Ten Thousand Eyes

Whilst searching the UK National Archives Image Library recently on another quest, I came across an aerial of the radar station at Douvres-la-Délivrande which Dr Jacques Sustendal had gathered intelligence on while making his way home. The link to the NA page is here. I am not sure of the date on which this aerial was taken, but I'm guessing it was in the spring of 1944. Note how extensive earthworks exist on both sides of the road on which Dr Sustendal had traveled the previous August.

More follows...

Pat

 

To continue the book narrative...


For a moment Odette stood appalled. Then, forcing herself to be calm, she opened the street door, and descended the worn stone steps to the pavement. She called, "Monique! Come here a moment, cherie."

Half a dozen pairs of childish eyes watched her with the polite hostility reserved for adults who intrude unwanted into a world of make-believe. Among them, with a sinking heart, Odette recognised the little girl who lived along the street—in the house next door to the Gestapo officers' billet.

Odette said, "Come inside a moment, cherie. I want you to help Mama." Then, smiling with what she knew was false brightness she took the plunge. "What sort of game have you • been playing this morning?"

"We've been playing houses. Our house is the Deuxieme Bureau. I heard Papa say so."

Now was her chance. "Mais non, ma petite, you didn't understand properly." She turned to the other children, sharing the secret: "At home, you see, we have a game—each room is a different bureau. The living-room is the Premier Bureau, the kitchen is the Deuxieme Bureau, the bedroom is the Troisieme Bureau. Each room, you see ... a different bureau . . ." Her voice faltered and died; the children stood and stared, saying nothing. They were not fooled that easily. The deadly significance escaped them, but it was imprinted on their minds now, and they would wonder why Madame Duchez was anxious to pretend that her house wasn't called the Deuxieme Bureau when so obviously it was. Children like to know the reason for things. They might ask their parents. . . .

And Monique was still repeating stubbornly, vexed at being made to look foolish: "But Mama, our house is the Deuxieme Bureau. . . ."

Hastily, inventing some excuse, Odette led the child indoors. For the rest of the day she took care to keep her well within earshot. But the worry obsessed her: for how long? They could not keep her indoors for ever. You could not explain to a little girl of three that the lives of her father and mother hung on her weighing every word she let slip in play.

When Odette confessed her fears, Duchez did not assure her breezily, as he so often had done, that everything would work out right. He, too, saw the need to watch his words, even in front of his children, and from that moment he began to like himself less.


Whichever way you looked at it security was a problem. Some of the part-timers, like Andre Masseron, the big phlegmatic pork butcher, from Bretteville-sur-Laize, preferred to commit nothing to paper, and almost every day Masseron called with fresh information on the bomb stores or the petrol tanks at heavily-guarded air bases like Carpiquet and Fontenay-le-Marmion. (One of the first requirements of the invasion planners was to neutralise all airfields within 150 miles of the Normandy coast, so that the Germans were operating from air bases as far back from the Wall as the English bases used by Allied planes.) Masseron, who held the contract to smoke the Germans' pork, was the most popular man on these airfields, and no one awaited his verbal bulletins more eagerly than Duchez.


But now Duchez told Masseron and other agents like him: "Don't come to my house more often than you can help. Look for me in the Cafe des Touristes and if I'm not there, leave a message with Paul in the boiler."

Maurice Himbert, the courier, was still bringing the weekly questionnaire down from Paris and the queries were piling up on Meslin's desk. It was hard to observe more than average caution in gleaning the information, too, because Dewavrin's questions had an urgent hurry-up quality that brooked neither delay nor argument. For instance, in the last week of August, 1943:

TOP PRIORITY

Information is urgently required on the following defensive positions which you have already reported in the coastal zone:

1. The exact emplacement, and details of the blockhouses at HONFLEUR, particularly surrounding the railway station, the Chamber of Commerce and the Central Quay.

2. What is the limit of the minefields on the beach west of HONFLEUR? Are they anti-tank or anti-personnel?

3. State exactly the calibre of the battery situated at the entry of the harbour at dives.

4. Is Mount Canisy only fortified near barneville, or near touques and south of deauville as well?

5. South of morsalines you have signaled 7 blockhouses. Are these not rather platforms for artillery? Give corrections and precise details.

There were other questions, too, fourteen in all and for Meslin to issue instructions to his departmental heads, for them in turn to prod local agents, was a tedious, nerve-stretching business. The Todt Organisation was building feverishly now: between the Bay of Biscay and North Cape, Norway, Hitler had 300,000 slaves working like beavers on his impregnable Wall—in one year they had shifted almost two million cubic yards of earth! But Dewavrin's scheme to enrol the Secret Army as agents had turned the scales in Century's battle to glean more and yet more detail.


Guns had ever-increasing priority in these questionnaires. To the Allies they counted more than solid concrete: each coastal battery covering the sea approaches held from two to six guns, and some could fire 12-inch shells by radar prediction, with a 360-degree range of fire. Moulines had his agents well planted in the Cotentin peninsula, where the concentration was thickest: the schoolmaster of St. Croix, Monsieur Richard, was reporting on the heavy batteries in the north, round Cap de la Hague, and another schoolmaster, an Alsatian named Unterreiner, kept watch on the batteries at Couville, south of Cherbourg. But all these men reported greater difficulty now in spotting the real thing. The Germans were beginning to camouflage them cannily, tunnelling strongpoints from the soft chalk of the bluffs, masking the telltale embrasures with pine branches and turf.

One that they knew little about—and what they knew they feared—was in the wild heath country at St. Martin-de-Varreville, guarding the seaward approaches to what was later called "Utah Beach." Moulines badly needed more details on that battery, and in the nearby village of Ste. Mere-figlise he singled out an electrician named Antonin Maury, a pink-scrubbed-looking little man, full of old-world courtesy, who seemed more like the dean of a provincial university. Maury still recalls the afternoon he looked up because a shadow had barred his work bench, and there was Moulines, in his old leather jacket, standing in the doorway and announcing rather dramatically: "I am looking for a man loyal to General de Gaulle."


Maury replied with feeling: "Who isn't?" But in a few days he was an accredited Century agent, haunting the road that ran past the gun-sites near the tiny village of Ste. Mere-figlise. Using Thomas's maps, it would not have been difficult for anyone to work out the actual co-ordinates of the sites, but Maury achieved what, even for Century, was a unique thing. He plotted the distance between each site of the six-gun battery without ever leaving his bicycle.

There was never time to linger: pedaling hard, he would pass one battery, two hundred yards distant across the rolling heath, and there were armed Schutzkommandos everywhere, waving him on, but he had no need to stop. He kept pedaling grimly on up the sheer twisting road, between the gorse and the pines, a pink perspiring Frenchman in a beret who could feel his thigh muscles knotting with the strain of the uphill grind. Maury was checking every revolution of the pedals, to achieve the same effect of pacing as if he had walked.

Once, when Moulines dropped in for the night, as he so often did, to find a bed and check results, Madame Maury challenged him mock-severely: "Are you trying to turn my husband into a madman? Whenever I see him now he's rushing into the house muttering numbers to himself and scribbling them down on bits of cigarette paper."


What always presented a bigger problem was discovering the calibre of the guns: even a man on the spot needed luck for that if the sites were some way off the public highway. Usually Girard confined his men to finding out the artillery regiment, before unearthing the kind of guns they used from sources close to the Germans. But Maury managed it all on his own at Varreville, pausing for breath on his bicycle to say: "Big guns," appreciatively, every time they checked his pass. He employed this ruse a good many times without success, until an unusually dim-witted sentry, prompted by patriotic pride, answered: "Ja, ja, gut—155s—Tommies; kaput." After that he may have wondered what became of his little friend, the electrician, whose rides became noticeably fewer.


For the record Maury was in the train on the way to the office of Harivel, the insurance agent, on the Place St. Sauveur, Caen, wearing a disreputable belted leather jacket whose lapels were frayed beyond repair. Tucked securely inside the rents were rolled wafers of cigarette paper inscribed with the battery co-ordinates and the relative distances.


Where one man asking too many questions in the district would have quickly aroused suspicions, the presence of Girard's Secret Army troops in the Manche spread the risk evenly. Few except Colonel Nobody and his checkers in Paris could see the final picture building. At Varreville another agent, unknown to Maury, reported that the 150 men manning the battery were housed in a stone building on the east of the village of Mesieres; a third, working on the site, helped distinguish the battery dining-room from the iron equipment hut.

The checking was so precise that when Dewavrin in London pressed impatiently for details on a small sinister concrete structure that had sprung up on site, Moulines's men had the answer within days. It turned out to be a shower bath!


Just east of the village of Grandcamp-les-Bains, perched on the rocky spur of Pointe du Hoe, the Todt Organisation had got busy on what later proved to be the most lethally-sited battery in the whole Normandy sector of the Wall. Obviously something would have to be done about those guns, perhaps even a task-force raid in advance, so what mattered most, as urgent questionnaires informed Century's organiser, Andre Farine, were the defences surrounding the defence on this isolated bluff. Farine got to work with a team of forty men—twenty Century agents, twenty Secret Army men—but the first results were disappointing.


A strange man, Farine, and a contradiction in terms. Close to forty, an ex-sailor with a brick-red face and a clipped moustache who still walked with a nautical roll, he took a perverse pride in being totally unamenable to discipline. "I, Andre Farine," he would growl, "have seen the inside of the lock-up in every port in the world. The Navy could do nothing with me!" The discipline and patience he exercised to plumb secrets of the Pointe du Hoe battery earned him the Croix de Guerre, though Farine would have knocked down the man who laboured that point unduly.


Near Grandchamp, Farine kept the Cafe de l'Etanville, a cheerful crowded brasserie that could accommodate a hundred covers. Holding this trump card, he began to use his ingenuity. First he applied for a licence for baking bread; then for permission to travel inland and buy wood to fire his bread ovens. Presumably nobody lost sleep over why he bought all his wood from one farmer named Fouche, but it was more than coincidence that Fouche's farm was perched on the top of a high hill called La Perruque (The Wig). From here, with the aid of binoculars, Farine had a perfect view of the orchards and the gentle green fields sloping up to Pointe du Hoe.

Now, using maps and binoculars and compass, crosschecking with the church spire at St. Pierre-du-Mont, he could work out the co-ordinates of the six-gun battery—but not the calibre of the guns, they were too far away. There was a double network of barbed wire, too, superficially camouflaged to resemble hedges. The ghost of a smile creased Farine's brick-red face as he knelt in the coarse grass. A fine hedge that glittered like tinsel when the autumn sun caught it! The local gossip had it that those "hedges" were mined. The gun emplacements were very close to the cliff-edge, seeming to crouch above the naked rock, and Farine shook his head, troubled. He knew that beneath the cliffs the smooth tan sand stretched a long way, almost fourteen miles from Port-en-Bessein to the lies St. Marcouf. If these guns were like some others of which he had heard tell, all those beaches would lie well within their range.


The questionnaires gave Farine no clue as to why the guns were important. No one, in any case, had yet christened those beaches "Omaha" or "Utah." With him, as with the others, it was a question of faith, and although he got the information that counted, after six months' patient inquiry, it would have covered no more than a page of typescript. Like Dr. Sustendal, he had to win the confidence of the reluctant young labourers of the S.T.O. On Sunday nights his cafe grew crowded and noisy, with a big iron stove in the centre of the room glowing almost red-hot, an accordion squealing jauntily from the bandstand as the labour corps youths and the village girls shuffled cheek-to-cheek in the murky twilight of the dance floor. German edicts forbade dancing, but there were few Germans in the area to enforce them, so Farine defied them cheerfully—to prove himself "beyond discipline" and to win the confidence of his customers.

Sometimes they formed a group round the shirt-sleeved proprietor and fed him information. It was as bad as he had feared—the guns were 155s with a blasting 25,000-yard range. Rumour had it that the batteries were to be stoutly manned—a guard of 125 shock troops and 85 gunners. As for the distance from the water's edge to the cliff base, that was easy, they had walked it many times—twenty yards— but what troops could scale cliffs over a hundred feet high, as high as a nine-storey building? The batteries and cliffs had been photographed many times, confirming this intelligence, before the 5oth U.S. Rangers settled down to solving that problem on similar cliffs at Swanage and in the Isle of Wight. [NOTE: this appears to be an error – the cliffs were stormed by the 2nd Ranger Battalion on D-Day]


What caused Century even greater concern were the mobile guns. Behind the coast the Germans were building up a force of ultra-mobile 170s, with a range that even outdistanced the 155s—32,370 yards. Eight of them were spotted by Moulines's agents in the Cotentin peninsula and Jean Chateau reported a whole concentration of them not far from Caen, east of the Orne. One of which the Germans were particularly proud lived on a truck mounting in a railway tunnel behind Houlgate. It took malicious pleasure in sneaking in again whenever the R.A.F. came over to look for it.

In cafes the Germans boasted that these guns handled so easily that they need fire no more than two rounds from the same position. Two rounds! This was Duchez’s area, and the painter knew enough gunnery to realise that this made effective counter-battery fire almost impossible.

