The Cost of Courage Read online

  MEANWHILE, in London, Charles de Gaulle is cementing his position as the leader of the Free French. Once France has signed an armistice, the British no longer worry about offending the new French government, and Churchill is ready to grant de Gaulle formal recognition. At this point de Gaulle is still a little-known, recently promoted general, and Churchill hopes that he will attract other, more famous French personalities to his cause in London. But that never happens.

  At the end of May 1940, eight hundred small boats had loaded 338,000 men into larger ships during the legendary evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, including 500 French officers and 18,000 French sailors, to prevent them from being captured or killed by the Germans. But all but 50 of these officers and 200 of these sailors will return home to occupied France, rather than stay in Britain to fight the Germans.

  “Their idea was to get out of the war no matter what, as quickly as possible,” recalled Sir Edward Spears, the wartime liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle. “We had 15,000 French sailors at Liverpool. I went to speak to them. I tried to persuade them to continue the fighting. Impossible … As for what might happen to England, they couldn’t care less. That was the way it was — we were defeated, and if the French army was defeated, it was impossible to imagine that the English would survive.”

  Only one deputy, one admiral, and one leading academic remain with the Free French in London, and de Gaulle notices that all of his earliest supporters are either Jews or Socialists.

  A man of mythic pride, de Gaulle is infuriated by his total dependence on the British. His relationship with Churchill vacillates between prickliness and open hostility. But both men share “a love of drama and a deep sense of history” — and they recognize that they need one another. Like André Boulloche and Postel-Vinay, de Gaulle experienced the defeat of 1940 as a searing humiliation. Some thought de Gaulle felt like a man who had been skinned alive.

  There was one other thing de Gaulle had in common with the Boulloches’ ancestors — the general’s father had also believed that Dreyfus was innocent.

  One thing that provokes the suspicion of antifascist Frenchmen in London is de Gaulle’s initial reluctance to publicly embrace republicanism. This hesitancy makes some people doubt his commitment to democracy in a postwar France. Early Free French broadcasts from London are introduced with the motto “Honneur et Patrie” (Honor and Country), rather than the traditional republican “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

  But the general sees his position as tactical: Especially at the beginning, he tries to avoid all political labels so that he can attract the widest possible support. Not until November 1941 does he finally embrace “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” — to remain “faithful to the democratic principles … which are at stake in this war of life and death.”

  The BBC broadcasts quickly become a vital part of the Allied propaganda effort aimed at France. For millions of French people, listening to the outlawed BBC is the main act of rebellion they engage in.

  The British give the Free French five minutes on the BBC every night. At the same time, French-language broadcasts of the BBC expand gradually from two and half hours daily in 1940 to five hours in 1942. As the size of the organized Resistance increases in France, these broadcasts also include a growing number of coded messages, which communicate everything from the location of new arms drops by parachute to the launching of the Allied invasion in Normandy.

  AT THE END OF 1940, just as André Boulloche starts collecting information for the Resistance, de Gaulle creates a department in London responsible for “action in the occupied territories.” The agents who are eventually recruited are hardly professionals. Almost anyone who volunteers is accepted, once he has satisfied British intelligence that he isn’t a double agent.

  Most of de Gaulle’s earliest recruits are from French units that were evacuated from Norway or Dunkirk. At the end of June, his ranks are swelled by the residents of Sein, a rocky island off the western tip of Brittany near Audierne. The Germans don’t reach the island until July, and by then two small fleets of fishing boats have put to sea with 133 men aged fourteen to fifty-one — virtually all the able-bodied men from the island.

  Each of the emigrants carries a little food, a liter of wine, whatever money their family has — and the family shotgun, if there is one. After they dock at Falmouth, de Gaulle welcomes them in London. They will become some of the earliest recruits of the Free French. “The island of Sein stands watch duty for France,” the general proclaims.

  A week later, a French Army captain named André Dewavrin, who had fought in Norway in the spring, presents himself to de Gaulle at his temporary headquarters at St. Stephen’s House on the Victoria Embankment in London. Nearly all of what Dewavrin knows about spying he has learned by reading thrillers.

  De Gaulle is impressed anyway — and at this point he doesn’t have a lot of alternatives. He promotes Dewavrin to major and puts him in charge of what will eventually become the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) or Central Bureau of Intelligence and Action. The BCRA is the product of a merger of two organizations de Gaulle has started after his retreat to London: the Deuxième Bureau (intelligence) and the Troisième Bureau (operations). The original task of the Deuxième Bureau is to gather as much information as possible about German preparations for what is considered an almost inevitable invasion of England.

  Dewavrin gives himself the code name of “Col. Passy,” and he eventually dispatches more than 350 agents to occupied France. Because he depends on the British for transportation and radio equipment, he has to work with the newly created Special Operations Executive, which has an RF (République Française) section to work with the Free French, as well as its own French section (section F), which carries out independent operations in France. There is constant tension among all three bureaucracies, but by the end of 1941, Col. Passy has already managed to send twenty-nine of his own agents to France.

