Ten Thousand Eyes

On Monday morning, 15th June 1942, Alain de Beaufort, the prospective de Gaule recruit, picked up Renault, Edith and their children Jean-Claude, Catherine, Cecile and baby Michel in Alex’s old Peaugeot car. In order to not draw attention to themselves, they were going to stay two nights in the village of Riec-sur-Belon, what is situated just a mile and a half from Pont-Aven, the river port from which they would embark on the dangerous journey onboard the 'Deux Anges'. Courtaud, the radio operator would come with them as far as the embarkation point to maintain contact with London.

Early the next morning, Courtaud got through to London and confirmed the rendezvous with the N51 trawler on the Lorient fishing bank for the following day, Wednesday, 17th June 1942. All they could do now was wait. Renault, knowing all too well the dangers which lay ahead for his family and himself on this attempt to reach England, still considered it was the correct course of action. The alternative was to remain in France with the Gestapo desperate to locate him. He knew he could not remain at liberty long if he remained, but one thing he had decided, keeping it from Edith and all of his agents; he was not going to be captured alive. If he was going to die, he would go down fighting and bring as many of the enemy with him as was possible in the circumstances which prevailed.

That Tuesday evening, Edith and Renault left the children in the care of the hotel proprietress and the whole group took a horse carriage to the Moulin Rosmadee in Pont-Aven for dinner. The Inn was a highly rated establishment which still does brisk business to this day. I found it on Google ‘Street View’ here, having changed little from the description in the book:

‘…a weather beaten wisteria-covered inn with black old timbers sited by a thundering weir which was – and still is – celebrated as a gourmet’s paradise.’

Edith carried the brief case containing the dispatches and Renault was almost invisible beneath two enormous cardboard cartons of dispatches and the biscuit box containing Duchez’s map. The thought suddenly occurred to Renault that a horse drawn buggy such as the one they were now riding in might attract less attention than a car in the morning when they were setting out to meet the ‘Deux Anges’. He took the opportunity to arrange with the driver to collect the whole group and to cement the bargain he invited the man to dine with them in the Moulin Rosmadee.

As the group, made up of Renault, Edith, Courtaud, de Beaufort and Alex sat down to dinner, laughing and chatting as if at a pre-war dinner party, the driver seemed rather bewildered by his gay and noisy compatriots. However, it was the correct attitude to show in the circumstances. Renault had left the cardboard cartons and the biscuit box outside in the lounge area near the main doorway where they were in line of sight but far enough away as to seem separate and un-associated with the group of diners.

Sometime during the meal, Edith turned to her husband and said ‘Look dear…’

The hallway of the inn was suddenly filled with men wearing neat blue uniforms of the German submarine service and two of them were standing right beside the biscuit box. Then six of the officers from the group took a table overlooking the garden and suddenly the biscuit box was covered in peaked caps and the holstered side arms. The Map was as safe now as it was when Duchez placed in in temporary storage in ‘’Albert’s’’ greatcoat in the Café des Touristes in Caen!

Renault relaxed again and added a brief silent prayer of deliverance.

At 9pm, with the darkness now enveloping the rushing water of the river outside, they retrieved the cartons and biscuit box from beneath the pile of naval hats and made their way down to the bank of the river where the 'Deux Anges' lay at anchor in the gathering darkness. They stowed the cartons and the biscuit tin onboard in readiness for the morning departure.

When they were back on the quay, Alex told them to be at the same spot at 6am in the morning without fail. The 'Deux Anges' had to depart at that time in order to merge with the other fishing vessels going down the estuary. Every second boat in the fleet was boarded and searched at the control point three miles downstream at Port-Manech before being allowed to proceed out to sea. If they were late joining the other boats, it was inevitable they would be searched.

At 4am Renault woke the children and told them of the plan to attempt escape to England. In order to reinforce the need for them to be absolutely quite at the control point, he did not sugar coat the danger they faced. Despite their young age, the children picked up on the sternness in their father’s voice. They nodded understanding in unison.

Renault had arranged with the landlady to leave the front door unlocked, stating he had arranged for a horse carriage to collect them for an early start for a day by the seaside at Quimper. As Courtard appeared from his room to confirm their departure with London, Renault went silently downstairs to check the door was unlocked. When he did, he found it still locked; the landlady had forgotten and he had no idea which room was hers. He ran from hallway to kitchen trying all the side doors. All were locked. Blind panic seized him.

Five fifteen came and went with no sign of the landlady and worse still, no sign of the horse carriage. Eventually, both the landlady and the horse carriage arrived and they reached the square in Pont-Aven where de Beaufort was waiting for them in the town square. It was now six fifteen and Alex, impassive with anger, had the engine of the 'Deux Anges' already running at the quay.

As the old lobster boat made it’s way down the estuary in the gathering light, Renault gazed to both sides and watched out-cropping of rocks covered in yellow furze bushes slip past and wondered if he would ever see his beloved France again. His deep thoughts were interrupted by Alex who now told them they were just ten minutes from the control point at Port-Manech and to take their places in the boat’s tiny lockers. Renault, carrying the baby, and de Beaufort were assigned the bow locker. As both men stumbled forward on the deck, the skipper, a salt of the earth Breton named Louis Yequel remembers thinking at the time that he would have had no part in the venture were it not for the children. If the Germans so much as lifts one locker lid we are done for, he thought.

In the bow locker, the smells of stale fish, tar and petrol fumes from the engine were nauseating in the tiny space which measured a mere two foot high and about five foot square. Both men lay down in the darkness with the baby on Renault’s chest. Edith and the other children were in the side lockers. Renault fumbled in his coat pocket a bottle of milk in order to keep the baby occupied as soon as the engine stopped and the 'Deux Anges' pulled into the line of boats at the control point on the quay at Port-Manech. However, Michel having been fed at 4am as usual, had no interest in the bottle and began to stir on his father’s chest. The rocking of the boat became more severe now that they were at the mouth of the estuary and conditions in the lockers became almost intolerable. The baby began to protest loudly and now that the boat engine was turned off, they could hear the Germans walking up and down the quay as every second boat was boarded and searched. At the risk of the baby choking, Renault had no choice but to give Michel a chocolate sweet to keep him from crying. The 'Deux Anges' was the odd boat out and was not searched. Life and death came down to that stroke of luck.

The boat engine started up again and they proceeded out to sea. The Germans had just checked the crew list without boarding before allowing the boat to proceed. Alex lifted the latch, telling them to remain where they were for the time being. They could not risk the other boats seeing refugees emerging onto the deck. There were about twelve boats in the fleet that morning and it took some time for them to drift apart while laying out their nets. The 'Deux Anges' fished for an hour before moving on, as was normal behavior.

Now they faced the new danger of the N51 not making the rendezvous at 4pm. This would mean the 'Deux Anges' would have to return to Pont-Aven in the evening as only the larger trawlers were allowed to stay out overnight. All day the escapees had to endure the lockers as Focke-Wulf fighters maintained a constant roaming patrol over the area.

At last, just before 4pm, Alex raised the locker lid to say there was a two masted trawler from Cameret, which technically had no right on the Lorient fishing bank, spotted ahead. Rigid security meant that neither boat could give the pre-arranged signal before the appointed time. Just as Renault though it safe to emerge from the cramped stinking locker, a German plane roared towards them and circled both vessels. After a few circuits, the pilot seemed satisfied and flew on, leaving the two just 300 yards apart now. The signal was given and eventually both boats came alongside each other at the agreed rendezvous point Latitude 47.37N, Longitude 04.2W.

Now with all but himself safely onboard the N51, Renault turned to the crew and shook hands with each man in turn. His trusted agent Alex, the skipper Yequel and the Breton brothers who made up the rest of the 'Deux Anges' crew.

‘God bless each of you, my friends and thank you all.’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

Then he stretched upwards, hung for a second above the swell, and clambered aboard the N51 where sailors crouched beside the gunwale, Sten guns at the ready and as he touched the deck, he could see more weapons hidden under fishing nets. The sight of these sailors and their weapons added to Renault’s sense of joy at the success of the rendezvous; these were free men from a free country. Although they were not yet out of harm’s way, he knew he was no longer under the heel of a tyrannical regime.

As he watched the little 'Deux Anges' motoring back to Pont-Aven, the red sail slowly disappearing in the distance, Renault felt a pang of regret for doubting and despising the little boat that had now delivered his family and himself out of the darkness.

All that Wednesday evening, the N51 sailed northwards towards her home port in the Scilly Isles at eight knots. Her young Breton skipper, Lt. Danial Lomenech RNVR, knew they were still in range of German patrol craft. His passengers slept on cabin floors and passage ways. Next morning, Thursday 18th June 1942. Lomenech issued instructions to Renault to have his party remain below out of sight and by evening they had reached the dangerous Raz de Sein half way up the Brittany west coast. In this area, there was one spine chilling moment as two small German warships looked like they were about to hail them but at the last moment they turned away for Brest.

The next day Friday saw them in home waters and the N51 suddenly showed herself in her true colours with the White Ensign fluttering at her masthead and twin Lewis gun mountings gleaming in the sunlight fore and aft. At 8am, two twin engine RAF Beaufighters appeared in front of them not 150 feet above the sea and weaved and circled all day in relays like gulls after a real trawler. The aerial escort had been arranged between Dewavrin and Commander Slocum. At just after 10am on the Saturday, they anchored at Tresco, where a MTB was waiting for them and the skipper, Lieutenant (later Commander) D.M. Curtis who had commanded the last MTB to leave St. Nazaire after the famous raid just three months previously, took Renault and the family to Dartmouth Naval Base. On board the MTB (I’m assuming not the same boat which was shot full of holes during Operation Chariot), were another naval officer and an intelligence man.

‘Well now Colonel Remy, what have you brought us apart from your family and yourself?’ asked the man in plain clothes.

‘Maps’ answered Renault, opening the biscuit tin to reveal Duchez’s map which, when unrolled, extended more than the width of cabin. All three men were dumbfounded at the sight of what now lay before them.

