The Saboteur Page 14

  La Rochefoucauld, meanwhile, went to some of his old training sites and met with other commanding officers. They knew of his imprisonment and admitted they thought he’d ended up like so many before him, one of the 75,000 French Resistance fighters to die at the hands of the Germans during the war. “To them, I looked like a ghost,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. His resurrection called for celebration, then, and as Robert’s story spread through the ranks, the Brits made it a point to feed him and show him a good time—every night. “We were endlessly invited to the best houses,” he wrote, “and women fell into our arms!”

  Rationing had not ended, the bombs still dropped, but life and London in this moment in May came furnished with a certain joie de vivre. “Hope was prevailing,” Robert said. The Germans had overreached in Russia, and the Allies had fought their way north from Africa, and soon the European landing would come, had to come. “The hope of a victory people wanted to believe was near,” La Rochefoucauld wrote.

  He wondered how he would contribute to it. His hatred for the Germans and shame of his collaborating countrymen had not abated, and now—more than ever—he longed to prove to himself and the enemy that deprivation and torture could not break him. There was honor in that, especially for a man whose country had so often acted dishonorably. There was—and he liked this, too—a great deal of fun and adventure in another posting. He wanted to return to work in France, to be there when the Allies landed.

  One day he was called to meet with an SOE major, who told him his assignment: La Rochefoucauld and a small team would sabotage a munitions factory the Germans operated outside Bordeaux, in a town called Saint-Médard-en-Jalles. Saint-Médard’s factory was less a plant than a compound: three massive buildings, barracks for officers and 5,500 laborers, the whole of the works covering 684 acres, or more than one square mile of suburban Bordelais real estate. Already, this plant had been attacked. On April 29 and 30, seventy-three British planes dropped 268 tons of bombs on the grounds, severely damaging its northeast wing, boiler house, and some ancillary buildings and leaving throughout fires that burned well after the bombing ceased. The damage was in no way complete, however, and eight days after the raid, the Germans had large parts of the works operational again. It would be La Rochefoucauld’s job to cripple what the errant British bombs had not. The mission would take time, of course, and the Saint-Médard job wouldn’t be Robert’s only responsibility. He was to bring mayhem of all varieties to southwest France, working within Resistance outfits as he tried to find a way into the munitions compound. From there, he could figure out where charges might be laid.

  The major recommended La Rochefoucauld reacquaint himself with the nuances of plastic explosives.

  CHAPTER 15

  On May 7, two Halifax bombers idled on a runway outside London, crews loading three tons of arms, explosives, wireless devices, and radios into their bellies. With midnight approaching, La Rochefoucauld and his radioman squeezed into one of the planes. Moments later, they took off.

  Once at cruising altitude, the pilot turned around to tell Robert he could take a nap; they wouldn’t be to Bordeaux until nearly dawn, and their landing site was ninety miles south of there. But “I didn’t sleep a wink during those tense hours,” he later wrote.

  Bordeaux was a different beast than the Yonne, more volatile and yet more cosmopolitan, and La Rochefoucauld was a different man now, still eager to fight but aware too of the consequences. This mission would be more dangerous than his last. The Nazis already had large parts of the “old” factory in Saint-Médard operating—its output had armed the French during World War I—and with each day, Robert assumed, the plant gained more functionality.

  Bordeaux itself accentuated the peril of the assignment. The city had a reputation among Resistance fighters as a place where Nazi repression was at its worst. Bordeaux’s port was a significant U-boat base. Its SD agents had been there since August 1940, longer than in any other provincial city, and these men now knew the region well. The Resistance leader Albert Ouzoulias said Bordeaux was “a cemetery of the finest fighters.”

  In part this was due to Friedrich Wilhelm Dohse, who oversaw the regional German police structure, coordinating all espionage, counterespionage, and security activities for the Nazis across southwest France. His portfolio included the military intelligence of the Abwehr and Feldpolizei, and the secret policemen within the regional SD offices. He was precocious, thirty-one in the spring of 1944, and in surviving photos bald and grimacing, as if the responsibilities of his post had aged him. Dohse spoke fluent French, dressed extremely well, and had single-handedly dismembered Bordeaux’s largest Resistance group, Scientist. “This is a man who got results,” a Bordeaux police officer later said. “He was an evil man.”

  The plane drew ever closer to Bordeaux. Soon it flew over the reclaimed marshes on which the city lay, where even the topography worked against résistants: The surrounding hills scrambled many of the wireless transmissions sent to London, and so drops like this one moved to the forests south of Bordeaux, to clearings in the terrain that only locals knew. La Rochefoucauld’s landing would occur in the neighboring southern department of Landes, in a town called Mugron, amid its vineyards and groves of pine and fifteen hundred sleeping residents.

  The plane swooped low, nearly skimming the tree line, five hundred feet off the ground. The pilot saw a formation of lights in an opening in the forest—the local résistants—and established radio contact with them. The bird swirled round and headed back for the formation, and La Rochefoucauld moved to the plane’s hatch and stared at the red light opposite him. He waited, just as he had done in the Yonne, for the light to turn green.

