Hi All, I rescued this book from an attic whose contents was being thrown into a skip and have read it a couple of times during the past year. 'Ten Thousand Eyes' by historian Richard Collier was first published in 1958 and the copy I have, which is falling apart beside me on the desk as I write, was published in 1960. It tells the remarkable story of the 'Century' Network which operated out of Paris and Caen for several years prior to the Normandy Invasion and provided much of the intelligence used by SHAEF in the planning for D-Day. Some of the network's agents paid the ultimate sacrifice and did not survive to see their country freed of German occupation. Below is the Organisation Chart showing the chain of command back to London: I plan on posting extracts from the book here in this thread and would appreciate any contributions, corrections and comments as the thread progresses. Regards, Pat
This story starts in the port of Brest, Brittany on the day France fell; the 19th June 1940... It was a sad and lonely Captain Andre Dewavrin who boarded the last troopship, SS Meknes, leaving the port around midnight, to join a small convoy heading for England. He still wore his polar kit from when just five days previously, he had been a captain of engineers at Narvik. Now he was leaving his country in a state of shock. At best, he hoped that one day the 1000 fellow Frenchmen who accompanied him on the Meknes would one day storm ashore on a French shore and free his country from the darkness which was now enveloping it by the hour. Somehow he knew he would be there to help liberate France. Had he known the magnitude of the task in front of him, not to say the cost in lives, perhaps at that moment Andre Dewavrin would have been more clear of mind and fortitude. Tonight however, he was desolate, sad and lonely. At dawn on the 21st June, the French were surprised to see that landfall was England; not North Africa as they had expected. Southampton Water looked grey in the early morning rain. After being led through the streets by the MPs, his group stayed under canvas for eight days at Trentham Park, contemplating their country's fate. Slowly, as the week passed, they learned of an unknown General, a Frenchman, who had just been been appointed French Under Secretary of State for War. He was known affectionately as 'Big Charley', but it was clear that both himself and Churchill meant business. General Charles de Gaulle struck an imposing figure in both appearance and fortitude. The General urged his countrymen - 'France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war!' He told them to to join with him in disavowing Petain and fight on from England. This was treason in the eyes of the Vichy Government and many of Dewavrin's regiment choose to obey what they saw as lawful orders and on the 1st July embarked for North Africa. Captain Andre Dewavrin however went to London instead to seek out General de Gaulle's Free French Headquarters. The French HQ was located at St. Stephen's House, Westminster. After been taken up three floors in the drab, red brick building, he joined a group of waiting officers and civilians. Many of them were exhausted, unshaven and had bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep. It took till mid-morning before it was his turn to see the General. The tall figure of de Gaulle sat behind a large desk in a room overlooking the Thames. Dewavrin noticed the General was smoking heavily. Later he came to know this was a sign he was under stress. "Regular or Temporary?" "Regular, mon General" "Speak English?" "Fluently, mon General" "Done any fighting yet?" "I was at Narvik, mon General" "Alright, you can start my Intelligence Service - The Deuxieme Bureau. Lieutenant de Boislambert, outside, will find you an office." Dewavrin drew himself up and saluted. De Gaulle didn't even see him do it; he was re immersed in his mountain of papers on the desk. Captain Andre Dewavrin found himself breathing faster now then when he had went in to the General's office. De Gaulle had taken exactly one minute, twenty five seconds to chart his destiny. More to follow.... Regards, Pat
Continued…/ I note with interest the steamer which brought Andre Dewavrin to England on 21st June 1940, SS Meknes, was sunk by a torpedo strike from a German E-Boat just over a month later on 24th July in the English Channel. She had over 1100 onboard, French sailors mainly being repatriated back to Vichy France via the port of Marseilles. The ship had stopped after being hit by a long burst of machine gun fire from the E-Boats. She was flying the French Tricolour and had both her sides illuminated clearly identifying her as a non-belligerent vessel. This did not protect her from attack however. Over 400 lost their lives when the ship was torpedoed softly after heaving-to. I have seen two different names mentioned as commanders of the E-Boat responsible – Werner Toniges of S19 and Berd Klug of S27. The confusion may be due to the fact that the attack took place in darkness at 23:05. SS Meknes sunk within five minutes of being struck. I wonder if any of Andre Dewavrin's comrades, having decided to follow Petain’s orders and return to Vichy France, were on the return trip. In any event, Andre Dewavrin was now Head of the Free French Intelligence Service...with a staff of one. His first task then was to recruit staff. Approaching two of his fellow officers from Narvik, Maurice Duclos, a former stockbroker from Paris and Alex Beresnikoff, a lean youngster with a passion for the outdoors. Both men agreed to join him. Now there were three. Between them, the three men had less than £100 in personal savings and already bed and breakfast at 69 Cromwell Road, Kensington was costing them £2 each per week. They were as yet no assigned salary for the men and they dined on baked beans and coffee at a nearby milk-bar. All three men had families in France, so one of the first things to be done was to come up with cover names to protect their loved ones. It was Duclos, always the man about town, who came up with the idea of using Paris Metro Stations for their cover names. Duclos choose St. Jacques, Beresnikoff became Corvisart and Dewavrin became Colonel Passy, after a station near the Bois de Boulogne. One thing was clear to Dewavrin; there could be no Free French Intelligence without the British. The British, he knew, had an Intelligence Service second to none and was well resourced with access to boats and aircraft, together with contacts in neutral Lisbon, Stockholm and Bern. But how was the new Service to gain it’s intelligence? After many agonising days and weeks, it became clear – the vital information had to come from first hand sources on the ground inside German occupied France. Dewavrin took out a map of France and noted the 25,000 miles of main roads. A labourer sent to repair a road might see much of the military traffic which passed along it – if he was taught what to look for. And similarly, railway men along the vast network of track in France would know where the trains of copper, tungsten and coal were heading and where they had come from; who better than the shunters in the marshalling yards and the rail gangs maintaining the tracks to provide this information. If England held out, the next stage of the German occupation of France would be the construction of coastal defense works all along the coastline. When the time came, these defenses would have to be breached. Aerial photography, Dewavrin supposed, would provide the bulk of the intelligence to plumb the secrets of these defense works, but from high altitude a lot of the intelligence gleamed from the resulting aerial photographs would have to be carefully reconstructed guesswork. Even a farmer’s wife, going about her daily work of picking up eggs from haystacks, could be trained to observe German activity in her local area – provided she went about her daily task as she had always done. This then was the secret to success – agents which looked normal because they were normal. This was how Dewavrin world gather his intelligence for De Gaulle. There would be a network of men and women in each area patiently gathering information. Government officials, technicians, farmers, bank clerks – virtually unknown to each other under one man’s direction. And for additional security, even this local boss, their chief, would know only a few of his agents and would receive his direction from St. Stephens House in London. Dewavrin considered it a bold and logical plan, even if it was against the precedent of any intelligence agency in the world. More to follow... Regards, Pat