‘My God,’ said Curtis, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. How on earth did you get hold of this?' And Renault had to reply truthfully then that he did not know – nor did he find out the story at all until after the war. In Dartmouth, they were transferred to Commander Slocum’s yacht as his guests.

Renault knew then he was back in a free world.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

On Monday morning, 22nd June 1942, Dewavrin and his deputy Manuel were sorting through the vast horde of documents which had been in Renault’s cartons. Both men’s desk were inches deep in paper and it took some time before Duchez’s map surfaced. When it did de Gaule’s intelligence chief stopped in his tracks and gave a silent whistle. Reaching for the red phone marked “Most Secret”, he turned the dial to “Scramble” and called Sir Claude Dansey.

‘I’m sending something over that I’d like you to have a look at urgently.’

Knowing the coast of Normandy well, Dewavrin divined correctly that this map was something of more than routine interest. Over the next few weeks, the number of people who became interested in the map even Dewavrin himself could not have foreseen.

The focal point of the interest rested in a bleak basement called the ‘Martian Room’ in Storey’s Gate, St. James’s Park where a few self-taught Intelligence experts had unwittingly become Britian’s greatest authorities on what was going on across the Channel. ‘Martian’ was the code name for anything relating to a then far distant invasion plan.

Headed by an Oxford don named John L. Austin, the ‘Martians’ or Theatre Intelligence Section, G.H.Q., Home Forces had been set up to sift the networks’ dispatches for the benefit of interested Air, Military and Naval departments.

Duchez’s map, as Austin recalled later, scored a very great hit with the Martian team – it was the first genuine home-produced information about German defenses in France which Britain had received up to that point in time.

Firstly, it showed the level of troop dispositions along the Normandy coast was almost three times less that what other sources had confirmed were stationed north of the Seine. Even weaker than the level of troop dispositions was the density of coastal artillery sites. For those sites which were shown on the map, it was obvious that the layout of bunkers and blockhouses were adhering rigidly to the old Siegfried Line West Wall specifications. Later they found that even a few already build had not been spotted by aerial reconnaissance.

With the help of Royal Engineer staff, the Martians transcribed Duchez’s map onto a more manageable working copy with contour lines added, becoming the star item in the “Martian Report” issued to planners and inter-services committees during the first week of July 1942.

‘It turned their attention sharply to this weakly defended section of the French coast, showing that many earlier estimates of German strength in Normandy had been alarmist and that a good deal of photographic interpretation had been in error,’ said Austin later.

Meanwhile, Dewavrin very much wanted his map back from the British. It had dawned on him that there might be a small chance of producing a good enough fake map to be smuggled back across the Channel to Caen before the theft was discovered. Trying to recall a top secret map from interested Services departments, however was more easily said than done and for some numbers of days he was stonewalled. Then in the second week of July, his idea died a sudden death. A note arrived on his desk from Max Petit, Renault’s deputy in Paris. Decoded, it simply stated:

‘SEARCH FOR MISSING MAP IS PROCEEDING IN CAEN AREA’​

Even if it was possible to do so, returning the map was now a useless venture; the Germans had discovered one of the 12 copies was missing.

Back in Caen, things had been deceptively quite during first couple of weeks in June. Then one morning Leblond, the young police inspector got a call from one of his informants. He immediately passed on the message to Meslin, the government engineer, and Torres, the Century security officer:

‘Their rounding up the draughtsmen,’ was all he said and hung up.

Drawing up blueprints for the Normandy coastline was the job of Oberbaudirektor Weiss, Todt Organisation’s chief engineer at the Paris H.Q. of Einsatzgruppe West (area control sector of Holland, Belgium and France). Each fresh set of plans which Weiss drew up had first to be approved by Berlin before coming back to Paris for onward distribution to area HQ and sub sectors.

It was lucky for Duchez that the map he took had been one of twelve duplicates which had already passed through “Out” trays in Paris, Berlin and St. Malo. Thus when Bauleiter Keller, in Caen, discovered that his set was one short, he at first assumed that another department had retained it for study. The chief of Caen’s Todt Organisation, Bauleiter Engenieur Ott, seems to have assumed the same thing. For several days various departments were engaged in the age old pastime of passing the buck. But at last, it became painfully obvious that the map was now a long way away from the Avenue Bagatelle.

However, both Keller and Ott trod very carefully. For obvious reasons they made no attempt to contact Burger, the St. Malo chief, much less the fearsome Weiss in Paris. Neither von Rundstedt, the defender of the Wall, nor Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, head of the armed forces High Command, became party to the secret of the lost map.

Todt Organisation Caen, which had a vested interest in keeping the story quiet, also had their own mechanism for carrying out a search without even troubling Helmut Bernard’s Caen Gestapo. Their security detachment, an S.S. squad under Sturmbannfuehrer (S.S. Major) Friedrich Riekert, held direct responsibility for the well being of all secret documents; it was in Riekert’s interests too, without making it obvious how serious the loss was.

Riekert launched a serious of hit and run raids. At the Café de Touristes, Paul the owner watched in bewilderment, on what he took to be a routine raid, as the S.S. poked long spikes down the stuffing of the seating in the café. Not being aware of the reason for the search, he was worried the broken down boiler ‘post box’ might get a going over too, but the Germans never gave that a second glance. In other city cafes too the search continued. Meslin, reading a copy of the Le Figaro over a coffee, had the newspaper torn from his hands and held up to the light and examined page by page.

As Leblond had warned, draughtsmen from all Government departments were called in for questioning. It occurred to Riekert that local talent might have been employed in making a copy of the map.

Inn keepers and hotel managers had to wade through questionnaires regarding any guests which had stayed with them during the previous six weeks. Well over a score of innocent citizens of Caen had the chilling experience of being questioned by Riekert’s thugs, but all were released eventually for lack of evidence.

Just about the only person who was not questioned was the real culprit. The painter’s boast seems to have held good, for incredible as it seemed to the men of Century, there is no evidence that Duchez was ever suspected by the Germans. His air of benign idiocy had paid off, while an electrician who had done some work at the Avenue Bagatelle HQ a few weeks previously was held prisoner and questioned for three days, in sweating terror, not even knowing why he was arrested until after the war. When he finally did discover the reason in 1945, his comments were understandable but unprintable!

Girard later said:

‘That was the thing about Duchez – he could get away with things with the Germans that no other man stood a chance of doing.’

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

In his enthusiasm to see France free, Renault was a bit ahead of schedule. The talk in London during the summer of 1942 was indeed all of invasion, but as a basic principle, not a stern reality. Neither American nor British planners then contemplated an assault in the area covered by Duchez’s map. The British pondered an assault west and east of Le Harve on beaches from Deauville to Dieppe. The Americans talked of a push in the spring of 1943, seizing bridgeheads that could be consolidated and expanded between Le Harve and Boulogne.

For a little while yet, the map remained with the ‘Martians’ for further study. In Paris, Girard sought the guidance of Colonel Touny and Berthelot on the future of the new Century network. Touny, whose military brain was probably the most incisive of all in the whole French Resistance movement, had drawn inspiration from his view of Duchez’s map.

‘In future,’ he said after some discussion, ‘that is the field on which we should concentrate.’

Girard, assuming he meant the stealing of more German maps, stated he doubted if Duchez’s coup, spectacular though it was, could be pulled off a second time. Touny explained his thoughts:

‘It would be useless if it could. Remember above all that the Germans are not fools and that they have such a thing as the Abwehr. What this agent did may have been valuable, because it possessed the element of surprise. Now, however they may do one of two things; they either make it easy for us to remove what will be false and misleading maps, or assuming some of the locations on the map we have are not yet built, they may revise the remaining building plans completely. In either case, a check on the building programme as shown must be carried out.’

Girard was not slow on the uptake. ‘In other words, mon colonel, we make our own maps?’

‘Precisely; we make our own.’ Touny replied.

For some days Girard pondered this latest problem. His new network had little experience in any form of espionage, let alone map making. There was of course the sculptor Douin’s map, but there were very few agents who could legitimately gain access to a church belfry in Normandy. However, everyone knew that maps produced on French soil by local agents were worth far more than any number of stolen maps of doubtful pedigree. There was precedent for this. In ports such as Lorient and St. Nazaire, Renault’s agents had been busily sketching scale diagrams of locks and torpedo nets and the dimensions of dry docks for the last two years.

In addition, on Dewavrin’s instructions from London, every network in France had to produce some maps of suitable landing grounds in their areas. Century agents like Duchez and Arsene, on their daily rounds, kept an eye open for flat terrain 600 yards square which the Air Ministry had stipulated, before then pacing them out at night and feeding the details to the few agents with mapping abilities who in turn used the standard Michelin Road Map scale of 1:250000 or one inch to four miles. The landing grounds were also marked up with any advantages or disadvantages in the map legends – high tension wires that could bring down a low flying Lysander or wheat fields which could be safely used to hide canisters of supplies until harvest time.

However, more intensive mapping was now required on a much larger area and scale. Girard thought of a particular map made by young Robert Thomas covering the Bayeux area. It had been a good map and it impressed Century’s chief with its neatness and attention to detail. Girard approached the young man one evening during a meeting in Caen at his headquarters in rue St. Jean.

‘What we want from you young Thomas is all the information we can get on the Atlantic Wall in map form.’

Robert, conscious that everyone was looking at him, smiled his shy rather charming smile, blushed and murmured:

‘To want it is one thing, to get it is another.’

However, Robert Thomas was secretly pleased at being tasked with the job. He had been a Caen mechanic until the war came, but his secret ambition was to work with maps. Whenever he became fractious as a youngster his father, who worked under Meslin as an Inspector of Roads and Bridges, was always able to restore order by drawing him a map. Thomas, a frustrated cartographer, saw his opportunity to really make a difference with this order from his chief.

Then the enormity of the task suddenly dawned on him.

‘But what about dept and area?’ he asked.

Girard, not fully grasping what was now plain in Thomas’s mind, replied:

‘It should not be too difficult. You will do the maps to a dept of one kilometre inland only.’

Girard was seeing the Atlantic Wall purely as a matter of beach defences. It was of course a far more complex animal than that to tame as future events were to prove.