Eventually, after he had thought about the problem, he came up with a partial solution smacking strongly of psychological warfare. Long observation had taught him that one of the noisiest bees in the German bonnet was fitness—above all, the fitness of youth.

Doling out faked passes and papers he and Odette began recruiting large mixed parties of youngsters in their 'teens, owning cycles. At week-ends, when they put on track-suits and pedalled rhythmically along the sheltered lanes east of the Orne, the sentries tended to eye them benevolently and not ask too many questions. The sections of control-map hidden inside their handlebars helped them check weekly changes of position, the news being transmitted from one permanent radio set that Century then possessed in Caen. Post Office workers had made it secretly to "Third Fool's" specifications and so far it had escaped detection in a unique hiding-place: the chimney stack on Arsene the plumber's roof.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

Nobody, least of all Duchez, was getting much sleep now. For one thing Dewavrin was asking too many questions, and Girard, who received the questionnaires first, added some of his own. Troops were coming more and more to occupy his attention, for, given that "Third Fool's" map was the German defence plan, the location and quality of troops was the factor deciding any Allied estimate of strength. No sooner was there a hint of fresh troops being drafted to the coast than no cell along the Wall received any peace. What village were they in ? How many were there, and what branch of the service? What transport did they have available and what kind of arms ? What was the size of the unit and where had they fought ? How, above all, was morale?

Century already knew the answers to many of these questions. They reflected the big problem haunting von Rundstedt, who also knew that the combat value of most Atlantic Wall units was non-existent. No matter what priority the Wall rated on paper, in practice trained and eligible men were needed on the Russian and Mediterranean fronts. The bulk of those left were a mixed batch of Mongols, Czechs, Poles and Austrians who had little stomach for the defence of Festung Europa. Most of the Germans were throw-outs from the Russian campaign with third-degree frost-bite— sixteen plus or hovering on fifty—and Mercader, who sold bicycles to them in Bayeux, estimated that there were no more than 1500 of these in the twenty-five miles of coast between Courseulles and Grandcamp.

To the observant French, small signs, viewed from a national standpoint, provided big clues. At Grandcamp, the "undisciplined" Farine watched a small group sipping their aperitifs in sombre silence while his wife cooked Sunday dinner in the kitchen. That afternoon he submitted a classic report: "The morale of the troops is low. They are not well-fed, reacting almost with anguish to the smell of kidneys stewing in cream."

The steadiest and most valuable information on troop dispositions and movements was coming from Aloyse Schultz. A big gangling man with prominent eyes, Schultz spoke French and German with equal fluency in the harsh accents of Alsace. The proprietor of a small radio shop in Vaucelles, a working-class suburb south of the Gare Centrale at Caen, he had been recruited by Chateau, the electricity-board inspector, because his basement seemed a likely place for a transmitting post. After a few weeks, Chateau asked Schultz how he got along with the Germans. Schultz said he got along so well that they came in parties to his basement to listen to the radio.

Chateau said incredulously: "To the radio? Can't they listen to the radio in their barracks?" And the big ungainly man replied seriously: "Well, yes, old friend, put that way, no doubt they can, but I don't suppose they can listen to the B.B.C."

Many Germans passed through Caen on leave. Some came from as far afield as Cherbourg—to see girl-friends, to look up old comrades in other units, or merely on their way to the fleshpots of Paris. Now, by word of mouth it was spread that a Frenchman in Caen who spoke German "like one of us," did a marvellously cheap and efficient job of repairs on portable radios.

Of course you had to wait your turn, so many other Germans went there, and the cursed Anglo-American raids meant that delivery of spare parts was slow but all the same . . .

"I'd like to promise it'll be ready by the time your leave's up," Schultz was saying a dozen times a day, "but if you're only here another two days . . . Tell you what, why don't you let me send it? Give me more time and I can do a better job." "Well ... yes ... all right, I will. I can rely on you?"
"Never yet, mein Herr, have I let a German officer down. Now let's see, it's Leutnant Keppel, of course, and you're at------?"
"La Riviere, just up the coast."
"La Riviere, of course. And I'd better have the unit, Herr Leutnant, just in case ..."
"Why, yes. Stupid of me to overlook it. 4415! Ost Battalion will find me, Monsieur."

In this way Schultz was able to deliver a score of radio sets each week—and a score of unit locations for onward transmission to London. Franck, the Alsatian schoolmaster, secure in his job as interpreter at the Prefecture in St. Lo, or Jean Auge, the bald dapper little stationmaster at Caen, did their bit too, but with greater difficulty. Auge, for instance, knew how many wagons were taken up by a division of infantry, but with forty troop trains rattling through Caen daily, he was bound to miss a good deal. Movement orders were one check but later, to create a false show of strength, the Germans issued false movement orders for the benefit of railway Resistants.

But in such humble cases as Leutnant Keppel's radio, Century had the surest check of all. Either he gave Schultz the right address or he never saw his radio again.

No one could quite explain it, but despite the triumphs there was fear in the air. The fear was infectious, though hard to analyse. A man afraid for his life finds many fears blending violently into one. The fear of the knock at the door, a daily fear, prompting the unspoken racing questions. The milkman? The leather inspector, calling to check how many shoes you had? Or the men you feared more than death, who wore neither black nor field-grey, but gentlemanly raincoats and green pork-pie hats.

Often enough they searched your home, defiling it systematically in the process. You were too numb, too sick with hatred, to know fear then, but if they found nothing, the fear worsened. They could so easily have stumbled on it— so now you feared the next time. There would be a next time. You knew that. When it came, you feared the torture, but supposing you survived the torture, bleeding and outraged, the worst fear mocked you in the cattle trucks on the journey to the concentration camp. The hollow twisting fear that it had all been for nothing, that you would never survive to share in the better life which had made the shock and the agony endurable.

No doubting now, in the autumn of 1943, that the Gestapo suspected something. They were putting out feelers. Three times they came to SustendaFs little surgery behind the wind-swept promenade at Luc-sur-Mer. Each time the interrogation, conducted by the infamous Einst, dragged on for hours. Sustendal, startled, found they remembered more of his journeys than he could. For instance:

"Four times between the 1st and the 5th September you visited Courseulles-sur-Mer, Doctor. Why?"

And Sustendal would look vague, tugging his scrubby moustache. "Well, gentlemen, you know more than I do. I shall have to check. . . ." He had been gauging the length and depth of the minefield along the seashore, of course, but luckily the alibi was there in the big leather day-book: an old lady with suspected bronchial complications.

Einst knew all about that, and knew, too, that the prescription had been delivered to the pharmacy on the evening of the first visit. So why three further visits? And why such frequent visits to Colleville-sur-Mer.

Always the day-book was the staunch friend, cloaking the real motive; always, too, the Gestapo had checked the prescription at the pharmacy. By a stroke of luck they did not search the house, but the questions were too near the bone to reassure.

"You're up to something, Doctor," said Einst unpleasantly, when they left. "I wish I knew what."

Within days Arsene, the argumentative plumber, was searched—perhaps because an officer at the Kommandatur unwisely asked his views on current events. With the Germans Arsene rarely smiled like Duchez or feigned camaraderie. His hate was violent and uncompromising. The lank black hair flopping across his forehead, that unsubmissive man answered:

"If every Frenchman thought like me, there'd be one German hanging for every cider apple ripening in Normandy."

A long shocked silence followed his words. Next day the Gestapo searched his house.

They searched three times in as many weeks. They tore up the parquet with chisels and almost wrenched apart the lavatory cistern. His wife and children were terrified. But Arsene stood there smiling maliciously, unafraid. He dispised the "thoroughness" of their searches because they stopped short of real intelligence. They tore up his parquet but left his roof alone; their pigeon-hole minds could not envisage a man transmitting from behind a chimney pot. They knew so little plumbing that they never spotted the false compartment close to the spigot in which he hid his maps.

In those days the burly Torres, Century's security officer, was coming often to Meslin's office. To make Century's security watertight, they held long discussions. Agents were warned afresh to use the dictionary system of memorising names. Fierce ingenuity went into plotting new hiding places for control maps.

Roger Deschambres, the melancholy red-haired plumber, packed his into a lead pipe and sealed it, before attaching it to a windlass and letting down into his well. Maury, the electrician of Ste. Mere Eglise, scraped the cement bindings from the stones in his rockery, lining it with maps instead; Gresslin, the Cherbourg grocer, buried his in flower-pots. From police headquarters Leblond, the young inspector, supplied a list of collaborators for guidance. It was guaranteed authentic, since the Gestapo themselves had compiled it.

If some on the list died suddenly and violently after making contact with Century they had themselves to blame for picking a risky profession.

Torres issued fresh instructions: beware of using any new cafes as rendezvous. The Gestapo were wiring some with concealed microphones. Distrust friendly "priests" who claimed to shelter Allied aviators: this, too, was a favourite way of infiltrating a stool-pigeon into a group. Beyond a certain point, trust of anyone was at a premium.

Torre's security was good on his own account, so good that Meslin offered his congratulations. That morning, talking to another of the network, Pierre Faure, head of the Premier Bureau, responsible for screening personnel, Meslin had asked: "What do you think about Torres?" Faure, a neat greying little man like a well-groomed mole, hedged, "What do you mean, what do I think of him?" "Well, where do you think his interests lie?"

Faure knew Torres only slightly, but his girth and gargantuan appetite were a local source of wonder. (The Germans' greatest drawback, he complained, was that they ate too many vegetables and not enough meat.) "Apart from eating and talking," said Faure frankly, "I don't imagine his interests lie anywhere at all."

Meslin never forgot it. But so complex is the mind of man that Torres was torn between pride in his own camouflage and indignation at the slight on his war effort.

From London Dewavrin had urged the whole of the French Resistance to concentrate on planned decentralisation. The arrests of General Delestraint and Jean Moulin had made that need plain, and there was no sign of "Operation Grand-Duke" slackening up. Early September had seen a heavy wave of arrests in Paris, and the overall morale of the Resistance was perilously low.

If Century's Intelligence work, backed by the Secret Army, was going smoothly, this was because the agents along the coast were not yet compromised. Brossolette, that dark dynamic man, was sent back to Paris with Yeo-Thomas to put the whole organisation on a business footing. Central control would remain vested in Paris, but sabotage and shock-troop organisation would now be controlled regionally, and have independent contact with London.

As yet there had been few arrests in Caen, but Girard was worried. In the first week of September the Gestapo unearthed an arms dump at Falaise, twenty miles away, and twenty-two members of the Secret Army were arrested. Then, at Lisieux, too, an arms dump was discovered, and the arrests snowballed. Comby, the coal merchant, reported that the office on the Place Saint-Sauveur was being watched: Normandy Peat-Cutters Inc. was under suspicion. Through Meslin, Girard sent instructions that Comby and Robineau, the rather rash young man who had charge of the arms dumps, should disappear.

To plan the decentralisation scientifically, Girard held long discussions with Brossolette, Berthelot and Colonel Touny. The work that Century alone was performing—the mountains of maps, papers, and weekly reports on morale— was now awesome to contemplate. Colonel Personne estimated that Himbert, the courier, brought him about 7 Ib. of papers—a pile three and a half inches high—from Caen each week.

Through his contact with the Post Office, a man named Ernst Prouvost, Touny arranged that after checking by Per-sonne and his aides, Century's reports should now merely be passed to the C.N.D. for addition to their dispatches and collected by a Post Office van. Travelling under the blameless cover of Post Office sacks they would be routed as ordinary mail to an agent called Troalen, at Concarneau in Brittany. There, under the supervision of the gruff Alex Tanguy, they were loaded aboard the Deux Anges, and brought in the manhole of the fishing boat to its rendezvous with the N51 trawler. The despised little Deux Anges, which began her war service with Renault, had now completed about seventeen voyages for Century.

There was urgent need to revise more than the courier service. So much information filtered through Caen that if Meslin's headquarters was hard hit Century and Secret Army work would suffer badly. Touny gave Girard urgent instructions to create new Secret Army cells at Rennes, Angers and Le Mans which could not only recruit local agents but serve as alternate transmission centres between the Wall and Paris. The headquarters would be sited if possible at Le Mans. The gay Moulines was to take charge of all intelligence work in these areas, with Dany acting as liaison agent between Girard and the local heads. Meslin would continue as head of the Caen cell, with Gille as his deputy on military matters and "Third Fool" Duchez handling intelligence.

On Wednesday, 8th September [1943], Girard and Dany were booked to depart for Le Mans and set this ambitious programme in motion. But at the last minute a conference was called in Paris with two Secret Army delegates who had just arrived from London, Abielle and Kemerer. Touny had arranged the meeting in the "safe" apartment of Madame Wastel, an imperious old lady who was also one of Farine's agents at Grandcamp.

At two that afternoon, on the fifth floor of No. 29 rue Claude-Bernard, the meeting began. Touny was presiding and Girard, Berthelot and Moulines had also been called to the discussion. The subject under review was D-Day; all of them were convinced now that next spring must bring positive results, but a close observer might have detected that on this mellow afternoon Girard seemed to have little interest in "The Green Plan" or "Operation Turtle." At intervals his eyes half-closed and his thick fingers beat a slow, soft tattoo on the arm of his chair—a sure sign that he was ill at ease or bored or angry.