  It did.

  Despite how little he liked parachuting, he once again landed without difficulty. His radioman, however, sprained his ankle. About a dozen résistants emerged from the trees to greet the men and helped them fold their parachutes. All around them fluttered down the ammunition, explosives, and wireless sets, floating to the ground in black containers that were each the size of a man and carried up to four hundred pounds of supplies. It was a massive haul, and took the men hours to ensure no trace of it remained behind. When they were finished, La Rochefoucauld and the fighters of this Resistance group, Léon des Landes, departed on bicycles, the radio guy in a truck. They headed toward one of the group’s hideouts.

  Léon des Landes was led by one Léonce Dussarrat. Though he was an excellent shot, and even once taught a shooting course at the elite Saint-Cyr military academy, the forty-year-old was not a military man. He was a hardware store owner and a widower, who’d remarried and had four children. He’d joined the Resistance late, unaware that his business partner, Léon Baraille, was the local chief of the Organisation civile et militaire (OCM), a nationwide Resistance network. Baraille was sick and near death in 1943 when he revealed his involvement to Dussarrat, and asked him to carry on the fight when he couldn’t.

  What turned Dussarrat from a jovial shopkeeper to a Resistance mastermind occurred moments after Baraille’s funeral in September of that year. André Grandclément, the regional head of the OCM in Bordeaux, had been flipped by the Germans and quite openly discussed his betrayal; he worked with the Nazis, he said, because he believed the Communists to be the real danger to France. Grandclément visited Dussarrat at his office and asked him to turn over the OCM’s weaponry in the Landes. If Dussarrat failed to do so, well, Friedrich Dohse himself waited on the street.

  Dussarrat stared at Grandclément—and refused. He would honor Baraille, his deceased friend. What followed is a bit unclear: Either Dussarrat narrowly avoided his arrest or Grandclément, in a moment of conflicting loyalties, allowed him to leave through a back door. But in the days ahead, Dussarrat’s escape from Grandclément and Dohse became a one-way track to the underground, because now the SD knew who he was and where he worked. His refusal to turn over arms meant that he had no choice but to use them. So he put his family into hiding and began to learn the black arts of anarchy. />
  His former life helped him. Dussarrat knew the Landes, and its people, and as he met with them in secret, he began to construct the Resistance hierarchy, placing his group at the top of it, thanks in part to a store owner’s sense for building inventory. To wage war one must collect weapons, and Léonce Dussarrat relied on a conviviality he’d perfected to cajole people to give him what he wanted. Then he expanded his new business, bridging his group beyond the department—working with major Resistance outfits just to the north, in Bordeaux—until Dussarrat’s OCM chapter was larger than Baraille’s had been: seven hundred men in spring 1944, and growing to an estimated five thousand by summer’s end. As it grew, it transformed—Dussarrat collecting and distributing ever more weapons and planning ever more sabotages, finding a raison d’être in his new career—until it was no longer fitting to call Dussarrat’s group an OCM chapter. Its members rechristened themselves Léon des Landes, an homage to their captain.

  The Mugron parachute drop was Léon des Landes’s fourth in three weeks, and the sabotages started soon after: the destruction of 328 yards of rails and 150,000-volt power lines in Saint-Paul-lès-Dax on May 20; a sabotage the following day in Mont-de-Marsan on two more power lines; and then, on June 3, cutting an underground cable between Dax and Bayonne. The successful missions helped to draw other groups to Léon des Landes, and before La Rochefoucauld could venture north to Saint-Médard and the munitions factory, he was asked to contact a second band of résistants about a sabotage. The details were unclear, and La Rochefoucauld was supposed to learn more when he met with the other rebels, and explained his expertise and available arms.

  He was not the only agent that spring to parachute in with a skill set and supplies. Almost too many SOE clandestins dropped into France that season. By the middle of May, F Section had 75,000 men in country, R/F Section 50,000. The drops from RAF planes had increased from six tons in the last quarter of 1943, to 172 in the first quarter of ’44, to 794 in the second. In 1941, SOE’s first transmission station had only twelve channels; by June 1944, there were fifteen circuits and 108 channels.

  This had profound effects on France. The stream of weaponry increased Resistance recruitment. Resistance groups became networks and networks an underground army. In May 1944, the Allies gave General Marie-Pierre Koenig command of the newly formed French Forces of the Interior, or FFI, which attempted to coordinate rebellious acts against the Germans, in anticipation of the Allied landing in France.

  The Nazi reprisals in Bordeaux and the Landes turned even more vicious. The Germans could sense victory slipping from them and wanted revenge. Rebels heard savage stories: SOE agents disemboweled or the Nazis draping a French fighter’s corpse across the front of a German truck on patrol. As Robert and two other Léon des Landes men walked toward their rendezvous point, to meet the saboteurs from the second group, they moved quietly, all too aware of the repercussions for failing to do so.

