25
Sometime in late March or early April 1944, Friedrich Dohse began to hear rumours that a new SOE agent codenamed ‘Aristide’ had arrived in the area to direct Resistance operations. The Luftwaffe’s reports flowing into his office confirmed what Bordeaux rumour suggested. The huge increase in night-time parachute drops indicated that the British were rearming the Resistance and, Dohse reasoned, they would not be doing that unless they had a new agent in place or on his way. ‘This was (for me) the turning point of the war – and by no means a good one,’ Dohse would write later. ‘The coming invasion and the arrival of a new SOE agent effectively put an end to my plans [to persuade London to neutralise its Resistance activities in the southwest].’
What was happening in Bordeaux was being replicated all across France. A quarter of all the arms dropped to the French Resistance during the entire war were parachuted in during the single month of May 1944 – a sure sign, if any were needed, that an Allied invasion was fast approaching. In contemplating his next move, Dohse knew that, however successful he had been, the main threat he now faced, if he was successfully to minimise the threat to German troops, was the new arrival from London. Finding and capturing the elusive Aristide was now Dohse’s first priority.
Landes, meanwhile, had his problems, too.
On 6 May, Jean-Baptiste Morraglia – a new Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI) commander of the seven departments of the southwest – had arrived in secret in Bordeaux.
Fifty-four-year-old Morraglia, the son of domestic servants, had risen to the rank of colonel in the French army before the war. He was well known as a supporter of de Gaulle’s rival, Giraud, and struggled to impose his authority on the divided loyalties of his new command, many of whom saw him as a parvenu and a naphtalinard who had played no previous part in the Resistance. Nor did his service upbringing prepare him well for the informal, fluid nature of guerrilla warfare. Set in his ways, rigid in his outlook, Morraglia was above all a patriot and nationalist who hated all foreign interference in his country, and did not greatly distinguish in this matter between the Germans and the British.
He was also, in almost every regard, the polar opposite of Roger Landes. He was nearing retirement age and a career soldier; Landes was in his twenties and an amateur. Morraglia was a proud French nationalist; Landes appeared to him as a French Jew who had thrown his lot in with the British. Morraglia was a soldier trained in the art of formal war; Landes was mostly self-taught in the irregularities of the guerrilla. Morraglia was right-wing and hierarchical; Landes disliked politics and hated rigid hierarchies if they got in the way of effective action. Morraglia took his orders from the French line of command; Landes took his from the British-run SOE in Baker Street. Morraglia believed he was appointed to be in charge; Landes was in charge, and was not about to relinquish this position without orders to do so from above – especially to someone who, he suspected, didn’t know what he was doing.
Given the chasms that existed between the two men, it was perhaps inevitable that their first encounter would be awkward.
But it was far worse than that.
The meeting between the two leaders took place on a park bench at the southern end of the ornamental lake in the Parc Bordelais, not far from (and probably within sight of) the balcony of the Grandcléments’ new home on the Rue du Bocage. Thanks to Landes’s obsession with security, General Morraglia and his party at first thought they had walked into an ambush. ‘There were men watching from all sides and we thought that the Gestapo would arrest us at any moment. But we had no option so we just walked on,’ remembered one of Morraglia’s team. Suddenly, ‘Christian Campet walked up to us to check who we were and then vanished into a clump of bushes, emerging accompanied by Landes. It was only then that we realised that the armed men skulking behind the bushes and trees all around us were his bodyguards. Landes’s first words were not appealing: “Don’t move. I am fully prepared for trouble. If there is the slightest difficulty my men will take you down instantly.” We responded: “If we had done the same there would have been a bloodbath by now.”’
The testosterone-fuelled stand-off between the two men continued in this manner for an hour and a half. In the version recorded by a Morraglia aide, the encounter came to a head when an exasperated Landes demanded: ‘You should not forget that I am an officer in the British Army. I am highly decorated by His Majesty and I should be obeyed by all the French wherever and whoever they are.’ A more flagrant red rag could not have been waved before a more predictable bull. ‘And I am a general,’ Morraglia expostulated, ‘a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, with ten other French decorations, all of which I consider to be greatly superior to anything you may have.’
There was little more to say. The two leaders parted and went their separate ways, each claiming to be in charge of the southwest.
The deadly rift which had started with the Grandclément ‘betrayal’ had been widened with the execution of Camplan in January, and widened further with the assassination of André Basilio. It now took on the dimensions of a running fratricidal conflict. What ensued was a struggle not just between the French and their German occupiers, but also between Frenchman and Frenchman (and in some cases French women). With Grandclément effectively ‘retired’, those who had supported him now gradually shifted their loyalties to Morraglia, whom they now regarded as the true leader of the right-wing, anti-communist, authentically ‘French’ forces of patriotic nationalism.