Watching him, Moulines wondered idly which. Suddenly, almost rudely, Girard's voice cut harshly across Touny's words. "Moulines! Get downstairs and check with Dany. I have a hunch that something odd is going on."

The young count felt faintly rebellious. Between Madame Wastel's apartment and the street level where Dany was keeping watch were five flights of steep dark stairway and the building had, moreover, no lift. Hazarding that Girard would scorn premonitions, he tried to laugh him out of it. He said: "Come on, patron—you've never believed in hunches before." Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, "I still don't."

Girard rasped, "Young man, I am not asking your advice. I am giving you an order. Check with Dany. You'll find her on the street somewhere."

It was an odd trait in the prosaic Girard, one he rarely discussed, but he knew when something was wrong. Call it a gift, call it sixth sense, but often, like a dog, he could sense the footfall of danger long before a human ear could register the sound. Time and again, in war and peace, it had saved his life: this sense that everyone in the room or street had receded, and all time had ground to a halt, waiting. ... Like the afternoon in 1917, when the battlefield was quiet and the trenches were full of small relaxed jokes, but something kept urging him, move, find cover, the shell landing three minutes later, just where he stood, and it was not him but a man he had known well who was now a pulp of blood and bone and hair.

But Moulines had never known of this and a score of other incidents. Cheeks burning, he strode from the apartment, and all the way down the steep stairway, he smouldered. "Man Dieu! But he'd have a word with the chief later—calling him to order like that in front of strangers. Since when had he taken to believing in hunches?"

From the doorway he surveyed the wide sombre street which linked the Latin Quarter with the working-class district of Gobelins, but nothing strange was in sight. Only Dany would be loitering somewhere. He set off briskly up the pavement, arms swinging, and suddenly there was a light patter of heels and seemingly from nowhere Dany came running.

The encounter was not quite what he had expected. Suddenly her arms were round his neck, the cool grey eyes were looking into his, and as she kissed him, the delicious subtle scent of her perfume was in his nostrils. "Darling," he heard her cry. "Oh, but you were naughty to keep me waiting so long." And the susceptible Moulines felt his blood stirring. For a moment he thought, Why, I'd never thought of Dany in that way before.

But only for a moment, because the level sympathetic voice he knew better murmured, "Thank God you've come. Any moment now something's going to happen. Walk, but don't look behind."

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

The location of the meeting held on Wednesday 8th September 1943 at 29 Rue Claude Bernard in Paris is shown below:

​

I assume the fifth floor is the one marked with the red arrows, having the full balcony.

To continue the story...

Her words registered then, and dazedly Moulines was walking beside her, fighting a gnawing curiosity to peer over his shoulder. The full implication was still hard to grasp: Dany still snuggling against his arm, talking loudly and (he thought) convincingly of how much she had missed him. Suddenly she tugged at his sleeve.

"Darling, look! I've tried all over Paris, but that's the one I want you to buy me."

Moulines looked and as he did so the panic gushed through him and the reality of the danger took on paralysing shape. They had stopped in front of the electricity showrooms at No. 45, and Dany was pointing and he was looking at the glossy refrigerator in the window, but across the street, mirrored in the window glass like an image in water, was the sight that really held him. A thick-set man in a raincoat and a green pork-pie hat with a small feather tucked jauntily in its brim, leaning in the optician's doorway, paying no attention, face half-screened by a copy of Paris-Soir. Too studiedly careless, too still.

Moulines felt his knees turn to jelly, but to give credence to the charade he bent to examine the price-tag. As loudly as possible, hoping there was some way out, he said, "Forty thousand francs is a lot of money," and then, "How long has he been there?" Her reply was so soft he could scarcely catch it: "About half an hour. I was worried to death; there was no way to make contact." The drawback of the meeting place, as both knew, was that it lacked a phone, but Resistants could not afford to quibble over the shortcomings of gift apartments.

"But how, Dany—howl" Still bending to the shop window.

"It was the chief. The man was waiting for him outside the Cluny Metro station. He tracked him all the way here. He would have gone for reinforcements long ago, but he's been hoping I'd give him a lead."

Moulines straightened up. Ostentatiously he checked the money in his wallet: a newly-wed husband half-persuaded by the little woman's blandishments. "We'd better split up," he said. "Somehow you must lead him off and give him the slip while I get back and warn the others."

But Dany was more practical. "How do we know which one of us he'd follow? If he follows you, the others' will be worse off than they are now." The Gestapo had tried so hard to escape notice, she explained, that he had walked ahead of Girard. When he turned around, Girard had disappeared. Unless the man had seen Moulines leave the building he was still uncertain where Girard had gone to ground.

"All right," Moulines decided wryly. "We'll go to the bank and draw out our savings for that refrigerator. Somehow we've both got to draw him away from here."

Arm in arm, strolling like lovers, they ambled along the rue Claude-Bernard. Several times, woman-like, Dany evinced a desire to peer into shop windows and make sounds indicative of feminine cupidity. Each window told the same tale: the strategy was working.

The man in the green hat was following, only now the distance separating them was growing less. He was not losing the advantage.

They turned left (I think that should read 'turned right' from following along on Google Maps) into the long slatternly rue Gay Lussac. At mid-afternoon the queues were still sluggish outside the food shops, shuffling in voiceless apathy for a stale haunch of rabbit or a withered lettuce. This was too slow, Moulines decided; stepping from the pavement he began urging Dany along the gutter, past the silent crowds.

He glanced back. A hundred paces behind, the Gestapo man was in the gutter too, stepping out doggedly, keeping pace.

They walked more quickly now, fear mounting. Once, taking advantage of a sudden shining stream of bicycles, they dodged across the pavement into the Boulevard St. Michel. Outside the Capoulade (famous cafe) and the Luxembourg crowds of students argued passionately over books and the commis whisked the first leaves of autumn from the green painted iron tables. Green Hat crossed the street, too, negotiating the bicycles without difficulty.

For the first tune there was anxiety in Dany's voice; "How are we going to get rid of him ?"

"We'll have to head for a quiet neighbourhood where there aren't crowds," Moulines said. "Then he'll fall back."

By common instinct they turned right along the rue Soufflot, making for the grey mushroom dome of the Pantheon. From the quiet square surrounding the temple, the poor cobbled streets of the rue St. Jacques quarter, with the little tainted bah and the one-night hotels, drop between high houses to the river. In these narrow streets they would have a chance.

They began to hurry, half-running. The agent was only a few yards behind now; there was no more pretense. They turned into the great square under the lee of the Pantheon, and the thought jumped into Moulines's mind: it's a trap.

Fifty yards ahead a large black covered wagon was drawn up by the kerb. Looking back, they saw that Green Hat was no longer hurrying. As they watched he stopped short, pulled a whistle from his pocket and blew. The shock was like a physical blow: the whistle shrilling, the door of the van flinging open and men in plain clothes, half a dozen of them, jumping to the ground.

"Save yourself, Jacques," Dany shouted. "Don't mind me." And as she spoke and the men came at them in a spaced, dangerous line, she turned and ran. Without hesitation, Moulines dived into a side-street, his long legs eating up the distance. He saw a startled cat fleeing, and a dustbin rocked and crashed aside in his path. Rotting cabbage leaves, wadded newspaper and coffee-grounds cascaded across the cobbles.

Down the rue Valette Dany was running for her life. She was a tall girl running fleetly, but once as she rounded a corner, she skidded and almost fell; her high heels were betraying her. Behind her the background music of the hunt bayed into life; the frantic clattering of feet, the shouting, the wailing crescendo of the whistle. Run as if all your life depended on it, because it does, it does. Another corner now, the nightmare closing in. Ahead of her the street slept in September sunshine: shutters drawn back, the pastel shades of washing strung on roof-top lines, no one in sight. Fear shapes the wits beyond analysis, or why, of all the shops in that street, did she choose a dry-cleaners? She never knew, but she dived in.

The shop was empty, a bell jingling faintly in the back region, and then, somewhere in the plunging panic of her mind, the old ingenuity was resurgent. Stripping off her coat and turban she tossed them over the counter. Outside on the cobbles the hard thunder of feet sounded. God grant, she thought, that the owner doesn't come. She lifted the barrier, passing behind the counter. Again the bell jingled: a man, hatless and sweating, dangerously flushed, his breath coming in painful bursts.

Trim in blouse and skirt, Dany smiled inquiringly.

"Mademoiselle, have you seen a young woman in a green coat and red turban?"

Try to look unconcerned now. "Mais non, monsieur—no one at all." The door crashed to with his departure, and then the colour flooded to her cheeks as the back door of the shop opened. A hunched elderly woman was watching her in silent inquiry.

Dany said quickly: "I'm so sorry—forgive my clumsiness. I dropped my hat and coat over the counter and I came round to pick them up."

She thought the woman eyed her curiously before saying:

"Ce n'est pas trap grave, mademoiselle—but cleaning nowadays takes six weeks."

"Any time," Dany said. "Any time at all." And it was all she could do to stop herself from shaking.

Leaving the shop, she turned away at right angles, back into the anonymous bustle of the Boul' Mich'. By devious means she made her way back to the rue Claude-Bernard, this time approaching from the east. Once in the street she realised that unless Girard and the others had read a swift warning from Moulines's absence it was too late. A black Citroen with German police markings was parked outside No. 29. So the Gestapo had seen Moulines leave the building. They had found the house.

From a doorway farther down she watched, too numb to feel the grief that she knew would follow. The few people who passed took one look at the car, then hurried on, heads bent, as if ashamed that they were powerless to help. An hour dragged by, but the Gestapo did not emerge, and as evening drew closer Dany shivered. At last five men came out, got brusquely into the car and drove off. God be praised, there were no prisoners; the concierge had kept silent. If they had found the right apartment they would at least have taken Madame Wastel. She felt sick with reaction and incredulous joy.

She rang the three-in-one apartment from a cafe to find Girard in good humour. All had gone well. Scared by Moulines's sudden absence they had vacated the flat in a hurry, and while Dany and Moulines had played their dangerous game of hide-and-seek, Girard and the others had continued the meeting safely beneath the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens. Moulines, too, had lost his pursuers after a helter-skelter chase.

The three-in-one flat itself seemed safe. The concierge, who was reliable, had seen no suspicious strangers loitering nearby. But thereafter Girard never returned home without first phoning Dany to check that the coast was clear.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

I have traced as best I can the route taken by Dany and Jacques Moulines in trying to shake off the Gestapo agent trailing them on the 8th September 1943 below:

​

I would have loved to find the dry cleaners where the chase ended but unfortunately, there is not enough detail in the narrative to find which side street Dany was on when she rushed into the shop.

Moving on with the narrative...

So far, so good, but Girard saw the need for decentralisation as more urgent than ever, and on the morning of 10th September [1943] he and Dany travelled by train to Le Mans. Saussaye, the tall scholarly head of the Le Mans sector of Century, had given him the name of a contact there who he thought might be useful in starting a Secret Army cell: an ex-Army Intelligence officer named Colonel Becker, who had agreed to a rendezvous in a cafe near the station.

After the first twenty minutes' discussion, Girard felt his heart sink. Even in Le Mans you could feel the miasma of fear and suspicion, and from the frosty reserve with which he greeted them it was plain that Colonel Becker distrusted them on sight. A forceful, strongly-built man with iron-grey hair, he cut short Girard's arguments, saying: "I know nothing about you, Monsieur, nothing at all. And you can offer no satisfactory proof of your identity. I shall need something more than that to convince me that you're not working for the Gestapo."

And yet, Girard thought, it was only his own attitude of empiricism recoiling on him. "Make up a simple sentence," he told the Colonel. "Anything you like. For example, 'The sky is blue'." Becker thought and said finally, "The snow is melting fast."

Girard said: "Right. In forty-eight hours listen to the 9 p.m. news bulletin by the B.B.C. from London. Afterwards the announcer will read a list of personal messages for the French. Yours will be amongst them."

The sentence was relayed without delay and the day afterwards, 12th September [1943], Becker joined the Secret Army. Now his first task was to build up an organisation akin to Meslin's in Caen, and under the cover name of "Baron" he set inquiries on foot through the Underground. The search presented one unforeseen problem. Nine days later, when Girard returned to Le Mans, impatient for results, Becker was bewildered.

"It's much harder than I thought," he complained. "I made half a dozen discreet inquiries—all to people who only know me as 'Baron'—and they promised to scout around and find me a good deputy. Now all of them have come back and told me the best man to get in touch with is some fellow called Colonel Becker."

Despite such setbacks, Girard's re-organisation went on. He shuttled between Paris and Le Mans and Caen, busier than ever, adding fully-staffed auxiliary cells in Rennes and Angers under the leadership of an ex-regular officer, General Audibert. A military adviser, General Robert Marasse, cover-name "Surlaut," was appointed to keep Secret Army plans in step with the strategy of Allied invasion headquarters. Lamoureux de la Saussaye was given the job of co-ordinating all their activities on a civilian level. The primary responsibility of all these men was organising Secret Army troops for D-Day in Normandy and Brittany, but due to their efforts, details on troop movements, factory output and munition depots eighty miles inland from the Wall were steadily pipe-lined to London.