Girard added: ‘Technically you will be covering the area from St. Malo to Le Harve, but as we have no agents in either location just yet, you will concentrate your efforts between Cherbourg and Trouville.’

Robert Thomas was deep in thought as he cycled home. How in the first place to get the type of map which was required? It was specified to him the type must be what the French called Cartes Etat-Major (General Staff Maps). He knew the scale of 1:50,000, or one inch to the mile, required 1060 of these maps to cover France. In peace time one simply went to the local stationary shop to buy the road maps, but these General Staff maps were a very different proposition and the Germans, with their usual efficiency, had been quick to secure almost all stocks as soon as the occupation was complete in 1940.

All the Thomas household were staunch Resistants. Papa Louis was the nominal head of the family, but the real polarizing force of the family was Mama who inspired everyone in the belief that every single day in this war there was an enemy to which you could give no quarter. She was proud that her husband and son were good Resistants, her daughter Jeanne who worked in Meslin’s department was in the movement too, and also her other daughters Madeleine who worked for the Chief of Police in Trouville and Marthe who worked at the Prefecture in Caen.

Robert knew there was only one obvious source for the maps required.

‘Look Papa,’ he said at supper that night, ‘I need some of the maps you use at work – as many sheets of the Cartes Etat-Major as you can get in order to copy them.’

His father knew not to ask why Robert needed the maps. ‘All right Robert, my son, I’ll do the best for you that I can.’

The next night Papa Louis came home with four maps tucked under his coat. It was a start but the collection of maps in Meslin’s department only covered the area for which the government engineer was responsible – from the fishing port of Hornfleur thirty five miles north east of Caen to Isigny, forty miles west at the mouth of the river Vire. Four sheets of the Cartes Etat-Major series covered this seventy miles of coastline. For the rest of Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula, Meslin’s department held no maps at all.

But it was a start at least; Century was now in the map making business.

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

For an entire week Robert Thomas worked on hand copying the four maps. From just after dinner in the evening until dawn the following morning in a shed across the street his eyes strained under the dim orange flame of a single candle. He could not risk a brighter light as the Gestapo were known to check addresses where late night lights were observed.

By the weekend of that week, each of the four copies was complete, with every last detail traced and inked in, grid references checked and landmarks as clear as in an aerial view – the beach at Le Hamel, a sixteenth of an inch but plain enough, the church at Asnelles-sur-Mer, and Ouistreham lighthouse, visible even though scaled down to the size of pin heads.

Nobody said much at breakfast but there was a quivering sense of excitement. Papa had to return the originals to the office without arousing suspicion. Jeanne was to take Robert’s copies and somehow make enough mimeographed copies for the heads of the network to begin operations.

Making the copies turned out to be easier than expected. When Jeanne arrived at the office that morning it was as busty as an ant’s nest, with clerks scurrying everywhere with slide rules and rolls of tracing paper. Obviously something big was afoot. She cornered a passing clerk and asked him what was going on.

‘Oh the usual – extra work but no extra rations for doing it. The Port Commandant wants tracings of every map in our area,’ the man replied.

Century was in luck. Late the previous afternoon the pretentiously polite Karl Hoefa had called on Meslin and explained the Kreigsmarine Wehr were making a new survey of the defenses along the Wall. He called for several dozen maps of each sector to be traced and mimeographed within twenty four hours. Meslin had then told his assistant Alex Jourdan, who was in charge of the Service Maritime which held dossiers on all local ports, to get busy.

As Jourdan turned to go, Meslin said quietly:

‘You’ll make sure these tracings are delivered to the right quarters, won’t you?’

Jourdan sucked on his meerschaum pipe, said nothing, grinned and left the office.

Meslin could not order additional copies himself for fear of a stool pigeon in the building noting it and reporting to the Gestapo. It may seem strange that Meslin did not know at this time of Robert Thomas’s efforts and that Jeanne and her father, both members of his staff, were also members of his Century network. Such tortuous security called for patience and circumvention but it paid dividends in the Resistance movement, preventing infiltration and saving many lives.

Events moved faster than Girard had anticipated. In the general confusion of executing Hoefa’s rush order, Jeanne ran off six copies of each map and delivered them to her brother. A few days later, it transpired that Jourdan, suspecting that Robert Thomas, his friend of eight years when they had done military service together, was an active Resistant, brought his friend a further roll of tracings. From then on, Jourdan became Robert’s No. 2 in Century’s new cartographic service with Douin, the sculptor and repairer of church steeples, also helping out.

Each time the Kreigsmarine Wehr erected a new fortification in a port, they notified Jourdan’s office and through this process, Jourdan became aware of an extensive program of defensive works at the port of Ouistreham which could take ships of up to six thousand tons and by means of a canal, linked Caen to the sea.

‘It’s part of my job to note new defense locations on our charts for reference. Each time I do, I’ll bring you a tracing,’ Jourdan told his friend.

Jourdan was the first member of the new network to be officially classed as a ‘P1’ – a part time agent, who really pursued his Resistance from his office stool with unwittingly German sanction.

By mid July, the first map was ready to be sent to London. The network members were pleased with themselves, despite referencing just twelve of the seventy miles shown on the maps now available. Considering what they were later able to achieve, it might seem a trifle amateurish but in those early days Century was restricted by the lack of agents in the appropriate places in Normandy. This first map covered a mere twelve miles in it’s details of fortifications – between Le Hamel on what was later to become the eastern flank of Gold Beach, to Luc-sur-Mer.

Even the information on this map had been mainly provided by Meslin and Jourdan from information they had gleamed while on sanctioned trips to the coast during the course of their work. Meslin for example knew there were mines sown somewhere in the two and a half miles between Ver-sur-Mer and Graye-sur-Mer. There were mines again along the sea front at Luc; he had driven past one afternoon with Hoefa in the Port Commandant’s armoured car with a Schmisser armed bodyguard sitting in the front seat with the driver. They passed bricked up boarding houses and summer sea front villas. All along the sea front Meslin noted the ‘Achtung Minen’ signs attached to the barbed wire.

But what about the detail Girard had pressed for? – the length of the minefields, the dept inland and the type of mine employed. Meslin didn’t know.

‘We must just show the areas which are mined,’ he told Jourdan quietly, hiding his disappointment. ‘It’s a beginning anyway.’

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

We are now approaching the end of July 1942 in the Century Network story, but before I move on, I wanted to put up something more on that 'Scarlet Pimpernel' sea voyage of escape by Colonel Gilbert Renault ('Remy') and his family back the previous month between Wednesday the 17th and Saturday 20th June 1942. Specifically, I am anxious to show the enormity of the voyage undertaken with four small children. The map below shows the first part up to the treacherous Raz de Sein passage...

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...and then the remainder of the voyage, ending at Dartmouth Naval Base, which I estimate is about 500kms:

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I also found this great photo of the escapees onboard the N51 trawler:

Left to right is Alex Leger, Edith Renault, Ted Nash, baby Michel Renault, N51 skipper Lt. Danial Lomenech and Col. Gilbert Renault ('Remy').​

More follows...
Regards,
Pat​

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To continue from post #44 above...

The same issue cropped up over every defence they knew about – the detail. For example, the Germans had an underground tunnel behind the sea front at Luc-sur-Mer, but for what purpose? Nobody knew. Within their area of operations, it was easy enough to see heavy earthworks, strange embrasures in the cliffs and so on, but the finer detail – the thickness of the concrete, the caliber of the guns – defeated them.

A few days after the first map had been sent to London, Robert Thomas hit upon the solution one night as he lay awake pondering the problem. At the next meeting he took his courage in his hands and raised it with Girard. The idea involved recruiting more agents which Robert knew would not sit well with his boss, but he pressed home his plan of using a few more agents to produce maps of the whole Normandy coastline.

Only agents who lived on the coast, Robert argued, would have a chance of studying the fortifications in detail. Casual visitors, unless they kept moving, were at once suspect. Then why not appoint agents on the coast to hold a permanent watching brief? The liaison agent’s role would then be reduced to collecting the information and doing a quick visual check on the grid references.

Girard believed in the efficiency of small units and said so with force in response to this idea. To have hundreds of agents keeping written information all over their houses or outbuildings and the liaison agents then risking their lives once a week to bring it back to Caen, would be, he argued, the height of folly.

But Robert was ready with his counter thrust –

‘No, each one of the new agents would be provided with their own segment of the map – which would show just their own area.’

From now on, the Cartes Etat-Major sheets would serve as control maps at his home. Each agent would be supplied with a segment for his or her local area at a scale 1.5 times larger than the control maps. These local maps would cover an area no larger than about thirteen square miles and almost everyone had permission to travel that distance within their own locality. If one of these coastal agents saw a blockhouse being constructed, they would have months of observation time to establish the fine details of the construction which London were now seeking. No casual visitor could hope to match this level of observation however experienced in espionage. The details could be noted on cigarette paper and then transcribed onto the agent’s own map using local features to confirm grid references. The agent’s only concern then was to find a hiding place in his home for a piece of mapping paper eight by six inches in size.

Though Robert had come up with this brilliant plan independently, it was exactly the concept that Andre Dewavrin in London had envisaged when he first became head of de Gaule’s BCRA two years previously.

Robert finished his argument triumphantly with:

‘In that way, without risk, we can make a map of Normandy – a living map.’

Eventually Girard approved the plan and the task of recruiting the local agents began. However, to scout for new blood along the coast, liaison agents needed more than just a pass permitting them to travel through a locality; they needed a reason to linger and make contacts – reasons valid enough to hoodwink not just the Germans, but also the little core of collaborators that poisoned every community.

Once again, Duchez went to see his old army buddy Henri Caillet at the Maire. The poor man went rigid with fear as the painter cheerfully stated his needs within a few yards of Hauptmann Kramm. In the end his friend agreed to provide not only identity cards but complete sets of papers, false ration cards, permission papers to own a bicycle and signed permission to be in the zone – not granted unless the applicant possessed a bicycle. Henri began carrying these documents home at lunch time, while his wife Alice, who worked in a different department, carried home the Maire’s official stamp hidden in her powder compact. Duchez then took the batches of documents to his home where Odette was waiting for them and immediately got busy inventing false names and appending bogus but official looking signatures.