  * The doctor joined the Resistance in 1943. But when he was interviewed by the government after the war about his clandestine activities, he never mentioned the fact that he had a Jewish wife. (French National Archives, box 72AJ80)

  Seven

  Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

  — Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament, August 20, 1940

  And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

  — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaign address, October 30, 1940

  Throughout 1941, André continues his work as a highway engineer and a secret agent. The two jobs go well together, because his official responsibilities make it easy for him to travel without arousing suspicion. In his clandestine life, he alternates between diverting supplies destined for the Germans and accumulating a private stock of gasoline for his Resistance unit. He also continues to collect intelligence about German troop movements, to forward to London.

  The war news since the fall of France has been relentlessly bleak. The Battle of Britain begins immediately after the Nazis conquer France. Between July and September 1940, Hitler’s Luftwaffe targets Royal Air Force airfields and radar stations, to soften up Britain for what many people still think of as a certain German invasion.

  On July 3, the great British iconoclast George Orwell writes in his journal: “Everywhere a feeling of something near despair among thinking people because of the failure of the government to act and the continuance of dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command. Growing recognition that the only thing that would certainly right the situation is an unsuccessful invasion; and coupled with this a growing fear that Hitler won’t after all attempt the invasion but will go for Africa and the Near East.”

  Enraged by an RAF bombing attack on Berlin, Hitler switches his targets in the fall to London, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester
, and other British cities and ports. Beginning on September 7, London is bombed every day (or night) for fifty-seven days in a row. On September 12, the British government issues an invasion alert, but the scare fades quickly.

  On November 14, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, mostly built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is almost completely demolished by a German bombardment. By this time the British have already broken the German codes. Some historians believe that no extraordinary measures were taken to protect Coventry, to prevent the Germans from realizing that the British were reading their most secret messages.

  Between July and December, German bombs kill 23,002 and wound 32,138 in Britain. Nearly 3,000 Britons are wiped out in a single day at the end of December. But despite the loss of 1,173 RAF planes and 500 pilots, Britain survives the German onslaught. In the spring of 1941, the bombing campaign finally tapers off. Britain’s spirit, stoked by Churchill’s extraordinary oratory, is still intact. As Orwell and others had predicted, Hitler has turned his sights elsewhere, abandoning his cherished plan to conquer the British Isles.

  THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN is broadcast directly into American living rooms by Edward R. Murrow. The newly minted radio correspondent for CBS News becomes the most celebrated broadcaster of his generation practically overnight. Just thirty-two in 1940, Murrow is a master of vivid images, all of them rendered in the rich baritone of a Broadway actor. Fearless and theatrical, Murrow transfixes his listeners with live reports delivered from London rooftops, as German bombs fall all around him:

  This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid sirens … The searchlight just burst into action off in the distance. One single beam sweeping the sky above me … There’s another searchlight … You see them reach straight up into the sky, and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it … One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days — or rather these dark nights — just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.

  Blessed with a story that doesn’t require objectivity, Murrow becomes a good friend of Winston Churchill and a lover of his daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill.

  When he returns to America for a visit in 1941, he is greeted at the dock by a crowd of fans and reporters. CBS celebrates him with a banquet for eleven hundred at the Waldorf-Astoria. Three years later, Murrow will dine with FDR at the White House on the night of the Normandy invasion.

  In the fall of 1940, Murrow’s reports inspire considerable sympathy in America for the beleaguered British. But when Franklin Roosevelt decides to seek an unprecedented third term that year, he feels compelled to promise a reluctant country that he will stay out of the growing European war. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he pledges to a Boston audience a few days before he is reelected in November.

  At the same time, Roosevelt continues to withhold American recognition of the Free French and de Gaulle. Churchill’s relationship with de Gaulle is always prickly; Roosevelt actually loathes the Frenchman. As Eisenhower puts it delicately in his memoirs, Roosevelt “could not agree to forcing De Gaulle upon anyone else.”

  Or as the historian Ian Ousby slyly summarized their relationships, “The familiar slur of enemy propaganda that [de Gaulle] was merely the tool of Britain or the Allies certainly found no answering echo in the hearts of Churchill or Roosevelt.”

  At the beginning of 1941, Roosevelt still sees some value in maintaining relations with Vichy France, and he names Admiral William D. Leahy to be his ambassador there. Leahy even arrives with a 1941 Cadillac limousine to present to the Vichy president, Marshal Pétain. The historian Robert Paxton called the fancy American automobile “a very, very explicit act of support.”*

  American public opinion begins to rally to de Gaulle long before the president does. In a rift with Churchill, Roosevelt hopes to keep France neutral by cozying up to the Vichy regime. His actions are befuddling to the budding Resistance movement.

  THE MORALE of the French Resistance gets a huge boost from the rupture of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact on June 22, 1941. That day the Führer announces that he is invading the Soviet Union, on a line stretching from Norway to Romania. Hitler’s announcement includes what the New York Times calls one “vitally interested statement,” which is also a tiny source of hope — a public suggestion that German military forces will not be strong enough in the west to conquer the British Isles, as long as so many Soviet troops are stationed on Germany’s eastern flank.