Girard held conferences with each of them as often as he could, exhorting, encouraging, pressing for more information. The head of his Argentan cell, a cheerful electricity board inspector named Robert Aubin, recalls: "Because he had to be everywhere at once, you didn't see Girard often, but he only had to visit occasionally to make you feel that he was always there backing you up. It was as if he passed on to you something of his strength and his sense of humour and helped the job to go along more smoothly."

And the meticulous Jacquemin, in Le Havre: "I'd been waiting a long time to get into the Resistance, but I'd made up my mind that when I did get in, it would be under a chief I could rely on. When Pierre Faure. approached me at the end of '42, the first thing I asked was, who ran the network. 'Girard,' he said. 'I'll tell you more about it. . . .' But I said, 'That's good enough for me, I'm in.' When you'd known Girard as long as I had, you knew you could give him your trust."

Everyone felt this quality of leadership, though none could pin it down more precisely. Part of the clue, perhaps, lay in the simple fact that although Girard travelled almost everywhere in a rumpled sports coat and flannel trousers he saw himself always as a soldier in uniform, under orders. Outwardly he scoffed at himself as a "mothball soldier," but secretly, perhaps, he found comfort in being a link in a chain of command, and sometimes to Dany and Moulines he talked wistfully of the glories of being a Commando. "Stepping ashore in a battle with a hail of fire all round you. . . . What a war that would be." Because he, who led the secret Resistance of 7000 men, hated the secrecy. He, who in business broke through the tangled skein of verbiage and got results, hated the slowness, the uncertainty—"never seeing the end of the work I was doing."

If he drove others hard, he drove himself harder, sleeping uneasily, often, when money was short, making do with little food. As he saw it, the way to a planned Resistance capable of administering a stunning shock-punch on the day of reckoning was to live as a soldier, single-minded, ascetic, with the Atlantic Wall as your own front line—an almost Teutonic view and that was part of his secret, too. But if he was quick to blame, he was quick to praise, and a brusque word was soon forgotten. The one thing he stamped on utterly was when an agent began nourishing fancies about the romance or gallantry of his job. To one such he boomed furiously: "You see some men down the road putting up a blockhouse and then come and tell me about it. What is supposed to be difficult or romantic about those simple facts?"

The transmitting facilities, too, came under his eagle eye. With "Operation Grand-Duke" focused on Paris and arrests swelling weekly, Dewavrin's former conception had outlived its usefulness. There was now little point in concentrating the transmitters in the Paris suburbs when it was Century-cum-Secret Army units receiving arms drops or observing troop and shipping movements along the Wall who needed the sets on the spot. If they could radio London that a drop was "on" or that a battalion had moved within a few hours, that gave the Allies time to act on the information whenever necessary.

That autumn he appointed a new transmission chief for the region, Jean Chibeau, and the stock of transmitters along the Wall began to build up. Four in the Caen area alone—on Arsene's roof; in the cellar of Schulz, the radio merchant; in the house of one of Duchez's workmen, and in the hayloft of a farmer called Roger Savard, seven miles out at Anisy. Westwards towards Cherbourg other transmitters were housed, at Bayeux, Grandchamp and Ste. Mere figlise, in the attics or cellars of Mercader the bicycle merchant, Farine the cafe proprietor and Maury the electrician. Only Gresselin, in Cherbourg, was without transmitters: the neck of the Cotentin peninsula was too narrow, an easy target for detectors, and the ever-present radar created an insuperable barrage of static.

For Girard's men the tension did not slacken. There were small incidents, unimportant at the time, which seen in retrospect were like the first faint twinges of pain that betray the fatal sickness.

There was the incident of the Typewriter, when the Germans almost stripped aside the protective camouflage of security which Meslin's work as Government engineer gave the Caen cell. As usual, Jeanne Verinaud was typing the dispatches whenever she could sandwich the job into office hours. Drawn blinds, a light glowing late, only built up suspicion. One afternoon, when Meslin was away, she was alone working on a dispatch which Gresselin had sent through from Cherbourg a week earlier. Her fingers raced over the keys of the Underwood.

"Electricity Supply, Cherbourg Arsenal.

Following an inspection by a German Admiral, the French engineer in charge of supply has been warned that it would be fatal for this post to run short of coal. It is the only one to furnish distilled water to five Atlantic submarine bases...."

The door opened and Karl Hoefa walked in.

The girl went on typing almost by instinct, knowing that the worst thing was to betray either fear or surprise. With any luck, seeing that Meslin was absent, the Port Commandant would only pass the time of day before leaving. But Hoefa didn't. He sat down in a chair facing her, a little to her right, and lit a cigarette. She did not think he could see the paper in her machine. But she wasn't sitting where he was, so she couldn't be sure.

She did her best to seem polite and helpful. M. Meslin was in Honfleur. (Thank God Gresselin's scribbled notes were on the desk to the right of her machine.) Was there no chance he would be back? She made a dubious secretary'st face. "Well, I'm very doubtful. . . . He didn't seem to think . . ." She had almost eased the paper from the roller when the tall blond young man craned forward. "But Mademoiselle------"

"Yes, Commandant." Her heart was beating so fast that it hurt her.

"I am disturbing your work. Please, please go on with your typing."

Jeanne Verinaud thought, "I can't say I've finished it, even from there he can see the sheet is only half-filled. . . ." Reluctantly she ratcheted the paper into the machine. Would he notice it was a different make? Or ask her what she was typing? In either case she would not know what to say. She could only keep typing and hope.

Smoking and chatting Hoefa sat on. Apparently he was intent on nothing more than enjoying the society of a pretty girl and a chance to relax. He was not, she knew, a very ardent Nazi; before the war he had been National Skating Champion of Germany, Meslin always said you could talk to him like a human being, but that afternoon, conscious that he was a German and a patriot, she did not seem able to talk to him at all.

He would not go. He talked and smoked and would not go - She began to hate the sound of her own voice, absurdly stumbling and faltering. Supposing he got up and looked over her shoulder? Sometimes in the past he had done that, but only when she had been typing office minutes. He lit another cigarette. He would not go. She had to type twenty-nine lines that afternoon. It seemed like ten times the number. Towards four o'clock Hoefa got up, bowed slightly, pressed her hand in farewell, then turned and went out. She sat there for some time before she could go on working. She knew that it was all right. Nothing was going to happen; they were safe. But it had been close—very close.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

There was the incident of the Transmitter at Ste. Mere-figlise. In that village Madame Maury, the charming, self-possessed wife of the electrician, had always felt safer than the wives of some Resistants. She had a Gestapo man billeted in her house. (After he had gone to bed each night, Georges, her small son, made a solemn ceremony of spitting in his boots.)

But his presence was comforting, because it seemed to afford protection from neighbours' gossip. The man went to bed early, too early to witness the stealthy midnight arrivals of Moulines on his old bicycle, and he was away from the house all day. He was unaware of Maury's twice-weekly transmissions on the training programmes and daily doings of the 2nd Battalion of the 191st Artillery Regiment. Or so they had thought.

Madame Maury was the schoolmistress in the nearby village of St. Marcouf. One day that autumn, during mid-morning break, she saw the children huddled on the low wall of the playground watching something across the road. There was a wagon drawn up and peasants were being hustled brutally from their cottages; German troops and French milice were making a house-to-house search. The Sergeant of the Milice often exchanged jokes with the children and she called to him: "What's the trouble, Sergeant?"

"No trouble, Madame." He came trotting importantly over the road. "Tell the little ones not to worry." He tugged his big cavalry moustaches, strong and protective, a devil of a fellow. "Confidentially, Madame, there are terrorists in the neighbourhood, but do not fear. We shall soon have them."

"Terrorists?" The quaver was not entirely assumed.

"Indeed, yes—terrorists who have somehow gained possession of a wireless transmitter. The devils are cunning—it's almost impossible to find them on a house-to-house search. But don't worry—in a few days' time they are sending one of the R.D.F. vans from Cherbourg and then"—he cracked his knuckles triumphantly—"we shall have them."

Suddenly the sergeant and the children and all of them trembled in a wave of nausea, but with an effort she pulled herself together. Two hours from now Maury would be climbing the wooden stairs to the attic above the workshop for the midday transmission. She imagined the panic glazed on his face if the soldiers suddenly crashed in, tearing him from the set and trampling it, setting on him with their boots and clubbed fists. . . . But she could not leave the school before twelve-thirty. To disappear suddenly, when the children had heard the conversation, would set village tongues wagging. At her desk all the rest of the morning there was only a cold coiled lump of sickness where her stomach had been. She was obsessed with the thought: Is it our turn now?

Nothing had happened when she reached home and that same afternoon Monsieur Laurence, the Mayor, accepted temporary responsibility for the transmitter. It would have to be shifted after each emission now. They had just gained a breathing space.

Now the first yellow leaves shivered from the trees, and at night a wet opaque bandage of mist hung above the waters of the Orne. In the orchards the mistletoe berries glowed white among the apple branches, a promise of Christmas. Workmen with good contacts drank a hot grog in their favourite cafe of a morning to guard against the pinching frosts. At home in the evening men thumbed surreptitiously through calendars and tide-books and argued and discussed endlessly. How could they glean yet more information? How could they throw off the German yoke? And when would the longed-for invaders come?

All of them felt it could not be long.

There was the incident of the First Arrests, which were so nearly the worst.

The reason for them was rooted in the visit that a priest, named the Abbe Luc, paid to the Thomas household in the last week of September, 1943. His was a routine request: an R.A.F. flyer, sheltering under his roof, needed identity papers. Like most others in the network, the Thomases held a stock of papers, not only for agents entering the zone, but for aviators and young men escaping to the Maquis. They gave the priest the papers he needed, but this time, when he left their house, the Abbe was followed by Helmut Bernard's Gestapo agents, arrested and searched.

The second day of October [1943] began like any other Saturday morning. Robert had gone early to work at the potato controller's office. The soignee, vivacious Marthe was at her desk in the Caen Prefecture and Jeanne was busy in Meslin's department. Both Papa Louis and Madeleine, the tallest and most outspoken of the daughters, had the morning off. At No. 22 rue Montaigu, breakfast was over. The old man roamed placidly round the living-room. Madeleine and Mama Thomas were busy in the kitchen.

At 10 a.m. came the thundering at the door. "Aufmachen!" (Open up!)

No one moved. Papa Louis stood rooted to the ground. In the kitchen, Madeline and her mother consulted in frantic whispers. At last Madeleine went slowly to answer the door. She was half-way across the living-room to the hallway when Mama Thomas saw the maps.

They were lying on the scrubbed wood of the kitchen table, about half a dozen of them—copies of those that had already passed to Meslin's office for collection by the courier.

Mama took in the situation at a frantic glance. Robert must have tossed them down when he left for work, having no time to burrow beneath the soiled linen in the laundry hamper and store them in the two attache-cases that served as "box files." Bernard would give the Thomas family no quarter if the Gestapo found them. They would reveal the rambling old house for what it was: the branch office of an espionage service whose willing agents were numbered in thousands.

The old lady moved faster than she had ever done in her life, Madeleine was in the hallway now. The Gestapo was still pounding at the door. Trembling with emotion, she seized a box of kitchen matches. A yellow blade of flame sprang into life, but with anguish she saw that the tough cartographic paper only buckled at the edges, turning brown. The footsteps of the Gestapo were in the hallway. No good, no good....

She grabbed the maps and ran to the coal range. A vegetable soup was bubbling gently in a big copper saucepan. Lifting the lid she plunged the maps into the pulp of cabbage and turnips, mashing them down with the ladle. For a moment the maps floated obstinately on the surface. Then they bubbled and sank from sight.

She stood trembling inwardly but very unbending and dignified, in the manner of the French matriarch whose privacy has been violated, while Gestapo men in raincoats trampled through kitchen and living-room, spilling the contents of drawers on the carpet. Probing, rending and sorting. They looked briefly at the wicker hamper, then, with a gesture of distaste, turned away. They found bundles of identity cards and several stamps, including the stamp of the Chief of Police at Trouville. But no maps.

The senior Gestapo man said stiffly to old Papa Louis: "You and your daughter will come with us to the rue des Jacobins. Where are your other daughters and your son?" The old man lied that they were out for the morning, shopping in the town. It was obvious that a blanket order had gone out to arrest la famille Thomas, but as yet the thugs had not checked up on where the children worked. In any case, they would be found and brought to headquarters before the day was out.

To Mama Thomas the agent said: "Your presence is not required, madame. You will stay here and not attempt to leave the district."

Mama Thomas knew, of course, what the Gestapo intended. They were counting on the fact that human nature would rule out prudence and that, as soon as she thought the coast was clear, she would leave the house to warn others in the network. Bernard gauged correctly that few people are braver than the women of France. His mind failed to grasp that it is sometimes braver to do nothing at all.

It worked out a little differently.

