Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (16 page)

Cammaerts’ relationship with FFI officers on the ground was increasingly difficult. They were not impressed with his rank, knowing he was just a civilian who had enlisted for the duration of hostilities. He also had other duties in the 20,000 square miles of south-eastern France over which the JOCKEY network was spread out, primed to go into action in conjunction with the eventual invasion of southern France. On returning to the Vercors, he found that the Paquebot mission had parachuted in on 7 July from SPOC in Algiers, to supervise construction of a landing strip code-named Pencil Sharpener, suitable for use by DC-3 Dakotas, to the south of the village of Vassieux. Arriving with the Paquebot group was a petite and pretty 29-year-old Polish woman using the name Christine Granville, who had been sent to replace Cecily Lefort, now in the hands of the Gestapo.

Either because she weighed far less than the men, or because she was less adept at manipulating the shrouds of her parachute to control direction in the strong winds, Christine landed 3 miles from the drop zone. Burying her parachute as she had been trained to do, she started walking in what she thought was the right direction and met a search party, who asked whether she had seen any sign of a parachutist. She pretended to be just a local peasant girl out for a stroll until their chat convinced her that they were
maquisards.
Escorted by them to meet Cammaerts, she found him delighted at her arrival, but little thinking that it was to this slightly built girl he would shortly owe his life.

One of the most glamorous female agents of SOE, who was later thought to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s first Bond girl, she was born Countess Krystyna Skarbek of an impoverished Polish aristocratic father and his rich Jewish wife. Avoiding the usual prolonged SOE training by virtue of having already performed brilliant undercover work for Section D of SIS (the predecessor of SOE) in Poland and Hungary, she was described post-war by Vera Atkins as ‘a very brave woman, but a loner and a law unto herself. She had tremendous guts.’
⁷

One example of this was when she was arrested on the French Italian frontier while on a self-appointed mission to subvert Polish conscripts serving in German uniform in the Val d’Aosta. Keeping her nerve, she managed to convince her captors that she was an innocent local girl visiting relatives on the other side of the mountains. Her natural beauty belied by a total lack of make-up and a wardrobe of dull-coloured skirts and blouses, she looked and acted the part to perfection.

Two more French officers and one British officer dropped in on 10 July, to share in the good news that, two days earlier, with the cooperation of the footplate crew, a whole trainload of provisions had been ‘liberated’ near Crest. Hearing that
30
tons of sugar were on board, women rushed from nearby houses even before the firing ended with bowls at the ready to fill them for their hungry families. Also ‘liberated’ were 60,000 litres of alcohol and a whole wagonload of tobacco.

Picirella was not present, having been sent
en mission
with fourteen comrades and fourteen Americans to intercept what he described as a German division en route to the Normandy battlefront:

On a rock overlooking the road, I stretched out behind a hastily constructed wall of random stones. A few minutes afterward heard the sound of motors and saw the first vehicle appear. Opening fire on it, I heard another maquisard fire a bazooka taken from one of the Americans. With three trucks now in my field of fire, I saw the Germans returning our fire with the machine guns mounted above the drivers’ cabins. Other men were leaping from the rear of the trucks and taking cover. A German bullet passed between the stones of my wall. I felt it tug back the scarf wound around my neck. Since I was the only man positioned to fire on the lead truck, I watched for the least movement but missed a German who leaped out and took cover beneath the truck, but I got the man who followed him – or so I thought. He lay still for a minute or so, then rolled into cover and started returning my fire. His first bullet pierced my shelter and wounded me in the hand. Since I still had 200 rounds on me I laid down a harassing fire and my comrades did the same. A German was trying to pull a wounded comrade to shelter beneath a truck. In trying to hit him, I punctured the tyres, depriving them of a way out. Another German jumped out, was hit, fell and lay in the roadway covered in blood. The same thing happened again and again. My comrades attacking the third truck coming under heavy fire, I laid down covering fire that enabled them to withdraw across open ground. Moving closer to the first truck, I could see men lying beneath it and threw two American grenades at them and managed to pick up another from where the Americans had been. This one exploded beneath the truck. Some cries and groans, then an awful silence.

I was alone, the others having withdrawn some time since. Hearing a burst of sub-machine gun fire, I climbed down to the road, thinking that it came from a comrade – and found myself face to face with a German soldier. The sling of my rifle being caught up in some branches, I managed to get it free just in time to fire first. Before beating a retreat, as we had been trained to do, I tried to recover Picard’s body. He had been killed by a mortar shard right in the heart, and had only come with us because his work was in the kitchen and he desperately wanted to see some action. By a strange coincidence, his mother sold eggs to mine at the market of St-Antoine. In the uncanny silence, I picked my way homeward, recovering en route food and ammunition that had been thrown away by the Americans. Catching up with them, I and my comrades helped to carry their weapons and other burdens, as they were unused to travelling in the mountains. As nobody had eaten since the previous day, we stopped for a snack from the food I had recovered, and eventually fell into bed, counting the missing and the dead.
⁸

Some civilians went in a car to try to collect the body of Picard and came across the corpse of another
maquisard
, which had been hideously mutilated. Some peasants living nearby had been forced at gunpoint to collect the bodies of dead Germans, and had seen the whole thing. Hearing groans coming from a thicket, in which he had hidden, the Germans had dragged the wounded man out, broken his shoulder blades and tied his hands behind his back, then used him for bayonet practice after crushing his testicles. His forehead bore the imprint of a rifle butt, and he had been finished off with five bullets in the head.