  But something, some snapping twig in the forest’s underbrush perhaps, betrayed them. “We fell upon some Germans,” La Rochefoucauld said. The fight was brief and favored the overwhelming number of Nazis. One résistant fled when the skirmish could not be won, but Robert and the group leader were captured and sent to a command post the Germans called Bouriotte-Bragence, a sort of mini-Kommandatur staffed by a handful of soldiers.

  La Rochefoucauld couldn’t believe it: jailed in a second fortress. Because of the tales of atrocities, “I was convinced my friend and I would lose our lives here,” Robert wrote. After a few hours, the Nazis led him and the other résistant to a room on the ground floor, where a confused interrogation began, the Germans not speaking French well, and the French not wanting to answer.

  But then, just beyond the shouted questions, the fighters heard a car screech to a halt. In a moment three men peered through the window of Robert’s interrogation room. They wore plain clothes and, suddenly, raised submachine guns from their side. La Rochefoucauld hit the ground, crawling behind an upturned table. He grabbed his fellow résistant by the collar and dragged him close, more and more bullets tearing up the floor, ripping through walls, and narrowing their makeshift protection. The Nazis fell around them.

  The men doing the shooting seemed to be from Léon des Landes. The problem was, in the confusion of the moment, they shot indiscriminately; the angry hiss of bullets zipped by La Rochefoucauld’s ears. He tried shouting I’m on your side, but couldn’t be heard over the guns’ motorized roar. In such a confined space, it became “blindingly obvious,” he thought, that he would die here, at the hands of his own comrades. Robert switched tactics, hoping it would stop the barrage. “We give up! We give up!” he shouted. At last the firing ceased.

  His ears rang. The room smelled of gun smoke. He rose slowly from behind the table and saw the shooters, the thin skeptical lines of their mouths widening now into smiles, recognizing that La Rochefoucauld was one of theirs. They looked around the room, triumphant. Robert stepped over the corpses on the floor.

  At 8:15 in the evening on June 5, the BBC sent a coded message meant for all fighters of the French Resistance. “Blessent mon cœur/D’une Langueur/Monotone,” whose literal translation was “Wound my heart/With a languor/Monotonous.” These passages, from Paul Verlaine’s poem “Autumn Song,” were lines résistants had been waiting years to hear and had spent months planning for. D-Day had at last arrived.

  The next morning more than 5,000 ships, 13,000 aircraft, and 160,000 Allied soldiers attacked the coast of Normandy. Hundreds of miles south, the men of Léon des Landes, like résistants throughout France, carried out missions their commanders had been organizing. In the hours following the landings, Léon résistants ambushed German formations, slaughtering five here and dozens there and forty-two more at a command post outside Nanoose. But what really aided the Allies crawling on the beaches in northern France were the sabotages. From June 7 through June 10, Léon des Landes carried out more than two hundred. Rebels like Robert cut down power lines, blew up bridges and railroads, hid in trees that hung over major thoroughfares and fired at the Nazis as they drove by. They abided by the golden rule of irregular warfare: Kill the enemy, and when the enemy cannot be killed, delay his passage.

  Every hour the Germans’ forces were held up gave the Allied fighters bellying along the Cotentin peninsula that much more hope of taking the beach. There were, nationwide, up to a thousand sabotages on June 6 and the day after. A heavy emphasis was placed on blowing up rail lines, because 90 percent of the German army in 1944 moved by rail or horse. Throughout France train traffic collapsed by 50 percent. In Toulouse, one SS Panzer division equipped with the latest in armored tanks hoped to reach Normandy in three days. It took two weeks. Resistance fighters and Allied pilots first bombed all bridges heading to the beaches and all oil dumps where tanks might refuel. When Nazis tried to move north by railway, résistants sabotaged the networks of lines. Without fuel or rail transport, the Germans took to marching. Here, they walked into collections of snipers who, like those in the Landes, took aim behind strategic trees, or buildings, or hills. This played out in city, after town, after village. As Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower later said, “I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on the German war economy . . . played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.” Eisenhower later estimated that the Resistance in France after D-Day was the equivalent of fifteen extra divisions, or up to 375,000 soldiers.

  For La Rochefoucauld in those furious days of exploding power lines and quick-strike ambushes, a member of a secret army that was no longer so secret, he longed to complete the mission that had sent him back to France. One he hoped would cripple the Nazis and bring about their final defeat.

  CHAPTER 16

  Robert and his radioman headed north, to Bordeaux, joining a group called Charly, led by the theater director René Cominetti, who had been involved in the Resistance since 1941. Cominetti
had formed Charly with the help of a lawyer and banker, and by the summer of 1944, it had nearly 950 fighters. They roamed the terrain, taking up the battles of their neighboring underground tribes as well. Charly shared some of its résistants with a parent group, Groupe Georges, also operating near Bordeaux. It was led by Alban Bordes, a twenty-five-year-old as vicious with the Nazis—he admitted to carrying out hits that “God himself cannot pardon”—as he was fearful of them. He respected SD agents’ intelligence and lived in secret, knowing the reprisals that awaited his capture.