Someone from the rue Montaigu—a woman neighbour, whose name they had never known—had already set off to alert Marthe Thomas at the Prefecture. When she heard the news the plump self-possessed Marthe lost no time. Leaving her outraged boss gasping, she ran through the city to Meslin's office by the Pont de la Fonderie. There she warned Jeanne, her sister. Jeanne went on to the potato controller's office to warn Robert.

But to persuade Robert that he would benefit neither the network nor do his duty as a son by giving himself up— that was a harder job. All morning Marthe and Jeanne sat miserably in a little cafe trying to reason with him. "You know so many people in the network," Marthe argued, "supposing they made you talk? We hardly know anyone important, and even the few we do know are helping the airmen, not the maps. I'm sure it's because they think we're helping airmen that all this has happened."

But Thomas sat there, pale and determined, disputing it. All his instincts revolted at the idea of leaving his family in the lurch. All right, he said at last, he'd go, but first he had to get those maps out of the house. It took them another half-hour to talk him out of that. Somebody else must get them, Jeanne said. It would be suicide for him to go near the house again.

As it turned out, Jeanne was right. At the rue des Jacobins just then, the Gestapo were opening a dossier on the Thomas family and in the dossier, still extant, one sentence stands out clearly: "It would appear that these people have been manufacturing false papers on an extensive scale, possibly with the complicity of the man Paul Berthelot." The Cafe des Touristes was also suspect, though Paul was never questioned; better to wait and watch, Bernard thought, and then to pounce. The Gestapo chief knew that he was dealing with amateurs but it never occurred to him that amateurs were other than clumsy.

"This," demanded a Gestapo official when Madeleine Thomas was led in for questioning. "Where did you get this!" Looking down, Madeleine saw the rubber stamp that she had stolen from her boss at Trouville. Without hesitation she lied: "I made it." The man tossed it contemptuously aside. "Just as I thought. . . and a clumsy forgery at that."

As for Robert, he had a lot to do and little enough time to do it in. Early that afternoon he rapped cautiously at the door of the small fisherman's cottage that Girard, who had given up the rue St. Jean apartment, now rented near the river, and Girard, by a stroke of luck, was there to let him in. His face was very grave when Thomas finished; he started to say, "Mon petit, I don't know what to say. . . ." And that was true, because for once in his life Girard didn't. Thomas had never seen the tough practical Girard so strangely moved, and when the big man just stood there with his face working, patting him rather absently on the shoulder, he didn't know what to say, either.

For the first time he had the strange thought that he loved Girard like his own father, and Girard, too, had a soft spot for Thomas. The cartographic service would go on, but it was Thomas who had nurtured it and improved on it and sapped his strength in its service. Now the boy looked sallow and ill and without the force to fight any further because in eighteen months he had drawn or collaborated on and supervised close to 4000 maps—almost fifty a week.

After a spell Girard blew his nose violently, then said with his old energy: "But you've done enough, you know, Robert. I don't know how many maps you've done, but you've done marvels. But you won't be safe now, you know, wherever you go, and it worries me. I think you'd better go to England— I can arrange in Paris for a Lysander pick-up."

But on all counts Thomas rejected this violently. He said stubbornly: "I won't have that, chief. I'll go anywhere here you want me to but not England. I started my war in France and I'm going to finish it here." It was a brave and oddly moving little speech. Soon Thomas left and Girard urged him to quit Caen before nightfall.

Half an hour later, Thomas was knocking on Arsene's door in the narrow working-class rue d'Auge. Arsene listened with glinting eye, because this promised action. "You stay here until after dark," he said. "I'll look after you, but first I'll look after your maps." Then, leaving his camionet parked outside the door, he walked out of the house.

For ten minutes he trudged steadily uphill, past the great grey cupola of St. Michel-de-Caucelles, until he reached the rue Montaigu. The afternoon was still, with the sullen smell of rain in the air. The street looked grey and sombre, paint peeling from the shutters, few people about. The door of the Thomas's house stood half-ajar and Arsene hardly paused to see if anyone was watching. He walked in, through the hallway, through the deserted parlour until he reached the kitchen. Sunk in her private grief Mama Thomas heard a sound and swung round to see him standing there. His finger was at his lips, enjoining silence, and the cry of surprise choked in her throat.

Neither said a word. Quietly, grinning to himself, Arsene opened up the laundry hamper, burrowing beneath until he located the two attache-cases. His one eye winked farewell, then with his beret set at a jaunty angle, he swung away down the rue de la Porte. Reaching the Cemetery of Vau-celles, he walked cheerfully with his attache-cases among the white crosses and the rank grass of the graveyard until he came to the door of the crypt. Inside an empty tomb he found a safe repository for 400 of Century's maps.

It was then approximately 3 p.m. but the Thomas family saga was not quite complete. As Frenchwomen, Marthe and Jeanne had decided that they must surrender looking their best. After leaving Robert they went home to change into their smartest outfits, paying particular attention to cosmetics and hair style. Then, as gaily as if they were setting off to a dance, they waved to the gawping neighbours, strolled unhurriedly down to the rue des Jacobins and gave themselves up. All the Thomas family save Mama and Robert were now held in custody for further questioning.

That night, after dark, Arsene got out his camionet and drove fast between steeply wooded ravines to the village of Bretteville-sur-Laize, nine miles away. There he delivered Robert to the care of Andre Masseron, the big, phlegmatic pork butcher, whose plump pink face and relaxed air were so welcome on all the local airfields.

Masseron agreed to hide the young draughtsman in an upper room, and Arsene drove home again without incident. It had been quite a day.

A month passed. The men and women of Century had almost permitted themselves the luxury of forgetting to be afraid. Then came the incident of the Telephone Call.

Some time in the mid-afternoon of 3rd November [1943] the phone rang in Girard's Paris apartment and he answered it Dany understood that Harivel was talking from Caen, but she could not gather much from what Girard was saying. He said: "I see ... I see.... Yes, I see.... Thank you for letting me know." When he hung up he was very quiet, but after a minute, he said: "Harivel. Odette Duchez has been taken to hospital."

That was the cover-phrase the Underground used when they talked about a Gestapo arrest.

More follows…

Regards,

Pat

 

How it happened is on record. Why will always be debatable. Some said the Gestapo's monitor service at the Central Telephone Exchange intercepted some injudicious calls made to Duchez by one of his agents. Others charged that "Third Fool" incautiously put his own name and address to a message concerning "seven pots of paint" he had delivered —meaning seven American airmen who had recently passed through the escape chain. Or perhaps the Gestapo kept a check on the movements of a "French-Canadian airman" who was picked up and sheltered by Duchez's spotter service until the R.A.F. radioed that the man's service and squadron numbers were false.

Shortly afterward the "airman" had left for Paris on a one-way ride.

Whatever his reasons, Helmut Bernard decided, early on 3rd November [1943], that the most pressing item on the morning's agenda was an interview with Duchez. That was the worst day of Duchez's life; it brought the hardest decision he ever had to make.

Harivel called at the house that morning; the calm dependable insurance agent was then acting as liaison officer between Colonel Corbasson's Troisieme Bureau, which was carefully screening local targets for sabotage, and Duchez's Deuxieme Bureau, which controlled the part-time agents. The children were spending a few days with Odette's brother-in-law, and it was easier to talk freely. But at last Duchez finished his coffee and clapped his beret on his bony head, telling Harivel, "Allans, man enfant, au travail." Then the knocking exploded into the silence.

Odette felt her heart like ice, void of anything but terror.

So this was what it was like. For eighteen months, day and night, the fearful wonder had never left her, and now she knew. It was she who opened the door finally. As the Gestapo men shouldered past her, neither Harivel nor Duchez moved a muscle.

But the painter's brain was working overtime that morning, and in a swift look Duchez had sized them up. New men. He hadn't seen them in Caen before, so the chances were they had not seen him. (And the Gestapo did not carry dossiers or descriptions to the scene of their arrest: that was plain enough from the Thomases' experience.)

These thoughts lanced through his mind as the eyes turned to him, and suddenly, raising his beret formally to Odette, he said:

"Very well, Madame Duchez—since you have visitors, please tell your husband to communicate with me as soon as he returns."

The senior agent swung on him, a tall man with spectacles and a lisp. "Who are you ?"

Suddenly "Third Fool" was all outraged probity. "I am Monsieur Dupont, of Dupont and Durand." He indicated the frozen Harivel. "My partner, Monsieur Durand. We have called to see Monsieur Duchez, but as you see, he is not in."

For one instant the man wavered and Duchez knew that he had him. But he asked suspiciously: "What's your business with Duchez?"

"We have come to complain about his work. Only two months ago he painted our offices and already the paintwork is peeling. The man is a charlatan and we shall sue him, monsieur, you will see. . . ." But the Gestapo man, losing patience caught him heavily by the shoulder. "Raus! Schnell!" Too dazed to fully comprehend that the ruse had worked Duchez and Harivel were hustled down the steps and into the street.

Once, as they walked, Harivel tried to say something but Duchez, shaking all over, cut him short: "Don't say anything ... not now." At the corner of the street they separated.

Duchez made blindly for the cafe on the comer and flung open the frame door. Breasting the sine he ordered a calvados from the patron, gulping the fiery liquid so fast that the tears were pricking his eyes. Then he saw two men standing farther up the bar, one of them eyeing him disapprovingly: Arsene, the plumber, whose views on alcohol were well known, who drank only coffee, lukewarm, because of digestive trouble, a tense fidgety man who could not sleep.

Duchez moved over to him. "Look, Auguste," he said, using Arsene's cover-name. "I'm in trouble . . . the Boches are in my house."

Arsene said sharply: "...And Odette?"

"Odette's there." Duchez looked closer to a breakdown then than his comrades had ever seen him. "I left her—I had to. . . ." Arsene wasted no time asking questions. He swallowed his coffee and picked up his heavy bag of plumber's tools. "Stay there," he said. "Above all, show no fear." And he pantomimed a man shivering with funk. "You must be calm and smiling."

He pictured a man being calm and smiling. "Drink your calvados like a man with nothing on his conscience and then go to my house and wait till I come." He took long innocent sips of an imaginary liquid, nodded once or twice to himself, then loped out of the cafe.

Outside the painter's house the police car was still drawn up, but Arsene did not hesitate. A man in plain clothes checked him at the door, but Arsene mumbled something about being expected, so the man gestured sourly and let him through. He got far enough to see the ugly chaos that had hit the Duchez's little parlour: blank identity cards stacked in untidy heaps, bureau drawers wrenched open, the portable radio receiver from the basement (thank God it hadn't been a transmitter!) and Odette hunched in a chair weeping bitterly.

Arsene started to explain about the central heating, but the man with the lisp ran at him, caught his shoulder and catapulted him down the short flight of stairs. Bruised and shaken he limped back to the cafe to find Duchez gone.

Just about then Andre Masseron, the pork butcher, drove in from Bretteville-sur-Laize and halted his camionet near the station. Ahead of him stretched a busy morning delivering smoked pork to the Germans, but he also had routine information on Carpiquet airfield to pass to Duchez. It would save him time to go to the house, surely just once couldn't hurt, despite what "Third Fool" had said .. . then, with the engine ticking over, some instinct that he couldn't pin down warned him against it. Masseron saved his own life by driving to the Cafe des Touristes, waiting in vain, and entrusting a message to the boiler.

Meantime Arsene had arrived home to find Duchez in his living-room. "They've found the receiver," he reported, "and the identity cards." Duchez sat there looking very white and after a moment he asked dully: "Odette?" Arsene reported that she had been crying, and Duchez nodded reluctantly. "That's good. She's carrying out our plan."

"Plan?"

"We've always planned that if they came and I wasn't there, she was to blame it all on me. Say that she didn't know what I was up to, that I'd never tell her anything about it. Then she was to start weeping. It unnerves them if a woman weeps."

Arsene looked at him for a moment, but Duchez only sat therewith all the fight seeming to have gone out of him. After a moment he burrowed in his pocket and lit his pipe. "What are you going to do ?" Arsene asked.

Duchez slumped in the chair. "I've got to work on my part of the plan," was all he would say.

To Arsene it seemed that the painter was in a condition approaching shock; he did not pause to try and extract sense from him just then. Towards midday he approached Duchez's house again and the empty silence told him that the Gestapo had gone and Odette with them. They might return later for a further search, but in the meantime Arsene had work to do. Duchez had confided where he kept papers concerning the Deuxieme Bureau.

Outraged squawking and a flurry of feathers greeted the plumber's entry to the chicken run, but after a few minutes he had located the control maps, tucked carefully under the reeking straw. Before leaving he burned them, grinding the charred flakes to powder under his boot. That evening, when he returned home, the painter had gone.

Duchez was spending the night with Paul, in an upper room of the Cafe des Touristes, not wanting to compromise anyone by resting long under one roof. The painter was tasting the ashes of defeat. He had loved Odette deeply, being more dependent on her than many people knew, and in arresting her the Gestapo had brought home to him the savage misery of war as nothing else could have done. "C'est le sang-froid"—like a brave and mischievous schoolboy he had gloried in outsmarting the Germans, but the boyish improvident nature found it hard to come to terms with a reality as stark as this.