To top matters off, Arsene the plumber had successfully spirited out the official stamp of Feldkommandatur 723 from the commandeered Hotel Malherbe where he was working on the central heating system. No set of passes into the coastal zone were complete without this stamp.

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

By July 1942, Century was planning a comprehensive mapping campaign of all ports within their area of operations in addition to the other fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. In support of this effort, Robert Thomas and Odette were producing around one dozen sets of false identity papers per week. In addition, Robert’s sister Madeleine, who worked in the office of the Chief of Police in Trouville, obtained both a sample of his signature and his official stamp.

Other official stamps were soon added to the collection, so much so that it became important for a liaison agent traveling within the forbidden zone to remember on any one particular day, whether he was representing the Prefecture at Trouville, the repair depot at Caen Station, the Caen Tramways Board or the gas works at Deauville. Eventually there were over 150 official stamps in the collection, all safely hidden in the big wicker laundry basket in Mama Thomas’s kitchen. They knew that the hygienic Germans fought shy of rifling through mounds of soiled French linen.

As to the target ports, all were agreed that the Cotentin Peninsula was to take priority. Duchez’s stolen map showed this area to be the most strongly defended, with most of the works being under the remit of the Navy rather than the Todt Organisation, and consequently of a higher quality of construction. The north coast between Cap de la Hague to Pointe de Barfleur measured only fifty miles but already in this summer of 1942 held 26 medium or heavy batteries.

To crack the Cherbourg nut, Girard had appointed Jacques Bertin, Comte de la Hautiere, a local aristocrat, whose family home was Chateau de la Brisette, located on the Peninsula about 5.5kms NE of Valognes. His parents lived in the Chateau but their son, whose cover name was Jacques Moulines, never ventured home during the occupation for fear of endangering his family.

Just as fearless as Duchez, Moulines had one weakness; beautiful women, and it was not unusual for his chief to be out of contact with him for days if he was thus engaged! Yet his was one of the most difficult tasks of all Century’s field organisers. He was a pre-war aviator who now rode an old battered bicycle up and down the Peninsula, always hatless with nothing but an old leather flying jacket to keep out the cold and wet. On more than one occasion he rode past his home, freezing cold and wet to the skin, seeing the lights of the Chateau through the trees as he rode, but never daring to seek shelter for the night.

Moulines’s ‘patch’ was indeed the most densely occupied. There were 37,000 Germans in Cherbourg alone and the port of Cherbourg and the fifty square miles around was tough not only in terms of fortifications but in terms of troops and vigilance. Moulines had to move warily in country like this despite it being his own back yard.

This high density of enemy troops in Cherbourg shows the weakness of his position, but many of the citizens had seen them goose-stepping arrogantly through the streets - their streets - two years earlier, and that paradoxically was Jacques Moulines strength.

‘And we shall need more agents than I'd thought,’ Moulines reported after taking stock and when Girard asked why, he explained: ‘Because there's such a restriction on circulation; you need permission to move even from one canton to another.’ (A canton is an administrative sub-division of many square miles and the Department of the Manche, in which Cherbourg stood, had eleven.)

Girard sighed wearily, resigned to yet more agents, and told him to do his best. Moulines did rather better. Using Touny's military contacts, who were geared to an armed uprising rather than to routine intelligence, he first sought agents as close as possible to the A.A. batteries marked on Duchez's stolen map.

Above and beyond the port of Carentan there were five heavy batteries ringing the navigable canal, but there was also a plumber named Roger Foineau detailed for watch on the defences.

As head of the Cherbourg cell, Moulines recruited a whole-sale grocer named Yves Gresselin, whose 120 agents were concentrating on troop movements and shipping as well as defences. Both these last appointments were a better plant than Moulines then knew. With the zeal of a chain-store boss intent on expansion, the young count opened branches everywhere. Wherever he could, he went right to the top. In St. Lô, an important rail-head twenty-five miles from the coast, he was lucky to find Adolphe Franck, a schoolmaster from Lorraine, speaking faultless German. He persuaded Franck to apply for a job as interpreter at the Prefecture, and put him in charge of the whole St. Lo area. Franck gathered a team of more than one hundred men around him, three of them colleagues at the Prefecture; within weeks they were sending a steady flow of information on rail traffic and fortifications.

One triumph was securing the plan of the locks at La Barquette, which controlled the tidal flow for twenty miles up the nearby Douver River. When a mixed unit of US paratroopers under Colonel Howard R. Johnson seized them on D-Day morning to stop the Germans flooding the eastern half of the peninsula, there was very little they did not know about how the locks worked.

They used an old tried method of Renault's to pipe-line Franck's dispatches to Caen. One of his men, a railway guard called Bonnel, took the bulky package in his van and left it behind the bar at the Hotel de Rouen, with Mayoraz, the big impassive Swiss proprietor. Together with the Cherbourg dispatches these went on to Meslin's office for typing and transcription, though many of the scraps of paper came now to Thomas and Jourdan and two other cartographers Girard had appointed, Jouvel and Menguy.

The Manche was on its way to becoming the living map of Thomas's dreams. Thomas was red-eyed now from lack of sleep; he set himself the heavy target of completing one sector map each week. He ate without appetite, his brain on fire with details of grid references and ‘heavy earthworks 100 metres north of church,’ and ‘Farmer reports battery of 155s due north of farm house,’ using his work with the potato controller to check them whenever he could, and the one reward that sweetened the hardship was Girard's great bearlike paw on his shoulder every ten days or so. ‘Ah, Thomas, mon vieux, a wonderful batch of maps you sent to Paris last week.’

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

About this time Girard and Thomas had a long discussion about maps. For some weeks now they had been mapping sectors as far as six miles inland, but Girard explained that the Wall could no longer be reckoned in terms of a line of blockhouses on the seashore. Nor did the resources that could bring it into blazing life be said to stop short at six miles.

He said, 'What about it? Can you manage farther inland as well?' He was diffident because Thomas had grown pale lately; the rims of his eyes were sore and inflamed through constant use of the powerful magnifying glasses he needed for mapping.

Thomas was cautious. 'How much farther? Even with five of us it sounds like a job.'

'About forty miles.'

'Forty -? Why, that's as far as Vire. Well, now, wait a minute-'

'I know, mon petit, I know, but don't you see that we must find out too what the Germans are doing behind the Wall. Any Wall is only as good as the troops and the munitions and the resources to defend it. We want to know about munitions dumps and barracks and factories-particularly factories.'

'Ah, well,' said Thomas resignedly, 'it'll mean more travelling, but I can but try.'

Each night, at the risk of being stopped by a road-block, Thomas had been cycling three miles or more, clearing "letter-boxes" for the information that went to make the maps. From the Hotel de Rouen he collected dispatches from Cherbourg and St. Lô, while the house of Jean Chateau, the big florid electricity-board inspector, on the Bayeux road and the boiler of the Touristes served his needs for the Caen district. Now most of Sunday, too, was taken up in travelling to new letter-boxes: the box-office of a cinema in Flers, the sacristy of a church in Alencon. Four times on his way to letter-boxes he was arrested, but the rich cream of the jest was that within an hour he was always free again, having proved his bona-fides by one of his own faked cards. The Germans never suspected the real purpose of his mission. They had arrested him because with his fair cropped hair and pink and white complexion they were convinced that he was a British airman on the run!

The tough and hard-bitten Girard, the gay well-born Moulines and the sensitive Thomas were a notable combination, each in his way contributing an individual value to the kind of team that Dewavrin had envisaged in operation. It was characteristic that each saw the next man's job as tougher than his own. Despite the never-ending strain, Thomas counted his own lot as enviable beside Moulines's. He and Duchez and the others were among their own kin, but Moulines had no permanent place to lay his head, and for the eternal stranger like himself, the Gestapo set traps.

In Cherbourg and St. Lô he was careful not to take a drink before checking with a local contact: overnight the Gestapo would decree that no bar could serve red wine on Tuesday or Friday afternoons, and bartenders had to report anyone ordering it. He always entered a town wheeling his bone-shaker; on some days riding two abreast was arbitrarily prohibited.

And sometimes, beating up the east coast towards Cherbourg, the wind thrashing at his old leather jacket, he would see through the poplars the graceful eighteenth-century pile of the Château la Brisette, where his parents still lived, remembering the smell of wood fires and the banging of guns on an autumn afternoon and the high echoing rooms that smelt of linseed polish. But the Comte de la Hautière saw death as an ever-present certainty; he rarely went home to endanger his family until the war was over.

He slept like a fugitive, often in his clothes, carrying only a razor and toothbrush. One agent's wife remembers: 'Sometimes the poor boy would arrive drenched with rain and looking like a beaten dog, and just creep upstairs and sleep as if he was going to die.' Always his faith was invincible. Once the same woman, momentarily cynical, asked him whether he really believed that the Resistance was worth it, and the tall fair young man went quite white, and said:

'It is, you know. It must be, because it's got to be. It's the greatest chance that France has ever had for spiritual regeneration.'

In Caen where he slept mostly at the Hotel de Rouen, Mayoraz recalls him as a man without fear. Once Moulines slept undisturbed in a small back room on the ground floor while outside in the bar, five yards away, a dozen Germans whooped it up over calvados until the small hours.

Girard, forced to spend much time in Paris, found his lieutenant's movements a shade unpredictable. Moulines, he knew, was all too susceptible, and when, on an average of once a month, he fell in love, one district would receive meticulous attention to the exclusion of others until the passion cooled. Once, at this time, Moulines was a week over-due. Beneath Girard's rigid no-nonsense exterior was a man of intense feelings; believing that Moulines had been caught and tortured, he was suffering the agonies of the damned.

At five one afternoon a knock came at the second door of the three-in-one-flat. Dany felt that he heart stopped at the same moment-hardened Resistants called it "door-bell psychosis"- but she went to open it and there was Moulines shifting from one foot to the other. The conversation was uneasy too.

'Oh; hallo, Dany. Ça va?'

'Ah, oui, oui, ça va bien. And you?'