An affidavit sworn by a Mme Fernande Battier the following day added that Gayvallet had been dragged by his own belt, so that his trousers came off, and then tied to a tree where, one after another, the Germans beat him. An ambulance then came between Mme Battier and the man being tortured. She heard five revolver shots finishing him off. A corroborative affidavit was sworn by M. Charles Zois, a local butcher.
⁹

After this operation, 22-year-old Gaston Gély hid out for weeks deep in the forests. Literally starving by then, he risked making his way surreptitiously to his uncle’s house on the plain, to be turned away with, ‘What the hell are you doing here? Clear off, or you’ll get us all shot.’

Notes

1
Joseph, p. 222.

2
Todorov, T.,
Une tragédie française
, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 37.

3
Ibid., p. 78.

4
Rosencher, pp. 269–301.

5
See
www.memorial-vercors.fr
.

6
Dreyfus, P.,
Vercors, citadelle de liberté
, Geneva, Famot, 1975, p. 14.

7
Interview with Madeleine Masson during preparation of Masson’s book
Christine
.

8
Picirella, J.,
Mon journal du Vercors
, Lyon, Rivet, 1982, pp. 63–8.

9
Ibid., p. 69.

RANSOMED FROM THE DEATH CELL

As though to welcome Christine in her mother tongue, twenty-seven pupils and teachers from the Polish Lycée in Villard de Lans arrived at Huet’s HQ in St-Martin-en-Vercors to play their part. Seven were assigned as labourers to the team levelling the Vassieux landing strip under Captain Jean Tournissa, the others being spread out among combatant units. By now there was a confusion of SOE, OSS and Free French officers present, all with different assignments, but their numbers fell far short of the 4,000 paras that Huet had been expecting.

Among the SOE officers parachuted into the Vercors in August was the darkly handsome 26-year-old Major Alexander Wallace Fielding, nicknamed ‘Xan’. Son of British parents, he had been brought up by his grandmother in France and spoke the language perfectly, if a little hesitantly after all the years he had been away. Meeting Christine and Cammaerts just after he landed, he found them an impressive couple – as they were in every sense of the word: after the long lonely solo months, Cammaerts was understandably finding comfort in the arms of his uninhibited courier.

Unusually for an SOE agent, Christine frequently absented herself on missions of her own choosing, although always telling Cammaerts afterwards where she had been. She was thus not present on 11 August – some say 13 August – when a bona fide Red Cross car transporting Cammaerts, Fielding and a section RF officer named Christian Sorensen was stopped at roadblock near Digne. It was a rude awakening to Fielding who had spent the day enjoying the scenery and dropping into the local bar for a drink each time Cammaerts stopped in a village to brief members of JOCKEY on the latest developments.

As to what three SOE officers were doing, travelling together along a road with frequent German security checks, no one has the answer. Unable to read French identity papers, the Central Asian SS troops manning the roadblock would probably have let them go after comparing photographs and faces, had not a Gestapo car arrived with a sharp-eyed officer in civilian clothes. He noticed that the SOE office in Algiers had, in providing Fielding’s forged papers, committed two appalling errors: one document was out of date and another had never been date-stamped.

Seeing the Gestapo car approach, Fielding thought it prudent to divide the large amount of money he was carrying and gave some to Cammaerts and some to Sorensen. The driver of the Red Cross car had told the guards at the roadblock that he did not know his three passengers, but had picked them up on the road, where they were thumbing a lift. This was a perfectly normal occurrence at the time, with motor fuel in critically short supply. His passengers, in turn, said that they had only met while hitch-hiking that morning. Unfortunately, this alibi was useless when a body search revealed that Cammaerts, Fielding and Sorensen were carrying between them a considerable sum of money in notes all numbered in the same series. This, the third grievous mistake made in Algiers, blew right out of the water their story of being strangers. Within an hour they were all thrown into a cell in the Gestapo wing of Digne prison, although the driver was allowed to go because his Red Cross papers were genuine. It was through him that news of the arrests reached Christine.

The three SOE men were still in the Gestapo cell on 15 August, when 94,000 men of the US Seventh Army and the Free French First Army landed on the beaches between Toulon and Cannes in Operation Anvil, re-named Dragoon. By nightfall, the breakout from the beachheads was moving so fast that the Gestapo in Digne were already panicking and preparing their escape before the spearheads arrived four days later. In such circumstances, it was normal practice for them to kill all prisoners and hostages before departing. The lives of Cammaerts and his two companions hung on a thread.

On the Italian frontier, liaising with Italian partisans, Christine heard of their predicament and hastened to the rescue. Her first plan was to organise an armed attack on the prison in Digne. When this proved impossible to set up in time, she took what she later called a calculated risk. Had the three prisoners been just rank-and-file members of JOCKEY, her duty was to stay clear and not get involved, but only Cammaerts knew the details of the network’s command system and how to contact the different cells. It was thus her duty to risk her life in order to save his.

After a 40-mile bicycle ride, she arrived at the prison and chatted up an elderly gendarme under the pretence of being Cammaerts’ wife, saying that she wanted to leave a parcel of food and clothes for him. The gendarme introduced her to Albert Schenk, a bilingual Gestapo liaison officer from Alsace. She had learned when working undercover in Poland that, when you have to bluff, you bluff big. So she told Schenk that she was General Bernard Montgomery’s niece, in daily radio contact with the Dragoon forces advancing up the Rhône valley. To her request that he release the prisoners in order to save his own neck, Schenk replied that he did not have the necessary authority and introduced her to Max Waem, a more senior colleague from Belgium, whose job was to liaise between the German security organisations and the local gendarmes.