He could not even do what instinct prompted and pursue his war with even grimmer purpose. If his escape that morning was to have any meaning or value, his Resistance must end as of now. He must get away from Caen, and he must not be taken alive.

The whole audacious hoax had hinged on one probability —that the Gestapo would not link Odette with an espionage network. With him they would have been more suspicious. They would have brought out their best line in tortures, and if he had not cracked they would have tried other methods. Like bringing in Odette and torturing her in front of him— no wild fancy that, it was part of their technique. That could have succeeded where nothing else had. And Duchez knew or had indirect contact with almost 1500 people, few agents knew more: what they looked like, where they hid out, their responsibilities. Brossolette, Girard, Meslin, Moulines—none would have escaped.

War is a time of bitter decisions, but in putting his comrades and his country above his wife, Duchez tasted a decision more bitter than aloes, and proved himself a brave man. On the night of the 3rd [November, 1943], Paul remembers, he was hating himself as only a brave man can.

Even now it is not clear what plan Duchez had in mind. But on one thing everyone was agreed: without Odette he was a man demented. Next morning the grapevine brought news that Odette had been taken to the Rue des Jacobins for questioning, but that was all, and on 4th November [1943] Duchez slipped away from the cafe and sought shelter with Henri Caillet and his wife. Caillet, too, in his diffident way, was a brave man, brave enough to admit that Duchez's presence in his house over the whole week-end scared him stiff, but shelter with the Caillets had two adventages which other houses lacked. As officials of the Mairie, they enjoyed, to some extent, the trust of the Germans, and their house was a useful factor. It was an old house with a garden, circled by high walls, sited on the Impasse Bagatelle in the respectable middle-class quarters near the Botanical Gardens.

No doubting that the network was going to miss Duchez. True, there were factors in his personality that had been unsettling, those madcap pranks, the tuneless humming, like a swarm of gnats—but when you remembered how the bold blue eyes had twinkled at you and the full lips pouting in a mischievous grin—"C'est le sang-froid, mon ami"—you had to confess that you missed him.

That week-end it seemed that the Germans were missing him too. On the Saturday afternoon, women holding mops and dusters leaned from upper windows to watch the troops of armed soldiers in field-grey tramping among the gardens, probing in pigsties and outhouses. One of them even invaded the Caillets' garden and there was a nerve-pricking moment as his eyes, glaring across the trim lawn, sighted a full packet of Gauloise cigarettes on a desk inside the French windows. (Duchez who was hiding behind a door, had abandoned them hastily on hearing the garden gate.) Suspicious, the soldier came tramping across the flower-beds, shouting, gesturing with the barrel of his gun. Alice Caillet, a gallant and courageous Frenchwoman saw the association of ideas at once— cigarettes, a man hiding?—but pretended to misunderstand.

As he stormed through the French windows, she pushed them towards him shouting, "Well, take them, thief! Do you expect me to make you a present of them?" He stalked off, grumbling, his suspicions lulled.

About 8th November [1943], unobtrusively, Duchez left the Caillets. It was the time to seek shelter outside Caen. Mingling with the shabby hordes of factory workers as they trooped home through the dusk, he got as far as Arsene's house. There was a brief weighing up of the risks, but Arsene thought they stood a chance. Later that evening he drove out of Caen, Duchez perched warily in the back of the camionet, screened by the tarpaulin hood. According to the false identity card he carried he was now Raoul Jules Denaud, a forty-four-year-old labourer hailing from St. Nazaire, who resided at No. 5 rue Georges Clemenceau, Caen.

Towards nine the van drew up in the tiny cobbled square of Bretteville-s.ur-Laize and Arsene rapped surreptitiously on Masseron's shutter. The pork butcher led Duchez into a white well-scrubbed room with a roaring fire, trying to calm his nerves with calvados before leading him upstairs to share the attic room where Robert Thomas lay hidden. Thomas swung off his camp-bed to greet Duchez with rather less cordiality. Being cooped up beneath the draughty eaves with no news of his father or sisters was bad enough without Duchez's horse-play. (Only later did he learn they were in the gaol at Lisieux, where they stayed till the liberation.)

But "Third Fool" was in no mood for horse-play. The old fun and the old fire had left him. "He seemed to talk of nothing but Odette," Masseron said later, "and the plan he had evolved to rescue her." Most of the day he spent lying on his bed drinking or smoking, but more often just staring into space. Loyalty to his wife forbade him discussing it, but he knew that a score of people in Caen and Paris were holding their breath whenever they thought of Odette. Did the Gestapo suspect Odette of espionage—and would they find a means to make her talk?

The later evidence suggested that Duchez had guessed right. All Bernard's instincts led him to attach most importance to those bundles of identity papers. On the other hand, there was the portable receiver, which suggested regular instructions from London, and put together, the two hinted at a well-knit organisation, with connections that might lead almost anywhere.

When Odette was first led in to see Bernard the tall effeminate man with the high-pitched voice and the narrow shaven head must have decided that she would not crack easily under pressure. He began with blandishments and a talk on the advantage of collaboration, ordering a steak for himself in the meantime. As he sat at the desk and ate it, a radio played soft bitter-sweet music. The questions followed the established pattern, soothing, almost sympathetic.

"Where is your husband? From whom does he take his orders? To whom do you supply your identity cards? Why not be sensible—tell us where your husband is ?"

Odette's appearance was deceptive. To look at she was a plump, fresh-complexioned housewife, placid and easy going. You would picture her most easily at a copper washtub or ordering a pound of frying steak from her butcher's. But Odette was a Frenchwoman, and a Norman, and this amiable exterior cloaked an iron will. To all Bernard's questions she offered one toneless reply: "I don't know."

Bernard listened and nodded, finished his steak, then leant forward and slapped her face. Then he sent her back to the gaol. For a few hours she was confined in a damp narrow cell without food.

Later in the day Bernard resorted to more recognisable Gestapo tactics. For some moments after Odette was ushered in he affected not to notice her, then, without warning, he rose and smashed his fist into her face. Such shock tactics were believed to have a sound psychological effect in dazing and humiliating the victim before they had even collected their thoughts.

"Now, then," he said, sitting down again, and on his desk she noted there was a pile of white paper and several freshly-sharpened pencils. Evidently he had determined to deliver Odette's confession before the day was out. He said: "We will talk about you and your husband. Where is he, by the way?"

Odette said flatly, "I don't know."

Bernard looked at his wrist watch and began to polish his nails. "You have five minutes," he said. The minutes passed in ticking silence, broken only by the muted crooning of the radio in the background. At the end of it Bernard looked at his watch and said matter-of-factly, "Open the top drawer of the filing-cabinet." She hesitated and then did so, recoiling for a moment as she saw the ox-gut whip stiffened inside with a steel rod and crusted with dried blood.

"Now, then," Bernard said, "sit down facing the desk and put your elbows on it." Then he began to thrash her: for how long she did not know because mercifully she fainted.

That evening, there was another summons. Again the preliminary drubbing with the fists and the questions:

"Where is your husband? Who is your organiser? To whom did you give the cards?"

Then the whip came slashing down, searing and tearing and worrying the flesh until the mind could bear no more and she dropped downwards in a black void. Next day she was transferred to the prison at Alengon, where Gestapo men from Rouen continued the treatment, but Odette did not weaken and she did not talk. Girard, Meslin, and all of them were safe.

Despite her courage it seemed that Century's work in Caen was done and that even the Secret Army cells Girard had created in Le Mans and other towns would be hard put to it to carry on. "Operation Grand-Duke" was giving them no rest. Between the day of Odette's transfer and the 17th November [1943], a succession of chopping blows severed the chain linking Girard's unit with the B.C.R.A. in London.

Again it was the Paris Underground that bore the brunt A random raid by one of Colonel Relling's Abwehr squads, commanded by the Belgian traitor, Georges Henri Masuy, surprised the head of C.N.D.'s operations branch, Robert Bacque, in the middle of a transmission. Under torture Bacque gave names and within a fortnight forty C.N.D. men were swept into Masuy's net. One of them revealed an address in the Rue de Maine where archives were stored, and from these, when decoded, the role of French Resistance in the wider strategy of the invasion began to emerge: the location of arms dumps, the fast-growing railway resistance, the vital link with Post Office headquarters. Masuy exulted later:

"In one morning we accomplished a year's work."

In London the pattern of treachery was not at once plain. On Masuy's instructions Bacque kept up daily radio contact with B.C.R.A. in the hope of uncovering yet more Resistance plans. Only after ten days, as small discrepancies in the messages mounted, did the full implication hit Dewavrin. Three years almost to the week that Renault had sent that first famous dispatch, the whole of his Confrerie Notre Dame had been wiped out.

On 16th November [1943] at 9.15 p.m. Dewavrin signalled to all his networks via the B.B.C. the four-word alarm call to take cover: STORM IN THE WEST.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

After at bit of Googling, I found the Belgian Georges Henri Masuy's correct name to be George Delfanne (1913-1947). His Wiki page is here. It appears he done considerable damage to his own country's security by passing on to his Abwehr handliers the Belgian Army's locations and strength prior to the invasion of the Low Countries in 1940. The damage done contributed in no small way to the ease with which Belgium was defeated on the 28th May 1940.

To continue from the book...

That gentle man, Eugene Meslin, who loved the port and the city of Caen almost like human beings, did his best to stop the rot. But the facts were painfully plain. With the C.N.D. wiped out, Paris was a perilous bottleneck where dispatches would pile up uncollected. Right from the first Girard's units had relied on the C.N.D. to route their dispatches by air or sea, and now the transmission agency was no more. Prouvost, the Post Office chief, was on the run. The gruff warm-hearted Alex Tanguy had been machine-gunned to death in a Gestapo ambush. All links with the Post Office and with the Deux Anges were snapped clean.

None the less, Meslin did his best. Roger Deschambres, the melancholy red-haired plumber, had developed stomach ulcers, but just the same he was an ex-artillery officer, who knew guns, and Meslin made him take over Duchez's job. Jourdan, Jouvel and Menguy were carrying on the mapping work where Thomas had left off. But Deschambres and the others had to move carefully now. The fear of the Gestapo was like an acid eating into the heart and mind of the Resistance, and then disaster of a kind overtook Meslin, too.

Leaving his office by the canal, one night in the blackout, he misjudged the distance to his car and tripped head first into the icy waters of the Bassin St. Pierre. He managed to haul himself out after a minute, drenched and shuddering, but next morning he was running a high fever. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia. The Caen cell was without its leader.

The occasion had its lighter side. One afternoon Meslin awoke from a drugged sleep, burning-dry with fever, to find that Moulines had materialised beside his bed. He managed to croak: "What are you doing here?"

The young aristocrat beamed gently. "I've come to take you away, Monsieur Meslin. Girard thinks—we all think you've had enough. Things are breaking up here, Monsieur Meslin. I'm going to take you somewhere you can rest,"

Meslin smiled painfully. "In this condition? You were always very impetuous, Jacques. How?"

"I've brought an ambulance down from Paris," Moulines said calmly. "I got it from one of my contacts."

(An ambulance! Meslin wouldn't have been surprised at that moment if he'd brought half a dozen transmitters in it too!)

But moistening his scabbed lips, he said: "Look, Jacques, I can't. With the pressure that's coming through from London now I've got to stay—unless the whole organisation along the Wall is going to break down. And look how suspicious it would seem." Meslin was a good man, close to death at that moment, but as usual his first thoughts were for others. He pointed out: "The Thomases arrested, young Robert on the run, now poor Odette taken—that's the worst thing that's happened yet. My job is to get better and run things as long as I can. I believe we'll pull through somehow."

In the end Moulines, who had a lot of the St. George in his make-up, took the ambulance sadly back to Paris, rather disappointed that there was no really exciting rescue in the offing. From the long-term view Meslin was right, though he should have known better. The real danger had not yet begun.

At Bretteville-sur-Laize, Masseron and Robert Thomas were having trouble with Duchez. Unable to keep under cover for long, the painter had taken to prowling round the house at all hours, and, once when Thomas had hurried down to fetch him upstairs, Masseron nearly had heart failure because the local Sergeant of Milice, who knew Duchez by sight, chose that moment to call and cadge a free drink.

Thomas and "Third Fool" passed a grim half-hour fighting back sneezes in the dusty broom cupboard under the stairs, while Masseron coaxed the sergeant's mind from war with a little smoked ham and a lot of ferocious old calvados.

Masseron was uneasy on two counts: because of the fugitives and because the sergeant became tipsily curious as to how Masseron smoked his ham. The butcher worked manfully to talk him out of a demonstration, because there were grenades, plastic explosives and a machine-gun snugly cached at the base of the smoke-stack in the yard.

And thereby hangs a tale. Masseron was a doubly fortunate agent: first because he had thought better of visiting Duchez on the morning of Odette's arrest and secondly because Leonard Gille, the advocate, Meslin's military deputy, had brought him those arms. By December there had been six major drops in the Caen region—more than three tons of arms lying hidden ready for use by the men of the Secret Army.

