16
On Monday 27 September, the morning of his lunch with the Maquisard lieutenants in Captieux, Dohse pulled another of his ‘little tricks’.
The previous afternoon at Liposthey he had confirmed to the twenty-one-year-old Roland Chazeau that he would be releasing his mother and father, as a consequence of the successful recovery of arms, but not his fiancée, Suzanne. She was under arrest for a more serious offence.
It was a lie. Dohse had, in fact, nothing on the young woman. But he did have plans for her.
Before leaving for the lunch meeting, Dohse had Suzanne brought from her cell to his office and, using the same play as with Lucette Grandclément, informed her that she would shortly be reunited with her fiancé and should use his bathroom to make herself presentable.
Settled down at table at the restaurant in Captieux with Grandclément and his lieutenants, Dohse, with a flourish worthy of a Hollywood film director, ordered that the now ‘fresh and beautiful’ (Dohse’s words) Suzanne should be brought in as ‘a kind of hors d’oeuvres … [which] I had planned the night before, believing it would have a powerful psychological effect – and I wasn’t wrong. By this little trick – which cost me nothing – I won the absolute confidence and sympathy of Chazeau and his fiancée.’
It was an ‘absolute confidence’ which would, before long, be paid for at a far higher price than a little make-up and a lunchtime surprise.
Over a pleasant meal the four men, with Suzanne looking on, planned their next steps. They would begin with the retrieval of arms buried among the vines of Château La Brède – the great medieval fortress where Montesquieu had invented and perfected the art of the essay. The conspirators also agreed that, from now on, no German uniforms or lorries would be seen when recovering arms: all vehicles would be ordinary civilian ones and all Dohse’s men would be dressed as Maquisards and carry only captured British weapons. This would excite less interest in the locality and enable the three French collaborators to explain, if asked, that the Resistance was moving weapons from one location to another for operational reasons.
The following day, accompanied by a team of men and a small fleet of unmarked lorries, the quartet descended on a farm near Château La Brède, where they recovered around 250 containers buried in several shallow holes among the vines. ‘The day passed calmly without any disturbances,’ Dohse wrote. One suspects the poor vignerons of La Brède were less sanguine at this sudden descent of soldiers and lorries with picks and shovels on their precious vines. The vendanges (harvest) for the best-quality Bordeaux had started just nine days previously.
That evening the first ten prisoners, including the parents of Roland Chazeau and André Maleyran, were released.
By now Friedrich Dohse was back as the undisputed ringmaster of all that happened in KdS Bouscat, orchestrating almost every major event which contributed to the chaos and collapse of the Resistance across the Bordeaux region. Recruiting Grandclément as his agent had been Bouscat’s greatest counter-espionage coup in a summer of mixed results. Dohse was in his element and enjoying himself.
Towards the beginning of August, a schoolmaster and parachute reception committee chief from the seaside resort of Soulac-sur-Mer gave the names of his reception team to Rudolf Kunesch, along with the location of their drop site near the Médoc village of Queyrac, fifty kilometres north of Bordeaux, and the BBC codeword which would signal that a drop was imminent.
On 18 September (the day before Grandclément’s arrest in Paris), Dohse was listening to the BBC 19.30 broadcast on the radio in his bedroom when he heard what he had been waiting for: ‘Nous avons bon vent ce soir’ (‘We have good wind tonight’) – the signal for a parachute drop on the Queyrac site. Alerting his men, he waited expectantly for the final confirmation of the drop, which would be indicated by the repetition of the same code-phrase on the 21.30 broadcast. Two hours later, sure enough, there it was again:
No doubt was possible … We left for the drop site at Queyrac. Arriving at the spot I posted my men at the four corners of the drop zone and waited. The summer night was clear and we were totally silent. After about an hour, we heard the noise of the approaching aircraft. We lit the lamps which we had laid out in the shape of an L … and, using a red torch, signalled the first letter of the second word of the BBC code-phrase – that is, the letter ‘A’ in Morse. The noise of the aircraft grew louder and louder. And then suddenly we could see it in the moonlight flying towards us … It flew over us at a height of 80 to 100 metres – and then flew on to the west without dropping anything! We were so disappointed. Then we thought, perhaps it would be back. But nothing. We waited an hour. Still nothing. We returned, crestfallen, to Bordeaux.
If Dohse had been at RAF Tempsford at 02.24 the following morning, the pilot of the Halifax he had seen, Flight Sergeant Lime of the Royal Australian Air Force, could have explained his disappointment. And it would have made him even more ‘crestfallen’.
