Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (46 page)

 

While Charles Bedaux reminisced with his son in Algeria, the one he wished he had had, Frederic Ledebur, was being tailed by the FBI in California and New York. FBI agents there interviewed everyone who knew him, and they kept a close watch on his activities, opened his mail and reported regularly on him to J. Edgar Hoover. Many of the sources the FBI relied upon, as it delved deeper into Ledebur’s affairs, contradicted previous denunciations of him as a pro-Nazi immigrant taking pictures of West Coast naval bases. An FBI intelligence report of 8 April 1943 concluded, ‘No indication subject engaging in espionage or distributing Nazi propaganda.’ One source helpfully suggested that ‘he still wants U.S. citizenship in order to join U.S. Army’. Nonetheless, the FBI had its doubts about Lebedur: ‘Acquaintances characterize subject as improvident, lazy, immoral individual.’

Interest in Bedaux reached the highest levels of American and British intelligence. A working committee meeting in New York of the Hemisphere Intelligence Conference, which grouped together senior American and British spymasters, discussed Bedaux at length on 24 March 1943. It suggested that ‘Watchdog’, one of their most important spies in Germany, be contacted about Bedaux. The minutes of the monthly meeting listed two questions for Watchdog. The first concerned a new type of ship locater that the German navy had reportedly installed in the conning towers of its U-boats. The committee wanted to know if Watchdog, on a recent trip to the Canadian coast aboard a U-boat, noticed anyone stationed in the submarine’s conning tower. The second question was, ‘Did Watchdog, who was in North Africa at the same time as Charles Bedaux, know or hear of him there? As both Bedaux and Watchdog were allegedly associated with the German Armistice Commission, it was thought that Watchdog might produce additional evidence of Bedaux’s security activities at that time.’ Bedaux had no connection to the Armistice Commission, but a general from the commission had displaced him from his room at the Hôtel Aletti on the night of the invasion. He may have been the same Armistice Commission officer who was captured by the American army and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Trinidad, Colorado. The FBI interrogated the German in September 1943 on the case of ‘Charles Eugene Bedaux;–(Mission Bedaux); Trading with the enemy’. The FBI was nothing if not thorough in its pursuit of evidence in the Bedaux case. The main problem was that none of Bedaux’s friends in the United States, including Frederic Ledebur, had seen him since the United States and Germany went to war in December 1941.

ON 4 APRIL 1943, DR SUMNER JACKSON watched well over a hundred American B-17 bombers, the famous ten-man Flying Fortresses, bomb Paris in daylight for the first time. The roof of the American Hospital afforded a clear view of the planes unleashing tons of high explosives on an island nearby in the River Seine. Their target was the Renault car factory, which manufactured tanks and other armoured vehicles for the Wehrmacht. German Focke-Wulf 190 fighter planes, scrambling only after the raid had begun at 2.16 p.m., pursued the bombers and clashed with their British fighter escorts. The spectacle encouraged Dr Jackson and the other physicians and nurses who had been longing for the United States to fight in France with more than words. France would not be freed immediately, they knew, but the American liberation of the skies had begun.

The heavens above Neuilly that spring afternoon saw the drama of bombardments, dogfights and crews leaping from their planes in parachutes to avoid being burned alive. Below, the Renault plant was on fire. The Luftwaffe shot down at least four of the B-17s and just as many fighter escorts. The air war was beginning to cost the Americans, as it had the British for two years, thousands of planes and crew-men. It was also magnifying the danger to Dr Jackson and the other
résistants
who were dedicated to saving the Allied survivors. Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and free Poles and Czechs were parachuting onto French soil in greater numbers. Some were captured immediately, but others were found by sympathetic Frenchmen who handed them over to clandestine organizations. Many waited in the homes of French and American friends of the Resistance or at the American Hospital for the false documents, civilian clothes and guides they needed to undertake the perilous route back to England. Most spoke no French, and they were vulnerable to capture if the wrong person asked them a question. The pilots, navigators, bombardiers and radio engineers with their valuable training and combat experience were assets the Allies could not afford to lose. For the Resistance, including Sumner Jackson, returning them to fight the Nazis was worth the risk of torture and execution.