From what Google Maps tells me, This seems to be 69 Cromwell Road, where the three officers of the fledgling Free French Secret Intelligence Service were first billeted in the summer of 1940... More to follow, Regards, Pat
A few days after Dewavrin had formed his plan for the network of amateur agents inside occupied France, he had a visit from the Head of F Section, British Intelligence. The author of the book, Richard Collier, writing it in 1958, refers to this man as simply ‘The Commander’. He wore the uniform of a Commander in the Royal Navy. I have yet to discover the identity of this officer – can anyone shed light? In any event, the ‘Commander’ preempted Dewavrin’s new plan, as acting on the direct orders of Churchill, sought the help of De Gaulle in obtaining information regarding the German buildup on the French coast as a prelude to Operation Sealion. However, the ‘Commander’ had his own idea about the type and scope of agents he wanted sent to France on this mission. He wanted them to stay no more than 5 days and to operate within a confined area of twenty square miles on the coast of France. This was not what the new chief of the Deuxieme Bureau had envisaged. There were two initial reactions to Dewavrin’s plan for turning French civilians into secret agents amongst the British intelligence agencies – a) polite skepticism and b) lukewarm interest, when the ’Commander’ passed on Dewavrin’s proposal. The War Cabinet were understandably suspicious of a scheme which, from the security angle, placed all too much reliance on the human element and there was little evidence to suggest that Frenchmen would embrace the cause of de Gaulle rather than that of Petain. However, one man inside the British Intelligence community did support Dewavrin in his efforts – Sir Claude Dansey, who was at this time Deputy Head of MI6. Dansey was a highly experienced and pragmatic intelligence officer who saw the merit in Dewavrin’s plan to use civilian agents in an occupied country. During July, Winston Churchill was putting pressure on the intelligence agencies, both British and Free French, to provide information on the German build up across the Channel for the upcoming Operation Sealion. On the 17th July 1940, 27 year old Jacques Mansion boarded a fishing boat at Plymouth and became the first agent to be landed in Brittany. After this, Dewavrin sought agents to land in Normandy, where the expected invasion forces were thought to be massing. The lack of suitable candidates led Maurice Duclos, aka ‘St. Jacques’, one of the original three musketeers to volunteer for the mission. Duclos was well suited to the task, having a weekend chalet in Langrune, knew the coastal area around Ouistreham very well, having learned to sail a boat in the area, and his father’s stockbroking business in Paris afforded a perfect cover for traveling between the Capital and the Normandy Region. He proposed to Dewavrin that he could set up networks in Calvados, the Eure and the Manche. There was an agonising wait while Churchill examined the proposal. Then, they had their answer in two days; Duclos could go but there was a caveat; he must bring someone with him to bring back immediate information pertaining to the German pre-invasion buildup on the coast. The only available option at such short notice was the second musketeer, Alex Beresnikoff, aka ‘Corvisart’ . This decision to go to France would eventually cost Beresnikoff his life in 1944. He would not see his country liberated. While his two comrades were taken away by British Intelligence for an intensive course in espionage, Dewavrin found himself alone and once again pondering his most pressing problem – the lack of volunteer ‘spark plug’ agents to send to France. Then in the last week of July, someone knocked on his door. More follows… Regards, Pat
Dewavrin looked at the short broad shouldered man who put his head round the door. ‘I’m looking for Colonel Passy the stranger said, smiling at him. At first, Dewavrin thought the man had come into the wrong office. Reading from a sketch pad, Dewavrin asked: ‘Can I have your rank, m’sieu?’ ‘I have no rank; I am a civilian’ ‘Your profession in civilian life then’ Passing over his papers, the man whose name was Gilbert Renault, smiled apologetically at Dewavrin ‘I was in financing films’ ‘But it says here you worked for the Eagle Star Insurance Company in Paris.’ ‘Well yes, I did. Sometimes they invested in films, and I looked after the financing end of things.’ Renault described in great detail his many travels and contacts within France and slowly, as Dewavrin listened to the man, he began to realise that this was exactly the type of ‘spark plug’ agent he was looking for. This man was not seeing France’s war in cloak-and-dagger terms but rather in terms of the man-in-the-street, the simple faithful immemorial people of France. Renault for his part, felt a pang of guilt. His desire to return to France as an agent of de Gaulle was first and foremost a result of his grief for his country’s capitulation. However, he also felt a deep despair and pain of separation from those he loved more than life. He had left his wife Edith and their three young children in the care of his mother and five sisters. They still awaited news of him at their old shuttered house in the Rue Carnot in Vannes on the western coast of Brittany. He had left them back on the 19th June when he boarded the Norwegian freighter SS Lista at Lorient bound for Falmouth. To see Edith and his children again, Gilbert Renault was prepared to risk his life. Having finished his interview with ‘Colonel Passy’, he went back to the Buckinghamshire cottage of his friend George Gunn, the film producer, who had rescued him from the transit camp when he first arrived in England. There, mowing the grass, which he felt was the least he could do to return his friend’s generosity, Gilbert Renault awaited to hear if his application to become one of de Gaulle’s agents, was successful or not. Eventually, having passed the Commander’s screening, Gilbert was put on a Sunderland Flying Boat and dispatched to Lisbon in the second week of August, just as the Battle of Britian was approaching its zenith. More follows… Regards, Pat
