The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (35 page)

On the evening of 9 August, Francis and Christine arranged for the Jedburgh officers to meet the local FFI resistance leaders at a safe house in the forest near Gap. Here Paul Hérault outlined his detailed plans for the liberation of the region. These were approved unanimously. Francis then proposed a vote of confidence in Hérault’s leadership, and everyone left, inspired, and clear about the role that each must play.

The next morning Hérault learnt that one of the local leaders who had been at the meeting had since been arrested. Leaving a message for Galletti, he left Gap at midday on the back of a local gendarme’s motorbike to see if he could secure the man’s release. Half an hour later they were stopped by a Wehrmacht convoy that was, unusually, travelling on a minor road. Hérault immediately sprinted into a wood near the road, making it to safety only because the troops were not expecting anyone to run. There he lay, face down, as bullets shredded the bushes around him, and one was fired at point-blank range into the skull of the gendarme he had left with the convoy on the road. Frantically, Hérault started tearing up all the incriminating papers still on him from the night before. Having pressed them into a tight ball, he lobbed them away among the trees. He then crawled to the edge of the wood, waited until some time after the firing had stopped, and made a second run for it. He was brought down in a hail of bullets. His ball of paper was later retrieved by the resistance.

Hérault’s death threatened to rupture the precarious alliance between the various local resistance groups, but his legacy – the regional liberation strategy – proved strong enough to ensure effective action. Hamilton’s team assisted in blowing up the strategic bridges between Briançon and Gap, and at Prelles. He then moved on to fight at Briançon until he was forced out of action when his leg was broken in a car accident. O’Regan eventually met up with Marcellini and his men, whom he described as ‘young, nervous, and bearded’.
29
But before support could be dropped the Italians were forced to temporarily disband after ‘putting up determined resistance against several thousand German and Fascist troops for a fortnight’.
30
As so often, Allied offers of help seemed too little, too late. Undeterred, and supported by Hamilton in France, O’Regan used forty mules to ferry a huge amount of ammunition through the Col-de-la-Mayt pass to the Italian partisans. He also took part in several unsuccessful engagements, at one point leading a group of 150 men, only to have all but three desert into France overnight. Marcellini did regroup, however, for a while setting up his command post in the old barracks at the Col-de-la-Mayt. Francis later credited him as being ‘the only leader capable of stopping the Italian partisans from running away immediately they are attacked’.
31
By then O’Regan had moved on into the area around Turin where his work in the last weeks of the war made him a local ‘figure of legend’.
32

Like Francis, and so many others, Christine was deeply affected by Hérault’s death and, taking her last conversation with him as an unofficial order, she decided to now prioritize securing the defection of key foreign troops conscripted into the Wehrmacht locally. She had already sent a note to Brooks Richards in Algiers, brought out in person by Zeller, in which she told him that ‘there are very few Serbians and Checks [
sic
], some Ukrainians, Russians and Armenians’, but ‘the only important groups are Poles’.
33
On several occasions she had even managed to contact these units of foreign conscripts. However, this work became increasingly difficult after the Wehrmacht was alerted to the strategy.

Nevertheless, in early August, Christine made contact with the Polish garrison at Briançon. Initial talks with the 400 conscripted troops convinced her that they would be willing to surrender to the Maquis if certain conditions were fulfilled. Unfortunately one of these conditions was the liberation of Poland. ‘I cannot promise them a free Poland’, she wrote sadly to Brooks Richards, before asking for ‘authoritative propaganda in Polish language’, to help press her case.
34
Encouraged by the willingness of the Poles in Briançon to at least engage in talks, she now broached discussion with other Polish strongholds, both in France and further into northern Italy, to try to influence Poles and Russians serving in the Oriental Legion of General Friedrich Wiese’s 19th Army. Again many of these troops had been forcibly conscripted to protect their wives and children, or as their only livelihood. Was she to ‘demand’ immediate action from them, she questioned Brooks Richards with typical aplomb, or just get information so a specialist could follow up? Already hundreds were beginning to desert, often joining local resistance units. But Christine was soon presented with an opportunity of particular strategic value.