The Germans used the air raids to rouse French fear of America’s long-term intentions. ‘German propaganda was falling upon willing ears in France,’ Ninetta Jucker, the Englishwoman who was not interned because she had a young child, remembered. ‘We were told that the air raids were intended to destroy French industry so that the “Yankees” should find no competition here after the war; while the “systematic” destruction of French cities would create vast markets for American industry when the time came to build them.’

 

In 1943, the lack of food in Paris had, in General de Chambrun’s words, ‘reached its crucial point’. The hospital had to feed 500 staff and patients, who desperately needed a sufficient calorie intake to guarantee their recovery, as well as fifty unpaid volunteers and a group of elderly Englishmen in a hostel. Ninetta Jucker wrote that the house for old Englishmen beside the American Hospital had been a retreat for old women before the war. The Germans requisitioned it and left it empty, until the American wife of a pro-Vichy French diplomat managed to have the house reopened as a hostel in the spring of 1943. Its inhabitants paid no rent, but contributed the small sum of thirty francs a day for three meals at the American Hospital. The hostel somehow came under the supervision of a retired British general. ‘He was suffering from a combination of sex, religious and persecution mania,’ Ninetta Jucker wrote. When the general forced some elderly Englishwomen to move out of the hostel, Mrs Jucker complained on their behalf. ‘There used to be women here,’ the general told her, ‘but I had to get rid of them. Couldn’t do with women around. Females, you know.’ When Ninetta complained to the Red Cross, the general was soon ‘deprived of his powers’. The hospital, though, had to feed the elderly British subjects along with everyone else–more than six hundred people daily–when France was nearly starving.

‘The problem was solved,’ Clara de Chambrun wrote, ‘by making large farming contracts for regular supplies. Three departments collaborated in this effort: Comte de Caraman and M. Hincelin in Seine-et-Oise, M. André Dubonnet in Seine-et-Marne, and Alexandre de Marenches in the Eure lent their acres to furnish vegetables and fruits.’ Otto Gresser recalled that the lawns and flowers that had made the grounds of the hospital so congenial to patients like André Guillon in 1940 were dug up and replaced with furrows of tomatoes, beans, carrots and potatoes. Gresser himself was buying as much food as he could on the black market and from the wholesale food outlets at Les Halles, where the vendors knew him as the hard-bargaining ‘Ferdinand’.

Allied air raids around Neuilly raised the fear that the hospital might be cut from its water supply. ‘So,’ Gresser said, ‘we did some digging in the hospital grounds and after about fifteen meters down we found unlimited quantities of water. In fact, it was an underground Seine.’ The well was easier to hide than the increasing number of Allied flyers in the hospital.

 

René Rocher, the French dramatist whom the Théâtre de l’Odéon had just appointed as its director, invited Clara to translate Shakespeare’s
The Life and Death of King John
. Rocher had already produced and acted in many Shakespearean plays, but
King John
had yet to appear on a French stage. Clara, as translator of
Hamlet
and author of many Shakespearean studies in French, was an obvious choice. She, however, declined. ‘
The Life and Death of King John
was no favorite of mine, and I did not see that it held any elements of success at the theater.’ When Rocher somehow convinced Clara to attempt an original translation, she spent months going over the text and thinking about the play’s meaning. Once she began, she completed the translation in three weeks.
King John
had obvious advantages, she came to see, for a wartime Paris audience: ‘The play is short, demanded no cuts, and could be produced even during the brief playing-time which was allowed, for curtains had to be down and lights extinguished by ten-fifty. ’ For four weeks, Clara attended rehearsals. This led to an amusing exchange with one of the actors. When Rocher instructed him to begin reading his part aloud, the actor asked, ‘How can we begin? We don’t understand how the lines should be read.’ The actor demanded to see the author. Clara, from the stalls, said he was not there. ‘Why the devil isn’t he here? Does he think he can get us all out and not take the trouble to come himself?’ Clara replied, ‘I am afraid you will have to excuse the author as he has been dead for more than three hundred years.’

King John
opened on 3 May 1943 to good reviews, including praise for Clara’s ‘miracle of translation’. In the first night’s full house were Clara’s son, René, and his wife, Josée. They had dinner with Pierre Laval afterwards. A week later, someone hurled a grenade at German soldiers outside the Théâtre de l’Odéon. The show, however, went on.