'Oh, I'm fine, just fine-in fact, couldn't be better.' Too casually: 'I was-well, rather wondering if the chief was in.'

'No, he's out,' said Dany hastily, hoping that she could shoo Moulines away before Girard got wind of anything, then more severely: 'He's been worried to death about you. Where have you been?'

'Oh, that's a pity,' said Moulines unhappily, fingering his cheek and staring at the ceiling. 'That is a pity. I didn't want him to be worried. If I'd just seen him, you know, I could have explained everything .... '

Dany was just urging him to come back when she had paved the way, when the inner door opened and Girard called: 'Who is that?' And then there was no hope for it.

Dany waited outside quaking; she did hear Moulines say, 'I can explain everything, chief. ... You'd understand if you'd seen her-she was so pretty.' Then there was a sudden explosion and for a time she heard only Girard's voice reverberating like a summer storm.

Presently, in an attempt at appeasement, she heard Moulines explain that he had managed to install another transmitter in the Manche (smaller, more portable sets had now replaced the cumbersome 60-lb. affairs of 1941), and that the agent who had charge of it would now be able to radio all troop movements in his area direct to Dewavrin's operators in London.

'Well, that's one good thing,' said Girard mollified.

'How did you get it down there?'

'I took it on the carrier of my bicycle,' Moulines said, and Dany, guessing what was coming, winced. Another explosion, much louder. 'YOUR BICYCLE? Are you stark raving mad? Don't you realise it might have been inspected at a barrier? Do you want to be tortured and jeopardise the lives of everyone else in the network including all your own agents up there, however many you've got? ...'

There was much more in the same vein before Girard said suspiciously,

'By the way-how many have you got?'

'Two hundred, chief.'

'Two -?' Girard looked into Moulines's eyes, which were clear and blue and always extraordinarily free from guile when he was justifying an affaire de coeur. 'I don't know,' said Girard at last, gratingly, his heavy brows wrinkling until they almost met. 'You've been working, anyway. But you're incorrigible. There's only one thing I can think of doing with you that's any good' - he paused angrily, then suddenly grinned, the storm was over - '...and that is to forgive you.'

At the best times it was always like that. Between Girard and Dany and Moulines there was an easy comradeship, born of Resistance, that readily spilled over into laughter and a sense of warmth engendered by the value of the friendship-like the first glow of good cognac, only more durable. In the evenings they sometimes went to the Pourquoi Pas? a little restaurant known to all men of the Resistance, and there would be much music and laughter. One subject always good for a laugh was Girard's weight, which turned the scales at around 200 lb; lately he had taken to using a bicycle to keep his Paris appointments and Dany and Moulines would warn "Monsieur Le Mince" (Mr. Slim) as they had christened him, that his repair bills were likely to be heavy.

I found the Pourquoi Pas here, still in existence, at 13 Rue Pierre Aime Lair in Caen.

Off-duty Girard was a charming and lively table companion with a rich fund of humour, telling them about his stay with a Wandsworth family as a fourteen-year-old learning English, and of how he had fallen in love with Lucy, the daughter of the house, engaging in bitter rivalry for her favours at Clapham Roller Skating Rink with a German lad named Schulz. To win the upper hand, Girard had learned a poem for her which he recited in a fascinating Maurice Chevalier English: "Lu-cee you are the joy of my 'eart and the sunshine of my ex-ees-tence."

Then they would go back happily, arm in arm, to the three-in-one flat and Moulines would feel briefly that he had a home again.

There was a sense of urgency in the friendship too, an urgency that kept step with the calendar of war. One such date was 19th August, 1942. That afternoon, 1000 Canadians, British and Americans died on the beaches of Dieppe, and of the 6100 men who embarked on that expedition, only 2500 returned. It is history now that Dieppe was planned as a miniature invasion, involving the full use of combined arms and mass landings of infantry and armour, with the object of seizing (though not holding) a beachhead. Whether it was a tactical success or a tactical failure is a question still exercising military brains, but from Century's view-point it had one immediate result. Allied planners were impressed with the toughness of the Wall, the need to concentrate the maximum weight in the first assault in order to breach it, and Dewavrin, too, became increasingly anxious to learn more of the Wall's secrets.

At the end of August, Colonel Touny summoned Girard to the "Red Cross" branch office. Renault's Centrale had passed on instructions from London that all networks must concentrate maximum efforts on the ports.

Girard thought. 'I think Moulines has as many men in Cherbourg as it can safely stand,' he said; 'but I'll go to Caen and have a word with Meslin.' Meantime, in Berlin, the Germans were revising their conception of the Wall. Any Allied invasion, it seemed, would first have to aim at the seizure of key ports. On 29th September, Hitler called a three-hour conference, attended among others by Goering, Reich Minister Albert Speer, Chief of the Todt Organisation, and General-leutnant Rudolf Schmetzer, Inspector of Land Fortresses for the Western Front, in the Reich Chancellery. Apparently Hitler was fully convinced that Dieppe was a major landing attempt that had failed, but he warned against any delusions that further amphibious assaults were thus ruled out. The British, he said, could only try again, and when they did they might enjoy air and naval supremacy.

To this pretty problem he saw one answer: Concrete. The new Atlantic Wall would now consist of 15,000 concrete strongpoints to be defended by at least 300,000 men, a minimum of twenty men to each strongpoint. The goal was an impervious and permanent defence ring, so strong that the enemy could be smashed at the water's edge in their weakest moment - the moment of landing.

U-Boat bases would rate first priority, then harbours suitable for coastal traffic, followed by harbours suitable for enemy landings and the Channel Islands. Lastly, a long way behind, came landing places on the open coast. The target date for completion was May, 1943. The canny Speer kept most of his thoughts to himself, but in private he hinted that his Todt Organisation would be lucky to get 40 per cent completed by that date.

Apart from Cherbourg and Le Havre, France's greatest Channel ports, the most vital ports in Girard's area were Carentan, Ouistreham and Port-en-Bessein. Big ports presented big problems, but Girard thought that Ouistreham and Port-en-Bessein, being closer to the main headquarters at Caen, might be more easily handled.

At first glance there is nothing to mark out Port-en-Bessein from a hundred forgotten coastal ports. The sea wind carries the good, exciting smells of seaweed and mackerel and ships' tar along its cobbled streets, and the bistros are full of men wearing blue rough-knit jerseys and fore-and-aft caps, playing belotte. The harbour is sheltered by two long breakwaters like curved concrete arms, and at the mouth of the Drome river lies the port itself, in a deep cleft between two high hills. In wartime fishing was allowed infrequently; the port was dead, sullen, apathetic. Now as a result of Girard's instructions, Port-en-Bessein began to come to life.

From his headquarters two miles away, the head of Century's Bayeux cell, a dark perpetually-smiling bicycle merchant named Georges Mercader, set his agents to work. Shipping movements were divided up between Henri de Saint-Denis, a ruddy-faced ironmonger, and a boat-builder named Joseph Poitevin. That was the first step. Each day they reported the movements of Bessein's minesweepers and six patrol boats to Mercader; there were two lighter speed boats as well for inshore patrols, 70-tonners, about 65 feet long, armed with two machine-guns and anti-aircraft pom-poms. Each day Mercader signalled their movements to Dewavrin's operators in London from the small Phillips transmitter below his bicycle shop. It was cached in a hole in the wall, behind the second row of bottles in his wine cellar.

In time Mercader got a fixation, trying to remember whether both rows of bottles would look convincingly dusty to a search party and was always slipping down to make sure.

The Caen cell, too, was planting its own agents; one of the Bessein fishermen, Georges Thomine, was already feeding details to the redoubtable Madame Vauclin, the tiler's wife. They were verbal reports and no papers changed hands, but it was noticeable that on the Bessein bus, a rattle-trap local service crammed with farmers' wives and live geese and sacks of potatoes, Madame Vauclin was always knitting. On her knee was a pattern book and from time to time she noted numbers in the margin-45-63-19. These represented neither numbers of rows or stitches but items such as the distance between the customs post and the path at the foot of the cliffs. Back at Caen, Duchez received them with undisguised delight.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

Thus, piecemeal, a picture was building up of Port-en-Bessein. From the seaward side the agents reported the port to be very heavily defended: the Todt Organisation had done their work well. The defences were disposed roughly in the form of a triangle, with powerful strongpoints on the heights to the east and the west. The problem was to approach closely enough on the landward side to glean the microscopic detail needed, and it threatened to beat them altogether until Francois Guerin, a young student from Bayeux, had an idea. Guerin was not much above sixteen then, a handsome boy with steady blue eyes and a mop of dark curly hair, but one of his closest friends was a man thirteen years his senior, Joseph Poitevin's cousin Arthur. All the Poitevins were good Resistants, heavily-built men with glinting eyes; it was said that there had been Poitevins in the Port-en-Bessein district since the time William the Conqueror's fleet, massing in the tiny harbour, marked the prelude to the Norman Conquest.

Now Arthur Poitevin, a music teacher, sturdily built and as blond as a Saxon, was a good Resistant too, but no one, least of all the Germans, cared how near to any fortifications he approached. For Poitevin was blind.

A common feeling for music had brought the master close to the pupil, close enough to be on Christian-name terms, and often, to reach other pupils, Poitevin would accept a pillion to ride to outlying districts on the boy's noisy velo-cycle. Sometimes, passing through Port-en-Bessein, it was natural to stop for a breath of sea air, and what could be more innocent then, than a boy guiding the footsteps of a blind man?

The harbour offered a limited choice of strolls, and most often their steps led them along the breakwater, above the black jagged teeth of the rocks capped with seaweed, below the yawning concrete mouth of the casemate that marked the western strongpoint.

‘The wind's good,’ Poitevin would say. ‘Even if you're blind, young François, it's good to feel the sea wind on your face. It's coming from the west to-day. Tell me quickly, François, what can you see?’

‘I can see a casemate,’ the boy said eagerly. ‘That's just above us. And a gun-a really tremendous one. I just don't know its caliber.’

‘Never mind, the Germans will talk about it in the cafés. When they have drunk, they always do.’