One of the key German frontier garrisons was at Col-de-Larche, a 2,000-metre pass that dominated the surrounding terrain and effectively controlled the military route down to the large French garrison town of Digne. Marcellini had informed Christine that the fort was manned mainly by Poles, ‘recruited’ from forced labour camps or on the strength of threats to their families. Uncertain of the loyalty of these troops, particularly in the light of the growing number of piecemeal desertions, Wehrmacht officers had redeployed any French speakers, and moved the rest of the men around regularly to try to avoid their subversion. They had not reckoned on a Polish speaker in the mountains.

After Hérault’s death, Christine had agreed with John Halsey, the senior Toplink officer at Barcelonnette, that she would make a preliminary approach to the Poles at Col-de-Larche on 11 August. Unfortunately the new local FFI commandant was unwilling to cooperate with the operation. Unsupported, it took her, and the local gendarme who offered to serve as her guide, the best part of two days to climb the steep goat tracks through the forests up to the Col-de-Larche garrison, often slipping back on the swathes of dry needles that covered outcrops of sharp rock. Because she was slight, Christine often surprised her friends with her physical fitness and what Gunn referred to as her ‘reserves of strength’.
35
But despite the weeks she had recently spent trekking through the mountains, her muscles were soon aching and her legs were swollen and covered in cuts.

Christine knew that the Germans were now extremely nervous and on the lookout for local partisans aiming to subvert their troops. Dressed in sturdy army boots and uniform trousers, albeit rolled up above her knees, and with a loudhailer slung over one shoulder, she was clearly no longer going to pass as a local peasant. But her experience in moving about in hostile country proved invaluable, and they reached the huge concrete, stone and strengthened steel garrison undetected, carried out a careful recce and made contact with one of the Polish guards. Having got the information she needed, most specifically the place and time of roll-call, their partial descent to a village further down the Col was much faster.

Two days later the order came through to block the passes on the Italian frontier, soon followed by a warning that Wehrmacht troops were approaching quickly from the south. Christine now climbed up to the garrison again, this time alone. ‘Working entirely on her own…’, Francis later reported, ‘this was work of extreme danger’.
36
Once directly below the first fort platform she used the loudhailer to address the sixty-three Poles who were among the 150 officers at the garrison. To win their confidence Christine carried a red and white scarf, the colours of Poland, and even revealed her true identity, greatly adding to the likelihood of her being shot as a spy should she be caught. In the more colourful versions of the story she ‘jumped over the iron fence’ that surrounded the platform and was lifted shoulder-high by her compatriots, who ‘knocked the revolver from the Major’s hand as he aimed it at Christine’.
37
Whether or not a German revolver clattered on the concrete, in less than an hour Christine had persuaded the Poles that, when the time was right, they should sabotage the military installations, desert, and join the FFI. She then gave them a pre-typed A4 note with instructions to remain at their posts until they received the order to move, how to then descend in groups of ten behind white flags, what to do should their Nazi or fascist commanders order them to leave the zone before the order to desert came, and finally assuring them that if any were unwilling to join the resistance they would be treated honourably as prisoners-of-war.
38
Then she returned to report back to Halsey.

Halsey and Roper arrived at the garrison with around fifty maquisards on 19 August, less than a week after Christine had done the groundwork, and four days after the Allies landed in southern France. There was a short exchange during which a German soldier in charge of some Polish work crews trying to repair the pass road was wounded. Halsey and Roper then informed the garrison commander that his communications were cut off, he had no guarantee of reinforcements from Italy, half of his men were mutinous, and he needed a doctor for his wounded soldier. They then gave him an ultimatum to the effect that ‘to avoid useless bloodshed, we advise you to give orders to your troops to surrender. Terms will be conveyed to you.’
39

At first the commander refused to countenance surrender but instead, with surprising courtesy, he accepted Roper’s suggestion of inviting them for dinner. ‘We went up by bike’, Halsey later reported and, after their unlikely meal, ‘the commander assembled practically the whole garrison … and we argued’.
40
As the evening wore on the Polish troops deserted en masse, first rendering the German heavy weapons useless by removing the breech-block firing pins, as specified by Christine, and then abandoning the garrison, bringing as many mortars and machine guns as they could carry back down to the French and Italian partisans. Christine had already ‘persuaded the Polish troops to steal all the arms of the garrison and … hand them over to us’, Francis wrote with obvious admiration.
41
At half past two in the morning, with his men fast deserting, the garrison commander finally accepted terms. ‘It was a Hollywood scene,’ one of the men later remembered with evident delight, ‘with general handshaking, flag-raising and conducted tours of the spacious German quarters’.
42
The German officers were then moved under guard to a local château, their commander and his dog being led away personally by Halsey.