St Aubin sur Mer on the 6th June 1944 was the western most point of Sword Beach. Almost four years previously, during the early morning of the 4th August 1940, a Royal Navy motor launch heaved-to three miles offshore and stopped its engines. A rubber dingy was lowered over the side and the first two agents of the Free French Forces in exile, Duclos and Beresnikoff, clambered down into the precarious boat and began to paddle towards shore. The dingy was small enough for the two men, but the addition of a large basket of carrier pigeons made it feel even more cramped. As soon as the motor launch re-started it’s engines, now with the stern facing shore, a search light cone began sweeping the area. The Germans had heard the engines re-starting. After a few minutes, the cone of light suddenly went out and the two agents resumed paddling towards shore. The Germans however sent their own launch out to investigate the noise and, passing just fifty meters from the small dingy, almost capsized it with its bow wave. When all was quite again, the two agents proceeded and eventually made landfall and beached the dingy at the foot of the cliffs near the small harbour of St Aubin sur Mer. Duclos led the way up the familiar 200 ft cliff path to the bluffs above. Sentries abounded however all along their route and eventually they had to leave the pannier of pigeons in a crevice on the cliffs and make their way bent double, using the cover of the early morning fog, to reach Ducos’s deserted chalet three miles away at Langrune sur Mer. During the next three days, using his passion for disguises, Ducos donned overalls and dark sunglasses to pass himself off as a local peasant, he produced a mental picture of the whole coast between Arromanches and Le Harve. The problem was of course getting the information back to London. The pigeons had been left with a stock of grain, but try as he might on three separate occasions, Beresnikoff had tried in vain to retrieve the birds, but each time he was thwarted by the constant patrolling of the sentries. Back in St. Stephens House, in the stifling heat of those August days, Dewavrin waited in vain for news of his two friends, Duclos and Beresnikoff. As the Spitfires and Hurricanes joined battle with the Luftwaffe overhead, he pondered the fate of his friends. Had he sent both men to their deaths; or worse into the hands of the Gestapo? Four times during the next three weeks the Royal Navy launch returned to the pre-arranged rendezvous point off St Aubin, but each time it failed to see the light signal from the two agents due to the persistent night fog. Each time, the launch had to turn and go back to England while Ducos and Beresnikoff were chilled to the bone each time at the foot of the cliff as they tried desperately to signal though the murk. By mid-September, Dewavrin had given up all hope of seeing his two friends alive again. Jacques Mansion had returned from Brittany at the beginning of September, loaded with information and even had lists of people willing to act as local agents. Despite all this, the head of the Free French Intelligence was inconsolable, burdened by the certain knowledge that his two friends had died for his idea. Twice Dewavrin begged de Gaulle for a transfer to a combat unit, but each time his boss persuaded him to stay on 'until things were better organised'. Although he had a copy of the agreement between Churchill and de Gaulle whereby the British would fund the Free French Intelligence agency in return for supplying up to date military intelligence from the other side of the Channel, Dewavrin was frustrated by the lack of agents in sufficient numbers to bring his plan to life. In addition, despite having had many meetings with Sir Claude Dansey and the Commander, no one in the intelligence community in London knew what papers an agent needed to move freely inside German occupied France. It was clear by this time that Operation Sealion was off, probably for ever, but now the Germans would begin fortifying the coast. It therefore became even more critical than ever to have a viable network of agents in France to watch as the foundations for the Atlantic Wall began to be laid down. The last person he expected any information on the subject was Renault, the little man who had put his head around Dewavrin’s office door back in July looking for a ‘Colonel Passy’. More follows… Regards, Pat
Renault had been busy. Disguised as an insurance inspector, he had sent several preliminary reports via the French Consulate in Madrid, thence through Gibraltar to St Stephen’s House. Then on the 1st December 1940, a large collection of documents arrived from Renault who had now been operating for over three weeks in the Occupied Zone. The horde of intelligence included information provided by the port pilot of Bordeaux, Papa Fleuret on the movements of the two German warships ‘Scharnhorst’ and ‘Gneisenau’. The technical director of the ship building yard at the port would also provide him with up to date progress on the building of new ships. In addition, the collection of documents, all meticulously coded in invisible ink, also included scale maps of airfields and oil refineries in the Bordeaux area. Similar coverage for the Brest, Quiberon, Lorient, La Pallice and Merignac areas were also included in Renault’s reports. “This man”, said the Commander as he rifled through the blue flimsies, “is good!” “These men…because here we have the beginnings of the networks.” answered Dewavrin. By the spring of 1941, both Ducos and Beresnikoff had safely returned to London by different roundabout routes. While Dewavrin was delighted at their safe return, this left a gaping void in not only the coverage along the Normandy coast , but also other vital interior parts of France. On the night of 14th February 1941, Ducos was dropped by parachute from a Halifax near Bugue, in the Dordogne, part of the Unoccupied Zone and hence less closely guarded that the coastal regions. Ducos’s payload included a clumsy 60 lb radio transmitter and from the beginning everything went wrong for him. Twenty feet from the ground, his overloaded parachute harness snagged on a tall pine tree and Ducos broke his ankle after falling to earth. Worse, the valves in the radio transmitter were smashed and the set was useless. Eventually, with the aid of some friendly locals, Ducos made it to Paris, adopting his crutches as part of his disguise and began to build the network he had started on his previous mission around his father’s stockbroking business. Using the cover of the business, he was able to make important contacts in both Le Harve and Dunkirk but the prize of establishing a network in the wider Normandy area, with central control from Paris remained an elusive goal. By late autumn of 1941, Renault had had more luck in his ventures. He had now a hundred agents in his networks, covering the coast from Biarritz to St. Malo, a distance of over 500 miles. London had provided them with six transmitters and supported by a technical advisor, Captain Guy Juliette, not one shred of information pertaining to the movements of the three ships ‘Scharnhorst’, ‘Gneisenau’ and now ‘Prinz Eugen’ – ‘Bismark’s’ surviving companion, eluded them. The expenses of running these agents topped more than 150,000 francs a month. This was a price gladly paid by London for such valuable, high-grade intelligence. Renault, like Ducos, now made Paris his headquarters. Dewavrin knew Renault had, above all the others, been responsible for creating the networks. He had met the man less than half a dozen times. He had no knowledge of the extent of the risks faced by both Ducos and Renault in the grey and cold Paris. Dewavrin wanted a first hand account from Renault. And so, on the night of 27th February 1942, both Renault and Guy Juliette were picked up by Lysander from a secret strip codenamed ‘Guardian Angle’, near Rouen and flown to RAF Tangmere. The British Intelligence officer who met the men at the airfield asked them in amazement what they could possibly have brought with them in the three sacks which weighted over 100lbs. ‘Dispatches’ answered Renault anxiously, fearing he had broken some golden rule of aviation. The two men had come back to London not a moment too soon. In the same month of February 1942, General-Feldmarshall Erwin von Witzleben, moving eastwards on a tour of inspection from Cherbourg, through Arromanches, Courseulles, Ouistreham and on to Le Harve, had in his possession direct orders from Hitler. They were simple and stark – ‘The Fortification of the West.’ The War against the Wall was beginning. More follows. Regards, Pat