They had been staked out in seven dumps, the attics or cellars of other agents chosen by Emmanuel Robineau, the rather foolhardy young man who had charge of all dropping-liaison. Robineau knew all those dumps, except Masseron's—and Robineau was reckoned "contagious," Both he and Comby, the coal merchant, had been warned away from Caen by Meslin in September, when the Gestapo uncovered the Falaise and Lisieux dumps and started watching the offices of Normandy Peat-Cutters Inc.

Comby took the hint and vanished but two months later Robineau came back to Caen. The youngster had a fixation that one of the Caen Gestapo's auxiliaries was more dangerous to the Resistance than Helmut Bernard or any German, and he was tragically right.

The Caen Gestapo, like every other, worked with a detachment of the Milice, the 25o,ooo-strong army scoured from the gutters and prisons of France by Joseph Darnard, tht Nice brothel proprietor. Lucien Briere, the Caen chief, was like Darnard, a Frenchman; he was also a dangerously clever one, an ex-faith healer who had known Caen all his life.

He was a pale almost bald man, with a Louis Napoleon beard and the burning ice-blue eyes of a fakir. With a deeper in sight into French psychology and methods than Bernard and

his thugs, he was already keeping a close watch on so far unsuspected Century agents like Arsene and Madame Caillet. Sensing Briere was dangerous, Robineau did the worst thing possible. He started shadowing him through the winding streets of the city.

Nothing happened for about a fortnight, but one day, rounding a corner, Robineau found Briere waiting for him. The Milice chief snapped out: "You're following me, aren't you, boy? Why?" Robineau was a very young man, barely of age; in a way, like young Paul Mauger, who had nearly taken Duchez's plan for Renault on the Deux Anges, he was too young for the job they had given him, but unlike Mauger, he was a kind of daredevil weakling, who took risks to quieten his own self-doubt. When Briere spoke to him he coloured and mumbled and then slouched away.

After that Robineau stopped his shadowing—apparently without suspicion that Briere was now shadowing him. On 15th December [1943], a little before midday, he was again in Caen, crossing the Place Saint-Sauveur when Briere and a small group of Milice closed in and took him.

Robineau could not help what happened to him after that; he was a brave, if quixotic, boy, acting as he thought for the best, and no blame should be attached to him for his inexperience.

Briere and Bernard were savage and determined men, and in their zeal to smash the networks they habitually did the kind of dreadful things that a man hopes not to dream about. In a small back room at the Rue des Jacobins, Robineau was strapped to a chair, and an iron band placed round his head and the lobes of his ears and slowly contracted. By nightfall he was screaming convulsively, like an animal caught in a trap, and after much too long a time the Gestapo chiefs had what they wanted—the names and addresses of 130 of Girard's agents.

Jean Chateau had sent positive word to the delicatessen at Bretteville that Odette had been transferred to the prison at Alencpn as far back as 4th November [1943]. This spark of news kindled all the old fire of recklessness in Duchez and he could talk of only one thing. "We'll stage a prison break," he exulted. "We'll free Odette from those canaille yet."

Chateau was normally a placid and objective man, and it says much for Duchez's inner fire that he should not only have coaxed Chateau into discussing it but into helping him carry it out. The chances of two men staging a rescue from a heavily-guarded prison with one machine-gun as armament, loaned by Masseron, seemed slight, to say the least.

But at 3 a.m. one December morning they set off in Chateau's camionet. Duchez's heart was as high as a child's awaiting the coming of Christmas. Soon Odette would be free. She had to be free, for was he not Duchez?

Masseron knew better. "It was the only way of setting Duchez's mind at rest," he said later; "but I knew it was hopeless from the first." And events proved him right. Odette had stayed only a few days in the gaol at Alencon before they moved her to a cell-block in an S.S. barracks on the edge of the town. (In the next cell, which communicated by a tiny grille, was Robert Aubin, head of Century-Argentan, who had been arrested the same day, and he and Odette held gloomily-whispered discussions on the fate of Century.)

Local contacts had told Duchez and Chateau where Odette was being held, but after one look at the massive stone walls and iron-barred windows their hopes sank to zero. Duchez did try for a job as a labourer on a new extension they were building, hoping to establish some contact, but there were no vacancies, and after that he knew he was only torturing himself by staying there.

Both Odette and Aubin were caged in their tiny cells until mid-1944, and the Allies had already landed when they were transferred to Mauthausen, "the camp of no return." Both were to return to France in the autumn of 1945, but the gay and feckless "Third Fool" did not know that. He had to go back to Bretteville, summoning up the kind of courage that can accept defeat without losing faith, but it was not easy. The sharpest pain was in visiting Odette's brother-in-law, the schoolmaster at Fleury, where the children were staying, but he tried to put a brave face on it. "Well," he said gaily, as the children came to greet him, "here I am." Young Jacques, aged twelve, bit his lip and said nothing, but Monique looked at her father with big blue accusing eyes. "Et Maman?" she asked. For the first time in years Duchez broke down and cried.

He arrived in Bretteville to find the whole structure of the network crumbling. On the morning of [Thursday] 16th December [1943] the Gestapo cars were squealing to a halt in side streets all over the city. Professor de Briard of the Caen Faculty; Fouques, the Post Office engineer; Annette Quenardel, liaison agent; that good and upright man, Colonel Corbasson; Henri Rebiard, the electrician; Schultz, surprised in his radio shop in the Rue Vaucelles in the midst of a transmission; Pierre Bouchard, Caen's Chief Registrar—all were taken without warning.

The net spread out fast and surely like a web spun by a spider. Thirty miles along the coast, at Port-en-Bessein, they took the cousins Joseph and Arthur Poitevin and the fisherman Georges Thomine. At Luc-sur-Mer a Feldwebel, alerted by the Gestapo, called at Dr. Sustendal's surgery to arrest him, but found him out. It was plain that the Germans would return next morning and Sustendal had nowhere to flee, but in the one night of grace granted him, the doctor took his control maps and burned them to a cinder in his grate. Next morning they confronted him with Robineau, shaken and bleeding, who swayed on his feet and said pathetically, "I couldn't take any more, Doctor. I've told them where the arms are hidden."

Sustendal just grunted, "Well, if you have, you have," and led the Gestapo to the cellar of a deserted house in the village of La Delivrande, where he and Robineau had stored the arms. By the end of the day, only Masseron's meagre supply and a minor dump at Conde-sur-Noireau remained undiscovered.

The Gestapo had evidence in plenty now of the "Action" programme of Girard's units—a planned armed uprising organised, as a propaganda release had it, by "the infamous terrorist Colonel Passy, who is a Jewish-Communist agitator." But not one general survey map had they found. Those who still possessed them in quantity—Meslin, Arsene, Des-chambres, Harivel, and the three cartographers—had so far escaped the net. Thomas's maps were resting in peace in the tomb where Arsene had interred them, and Kaskoreff, Colonel Corbasson's aide, had fled from Caen, taking his wife and sister with him to seek safety in Paris.

The Caen headquarters were still intact and—incredibly —there was no evidence that for eighteen months thousands of men had been painstakingly piecing together a new blueprint of the Atlantic Wall.

Now a curious thing happened, and because of it, for three weeks, the lives of all Dewavrin's remaining agents along the Wall hung in the balance. One of the men arrested, under torture, revealed a name—the name of a Century agent in Rouen, an ironmonger by profession, named Gilles. He was no connection of Leonard Gille, Meslin's military deputy, but the man in the torture-chamber was too far gone to give any details. Further inquiries showed that there was indeed a Gille in Caen. Bernard ordered that he should be brought in.

At first the Gestapo drew a blank. They did not know that for seven months Gille had been hiding at No. 31 Rue de Place, in the house of Janine Boitard, the attractive young sophisticate who was the most dedicated member of Duchez's escape route service. They searched for him all the morning of the 16th, but none of them had any clue how valuable the arrest of Gille would be.

A man to remember, was Leonard Gille. Handsome, in a dark clever way, with what actors call "a presence" and the easy charm of a man used to getting results. Born of wealthy parents, Gille had no necessity to work, or to qualify as an advocate, but he had worked and for much the same reason as he resisted—to still the churning demon of dissatisfaction in that restless probing brain. Perhaps because much of his life had been easy, he enjoyed tackling the difficult jobs in war; once he escorted seven airmen, none of whom knew French, from Caen to Paris, steering them through crowds at railway stations by hoisting a pair of skis on his shoulder as a landmark.

The day the Gestapo began looking for him he had just completed one of the trickiest jobs of all.

It had been originated weeks earlier in a brief message from Century's Falaise agent, deposited in a letter-box at the Cafe des Touristes. Addressed to Gille by his code-name, "Marie," it read: "Marie—1 kilometre from here, before Langannerie, 1200 German pioneers are at work. Subterranean galleries are being constructed. The pioneers work from 8 to 16 hours a day without stopping."

The information went to London as it stood, but Dewavrin's experts did not let it rest there. They wanted further details. What about a sketch map of the galleries? What kind of munitions would be stored, and so on? Meslin signalled back that the Falaise area was heavily policed, an almost impenetrable zone, but the answer, in effect, was: "Send results, not excuses."

Gille, by dint of perseverance, finally coaxed a rough sketch map from the agent. On the morning of 16th December [1943], with Meslin still away sick, he took the map to Harivel, in the insurance office on die Place St. Sauveur.

At three-thirty that afternoon the edges of the sky had the burned black colour of charred paper. From his office on the second floor Harivel watched the early darkness close in on the steep-pitched roofs. Time to make ready. Taking Gille's plan of the subterranean munitions depots, he added it to other dispatches that had arrived, among them the coordinates of the batteries at Octeville, a heavily-defended strong point south-west of Cherbourg. He slid them neatly into a thick manila envelope and sealed it. Harivel was on tenterhooks because of the morning's arrests but he knew that much of this information was priority. Century's dispatches must go off as usual.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

To continue...

At the same time, in his small motor-cycle repair shop on the Avenue de Creully, Maurice Himbert, the courier, was wiping the grease from his hands with a wad of cotton-waste and preparing to leave for home. Himbert, a typical mechanic, a small leathery man with pale-blue impassive eyes and a thatch of dark hair, was not thinking much about the journey, which he had made many times before. His main preoccupation was the curfew in Paris. Usually the train ran late and there was barely time to make it to one of the hotels behind the Gare St. Lazare. Himbert chose comfortable old-fashioned hotels, like the Hotel de Liege in the Rue de Liege, because they had no central heating. He slept better if Century's dispatches were lodged safely up a chimney before he snapped off the light.

By four o'clock, when Harivel walked in with the envelope in his breast pocket, Himbert was ready to leave. The two exchanged a few words, but with morning's news neither of them felt like saying much. Trudging back to his house on the Rue du Moulin, Himbert's one consolation was that none of those arrested had known him personally. He was not anticipating difficulties.

Once indoors he washed hastily, changed his suit and packed Century's dispatches into a battered brown brief-case along with a handful of casse-croutes and a bottle of cheap red wine. Then, packing a small overnight bag, he kissed his wife and set off on foot for the Gare Centrale, a mile and a half away. On the way he picked up another agent, a girl called Jeanne-Marie, whose job was to cover him until he had boarded the train. As they walked, Jeanne-Marie relieved him of the brief-case, and Himbert carried the overnight bag. It was now quite dark, with frost in the air, and a chapping wind drove across the black gulf of the Orne.

Half an hour earlier the hunt for Gille had taken a new turn. That afternoon a Milice agent named Albert Herve had inquired for him at the Cafe des Touristes, but Paul's wife feigned ignorance of his movements. Then somebody at Gestapo headquarters remembered that one of Gille's closest associates was Maurice Himbert, the motor-cycle mechanic.

At the garage, Herve, who knew Himbert by sight, learned he had left for Paris. He got into his car and drove hard for the station.

It was now five forty-five. With the wind battering at them, Himbert and Jeanne-Marie were toiling up the incline to the station. As they reached the heavy swing doors that open on the main booking office the air-raid siren whined over the city. The dimly-lit hall was swarming with travelers: German soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets, ragged boys hoping to earn a few sous with their orange-box baggage carts, old women struggling with bundles.

At the guichet Himbert bought a third-class return to Paris, St. Lazare, and tucked it in the strap of his brief-case. Jeanne-Marie, following suit, bought a third return to Flers, where she had a daughter. Shouldering through more swing doors on to the platform, they turned right. Himbert was still carrying the overnight bag in his right hand. Jeanne-Marie held the brief-case in her left.

Ten minutes to six. Just time to descend the flight of stone steps, pass through the subway and gain Quay Three for the Paris express. As they started down the steps, two men loomed from the blackness in front of them. The leader, Herve, was a young slightly-built man with fair curly hair, wearing a sports coat and flannel trousers. He said, "Monsieur Himbert. Gestapo. Follow us."

It was the next sixty seconds that counted.

Automatically, Himbert and Jeanne-Marie fell back. Herve and his aide continued past them, not passing through the swing doors to the booking-office but turning right along the platform, beckoning Himbert and the girl to follow. Himbert saw the reason: about 120 yards along the platform, passing a few offices, the left-luggage counter, the office of the German Chef de Gare and the buffet, they would reach the exit to the car park. A thought floated into Himbert's mind idly: How odd to be arrested before you even had time to reply.