GERMAN U-BOATS TRAWLED THE NORTH ATLANTIC, sinking American troop carriers and merchant ships delivering vital supplies to Britain. Allied aircraft could not bomb them underwater, but they could attack the bases where submarines returned for maintenance on the Bay of Biscay at Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. Of the two, Lorient was larger, but Saint-Nazaire with its sixty-two torpedo workshops and twenty-one submarine pens was better protected. A picturesque town on the northern bank of the Loire estuary, Saint-Nazaire endured regular bombing missions by the Royal Air Force and a suicidal raid by British commandos on 28 March 1942. Although the raiders did considerable damage, almost all of them were killed or captured. The result of their sacrifice, in which five won Victoria Crosses for gallantry, was that the Germans reinforced the work bays with ten feet of solid concrete. During one raid on 28 February 1943, the American Eighth Air Force destroyed half of the town of Saint-Nazaire but lost six Flying Fortresses with all their crews. The
New York Times
called Saint-Nazaire ‘the toughest target of the American and British Air Forces’. German air defences took a large toll of British and American bombers, and Allied intelligence could not tell what effect their bombs made on German naval operations. Aerial photographs taken from the bombers were often obscured by cloud cover and revealed only the damage to the surface of the concrete over the submarine pens. They did not show how deep the bombs went or the exact dispositions of the German anti-aircraft guns. Meanwhile, the U-boats continued cruising out to sea from Saint-Nazaire to disrupt supplies to American troops in Britain and North Africa.

By the summer of 1943, the Allies needed reliable information from Saint-Nazaire more than ever. General Charles de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation instructed the Resistance in France to get it. This delicate mission was given to a 38-year-old former gendarme named Paul Kinderfreund. His code name was ‘R’ for Renaudot, a common French name. R, the operational chief in Paris of the Goélette-Frégate network, needed someone to enter Saint-Nazaire through the German security cordon, take the photographs and smuggle the film to a developer without being detected. Access to Saint-Nazaire was restricted to its inhabitants, workers at the port,
cheminots
on the trains that served the town and German troops. Saint-Nazaire lay within the Forbidden Zone, where Germany was constructing its Atlantic Wall against Allied invasion. Anyone caught there with a camera would be shot for espionage. An agent could not simply blend into the local population, because almost everyone in Saint-Nazaire had fled to the countryside for safety from the air raids.

R went to Nantes, upriver from Saint-Nazaire but outside the Forbidden Zone. It was as close as he dared travel to investigate the feasibility of the mission. In Nantes, he contacted another Resistance operative code-named Dorsal. This bicycle shop owner told R how Saint-Nazaire was protected by anti-aircraft batteries and Luftwaffe fighter squadrons. To get into the town, a visitor needed a special
Ausweis
from the Germans. Although few people were permitted, the Germans allowed students to visit the seaside town on school holidays. R’s solution was to send a schoolchild.

In Paris, R went to see Sumner and Toquette Jackson. They had worked with his Goélette network for more than a year and were used to unusual requests. But the proposal R put to them was startling even to these veteran
résistants
: R wanted to borrow their son. Until then, his parents had shielded 15-year-old Phillip from danger and had once reprimanded him for painting anti-German graffiti. The boy was unaware that Allied airmen took shelter in the hospital and that his avenue Foch home was a Resistance mail drop. Whenever Resistance members met at the Jacksons’ home, Phillip was sent to his Aunt Tat at Enghien. His parents had taken every precaution to protect the boy. Yet, when R told them that London needed Phillip’s help in Saint-Nazaire, Sumner and Toquette agreed.

R’s plan was to smuggle Phillip into the port town with a camera, but he would first need a safe place to stay. Toquette remembered an old friend from Saint-Nazaire, Marcelle Le Bagousse. Marcelle and her husband, a railway
cheminot
, had moved from Saint-Nazaire to the countryside nearby at Pontchâteau to avoid Allied bombs. Their farmhouse was just outside the Forbidden Zone, and Phillip knew the family already. He would be welcome there, but he would still have to get into the port town and back again with the photographs. R arranged for Verdier, the Goélette courier whom they knew from his visits to collect and drop off Resistance messages, to accompany Phillip on the train to Nantes.