The 39th batch of Renault’s dispatches, coded RZ 39 ( ‘R’ for Renault and ‘Z’ meaning correspondence) arrived in early 1942. It included plans of the U-boat pens at St. Nazaire and astounded the London intelligence community. It also earned Renault the DSO, which he modestly refused to talk about with anyone. The horde of intelligence on the port played a vital part in the planning of the ‘The Greatest Raid of All’ – Operation Chariot; the Combined Operations attack on the dry dock at St. Nazaire on the night of 27/28th February 1942. Just a month later on the 28th March, another successful raid, Operation Biting, secured vital German Radar equipment at Bruneval. This raid was a combined airborne assault and naval extraction. The intelligence for this raid is not specifically attributed to Gilbert Renault in the book, but I would have little doubt the agent provided at least some of the required information on the site just 18kms north of Le Harve. The Spring of 1942 also saw the Deuxieme Bureau a very much more professional organisation than it had been in what seemed like an age back in the summer of 1940. Better funded and staffed, Dewavrin’s organisation was now known as the Bureau de Centre Espionnage, Reseignements et d’Action (B.C.R.A.) and in the first week of March moved location to a twenty-seven room suite at No. 10 Duke Street, behind Selfridge’s. When I googled the address, I saw No. 10 Duke Street is now the home of the Masonic Order in London – I wonder do they know who their war time predecessors were? Dewavrin himself was promoted, becoming ‘Commandant Passy’ and noted in his diary: “Thanks to RZ 39, my conception of the networks is at last taken seriously.” Gilbert Renault took the opportunity while in London to write a detailed report on his networks inside France; a task which was far too dangerous whilst in Paris. However, even in the safety of England he was careful to exclude both the address of his Paris headquarters and it’s cover business – a furniture making company at 72 Avenue des Champs-Elysees, above the Ermitage Cinema. The Ermitage had opened in 1930 with ‘All Quite on the Western Front’ and closed in 1990. The building is now the large perfume store ‘Sephora’ from what I can see on Google Street View here. Again I would wonder do any of the customers flowing through its doors today realise the desperate, heroic efforts of Gilbert Renault and his agents in his Notre-Dame Brotherhood to provide London with the intelligence to eventually help defeat the Germans in France. This circuit of agents suffered many devastating casualties from the Gestapo, but always recovered and never once failed to supply London with intelligence, much of it of the highest grade. The thing which troubled Renault most was not the danger to his agents and himself but rather his inability, due to security considerations, to inform his agents whether or not their efforts were of any value in London; were they risking their lives to provide intelligence which was not useful or even if it was appreciated at all? Dewavrin explained the cold hard facts to Renault one evening while he and his deputy dined with Renault at the Waldorf. ‘The more the war progresses, the less you or any of your brave garcons will know – indeed, the less I shall know also. If one of you gets information which turns out to be useful, you wont hear a word of praise or even interest out of anyone. I know how you must feel hearing this but think of the risk if everyone in the networks knew the full strategic value of what they were doing’. At one of the many meetings during these weeks in London, Renault told Dewavrin of his fears for his family still in Brittany. ‘One day, it may be necessary to get my family out of France in a hurry’ At this time, Renault’s wife Edith and their four children were in Baud in Brittany having had to move house every couple of months for almost three years. The two men then considered the persistent problem of the 200 mile gap in the watch on the Wall between St. Malo and Le Harve. The area still had no network in place. ‘You could try Cherbourg.’ suggested Dewavrin. Cherbourg had a large port and seemed to both men to be the obvious choice to establish a network to fill the gap. Then Dewavrin turned to the issue of the six radio operators under Renault’s control in Paris. ‘You do keep them separate from your main headquarters don’t you?’ Both men knew the radio operator’s job, chained to his bulky set presented the biggest danger – both to each operator and the Paris headquarters itself. They were located in a chain of villas in the city suburbs. Each operator was told to move location after two transmissions. On the 28th March 1942, his last day in London before being returned to Occupied France, Renault went shopping for his agents. He bought soap, chocolate, cigarettes and other items to bring back with him. When he returned to 10 Duke Street and walked into Dewavrin’s office, he immediately knew something was wrong. Dewavrin sat at his desk, the strain obvious on his face. Also present were Manuel and Juliette, the technical advisor. Without speaking, Manuel handed him a message. It was from Robert Delattre, Renault’s personal radio officer. It read: “FIVE RADIO OPERATORS ARRESTED -STOP- AM READY FOR OPERATION THIS EVENING CEILING TEN KILOMETERS -STOP- BOB” More follows… Regards, Pat
During the car journey to RAF Tangmere, Gilbert Renault kept asking himself how had this happened and how badly compromised was his network. Then his thoughts went even darker – had they got to his family in Brittany? Having successfully found the lighted ‘T’ at the ‘Guardian Angle’ landing strip, the Lysander waited just a minute to offload its passenger and take on the RZ 40 dispatch bags. Renault felt a hand on his arm in the darkness; it was his No. 2, Francois Faure. He was whisked away by the reception committee. Next morning in his apartment in the square Henri Pate on the southern fringes of the Bois de Boulogne, Gilbert listened in silence as Delattre told him the worst news yet. The operator Julitte had appointed as his successor, before returning to London, a man called Subsol. This man had disregarded the strict instructions and had transmitted several days in succession from a villa in the suburb of Chatou. During this same week, the Gestapo had put into operation a fleet of thirty six radio detector vans onto the streets of Paris. They were easily recognisable; Peugeot vans covered with grey tarpaulin which crawled along the streets at no more than walking pace. In addition to the listening equipment, they could also communicate directly with the Gestapo central control point at 525 Rue de Saussais. They were capable of arriving at the location of a transmitter after just twenty minutes of the