sequoias on the front lawn, each adorned with a cast-iron memorial plaque recording the moment. What SOE’s new recruits thought about sitting in the shade of the Iron Chancellor’s memorial tree, while being trained to set Nazi-occupied Europe ‘ablaze’, is not recorded.