‘Both Christine’s personality and the enormously rapid series of “happenings” in the area’, Francis later recorded, made the surrender of the Larche garrison ‘the subject of divergent and even contradictory reports’.
43
But whether or not Christine had stood beside the flagpole on the platform and, ‘fingering the rope … started to pull down, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, the black Swastika sprawled indignantly on its red background’, as she did in one version of the story, she was certainly responsible for securing the garrison.
44
It was by Christine’s ‘own personal efforts’ that she achieved ‘the complete surrender of the LARCHE garrison’, Francis reported to SOE.
45
Her work ‘has not been short of remarkable’, General Stawell added in his later citation for her, ‘and of the greatest value to the Allied cause’.
46

Christine’s clever and courageous action at the garrison had not only cost no lives but had seriously impacted on German plans for an attack over the Alps. The sixty-three Polish officers were all brought into the FFI as a heavy machine-gun company, and later fought with the Maquis to prevent the Larche pass from being reoccupied. The Maquis were also left free to blow up the main road with the Germans’ own explosives, so helping to prevent the possibility of motorized troops crossing over from Italy and down to Digne to attack the advancing American columns in the weeks that followed.

Francis had long recognized that Christine had extraordinary qualities. What struck him most now was what he called the ‘inevitability’ of the Poles deserting and changing allegiance once Christine had set her mind to it. It was not just that she spoke their language. She shared the motivations, fears and aspirations of her countrymen, forcibly ‘recruited’ to serve an enemy who was at that moment razing Warsaw to the ground. Like highly trained frontier dogs, indeed like most men, ‘they were amenable to her charm’, Francis commented, but, more importantly, when they deserted they did it with immense enthusiasm. For the Poles, Francis said, Christine ‘was an avenging angel’.
47

13: OPERATION LIBERTÉ

On the day of the Larche garrison surrender, Sunday 13 August 1944, Christine heard that Francis had been arrested by the Gestapo. She set off at once to see how she could best attempt to secure his release.

Two days earlier, and just three days before the long-awaited Allied landings on the south coast, Francis had organized a reception committee at the small village of Seyne-les-Alpes, to meet new two agents being parachuted in. Xan Fielding, code-named ‘Cathédral’, short, dark and athletic, was an experienced British officer recently returned from helping to organize the resistance in Crete. His second-in-command, a ‘suave, silent man with greying hair, neat dark features and a tired, urbane manner’, was a South African gambler called Julian Lezzard. Xan had first met him across a baccarat table in Alexandria, and Christine had briefly coincided with him in Cairo. Lezzard was to operate under the code-name ‘Eglise’ (‘Church’) – though given that he was partly Jewish he joked that he should perhaps have been called ‘Synagogue’.
1

‘Lizzie’, as Lezzard was popularly known, cracked two vertebrae on landing. Fielding, who had braced his legs to receive the first shock, was lucky to avoid a fracture. Both of them had been dropped too high, got caught in the wind and were blown two kilometres off course onto a rocky outcrop. During his descent Fielding had kept his eyes firmly on the reception committee’s landing lights, weak beams from four-volt torches with fading batteries, but even so, ‘the only landmarks visible in any direction or dimension’.
2
As he was blown off course he watched these lights retreating diagonally across his field of vision, until they finally and abruptly vanished, leaving him alone ‘in the dark unchartered sky’ [
sic
].
3
The reception committee was just delighted to watch them fall at all, having spent the previous two nights waiting in the cold as the Lysander pilot, unable to pick out their faint lights, was forced to turn back with his uneasy passengers trussed up in their harnesses throughout the eight-hour round trip.