operator beginning a transmission. Thus the Gestapo had found Subsol. That would have been bad enough, but unbelievably he had a notebook in his pocket when arrested with the code names and addresses of the four operators under his control. How much more damage to the network could the Gestapo inflict once they got to work on the five agents? In addition, with just one remaining radio, Gilbert now had to both maintain his current workload and setup a new network in Normandy. All of Renault’s first day back in Paris was devoted to firefighting the immediate crisis. He met with several of his contacts in the city and arranged to have a second transmitter sent up from the Bordeaux cell. He also contacted London and requested additional transmitters be air dropped to replace the lost sets. During his shuttling between places using the city underground, moving from the left bank to Sacre-Coeur and back to the Opera, someone mentioned a name which might help with the Normandy gap. He recognised the name at once – Pierre Brossolette. ‘You mean that socialist who wrote articles for that Socialist daily “Le Populaire". Surely he is a bit of a firebrand?’ Despite being right of centre in political outlook, Gilbert Renault later in the day, with a characteristic pang of shame, relented. If France was to achieve her freedom again, then it would only be achieved through the unity of all creeds and colours and classes. A meeting was arranged, and Renault went to a small newsagent’s shop in the Rue de la Pompe, high on a hill overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. He expected to meet a big embittered radical character but instead Brossolette turned out to be an easy natured individual whom Renault warmed to at once. Brossolette explained that this shop, which sold crayons and exercise books to the pupils of the nearby Lycee Janson-Sailly, was the headquarters for his small resistance organisation specialising in propaganda. Renault promised to get funding for the group from de Gaulle in London and then asked about Normandy. ‘I know just the people for you.’ Brossolette told his new friend. Next morning they met again on the Champs de Mars, the long cypress grove below the Eiffel Tower and Brossolette had another man with him named Marcel Berthelot, who ran yet another network. The three men walked up and down underneath the trees. This was nothing new to Renault, who had already built fourteen other networks in a similar fashion. He knew instinctively both these men could be trusted. They were individuals who lived on the spot, with the fire of Verdun in their blood, fearless men and incorruptible. Now Renault had two new allies in the two networks. ‘Tomorrow morning you will meet my Chief’ Berthelot explained. Colonel Alfred Touny took Renault to his apartment on Rue du General Langlois. At first Renault remained skeptical when the man claimed to have 5000 supporters in his Organisation Civile et Militaire (O.C.M.). However the O.C.M. had survived the arrest of its original Chief in 1941, a Colonel Heurteaux and, unlike many small groups who lacked money and radio contact with de Gaulle in London, the O.C.M. had somehow survived. Unlike Brossolette’s group, who mostly used propaganda as a weapon, the O.C.M. specialised in military intelligence for its own use when the time came for armed uprising. However, the O.C.M. badly needed that link with de Gaulle, together with funding which only London could provide. Renault promised to have 200,000 francs released to the group within days. Now, what about Normandy? ‘I have a good agent for you, but he doesn’t operate from Cherbourg. However, he can get you anything you want from his base in Caen.’ ‘Caen?’ The old Norman city was eighty miles from Cherbourg and Renault did not hide his disappointment. ‘Of course that would be of help to use, but—’ Colonel Touny cut in ‘…I think you will find he can help with Cherbourg too. He travels constantly.’ The man being discussed was Marcel Girard, veteran of Ypres in the First World War, he had survived that conflict only to suffer serious leg wounds from machine gun fire at Dunkirk in 1940. After long months of recovery in a German Military Hospital in Brussels, he had been repatriated by the Germans in January 1941. Not long after he had met Colonel Touny and immediately set about organising an impressive group of patriots in his home town of Caen. More follows… Regards, Pat
Marcel Girard met with Renault on the morning of Wednesday, 1st April 1942 in one of the old plastered houses of the Rue Caulaincourt in the second floor of No.77. Neither man knew who owned it. The property was one of many ‘safe’ houses used for meetings, each of which commanded an average ‘danger money’ fee of 600 francs per month. Girard had set himself up as the salesman for a cement company and therefore had papers which allowed him free movement between Caen and Paris, together with other smaller coastal towns and areas where the ‘Wall’ was now beginning to rise from the French countryside. Only a few people in the company knew that Marcel Girard never actually sold one ounce of cement. During the meeting Renault explained what was required. A network of agents who could report on every new coastal battery under construction down to the smallest detail. The present gap from St Malo to Le Harve was to be his ‘patch’. London required to know not just the basics of the battery, but even the caliber and range of the guns, how many and where the machine gun positions were on each site, if there were minefields protecting it and how many troops guarded each position. The information required could not be obtained from a safe surveillance distance with binoculars. It would have to come from local people who had a reason to be seen cycling past within yards of the position; farmers passing with hay carts and animals to market, their wives supplying eggs and milk to the garrison troops, doctors and priests with nighttime passes to travel within curfew hours tending their patients and parishioners. It was going to be a momentous undertaking. More follows. Regards, Pat
Before moving on, I want to google some of the people and places mentioned in the book so far. I have also gone through the index to another book; ‘The Resistance – The French Fight Against the Nazis’ by Matthew Cobb in order to get a second perspective on some of these individuals and events. As stated already, the subject book of this thread, ‘Ten Thousand Eyes’ by Richard Collier was written in 1958 and the Corgi Edition of 1960 is my source here. Whilst that book I have no doubt is sound as regards the facts and time frame, a quick check of some of the same names in Cobb’s modern study, published in 2009, reveals facets of some of the same characters in a different light, which only research carried out in the intervening 49 years could reveal. More Follows… Regards, Pat
Continued from page 51 (1960 Corgi Edition) - Chapter 5 - 'A Network is Born'... In order to see where we are in this fascinating story, I have highlighted in green the people we have thus far met on the Organisational Chart at the back of the book below: This is an important part of the story as it brings us to the Normandy area of France where the 'Century' Network is born on the 1st April 1942. Over two long years will pass before the fruits of this Network's labours will finally pay off. Some of the Century agents will not live to see their beloved land liberated in the summer of 1944. They were indeed some of the most bravest people in the Normandy Campaign, with the knowledge that if they were caught, they would face a slow and painful death was bad enough, but it could also spell disaster for their families and friends inside German Occupied France. Nonetheless, the vast majority chose to persevere, despite the mortal danger. More follows... Regards, Pat