Flight Sergeant Lime had an agent and fifteen containers to drop into Dohse’s arms that night. He’d taken off from Tempsford at 20.33 German time and arrived at a height of 600 feet over Queyrac at 23.40. The weather was good and the flashing of Dohse’s torch, distinct. But, as Lime makes clear in his post-operational report, it was ‘not flashing the correct letter’. In one crucial element, Dohse’s intelligence had been wrong. The recognition signal, which had to be flashed from drop sites to show all was well, was changed for each drop and was not fixed as a given letter in the BBC code-phrase sequence, as Dohse had believed. Lime knew his orders. He dropped only on the right letter. He turned for home, no doubt somewhat disappointed himself – though, had he known the truth, he would have realised he had far less reason to be.
Autumn came early in 1943, bringing a prolonged spell of cold weather, which began soon after the vendanges was gathered in and extended well into November. It presaged, some country folk said, another hard winter. By mid-October the vineyards of the Médoc and Charentes had already begun to turn russet and gold, and by the end of the month the first light hoar frosts lay white on unsheltered fields.
During these weeks, Dohse and Grandclément were out almost every day, emptying arms dumps across the region.
On one of these chilly autumn days, Roger Landes bumped into them – almost literally – on his way back to Rue Guynemer in Bordeaux. He was wheeling his newly liveried bicycle across a junction when a large black car stopped to let him cross. Turning instinctively to see who it was, Landes recognised with horror the number plate – DJ342951 – Dohse’s Cadillac! Suddenly he found himself staring straight into the eyes of André Grandclément, who was sitting alongside the driver. The Frenchman stared back blankly, without even a flicker of recognition. Once again Landes’s talent for becoming invisible when it mattered, assisted by a little disguise, saved him.
Others, too, were trying to keep their heads low.
Jean Duboué’s Café des Marchands on the Bordeaux waterfront had been hit by an Allied bomb in 1940. (It was the only house on the quay which had been damaged in the raid, causing his friends to joke that this was his reward for helping ‘the English!’) Then, in mid-1942, the restaurant was taken over by the Germans. After Grandclément’s arrest, Duboué decided not to tempt fate further and moved everything – including furniture, pictures, linen, crockery and his stock of wines, barrels of Cognac, bottles of aperitifs, boxes of cigars and tins and jars of conserves – to the Villa Roucoule, in Lestiac-sur-Garonne. Here the family took up permanent residence and tried to live as quietly as they could. Duboué cultivated a little garden for vegetables and even planted some vines. Vic Hayes, too, shifted his weekend base to Lestiac so that he could be closer to Suzanne. Landes decided he was safer remaining in the bustle of Bordeaux, even though he knew by now from Corbin that the Gestapo detection vans had picked up his signals and, recognising his Morse ‘hand’, knew he was still in the area. Every night he slept in a different place, often relying on the sympathy of the girls in the local brothels to provide him with a bed.
Marcel Défence, meanwhile, decided that it was time to leave for London. With Landes’s agreement, he started to make plans to cross the Pyrenees into Spain.
Landes had an additional concern in these highly charged weeks: Mary Herbert, who was now into her seventh month of pregnancy. In late September, Vic Hayes warned her that ‘there was trouble brewing’ and advised her to go to ground. Landes arranged for her to travel north to Poitiers, where she spent the last weeks of her confinement with friends, celebrating her fortieth birthday on 1 October.
Meanwhile, Dohse too was having a ‘handling’ problem – with Lucette Grandclément. Knowing her influence on her weaker husband, Dohse spoke to Lucette almost every day. He soon discovered that, though she was keen to see the Maquisards freed from jail, she was vociferously opposed to relinquishing arms to the Germans in exchange, telling her husband that the weapons were not his to give away; only London or Paris could authorise it.
Dohse, fearing that her opposition would upset his delicately balanced apple cart, decided that, despite his promise to keep them together, he now needed to find a way to prise them apart. After some persuasion he finally convinced the couple that ‘for operational reasons’ Lucette should leave the city for a while, and move in with her mother, Mme Chastel, at Pompignac, ten kilometres to the east of Bordeaux.
In most other ways, things were going extraordinarily smoothly for Dohse. By the end of the first week of October he had emptied seven major caches, delivering up the astonishing total of 945 containers packed with 45,000 kilos of painstakingly parachuted British arms, including 2,000 Sten sub-machine guns, numerous pistols, rifles and light machine guns, millions of rounds of assorted ammunition, several radio sets and a mass of explosive and other sabotage material. The windfall was doubly pleasing, for not only did it deny British arms to the Resistance, it also provided a source of useful weapons for German troops, not least on the Russian front. One senior German officer welcomed the cornucopia, which included:
Stens by the thousands, a marvellously efficient sturdy little gun that delighted its German users beyond description. It was the best machine gun they had ever seen – so primitive, so unpolished, welded in parts. What German workman would do something like that? Yet this ugly little thing would fire and fire while highly polished and refined German guns were jamming after very little firing. Ah! And the plastic explosive! This too, they had never seen … and welcome indeed it was with the German Army running short of explosives. It was much favoured on the Eastern front where, mixed with some tarry substance, it was converted into a very effective anti-tank weapon.