The blind man always spoke with the biting distaste of the ascetic revolted by excess.

‘I will find out the caliber of the guns, but look at the casemate, François. In which direction is it sited?’

The boy stared across the harbour to the grey needle spire of the church, computing by means of the weather vane. Always he had the uncanny feeling that the blind man saw more of this than he himself. Two hundred yards away, on the jetty, some officers of the Kriegsmarine were gathered, yet they had glanced only fleetingly at the big blond man with the white stick.

He said finally: ‘The casemate seems to face north-north-east. There's a path leading to it quite near where we're standing. It must be almost 150 feet from here up to the strongpoint. It's a chalk foundation, jolly slippery, I should think, in wet weather.’

He took the blind man's arm. ‘Now we're turning back, Arthur, and I'm going to start counting. We'll see how many paces it is from the breakwater wall to the cliff path. Then I'll count again and we'll see how far the path is from the main jetty. Will you honestly be able to remember all that?’

Poitevin's reply was sombre and always the same: ‘When you're blind you've got time to remember, François.’

Back in the neat little studio in Bayeux, where for convenience everything seemed on top of everything else, the boy found even his brain, accustomed to the daily grind of dates and facts, reeling with those measurements. He was glad enough to grasp a wafer of cigarette paper and scribble down the details which came effortlessly from Poitevin's lips. It is no secret to physicians that blindness, by a process of compensation, sharpens the faculties, particularly the memory, but Guerin was only a boy; he marvelled at the sensitised accuracy of his teacher's mind. Sometimes Dewavrin's staff in London raised a query and a few weeks later the whole walk would have to be done again, but Poitevin's memory was rarely at fault. The boy had found the right man.

After sounding out contacts in Bayeux, Jean Chateau, the Caen electricity-board inspector, also had found the right man: a blond, barrel-chested giant named Léon Cardron, former skipper of the trawler Ave Maria. Another agent, summing up Cardon, said, ‘He was tough - really tough - a man who could make his point without raising his voice.’

When, after Dunkirk, the Kriegsmarine had offered to rent the Ave Maria for patrol work, Cardron's answer was to take an iron bar and wreck the trawler's engine. Strangely, the Germans neither shot him nor punished him. Fishing was rarely permitted more than once a week; they may have thought that scraping a living with a twenty-foot job called Le Maseu was punishment enough.

The check that the Kriegsmarine kept on Bessein's fishermen never varied. What they searched for most diligently at the control point were transmitters: they tooth-combed the lockers, even testing for loose boards in the decking that might be used as a hiding-place, but Cardron had no need of a transmitter. Instead, tangled in his 40-foot herring net were four eight-by-six plans of the coastline west of Bessein, prepared by Thomas's cartographic service.

Time out was limited-sometimes four hours, usually two and he had to stay in sight of the shore, but none of this bothered Cardron much. Like hundreds of Girard's other agents, he was the man Dewavrin had envisaged long ago in St. Stephen's House, when he doodled on scratch-pads and feverishly consulted maps. Cardron knew every inch of the crumbling chalky coastline. As a boy he had scrambled on the shelving cliffs in search of gull's eggs. Each land-mark carried a meaning which was sometimes poignant. Before the war, in the good days, coming back from Le Havre with the herring catch sold and the knowledge of gold in the bank, the cliffs there at Longues had told him that soon he would be back in his warm, dimly-lit cottage with its religious emblems and carved clipper models and all the family gathered round the long dining-table.

Now there was a mighty battery at Longues, four 155s, roughly equivalent to 6-inch guns, mounted in reinforced concrete casemates and a seemingly endless minefield surrounding it. Barbed wire clearly marked the seaward perimeter. In the calm autumn weather Cardron anchored 500 yards from the shore and dropped his net. Calculating distance in terms of sailing time he could mark the position of the battery on Thomas's maps correct to a few feet.

Cardron was not a man of words; he had a surer way of registering the physical details that Century needed. The nets had also camouflaged a pre-war box camera; squatting down in the bows, pretending to adjust the trawl, he squinted through the view-finder. Pik went the shutter. He wound the roll, fished a while, moved on again. Presently he was moored off another town-not really a town or a port at all, but a summer resort, with a long desolate beach, the chalets sand-bagged and shuttered now, like blind eyes. But Chateau had asked for details of every-thing along the coastline so he lifted the camera and registered the scene. Again the shutter went pik and in the same casual way his mind registered the name without any sense of its importance. He had known Arromanches for forty years, ever since he was a boy.

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

On 21st October [1942], Renault returned to France. The C.N.D. was still functioning, effectively though with great risk, under Max Petit's guidance, assuring weekly liaison with London from new headquarters in the Rue Dufrenoy. One of the first things Renault did was send for Girard, and the big man was shaken by his first sight of him. His back was hunched like an old-age pensioner's, a scrubby reddish-brown moustache covered his upper lip, his skin was as wrinkled as a prune.

All summer he had badgered Dewavrin and the Commander to let him take up the reins of his network, which had grown to number 1000 men and this had been the price: a nightmare session in the hands of a make-up man from Denham Film Studios, which had ensured that neither Edith nor the children, let alone the Gestapo, could have recognised him.

At least, Renault thought, it had softened the pang of parting. Edith and the children, safe in the English countryside, were still rocking at the thought of it, and even the austere Dewavrin, in the midst of conferences, would suddenly choke with helpless laughter.

"I can't even enjoy good food anymore," said Renault mournfully. "They've given me a kind of false paunch and it's interfering with my digestion." Then, getting down to business, "Just before I left I saw General de Gaulle. He asked me to convey his personal congratulations to the man who took the plan which you gave me in June. He did a fine job of work and the General has since told me that the High Command have found it of enormous value."

Girard glowed. His inner core of skepticism had always kept him wondering whether the plan was of use or not.

During the next month Renault saw Girard and Colonel Touny many times. The suave and polished Colonel came to his headquarters almost every day, and Renault became more and more convinced that the ultimate organisation of the whole of French Resistance must use Touny's movement as the hard core. On one occasion Renault said: "I am particularly pleased with this Intelligence network, Century, that Berthelot and Girard are running. At first, in London, we regarded it as one more C.N.D. agency, but they're sending through so much stuff that we're becoming overloaded. We shall have to think about separate transmission facilities." That was almost the last time that Renault saw Touny.

When he left for England again, on 12th December, this time stifling in the manhole of the Deux Anges, his idea was to return almost immediately. But after that Dewavrin ruled that the personal danger was now too great. He had been a pioneer in the struggle to unearth the secrets of the Wall, but like so many pioneers Renault was forced to step aside and watch rather wistfully while others fought and died in a battle he had planned.

All along the Wall, that autumn, the network signaled a new activity from the ports. Gresselin, the Cherbourg grocer, reported that the great mountain of Fort du Roule, 180 feet high, was honeycombed with subterranean galleries and casual travelers like Gilbert Michel, who still went there weekly as a hostage, brought rumors of a formidable stockpile of torpedoes and munitions. Many of the guns guarding the port, including the 6-gun heavy A.A. battery on the quay, could be brought to bear against shipping. The same with the heavy battery at the Torpedo Storage Depot. The batteries covering the harbors and the quay where the famous Normandie had once come alongside were all under concrete now, linked by underground tunnels, and an intercom system of zinc voice-pipes.

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Pat

 

Le Havre, too, was stoutly defended. Roughly 11,000 German troops, including 2000 of the Kriegsmarine, were in possession. On 15th December, 1942, after a meeting in Paris, Girard appointed an old colleague, a cement executive named Lucien Jacquemin, as head of the Le Havre cell. Almost at once Jacquemin, a sharp-eyed meticulous little man like a family lawyer, had a stroke of luck. Ostensibly he had become friendly with a German named Döttlin, one of the heads of the Berlin-based Polensky and Zöllner Construction Company that had built the submarine base in the Darse Sud. The base was never, in fact, used for submarines but its neat little pens served as anchorage for the 150 E-boats of the 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla.

But Jacquemin's firm had supplied some of the cement, which gave him a good excuse for showing more than passing interest in the construction when he chatted with Döttlin. The chance came one day when Döttlin revealed that his firm had also constructed the submarine base at Dieppe. "Then why," Jacquemin asked, "did you use waterproof cement there, but not here?" Döttlin assumed the superior smile of one technician about to amaze another. There was a piece of paper lying nearby - Jacquemin said afterwards that it cost him ten sweating minutes to manoeuvre it into position - and on it Dottlin began to sketch a blueprint of the great iron girders that had been driven into the ocean bed to form a skeleton for the reinforced concrete structure.

Jacquemin began to talk idly of tides. The continual ebb and flow of the tide, he said, must have made it hard to ensure that the foundations would support such an enormous weight of concrete. By the time he had finished Döttlin had supplied him with the exact thickness of the concrete used to support the load. He left the office without destroying the sketch and Jacquemin often wondered afterwards if he had wanted the Allies to know.

Inevitably a lot of the information passing through Caen to Colonel Nobody and his checkers in the Ministry of War suite was a duplication, though that was useful, serving as confirmation. Seven agents alone, for example, were working Port-en-Bessein, all unknown to one another!

Inevitably, too, some information conflicted and for the agents on the spot there was the wearisome and risky job of going back to check again; the cautious Jacquemin, in Le Havre, drove his sixteen agents quietly crazy by his unwillingness to transmit any information until he had received three confirmations.

Thomas and his map-makers never paused for breath because 6o per cent of all the information filtered through now was designed to be translated into map form.

In London, Dewavrin's staff had an even bigger headache, because by this time other networks had created cells working in the area, although none but Century had achieved a complete coverage of the whole coast.

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Pat

 

Duchez spent much of the winter of 1942 as the spearhead of the forces mapping out the port of Ouistreham. As usual, procuring maps had been the main problem. The defences were too thickly clustered in one area of the port to register more than an unintelligible blur on a general survey map, but Meslin's office possessed no large-scale plan. Jourdan, his assistant, had to make some studiously disinterested inquiries in Caen before a Government office - he has forgotten which - came up with something which gave him a quiet thrill of joy. It was a complete town plan of Ouistreham on the scale of one-in-a-thousand, which the tourist publicity office had issued before the war.