I want to go back a bit to the meeting between Gilbert Renault and Pierre Brossolette described in Post #10 above. This was an important meeting in the foundation of the 'Century Network' along the Normandy coast. The exact date of the meeting is not stated but I am assuming it's held within days of Renault returning to France and in the midst of the turmoil prevailing with the arrest of his radio operators. The meeting between the two men is stated to have occurred in a 'small newsagents shop in the Rue de la Pompe', which '...sold crayons and exercise books to the pupils of the Lycee Janson-Sailly'. I had a look along the Rue de la Pompe and found the school referred to - now shown on Google Maps as Lycee Public Janson de Sailly: On what I take to be the northern corner of the school and just across the Rue de la Pompe, I found this corner shop named 'Lamartine': If my french is correct, the three subtitles underneath the name plate read 'Bookseller', 'Stationery' and 'Shop'. So, is this Pierre Brossolette's wartime headquarters for his network? Anyone able to confirm or correct? This brave resistance leader, just 38 years old in this spring of 1942, would die by his own hand less than two years later rather than give information to the Paris Gestapo. He is one of the most highly decorated French Resistance leaders, having been awarded the 'Croix de Guerre', 'Ordre de la Liberation', 'Medaille de la Resistance' and 'Legion d'Honneur'. More Follows, Pat
Chapter 5 – A NETWORK IS BORN (p.51) Marcel Girard returned to his native Caen after the Paris meeting with Renault on Saturday, the 4th April 1942. You might please forgive me for diverging a little bit here as the author goes into some dept describing the pre-1944 City of Caen. I find this to be an intriguing insight into a world which disappeared for the most part with the bombardment the city in the summer of 1944. ‘In peacetime, like most other townsmen, he would have spent that morning fishing for trout on the banks of the River Orne, whose brown waters neatly bisected the city. Today he had business to do – Dewavrin’s business. Caen was much like Girard himself – shrewd, solid, un-demonstrative. It was a farmer’s city. The narrow cobbled streets ran between steep pitched red tiled houses and the cologne of these streets was wood-smoke and farm manure. Red dairy cattle, geese and pigs plashed in the dirt roads that formed its perimeter. The drink of the region was calvados, a potent greenish-yellow applejack, and no ‘Tripe a la Mode de Caen’, the brown glutinous stew designed for hungry farmers, was complete without a jiggerful. And when hungry farmers sat down to table, no meal was complete without the ‘trou Normand’, the Norman hole, a calvados taken midway through a ten course meal to make room for the rest. The people were short, square and stocky, great hunters and great fighters, who had fought the English for a hundred years, and would have fought them, if need be, for a hundred more. In peacetime the tourists had come with their Baedekers to ‘The City of a Hundred Spires’, snapped the fine eleventh century churches which everywhere pierced the skyline, then moved on to Paris for fun. For them Caen reserved the Norman look – cynical, kindly, humorous, argumentative. They had never had too much time for tourists. Their life was encompassed by the Wednesday and Saturday markets, when big shaggy Percherons brought the cartloads of rich Isigny butter and fine ripe Camemberts rumbling on to the cobbles of the Place Saint-Sauveur. To them this life among the damp apple orchards and forests, where the greybeards still remembered wolves, alone made clean, uncomplicated sense. Girard, the son of a local vet, had been one of them for forty years. He knew some men who would die to set it free. Still walking, he came to the docks. Swedish and German freighters, flags stencilled on their trim white sides, were tied up in the basin. Girard walked until he came to the Pont de la Fonderie, spanning the canal. Beside the bridge was a mellow red-brick house with stone sashed windows, ringed peacefully by a semi-circle of five chestnut trees. Inside, a notice on the wall of the tiled corridor said “Department of Highways and Bridges”. Girard stumped along it, turning right and climbing creaking wooden stairs to a pitch-pine door labelled “Eugene Meslin, Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges”. Meslin was a handsome blond man in his fifties, tall and broad-shouldered. ‘Ciments Francais’ had a factory near Caen, and he and Girard had done business many times in the years before the War. Since then inevitably the two men had grown mutually indignant over other things than the rising price of cement. When Meslin had dismissed his secretary, Girard said briskly, “Well, I’ve made contact with London, at last. We can start work.” More Follows…. Regards, Pat
I found a 'then and now' photo of the 'mellow red-bricked house with stone sashed windows' amongst Michel Le Querrec's Flickr collection here. The building was on the south east side of the Pont de la Fonderie as seen in this Googe Street view, but taking a few paces within that view shows the building disappearing to be replaced with a somewhat less attractive, more modern building! The change seems to have occurred sometime between and August 2017 and August 2020 according to Google Maps. Regards, Pat
Girard gave Meslin a brief account of his meeting with Renault. The new Network was to be divided into cells; Meslin would take charge of the Caen cell and other cells would be created in Cherbourg, Bayeau, St. Lo and Le Harve as well as inland towns such as Alencon and Rouen. The size of each cell was critical; it should have just enough members to accomplish the task of mapping the section of the Atlantic Wall in it’s area. The fewer members, the better in order to prevent infiltration and security leaks. As the Government Engineer responsible for all non-military maintenance, Meslin had freedom of movement to travel almost eighty miles of the Normandy coastline. Since March, he already knew of some works commenced under the recently three fold increased strength of the Todt Organisation ‘Oberbauleitung Normandie’ headquartered in St. Malo. During this spring of 1942, dotted amongst the dairy pastures and orchards which lay between Caen and the sea were camps holding 4000 men – mainly Dutch and Belgian deportees, together with local French coerced labor. In addition, almost 600 local French had been forcibly evicted from the coastal areas of Normandy. Bulldozers were in the process of clearing the white seaside houses at Vierville, Colleville and St. Laurent-sur-Mer. Already in some areas, the ‘Zone Interdite’ (Forbidden Zone) extended as much as twelve miles inland from the sea, in places as far as the RN 13 Cherbourg-Paris highway. Along many of the secondary roads leading into this ‘Zone Interdite’ sprung up roadblocks with black and white barriers manned by sentries. What the Germans were planning behind those barriers, no one could say with certainty – up to now. Meslin told Girard it was almost impossible to get beyond these roadblocks and the sentries re-checked passes every few miles. But Girard would not be dissuaded. ‘Nothing is impossible – you can go there for a start!’ ‘I am only one man and there are certain places where even I cannot get to’ replied the Government Engineer. ‘But there are others who can. They use local labor on the fortifications for a start. And they haven’t evacuated the farms, they like our eggs and butter and cattle too well. So, we can get farm workers or people who have business on the farms. These people can move around doing their ordinary jobs and using their eyes.’ Girard had it all worked out. A few days later the two men met again. Things are moving’ reported Meslin, ‘and we are meeting the new recruits tonight at the Café des Touristes. Do you play dominoes?’ The game was a good excuse for a meeting and a café was a much safer place to hold one than a private residence. The café stood at No. 73 Boulevard des Allies, one of Caen’s many cobbled streets (the Allies referred to had been from the First World War) and at first glance it was indistinguishable from thousand other French cafes. The café’s chief claims to fame were its patron and its chauffage – the central heating apparatus. Paul Berthelot, who ran the cafe – no relation to Girard’s chief, was a staunch Resistant, and the broken boiler in his basement had been agreed on as the new network’s first ‘letterbox’, where agents could deposit daily handwritten reports. ‘Scrupulously hygienic fellows, these Germans’ said Meslin dryly. ‘I don’t think it will occur to them that we’re keeping top secret information in such a filthy place.’ Despite all their later disasters and triumphs, time and events were to prove Meslin right. More follows… Regards, Pat
I want to take time for a brief description of each back gammon player present at that meeting in the Café des Touristes that evening. No exact date is given in the book, but from the flow of events before and after, I take it to have occurred sometime in April 1942. All present are central to the formation of the new ‘Centurie’ intelligence network. Overall, the group are described thus: ‘The bulk of those gathered tonight were small town tradesmen, sporting old-fashioned watch-chains and drawing thoughtfully on blackened pipes; but fighters to a man. It would have done Dewavrin’s heart good to see them.’ ‘Leon Dumis, for example, the garage proprietor, small and dapper with his twin toothbrush moustache and thoughtful blue eyes now joined them with a Cinzano in his hand. He was hardly seated when the patron’s wife appeared and Dumis, all in one movement, jumped up, snatched off his beret and tucked it under his arm to reveal a head as bald and as polished as an egg. But this grave courtesy, as Girard knew, stopped short of providing a German truck with so much as a litre of gasoline. Dumis had closed his garage on the day war broke out and since demobilisation had made do on his dwindling savings.’ There is more on Leon Dumis on the www.calvados.gouv.fr/ site here. Girard was glad to see Jean Chateau, the Electricity Board Inspector present. He was a big, placid man, with carefully brushed back hair and one of Normandy’s first Resistants, along with Roger Deschambres, the melancholy red-haired plumber, who lived a few streets away. Alongside these two at the table was Roger Thomas, a shy thirty year old with fair hair. His quietness however hid a deep passion to see France free again. Roger Thomas would eventually become a highly prized fugitive from the Gestapo in Caen and his remarkable volume of maps which made their way to London contributed in no small part to the eventual success of the D-Day Landings just over two years later. He looked more English than French and had a job in the Potato Controller’s Office on the Rue des Carmelites. He was the youngest member of the group now gathered and is further described as appearing always on the defensive. Girard knew however that this sternness stemmed from two years of Resistance work already under his belt having had to narrowly escape ‘blown’ safe house whilst transmitting in both Brest and Alencon. Such men were discreet, and Girard was glad to have them, but now, to hold watchful daily vigil over the more talkative members, the vast reassuring shadow of Wilfred Torres loomed over the meeting. As a close friend of Captain Gaubert, head of the Caen Gendarmerie, Torres would be forewarned on Gestapo coups and inevitably had drawn the job as Centurie’s Security Officer. The Germans were always pressing Torres to work for them and always he regretted infinitely – no equipment. In June 1940, when the Germans entered Lorient, they had found Torres, harbour works contractor, busy constructing piers for the French Navy. The Germans had decided Torres and his two wagon loads of pile drivers could be of use to them at Brest, helping the Todt Organisation construct the U-Boat pens which Renault’s networks had reported. Torres had asked for eight days grace to get his affairs in order and was given four. Four was all he needed. The Germans had loaded his wagons onto railway freight cars and labelled them “Brest” and left them in a siding at the Gare Maritime. Torres had used his four days grace to enlist the aid of a sympathetic shunter, change the labels to “Caen” and then tactfully disappear. Back in Caen he had supervised the unloading of the wagons and had the contents stored in a disused warehouse near his house. Now with skeleton equipment, Torres had to subsist on such minor repairs as Meslin could find for him, but at least there were eight tons of pile driving and dredging equipment that would never work for the Germans. The last and most picturesque member of the group had, as always arrived late. No one meeting Rene Duchez, the house painter could fail to react to him. You either liked him immediately or thought him the biggest fool on earth. You despised him or thought him the cleverest agent Dewavrin ever had. At forty, with bold blue eyes, Duchez’s pleasure was to make light of everything, especially danger and it was his boast that he had nerve enough to fool the smartest German born. No one ever estimated – or challenged Duchez’s capacity with the calvados, but this could be deceptive. At the very moment you thought him fuddled he would say something so much to the point, so full of horse sense, that you knew his rather bony head was functioning clear as a bell. Now that the group was assembled and seated at two tables, with a screen of back gammon ‘onlookers’ standing to protect them from view, Girard began talking very quietly: ‘Our friend here…’ – referring to Meslin by his code name “Morvain” ‘…has given you some idea of our task. We have to try and crack this new Atlantic Wall. Someone, craning over the board, said “Bien sur patron – and it’s no easy one.”. Girard countered quickly: ‘It isn’t impossible. Nothing is.’ He looked up at the ring of faces: ‘Now here is what I propose to do.’ More follows... Regards, Pat