Meanwhile, as the weapons flowed into the Germans’ stocks, more and more prisoners flowed out of their jails, each personally selected by Grandclément. This boosted Grandclément’s prestige and sense of self-importance, causing his friends to note a sudden change in his appearance. As if to underline his new gravitas, Grandclément began to wear spectacles and sport a neatly trimmed moustache.
The operation to hand over arms to Dohse went on until the end of October, when Grandclément, Maleyran and Chazeau told Dohse that they had now exhausted all the dumps. Dohse knew this to be a lie and could have proved it. He had so far tallied up forty-five tons of surrendered arms, but the crib sheet found at 34 Cours de Verdun showed that around eighty tons of weapons had been parachuted. For the moment Dohse decided not to press the matter. There would be time enough later.
With Grandclément busy persuading local Resistance units to join the ‘deal’, Dohse began to consider how he could extend the operation beyond the immediate Bordeaux area by making similar approaches to three other key Resistance leaders in the southwest region. One of these was the leader of the Resistance in the Landes area between Bordeaux and the Pyrenees. This was Léonce Dussarrat, one of the local businessmen who had loaned de Baissac 100,000 francs when he fled Bordeaux, just thirteen weeks previously. Grandclément told Dohse that, in his opinion, this was the man who would be the most susceptible to an approach along the lines Dohse had made to him.
Known locally by his alias ‘Léon des Landes’, Dussarrat was an electrician by trade. Thirty-nine years old, he was unusually short in stature and had a frame almost as wide as it was tall, a pugnacious personality and a temper to match. Notorious in the region for his aggression and hard living, he ran an ironmonger’s shop in the centre of the market town of Dax. He was also well known to Rudolf Kunesch, who had placed him under surveillance for Resistance activities ever since Christian Fossard identified him as the Maquis leader responsible for arms caches in the area. In late September, Dohse heard that Kunesch was about to arrest Dussarrat, and persuaded Luther that, given the success he had had with Grandclément, he should be the one to handle him. Neutralising the Resistance by sequestrating their arms, he explained, was far more effective than simply arresting their chief, who would soon be replaced by another. After all, Dohse argued, ‘what threat was an enemy without weapons?’ Luther agreed, and told the furious Kunesch to pull back and leave Dussarrat to Dohse.
The Gestapo man proposed that Grandclément should try to persuade Maleyran and Chazeau to act as intermediaries in negotiating the deal with Dussarrat. The plan was agreed by the two men, though not without some reluctance, which made Dohse briefly wonder whether the relationship between the three Frenchmen and Dussarrat was as good as they claimed.
One reason why Dohse was so keen to press ahead with this somewhat hare-brained scheme was to suck Grandclément deeper into collaboration with him. ‘It was this [step], much more than delivering arms, which moved him [Grandclément] into the realm of treason [because now] he was becoming my instrument to sow mischief and instability within the ranks of the Resistance. In this he was, from the start, driven by pride, ambition and egotism. These pushed him to continue to seek a role of importance in a “double game” in which he thought himself the cunning master, when he was in fact no more than a pawn on my chessboard.’
On 29 September, Dohse, Grandclément, Maleyran, Chazeau and Kunesch drove to Dax, where they parked in front of the town gendarmerie, at a spot which commanded a clear view of the front door of Dussarrat’s store. Maleyran and Chazeau went in first to see Dussarrat, who had just returned from the funeral of a friend. They told him that two Gestapo officers were outside with Grandclément and suggested that he should come down for a chat, stressing: ‘If you give up your arms, you will be left at liberty.’
‘You will have neither my arms, nor me,’ Léon des Landes replied, flushing with anger.
‘I think you will find it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ said Dussarrat, walking over to look out of the window; he saw a number of German policemen, a Gestapo car and Dohse standing talking to André Grandclément. Dussarrat, true to his reputation for temper and unpredictability, exploded into a rage, railing against Grandclément and his treachery.
‘Your Resistance activities are over,’ Maleyran announced. ‘If you don’t want to cooperate, you had better flee.’
‘I told them to go to hell and barged through a secret door that led into my secretary’s office, which I had to open with my shoulder. Then I fled down some stairs leading to my backyard,’ Dussarrat, never a man to resist embellishing a good story, later related. From here the Maquis leader apparently leapt over the walls of his neighbours’ back gardens, ran through the back door of a butcher’s shop, out through the front, onto a backstreet – and away. Dohse’s subsequent search of Dussarrat’s shop and house produced nothing.
For the first time since the arrest of Lucette, Friedrich Dohse had been publicly outwitted. He had been made to look a fool and Kunesch did not let him forget it, reminding all and sundry that he didn’t approve of these ‘soft ways’. The only way with the French was speed, toughness and uncompromising repression. ‘I lost a great deal of prestige with my superiors,’ Dohse admitted later. ‘I had to concede that Kunesch was right.’
Next time he would arrest first and negotiate afterwards.