Not only was every street and boulevard marked in but a legend for visitors picked out all the landmarks which ensured a happy holiday - the Casino, the Turkish Baths, the miniature golf course, even the chemists who would help keep the liver in shape.

"We'd better make a plan on a larger scale and divide it into sections," Meslin decided. "Each section will show so many yards of sidewalks and we'll show the pill-box defences and barriers for every street. In that way we can give London the full picture of what's going on."

Later Thomas and Jourdan agreed that among all those they produced, the Ouistreham map was the biggest headache. With fresh details trickling in every few days, most sector maps took an average of three months to complete: Ouistreham took six. The Kriegsmarine Wehr only kept Jourdan's department posted on new defences that affected the running of the port, and the port and the gare-maritime, on the east side of the town, were only a small part of Ouistreham. Fashionable Ouistreham, with its memories of Spanish-style week-end villas and girls in one-piece bathing suits lay west of the River Orne, running along the Boulevard Aristide Briand, and this sector was sealed off completely. It was, as Meslin told Girard, "a forbidden zone within a forbidden zone"- what the Germans called a Stuetzpunkt (strongpoint).

Lacking knowledge of the defences, Thomas, his father and Jourdan divided the cartographic side of Ouistreham between them, picturing the town in three mammoth plans - roughly twenty-three yards of pavement to every inch. These were the trickiest plans that an agent had so far handled, since their size did not make for easy concealment.

One set, luckily, was apportioned to Duchez, who always seemed to revel in the idea of taking risks. The painter had found the months since his great coup dragging interminably. Under half a dozen aliases he had been pressurising agents in the Caen area, feeding a constant stream of information to Meslin's office, but to Duchez this was disappointingly work-a-day stuff. As stimulus he needed the constant excitement of tangling with the enemy, of bearding them in their own den-sous la barbe de Monsieur, as he put it. An advertisement in the local paper, Le Bonhomme Normand, gave him a fresh chance.

In view of the accursed Anglo-American air-raids on Ouistreham and Caen, it announced, volunteers were urgently needed for Civil Defence service. Duchez approached Henri Marigny, the bookseller, who months ago had supplied the network with their road maps for parachutage. Marigny, a dark solid man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a clipped moustache, had begged to be employed more fully.

"If you really want to play a more active part in the Resistance," Duchez told him, "here's your chance."

Marigny's home was at Ouistreham and Duchez could plead that work took him frequently to the area. Within days they had been accepted as air-raid wardens for Ouistreham.

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The quest for detail was now launched. Twice a week, as part of a roster, the devil-may-care Duchez and the prudent Marigny, equipped with the white helmets and blue arm-bands of the French Civil Defence, stood a dusk-to-dawn vigil in Ouistreham. On their night patrols, their footsteps ringing hollow on the deserted sidewalks, the Boulevard Aristide Briand lay open to them, and when they saw it they stopped amazed.

Bauleiter Ingenieur Ott had done his work well. From the eastern end of the promenade to the Casino, a clear 300 yards, hotels, chalets and beach-huts had been wiped away - bulldozed into nothingness. In the darkness blockhouses and casemates loomed from the sand like the concrete tunnellings of mole-men and the squat wicked barrels of the guns poked forbiddingly at the skyline-155s, 75s, 230s. The strong point was sealed off from the streets running parallel by barbed wire unwinding like an endless watch spring across the torn scarred ground.

Some of their most significant discoveries were made as the bombs came howling from the sky. Once, dashing for cover, they dived into what they at first took to be a slit trench - until they identified it as an anti-tank ditch, more than two feet wide, which had been scooped from the pave of the Boulevard Daladier. Then there was the ack-ack. Close to the old Casino, on the beach, the Germans had posted two flak batteries to protect the immediate area of the port.

During the alerts, which came often that winter [1942/43], it was easy for air-raid wardens to pace out their exact position as the glowing balls went hammering upwards, drowning the silken rustle of the sea on sand.

In time they picked out the one small quarter of the fortified zone still occupied by French civilians from the larger area made up of German barracks. "Easy to tell," chuckled Duchez, who had a Frenchman's aversion to restraint. "As usual our countrymen have the worst blackout discipline in the world."

Within six weeks they had gathered together a general picture, enough for Thomas to begin filling in small black crosses on the virgin spaces of the street plan. But the detailed overall picture which eighteen months later was to be of invaluable aid to Captain Philip Kieffer of No. 4 Commando, called for careful prospecting. More time needed to be spent in Ouistreham, especially in daylight hours.

Duchez found the solution. Several times that winter judiciously aimed sticks of bombs put the locks of the canal out of action for days. In Caen the Mairie called for volunteers to drive lorries loaded with vegetables up to Ouistreham and bring back the meagre supplies of fresh fish. Among the volunteers were Duchez and Marigny. The turn-around period was employed profitably in gleaning more information about the two munitions depots sited at either end of the west quay, about those roads which were screened by mines and those which were blocked only by machine-guns and pill-boxes.

Waging this kind of war, Duchez was in his seventh heaven. Marigny was an impassive man who kept his fears pretty much to himself, but Duchez really exulted in the risks. Driving the lorry loads of fish back from Ouistreham - always in the centre of the road, to the despair of the German traffic patrols - he would sing abominably through his nose, happy in the knowledge that he had perceived one more chink in the German armour. What did it matter if, as he was bound to be, he was searched as a matter of routine?

The salient points were noted down in cider on wafers of cigarette paper, which remains invisible until treated by heat. His conviviality became a by-word in the bistros of the port. As in Caen he joked and clowned and missed nothing. At the eastern end of the promenade, for example, the Germans had installed a battery of flame throwers. More precise details were hard to come by. But in the cafes where the workmen gathered the talk was all of the Wall, and a few had seen the tests. They believed the flame-throwers were operated by remote control and that their flame could shrivel a target to nothingness sixty-five yards away-right by the water's edge. The roaring orange jet operated in high-pressure bursts, lasting from five to ten seconds.

Duchez found there were even ways of sabotaging Hitler's Wall in advance. In one cafe he and Marigny met a man named Chretien, a contractor from St. Aubin, whose firm was supplying much of the cement for the Ouistreham defences. Duchez leant across the table, his eyes glinting. "Take my tip," he hissed. "Don't give them your very best cement. For that kind of construction, one part cement and two parts sand is a much better mixture."

The painter was right. Eighteen months later, under heavy bombardment from the U.S. 9th Air Force, some of the blockhouses tilted crazily sideways and their German defenders had to retreat hastily.

Jourdan, too, was working on the town. Early in July [1942] he had obtained permission to visit relations in the area, though it was noticeable that he spent more time drinking and smoking his meerschaum pipe in a small cafe on the Boulevard Boivin Champeaux. He knew the ritual of his countrymen: the cafe bore the legend: "On peut apporter son manger" and from midday until almost three the workmen would be drifting in, in ones and twos, bringing their lunch-packs of bread and garlic sausage, to be washed down with harsh red wine. They, like most of the town's available labour, were engaged on sections of the Wall.

"That's a mighty-looking blockhouse you're working on beyond the barrier," Jourdan would say. "The concrete looks pretty thick." "Thick enough," a man grunted, after masticating a chunk of sausage and surveying him for a minute. "The Boche don't leave much to chance."

"I can believe that," Jourdan would rejoin. "I'm an engineer myself and I know concrete two feet thick when I see it."

The approach was childishly simple. A skilled agent could have seen the question coming minutes before it landed. But the workman was not a skilled agent, and Jourdan had counted correctly on the passionate desire of his countrymen to prove that they are in the know.

"Two feet, you say? Engineer or not, monsieur, your eyes deceive you. We've had special instructions to build the walls four feet thick on all the blockhouses I've worked on to date .... "

Later they had a drink or two and presently, Jourdan, seemingly in friendship, followed the man into the street and watched him past the barrier, walking with the short fumbling paces of the ouvrier who rarely sheds his clogs, towards the site where his workmates were busy. It was a crisp sunlit afternoon, with no sea-mists and Jourdan, puffing doggedly at his pipe, leaned against the door post of the cafe, watching him. Thirty-five ... thirty-seven ... thirty-nine paces exactly, from barrier to blockhouse.

He went back to Caen to tell Thomas about it.

That was the last week of February [1943], when the heads of the movement in Paris suddenly received electrifying news. "Colonel Passy" had arrived in France.

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Only Dewavrin's implacable obstinacy had got him there at all. At the end of January [1943] his visit had been all set and the clever sardonic Brossolette, now his deputy, had gone ahead by Lysander to make preparations. Then, on 15th February, had come the sudden and peremptory news that the War Cabinet had vetoed the trip. It took a few minutes to sink in, then all his old mulishness was stung into life again. By phone call and minute and personal visit he began to bombard officials as zealously as he had once done over the precious concept of the networks. In vain did his old friend and ally Sir Claude Dansey point out that Churchill himself was against the mission, on the understandable grounds that if the Gestapo got him there were very few secrets of the Resistance that he didn't know. He even reminded that, a year back, he had been formally sentenced to death, by Vichy, but the young man did not seem to mind at all. Dewavrin's next port of call was de Gaulle himself. First, he pointed out, Brossolette had already gone, and the journalist had quite as much detail at his finger-tips. Secondly, in case of capture by the Gestapo, he had armed himself with a hollowed-out signet ring, with a swivel top, containing a cyanide pill. De Gaulle took one look at his implacable young Intelligence chief, who was always willing to die for an idea to prove it was right, then rang Churchill. Two days later the ban was lifted.

So at approximately 3 a.m. on Friday, 27th February [1943], Dewavrin parachuted from the hatch of a Halifax bomber that had brought him from Tempsford aerodrome, England, and billowed gently down in a cornfield near Lyons-la-Forêt, twenty miles from Rouen.

Accompanying him was a British officer, Wing-Commander Frederick Forrest Yeo-Thomas of "F" Section, Special Operations Executive, the British-operated section which undertook to supply the arms and equipment to Dewavrin's networks. Yeo-Thomas, who became known to the whole of French Resistance as "Shelley" or "The White Rabbit," had come to make his own independent summing-up of the task in hand.