Girard had overlooked very little. As with all the networks Renault had founded, the new network was to be run on the lines of a French military general staff, with a marked division of responsibility. To begin with there were to be three classes of agents – P-0, an occasional agent who would go about his or her normal business. P-1, an agent devoting at least at least half their time to Resistance work and P-2, who were full time agents. Girard planned to have as few P-2s as possible. At their Headquarters, location still undecided, the work would be sub-divided into dossiers: Casemates; Anti-Aircraft Batteries; Communications; Beach Defenses. Girard appointed Rene Duchez, the painter/decorator to take charge of the P-1 agents. As a man noted for convivial meetings in the town cafes, he was likely to attract little attention. ‘We must think of this operation,’ Girard stressed ‘in terms of detail. Nothing is too small. We must know the texture of the sand along every inch of that shore. If there is barbed wire, we must find out not just how high it is but also what strand (gauge) it is. If we find them building a block house along the coast, we must find out not just the location, but how thick the concrete walls and roof are.’ ‘We also must find out about the doors’ Girard continued. ‘Doors?’ asked Roger Thomas, who always liked to have precision of detail. Girard explained: ‘If this is to be a Wall, it will have doors. They have to move troops up to the forward areas from Caen and other towns, don’t they? Even at the nearest point, the railway runs more than a mile from the actual beach. At intervals, there must be channels, camouflaged so that their not easily recognised, going miles deep into the fortifications. They could be used by friend or foe – if the foe knew where they were.’ The question of freedom of passage was raised. Girard explained to Duchez that as the P-1 agents would have to work under fictitious identities as well as their own, the faking of identity papers and travel passes would be the department of the painter’s wife, Odette who was a pleasant woman from Evreux and not present at the meeting. ‘’Tell her we don’t want to use fake identity papers,’ Girard said, ‘if we can possibly help it. Somebody must have access to the real thing and our job is to find them’. Methodically, Girard assigned other tasks. Recruiting agents whose business normally took them through the Forbidden Zone was divided between Meslin and a liaison agent not then present, a dark strikingly-handsome young advocate named Leonard Gille. Daily liaison between Meslin and the agents and the distribution of funds would be Pierre Harivel’s job. A solidly built man with a broad forehead, Harivel’s work as an insurance inspector for the company Le Preservatrice, gave him a limited freedom of passage throughout part of the Zone. Once again, Renault’s old and sure methods would be used to good advantage. There were other meetings which followed between Girard and Meslin and between Meslin and his team in Caen as points were trashed out and solutions were found. Within these first days, there was now a perceptible feeling that the new network was clicking into shape. ‘It won’t be any picnic,’ Girard warned them frequently, ‘we can’t afford time – we haven’t got any. And it will be a bloody job, because there will be losses. We have to face that. Some of us are going to get caught.’ More follows… Regards, Pat
The danger to which Girard referred could not be overstated. The Gestapo were located at No. 25 Rue des Jacobins in Caen, which the book states was a ‘converted doctor’s surgery’. I have seen other sources state the address as being at No. 44 on the same street – see this page on the sgmcaen.free.fr site. According to this source the doctor, Dr Pecker, had been a Jew taken as a hostage following the sabotage at Airan where on the night of April 15/16 April 1942, resulting in one of the deadliest Resistance attacks on the occupying German forces throughout the War. Around thirty German troops on leave were killed when the train carrying them was de-railed by four Resistant fighters. Dr Pecker was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. His son, Jean Pecker was to serve later in the French 2nd Armoured Division under General Leclerc in Normandy. The head of the Caen Gestapo is stated in the book be Helmut Bernard whose methods of extracting information varied from bribes of cigarettes and good meals to electric shock and immersion in ice baths. It took me a while to find this guy on Google but once again the excellent sgmcaen.free.fr site came up with the result I needed. His correct name was Hauptscharfuhrer Harald Heyns (1913-2004), known as “Bernard”. It is this man which was directly responsible for the decision to shoot between 70 and 80 prisoners in Caen Gaol on D-Day. Their bodies were buried inside the prison courtyard and then exhumed by the Germans just before the city fell towards the end of July 1944. The final resting place of these prisoners, mainly Resistance members, has never been found. Heyns was arrested by the British in early 1945 but escaped while in custody. He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Paris Military Tribunal in July 1952 and died peacefully in Germany in 2004 whilst living under a false identity. Under this threat, Meslin’s first task was to choose a nerve-centre for the new network. He was a bachelor and lived with his housekeeper in an old house overlooking the Orne, a good twenty minutes from his office in the city. The office, where he worked 12 hour days, was the real centre of his life. Choosing it as the location meant bringing in his secretary, seventeen year old Jeanne Verinaud into the network. He agonised over the decision, knowing that in so doing he might well be the cause of her death. When he asked her if she would join his network, explaining the risks carefully, she simply unlocked the top drawer of her desk in the office and took out a photograph of de Gaulle that she had prized for two years. On one thing the network was determined from the start: to learn from past mistakes of other groups. The Security Chief, Torres did not know of the disastrous blow dealt to Renault’s radio network in Paris by the careless Subsol the previous month – he had no need as there was a glaring example of carelessness right here in Caen wherein another newly fledged group, working in the dark without guidance from London, had been wiped out also in March when one of its agents was also caught with a list of addresses. Seventeen of its members were still held in the gaol in Caen awaiting trial. The danger of writing lists of names had to be overcome. Eventually Torres happened on a brilliant idea – a simple pocket dictionary. To remember a name, the bearer just had to put a mark against a word which sounded similar – for ‘Duchez’ a mark would be put against the word ‘duchess’; for ‘Torres’, a mark against “torse” and so on. The Gestapo could now do spot checks as often as they liked but they would find nothing but innocent men and women eager to increase their word-power. Duchez was not idle either; one morning he drove his battered camionette down to the city Maire, a weathered, yellow plastered building on the Rue Pasteur to see Henri Caillet, the assistant to the Secretary-General. Caillet had served with him as a private in the 21st Transport Group at Tours and Duchez knew he was a man of integrity – besides being responsible for the issuing of food and identity cards 57,500 people. Every three days thereafter, though Caillet did not know it that first day, Duchez would return for another batch of cards. Not wasting any time, on the same trip he visited his friend Inspector Roger Leblond at Police Headquarters. ‘There was never anyone like Duchez,’ Leblond later recalled, ‘for playing on your emotions.’ When the policeman gave him a single blank identity card, Duchez told him, with a glint in his eye, he would be back for a thousand within the week! Now Leblond was in the new network up to his neck and soon became a regular at the Café des Touristes and the disreputable broken boiler which the Germans scorned to touch became a receptacle for hundreds of stolen identity cards. More follows… Regards, Pat