Then suddenly the panic broke through, shooting in his brain like an abscess: Get rid of the brief-case! Get rid of it!

He glanced furtively at Jeanne-Marie walking level, composed and tight-lipped. Eyes riveted on the men ahead, he swung the overnight bag across, transferring it from right hand to left. In the darkness his right hand stole out to meet Jeanne-Marie's left, fingers wound tight round the brief-case. Fleetingly as he tugged he felt them resist, then the brief-case was in his hand. They couldn't have had time to make a mental inventory of his baggage, it was too dark....

Get rid of the case. Get rid of it!

On the concrete their footfalls were hollow, and the Gestapo men were only grey smudges in the blackness ahead. But they would hear the noise of the case as it dropped.

Get rid of it—but how, how?

From the darkness they came level with the German stationmaster's office, and two things happened. The bright white rays of the electric globe above the door struck at them, and by reflex they recoiled, squinting at the light. Near at hand the ack-ack batteries covering the railway spotted a raider, and all the guns opened up at once: heavy pummelling blows you could feel in the stomach.

Himbert let the brief-case slip from his fingers then. It fell to the platform in the pitch darkness beyond the blinding pool of light, and the pounding of the guns along the river swallowed all sound.

More follows...

Regards,

Pat

 

The days that followed were wrapped in mystery. On the Friday [next day, 17th December 1943] at 10 a.m. Himbert had been due to contact Rivalin, the young medical student, in their new meeting-place, a bench under the trees in the Orangerie in the south-west corner of the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. Security precautions were stringent now: meetings took place in the open air and it was understood that neither party waited more than ten minutes if the other was late. Just before ten-fifteen Rivalin went disconsolately home across the Seine to the Ministry of War suite on the Boulevard St. Germain. Himbert was rated as dependable as an eight-day clock. It was unlike him not to have sent word that the dispatches weren't coming.

Madame Himbert had no anxieties until the Sunday night [19th December 1943], but when her husband did not return, she rang Harivel. Harivel had no news but knowing the contents of the briefcase he was shattered. By Monday the 20th it was plain that the Gestapo must have Himbert and that if they did they also had one of the most dangerous dispatches that Century had ever routed to Paris.

A curious position, Humbert's. On that week-end, as on any other, he had no inkling of what was in the envelope he carried. He had the kind of faith that Dewavrin demanded, knowing that it only meant death if he was caught. When the B.B.C. announced, a fortnight after each journey to Paris: "The three cabin boys lunched well in Dieppe," Himbert did not know that Dewavrin was announcing the arrival of the Caen dispatches in London. But if he was tortured he knew enough. He knew the headquarters of Century-Caen and he knew both Girard and Meslin.

The week before Christinas was an anguished silent week of waiting, and as always it was the suspense that hurt most. They lacked news from Dr. Sustendal, Colonel Corbasson, Schultz (all later deported to Mauthausen) and, above all, from Himbert. If only some news would come.

No word would be coming from Robineau. He was dead.

But when news of Himbert did come it was more bewildering than ever. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Janine Boitard answered the phone to find a shaken but free Jeanne-Marie warning her that "Monsieur Legrand" (little Himbert's cover-name) was "in hospital." Janine said cautiously, "Did he have time to deliver the parcel?" Jeanne-Marie said No. He had dropped the parcel, which was regrettable.

That was much worse. Ultimately the brief-case would be found and Himbert's name was stamped inside it. On Christmas Day, three agents spent most of the morning and afternoon scouring the platform, the buffet and the left-luggage office at Caen. Not a clue. With Meslin still sick, the main burden of the search now fell on Janine and on Leonard Gille, but even Gille, with one of the sharpest brains in the Caen cell, found himself foxed by two problems.

If the Gestapo didn't have the brief-case, who did? And if they weren't holding Himbert on suspicion of espionage why hold him at all? Jeanne-Marie could throw light only on point two. For eight days they had kept her in gaol, summoning her daily to the Rue des Jacobin and the burden of all their questions had been her relationship with Himbert. And did she by any chance know Gille ? (Even this was enough to make Gille leave Caen on Boxing Day.) Finding that she had no startling disclosures, they let her go.

In the gaol at Caen, crammed with two stool-pigeons into a cell nine feet long by six feet wide, Himbert was painfully aware of what they wanted. It came home forcibly each time he was driven across town to Gestapo headquarters for sessions with Herve that lasted three hours. With his wrist chained to the radiator, soft music playing, he parried the questions:

"Where is Gille ? What does he do ? What does he look like?"

And Himbert answered doggedly: "Monsieur, he is only a casual acquaintance of mine. It's true we were at school together, but I don't know what he does for a living or where he lives. Perhaps we've had a drink together six times in as many years. And he looks like anybody else—not very dark, not very fair, neither tall nor short."

His private diary came under the microscope, but luckily the addresses listed were business connections and he could prove it. Baulked, Herve tried another track. "Aren't you worried about what your wife's doing while you're locked up ?" he insinuated. "They say in Caen that she runs around with other men."

Himbert shrugged. "When a man's wife is unfaithful to him in France, monsieur," he said with lonely pride, "he is the last person to be told."

But they did not torture him and it was plain that never at any time did the Gestapo realise that in Himbert, the humble courier, they had the key to the whole complex structure of Girard's war against the Wall. Nor did they know that the dispatches of the most highly-organised Intelligence network along the coastline had been within reaching distance. They were holding Himbert solely because he knew a man called Gille—and a different Gille, at that, from the man they were after.

Playing for time, Himbert returned to his hard plank bed, to nourish his hopes on sour beetroot soup and do some thinking. In other cells along the same corridor were Colonel Corbasson and Schultz, the radio shop proprietor. Having found the arms depots, the Gestapo had not tortured the Colonel, but the big Alsatian, who had been caught transmitting, had been beaten terribly. Himbert thought there must be a way out without endangering himself or the network—but what had happened to the brief-case!

And that was one of the strangest stories in Century's unorthodox saga. About two minutes after Himbert dropped the case the German Chef de Gare, Herr Lutz, had left his office and stumbled over it in the gloom. The ticket in the handle-strap showed that it was the property of a third-class passenger en route to Paris. Lutz, like many German officials, was scrupulously honest if unimaginative. Hurrying through the subway to Quay Three, he handed it to the guard of the Paris express.

No one claimed it at St. Lazare, so for a month it gathered dust on a shelf in the left-luggage until on 16th January [1944] the clerks grew tired of looking at it and sent it back to Caen.

This time it was passed to Jean Auge, the bald, smiling little stationmaster, himself a Century agent, and one glance at Himbert's name and the thick manila envelope told him enough. He deposited it with Caen left-luggage office and rang Madame Himbert.

Next day Janine Boitard called to collect it (paying ninety-three francs lost property charge) and took it home. The envelope she later took to Paris herself, but it was when she and Madame Himbert first opened the case that they were faced with perhaps the oddest problem of all. Outwardly, there was no sign that the brief-case had been opened. Himbert's business papers were intact. The seal on the big envelope was unbroken.

But the bread and wine had gone. To some anonymous citizen, hunger had allowed no choice.

In the third week of January [1944], Himbert saw his way clear. Herve had sent for him several times and told him that the one way to get free was to hand over a photo of his close friend Gille. He dropped the same hint to Madame Himbert, and even gave permission for her to visit her husband in gaol. Once she had told Himbert that "they found the parcel you lost on the way to Paris," he knew the time was ripe. "I can't hold out any longer," he told her loudly, for the benefit of any concealed microphones, "You'd better take the picture of Gille out of the family album and give it to them."

Twenty-four hours later Herve was the proud possessor of a photograph of Gille—or rather a smudged snapshot of a short dark man wearing a dinner-jacket. Though it may have borne a faint resemblance to Gille, it was actually a photo of Himbert's cousin at a wedding reception, but Herve was delighted. On Sunday, 30th January [1944], after a last bowl of beetroot soup, Himbert became a free man. Century was safe again.

Herve never found the cousin, but this was no reflection on his skill as a Gestapo agent because Himbert hadn't seen him for twenty years either.

Girard took fresh precautions after that alarm. His first step was to treble the couriers—diminishing the risks of dispatches not getting through by increasing the odds. Himbert was out of the running now, so the solid reliable Gilbert Michel brought one lot of dispatches from Caen (travelling with brief-case in one compartment and himself in the next) to the Ministry of War, with another courier, Henri Lemoine, taking the rest to Aime Jean Jean, the Prefect of the Ardeche who worked for Century in the immunity of the Chamber of Deputies with a German sentry guarding his door.

Many other dispatches came through the forceful Colonel Becker in Le Mans, although with the Deux Anges out of commission it often took weeks to arrange a Lysander pick-up or a boat from some out-of-the-way port. Then, early in February [1944], by the kind of luck which seemed to favour Century, instructions came that in future type dispatches and maps must be reduced to the minimum.

Dewavrin, it seemed, now had all the maps he needed, and troop movements and modifications of defences could more easily be signalled by radio from the countryside. Thomas's sector maps would still come in useful for the agents to work out the grid references.

Back in the previous November, after the Teheran Conference, the Allies had been fully committed to mount "Operation Overlord" in May, 1944. Under Eisenhower, the pieces were being assembled now for the mightiest jigsaw puzzle in military history and every fact that Century had supplied was checked and double checked and checked again. Every day for months Mosquitoes had climbed above the Wall, first at 40,000 feet, then, concentrating on verticals and obliques, more riskily: first at wave-top height, 3 to 4 miles out, then at zero feet, 1500 yards from the shelving bluffs, then 1500 yards inland at a heart-stopping 2000 feet, rocketing along the wall at 400 miles an hour. From these prints and the agents' findings the Navy alone made use of 120,000,000 maps.

Deep in the Duke of York's Barracks, Chelsea, a secret team of 12 men worked on enormous mock-ups of the invasion area, corrugated cardboard covered with cheesecloth and sprayed with green and brown paint. Even Ouistreham lighthouse was there, made to scale out of linoleum, though security was strict enough to leave the team as much in the dark as Century. (Caen was "Poland" and the Orne was the "River Prague.") Planning teams worked on beach folders that listed not only each blockhouse but each foot of pebbly shore. The work of years was bearing fruit.

On the other side of the Channel, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, who had become Commander of Army Group B in late November [1943], was a great deal less than happy. Early in December he had taken his first view of the much-vaunted Wall and what he saw staggered him.

It came home to the famed desert tactician that Hitler was a victim of his own propaganda. The Wall was not a Wall at all. Only at a dozen points had the Navy and the Todt Organisation come anywhere near creating the impenetrable fortress that Goebbels had sold so long and so loudly. (Only one of these, Cherbourg, was in the Allied invasion zone.) To some extent the batteries did form a continuous cross-fire, but while the naval guns, like a battery Gresselin had reported from Crisbecq, were in steel cupolas, the army artillery, to ensure greater freedom for their field of fire, was only dug in.

Even the few strongpoints under concrete had head cover only sixty centimetres thick, and between the Orne and the Vire, Century's main hunting ground, there were few enough of these. In all essentials it was still the same wall that had unrolled in blueprint two years before across Duchez's map.

Vague echoes of Rommel's disquiet reached Girard in Paris: nothing too posititve, the muttered gossip of orderlies and clerks, sifting through bistros and duly remarked by Century's men. After inspecting the fortifications at Deauville (or elsewhere) Rommel had seemed tres inquiet. But Rommel faced more setbacks than any commander should be called upon to overcome in six months. The scarcity of steel made it impossible to obtain the gun turrets he needed. The bulk of the Todt Organisation was in Germany, clearing up bomb damage. And who, in the end, was going to defend the Wall?

Hitler had reckoned, two years back, that it needed ten to twelve extra divisions to establish a solid front along its length, but the three-front war had steadily siphoned off the cream of the troops and most of the transport. The Wall must be a rampart, Hitler and von Rundstedt had said, capable either of smashing an attack on the beaches or holding it until the massed armour counterattacked.

But how to use massed armour to effect when the Allies had the mastery of the air? The lesson of North Africa had shown Rommel the futility of that.

No, the only hope, as Rommel saw it, was the Wall itself. It would have to be strengthened, the battle waged from natural posititons, as the one means of counteracting Allied mass and mobility. Time and again Rommel stressed, "We have got to stop the enemy at the water's edge, and within forty-eight hours of his landing." Now he was forced to depend on the Wall in a way that von Rundstedt and Hitler had never dreamed, and with time, labour and materials denied him, field-type defences stretching three to four miles inland seemed the only hope.

In February [1944], when he set to work, Century was watching. They had suffered crippling blows, but there were still hundreds left. "Third Fool" was hiding on a windy hilltop above Falaise, whence Masseron had spirited him, with the men of the Maquis St. Clair; Thomas and Gille were with Maquis groups in the Haute Savoie, but many had survived along the Wall and together with the shock troops, of the Secret Army they would carry on.

More follows…

Regards,

Pat