The task was a mammoth one, and Dewavrin had no very clear idea of how to set about it. But before the conferences began, there was the risky problem of reaching Paris in safety. From the darkness of the dropping-ground loomed the imperturbable Olivier Courtaud, the radio operator, who had aided Renault's escape to England nine months earlier; he had headed the reception team which guided their Halifax to the target. To Dewavrin, at least, the next twenty-four hours were like the slow awakening from an anesthetic. The odd purposeful silence as they trudged from the cornfields; the lurching uncomfortable bicycle ride through the icy darkness; the sudden painful sense of being home again when they arrived stealthily in the small hours at the house of the local C.N.D. agent to find a meal of Bayonne ham and rough cider awaiting them in a brightly-lit kitchen.

Next morning there was Rouen, black, medieval and unfriendly, in the pre-dawn cold, with troops of S.S. swaggering everywhere, then the long stuffy bus ride to Paris, to find yet more Germans, Germans in rough grey uniforms pressing against you in the Metro, staring stolidly ahead of them like pink well-drilled animals. As Courtaud led them out of the Porte Dauphine Metro into the frosty night, Dewavrin knew already that Paris was different. The Metro smelt the same, the rough smell of caporal tobacco was the same, and in the parks the full moon lent a theatrical black-and-silver beauty to the formal vistas of the chestnut trees.

Yet everywhere Dewavrin, a Parisian, could feel the un-happiness of his native city. It was as if the bleak winter of 1942 had turned its heart to stone.

Their first rendezvous was with Brossolette in Berthelot's flat on the Boulevard Flandrin. (Renault had urged that Colonel Touny and his deputies deserved closer study, and this was to be a decisive factor in the future of Girard and his men.) The dark volatile journalist, who had thoughtfully dyed the white streak in his hair to escape recognition, had found a safe flat for them on the Rue Marcel-Renaud, a ground-floor apartment overlooking a courtyard. Now their work began.

Dewavrin had been awaiting this moment for almost a year. In London, all through 1942, there had been many conferences, and the upshot had been unanimous agreement on one point. The time had come to organise the entire French Resistance, not only in the coastal zone, but far behind the Wall, under one top authority. Up to now its weakness had been that every movement worked independently of all the others-not only because, as secret organisations, they lacked communications, but because their political views were poles apart.

The task of Passy, Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas was this: to unify and finance ten large rambling inexperienced groups and a dozen smaller ones under General Charles de Gaulle.

If they could achieve it - and it was a big if - the first step was for the leaders to form a committee responsible to de Gaulle - the National Council of Resistance. But this was to be only the beginning. Their next task was to create a Secret Army, under direct command of General Delestraint (Vidal to the Underground), a frank and fearless regular officer appointed by de Gaulle in London. The Army was to be organised on a regional basis with local commanders appointed for air and military liaison. It was a plan which looked to the eventual co-operation of the French Underground with the Allied armies on D-Day, and one worthy of Dewavrin's fertile and patriotic imagination.

Their first step was to sound out the leaders of the principal Resistance movements. Now the conferences began.

Sometimes they were held hurriedly in small "safe" apartments, which were only "safe" for twenty-four hours, sometimes in cellars; at other times in O.C.M.'s suite at the Ministry of War, or in the small restaurant called the Pour-quoi Pas? (the Why Not?) in the crowded Rue de Lille. Here Brossolette, who had already met Girard and Touny, laid the groundwork.

In his cold logical way he told Dewavrin: "You know Renault was right - this Organisation Civile et Militaire can offer both troops and discipline. Any Secret Army will have to be built round them."

That was the beginning of it. On 2nd March [1943], after a previous meeting with Berthelot, Dewavrin and Brossolette met up with Colonel Touny in that elegant flat in the Rue de General Langlois. The head of O.C.M. was inclined to be stiff with strangers, and all were cautious, a little on their guard. Only at their second meeting did Dewavrin lay his cards on the table. He explained the concept of the Secret Army, which on D-Day would be given specific tasks designed to harass the Germans in the rear behind the Wall.

Out of months of fevered discussion - Duclos, the stockbroker, now back in London running B.C.R.A.'s "Action" Section, had helped too - had emerged three key plans. Most ambitious was the "Green Plan," which aimed, by means of 1000 rail cuts, at slicing the critical military railroads on D-Day. Aligned to this was "Operation Turtle," a plan for the strategic stalling of all German road traffic. The "Red Plan" was designed to confuse and harass the enemy by free-for-all guerrilla action, and the cutting of military telephone lines.

Touny was intrigued. He promised, by 1oth April [1943] at latest, to render a complete return of his strengths in all the regions between Bordeaux and the Belgian frontier.

Meantime there were more journeys, more conferences. The leaders of four other movements similar to Touny's - Ceux de la Resistance, Ceux de la Libération, Libération, and the Front National - had to be met and wooed.

Brossolette journeyed along the Wall itself and in Caen held earnest conference with Meslin the Government engineer, and Duchez, who impressed him particularly. Yeo-Thomas went south to inspect Touny's units in the river valleys of the Nievre, the Cher, and the Allier. Dewavrin went north beyond the Somme to the desolate region round Calais.

In these weeks Dewavrin knew too many tumbling emotions for anything as uncomplicated as fear or satisfaction. The one emotion that seemed to transcend all others was loneliness. He no longer had the sense of belonging in this cold smoky garrison town. For security reasons he could not contact his mother, who was still living in Paris and neither he nor his colleagues ate in restaurants more than they could help. To his proud introverted nature it seemed that when he travelled by Metro people moved unobtrusively away from him. It was as if they felt he was different.

He had never felt so alone and Renault's words came back to him vividly: "Is it any wonder the networks sometimes ask themselves whether London makes any use of the information they get or whether they're even interested?"

The world knows now that the joint-mission of Passy and Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas was initially successful. On 26th March [1943] the leaders of the five principal Resistance movements, together with their assistants, arrived secretly and severally at an apartment in the suburb of Neuilly to announce that they accepted de Gaulle as their leader.

Besides Touny there was Monsieur Lecompte-Boynet, the scholarly head of Ceux de la Resistance, then 1000 strong, but able to command between 25,000 and 30,000 men in the Champagne, Vendec and Contentin areas by D-Day; Coquoin, head of Ceux de la Liberation with a potential of 35,000 agents among the police and transport drivers; Monsieur Perigny, head of Libération, an Intelligence movement with a strong trade-union background, and Ginsburger, head of the 30,000 strong Front National, the Resistance organisation of the Communist Party.

All of them solemnly signed an agreement to carry out the instructions of the Allies as transmitted by General de Gaulle. The National Council of the Resistance was formed. So far as the war against the Wall went, it was not this meeting, but one arising out of it that really tipped the scales in the battle.

Two days before General Delestraint arrived in Paris, with Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's political representative for the unified Resistance, Dewavrin met Touny again, and out of a chance remark came a bold scheme designed to increase the efficiency of Girard's network thirty-fold. As Dewavrin entered, Touny looked up from a sheaf of strength returns.

"As I promised, my figures are complete," Touny announced. "I can offer you 32,000 men." It was a moment before it registered. Then incredulously, "These are the men you expect to have in position by the date of the Allied invasion, not the men you have in position now?" But, politely, Touny disagreed. The men were in position at that moment-thirty times the number that any organisation, aside from the Communists, could then offer.

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Dewavrin, who had a lithe and adaptable mind, thought furiously. Much of the old fire and obstinacy still smouldered within him but three years as de Gaulle's Intelligence chief had taught him something of the value of compromise, and in the light of experience he was never afraid to change his ideas.

He had seen enough now to convince him that he could make an old dream come true. There were close to forty Intelligence networks now, and you could form as many as you liked, all over France - but to what point? Networks meant radios, radios meant regional transmission agencies and in London there was a crying shortage of the technicians who could be sent to supervise them, men like Courtaud and Julitte. There were even fewer men of Renault's calibre, men who could organise the networks and appoint local heads.

Why not, then, concentrate on the Secret Army and turn its members into part-time agents?

"What I propose is this," he told Touny. "For security reasons you should keep your Intelligence agents and shock troops separate. But as the troops must come across so much information that they never pass on we'll issue both agents and fighters with a standard questionnaire listing the points on which to concentrate - the scale on which to draw rough maps, the details which we regard as important. From now on, I shall split the Confrerie Notre Dame into two for security and to cope with the volume of traffic."

One of Renault's deputies, Jean Tillier, would take charge of one branch, handling the intelligence from the agents, while Olivier Courtaud would take charge of all information coming in from shock troops.

Until further notice it was agreed that maps and dispatches would be routed to England by the method which then held good - by twice monthly pick-up from a ground near Arras during the moon period and, on the dark side of the moon, by the Deux Anges out of Pont-Aven. Renault's system was a year old now and still working well.

There was a little more discussion before Touny said: "Colonel Passy, this is something I should not ask perhaps, but when may we expect an Allied landing? And where?"

Dewavrin thought like lightning. Some of the other Resistance leaders had asked him that question when he first arrived in Paris. Dewavrin had no official intimations but he was an intelligent man who had studied not only the maps of many defences but the strength returns of every German unit between Belgium and Spain.

Some of these leaders are still alive to testify that he first guessed with uncanny accuracy: "Somewhere between St. Brieuc and the bay of the Somme - in the spring of 1944."

But the response had been only a grave silence, and in every man's eyes he could see the thoughts unspoken: Twelve more months - a year to wait. You can go back, safe and secure to London, leaving us to twelve more months of this.

So now he shook his head positively. "I have no idea," he told Touny, thinking It's still as I told Renault. They've got to have faith. Nor was his faith in them misplaced. Four days afterwards, late on the night of 16th April [1943], a Lysander touched down between the glowworms of light on the field near Lyons-la-Foret and carried Dewavrin, Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas safely back to London. Six days after, on 22nd April, Thomas completed the last map of Ouistreham – a perfect one-in-a-thousand blueprint of all defences from east to west. A week later it was on Dewavrin's desk.

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Pat