  The invasion transforms the attitude of Communists in France, most of whom have refrained from joining the Resistance up until now, because of the nonaggression pact. Now they will become some of the Nazis’ fiercest enemies.

  The new military campaign also buoys every French citizen who remembers the importance of June 22, 1812, from history class at the lycée. That was the date Napoleon launched his invasion of Russia. Now, millions are praying that Hitler will replicate Napoleon’s disastrous experience on his journey toward the Urals.

  * When de Gaulle liberates Paris in August 1944, he makes sure that he enters the city in a Hotchkiss, a large French limousine. (Collins and Lapierre, Is Paris Burning?, p. 182)

  Eight

  This was our obsessive fear: that we would be tortured into giving names if we were captured by the Germans. Compared to that nightmare, death hardly seemed like a menace at all.

  — Christiane Boulloche

  ANDRÉ POSTEL-VINAY, the man who has recruited André Boulloche into the Resistance, is lucky because his two bosses at the Finance Ministry know about his work as a secret agent, and never object to it or betray him. Thanks to their complicity, he is able to work practically full time against the Germans.

  By the middle of 1941, Postel-Vinay has begun to wonder whether the information he is collecting is actually reaching London. To find out, he includes a request in one of his coded radio messages, asking the BBC to confirm the arrival of his dispatches by broadcasting “CBA-321.” One night, just back from a trip, he flips on the radio. Through the garbled sounds of the jammed transmission, he manages to make out the magic combination: “CBA-321.” At that moment, those syllables feel like a miracle “from the great beyond.”

  Most of the newly organized Resistance units are dangerously porous organizations, easily infiltrated by double agents. Even the Resistance leaders who are trained in Britain before their repatriation to France receive only the most rudimentary instruction in the dark arts of espionage.

  Pierre d’Harcourt introduced Postel-Vinay to the first two Resistance units he works with. In July 1941, d’Harcourt is captured by the Gestapo in a Paris Métro station. When he is cornered by the Germans, d’Harcourt tries to run away and tumbles down a stairway. As he falls, he tries desperately to destroy the secret documents he is carrying with him. At the bottom of the stairs, the Germans fire on him, shooting him through the foot, the leg, and the lung.

  Postel-Vinay learns the identity of the “charming accomplice” of the man who has denounced d’Harcourt. Postel-Vinay thinks that this accomplice is also aware of his own work in the Resistance, so now he feels like he is perilously balanced on a tightrope. And yet he still doesn’t want to “interrupt” himself.

  His behavior suggests a kind of fatalism that is familiar to his co-conspirators.

  Two months after d’Harcourt is shot, the Gestapo raids the apartment of Captain d’Autrevaux, the number-two man in the French military intelligence unit Postel-Vinay has been working with. D’Autrevaux happens to be away when the Germans arrive, and he manages to escape to the unoccupied zone in the south. After that, three of his associates ask Postel-Vinay to start relaying their information to London. Postel-Vinay considers this a wonderful development: He finally feels like he is making a difference.

  But then another danger sign appears. In November, an agent named Wiltz, who has been d’Autrevaux’s closest collaborator, misses an appointment
with Postel-Vinay. Almost immediately, Postel-Vinay receives word that Wiltz has been arrested. Now he begins to feel like he is back in the infantry, surrounded by artillery, the sounds of their explosions steadily approaching.

  LATE IN THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 13, Postel-Vinay arrives home at his parents’ apartment on avenue de Villars, adjacent to Les Invalides, which houses Napoleon’s tomb. As he walks through the front door of the building, he spots two young men coming down the stairs in front of him.

  He immediately recognizes the first one: a tall, thin, blond Englishman he knows only as Paul. Paul has been an aide to Patrick O’Leary, the head of one of two Resistance groups Postel-Vinay has been working with all year.

  O’Leary pretends to one and all that he is a French-Canadian officer. In fact, he is a former surgeon in the Belgian Army, whose real name is Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse.

  After serving with the Belgian Army during the eighteen-day campaign of 1940, he escaped to England, where he secured a British Navy commission as a lieutenant commander. On April 25, O’Leary was on the HMS Fidelity when it overturned in a squall off the French coast near the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but he managed to swim to shore.

  Identifying himself to the gendarme who arrested him as Albert O’Leary, an evading Canadian airman, he was sent to St. Hippolyte du Fort near Nîmes, to be with British officers. There he met Ian Garrow, a tall, dark-haired captain in the Highlanders in his early twenties, who quickly helped O’Leary escape.

  O’Leary then joined one of the most effective networks of the war devoted to the repatriation of downed Allied pilots. After Garrow is arrested in October 1941 O’Leary takes charge of the operation, which becomes known as the PAO line (for his initials) and, more famously, as the Pat or O’Leary line. It eventually helps an astonishing six hundred pilots to escape from occupied France.