As the local representative of the ‘English’-run Resistance, Landes was increasingly viewed by those who supported Morraglia with deep suspicion. ‘We had to be very watchful of the English,’ said one commentator on Bordeaux affairs at this time. ‘They would always grab what they could for themselves and turn every operation to their advantage … in the maps in Allied headquarters in London there were very few French flags planted in the Bordeaux area, almost no American ones and many, many British ones … The English had all the radios and they used this fact to their profit so as to fly the English flag over Bordeaux.’ Anti-Semitism was not far below the surface of these increasingly bitter and turbulent waters. Morraglia, commenting on Landes to a colleague, said that he ‘refused to work with that dirty little English Jew who is an obstacle to the liberation of France’. There were even some who went so far as to summon up the ghosts of the Hundred Years’ War, claiming that Landes was the modern instrument of the centuries-old English strategy to win back the Black Prince’s lost lands in the Aquitaine.
The depth of the antagonism between the groups led by Landes and Morraglia at this time may have been unusual, but inter-Resistance feuding, some of it equally deadly, was not.
As D-Day approached, Resistance movements across France became increasingly infused with politics and personal rivalry as all began to manoeuvre for power, influence and position after the Liberation. Open conflict between rival groups was common, sometimes even involving loss of life, especially where the communists were involved. Landes did his best to ensure that his Maquisards were not drawn into this by making it a strict rule to accept individual recruits of all political persuasions and none, but to refuse any alliances with groups which had declared political affiliations.
With internal French political tensions rising, the number of assassinations in Bordeaux started to increase. The city was again becoming more dangerous by the day for the Grandcléments. On 18 May, following a number of threats to the ‘traitor’s’ life, Dohse advised his charge to give up the lease on his house overlooking the Parc Bordelais and move out of the city. He tried to persuade Grandclément to go to Spain or Portugal, but, again, the Frenchman refused to leave his family. So Dohse moved him first to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and then to a villa overlooking the sea at Moulleau, on the outskirts of Arcachon. Here Lucette and André were placed under the protection of one of Dohse’s friends who commanded the Wehrmacht detachment in the area.
With Grandclément safe, Friedrich Dohse, master of the dark arts of counter-intelligence, could now turn his attention to what he did best – stirring the pot of French division, suspicion and conspiracy by sowing disinformation wherever he could, and then leaving it to local rivalry and mistrust to do his work for him.
Which is what may well have happened in the case of one of Landes’s erstwhile friends and a one-time trusted colleague.
On 20 May, Landes was crossing Bordeaux’s famous Pont de Pierre when he saw, with a jolt, that among the crowds coming towards him was a face he recognised. It was André Noël, one of those names he had left with Marguerite Faget before he escaped over the Pyrenees. Landes had hoped that Noël would help him resurrect his resistance organisations when he returned. But in his absence, Noël had, according to Mitou Faget, betrayed him and ‘joined Grandclément’.
Noël was as surprised to see Landes as Landes was to see him. In Landes’s account of the incident he claims that Noël would have killed him on the spot, but for the fact that he feared that his old colleague might have hidden bodyguards in the crowd. The two exchanged a few words, in which Noël sarcastically welcomed the new arrival back to Bordeaux, promising that he ‘wouldn’t last long’.
Landes’s suspicion of his old colleague, already deep as a result of Mitou Faget’s condemnations, had been deepened further by the arrest of his old friend Harry Peulevé earlier that year. Noël reputedly had a hand in this, having worked with Peulevé until the two had parted in bad blood. Landes subsequently learned that Noël had also been close to Basilio and had met with the Canadian agent, Pierre Meunier. This, Landes concluded, placed it almost beyond doubt that André Noël was a Gestapo agent.
In fact, Landes’s suspicions about the treachery of Noël were entirely unfounded. Dohse had indeed tried to recruit Noël, even inviting him to his home after turning André Grandclément. But Noël had firmly rebuffed the approach: ‘In my view your work with Grandclément may be a great success for the Gestapo but it is betrayal for the Resistance. I do not share Grandclément’s views and I will fight you to the end, my weapons in my hand … I could kill you now. I have my pistol on me. But I will not. Because I am not an assassin.’ Dohse’s interview with Noël had been held under an assurance of safe passage, so the German had no option but to let him go. Afterwards, however, he launched a series of determined attempts to arrest Noël, in one of which, in the middle of March 1944, his quarry escaped only by the narrowest of margins.
It seems, therefore, more than likely that Dohse would have done all he could to leak information which would encourage Landes in his belief that Noël was indeed a traitor. If so, it worked perfectly. Following the Pont de Pierre encounter, Landes planned an ambush to assassinate Noël. The ambush failed. But Landes’s death sentence on Noël remained in place for another time.
None of the distractions with Meunier, Manolistakis, Morraglia or Noël disrupted Roger Landes’s main efforts during the months of April and May, which were to lay the ground for the Allied invasion. As his units became trained, Landes tested them out in a series of minor sabotage attacks, beginning in early May with the destruction of sixteen railway engines at Morcenx station, north of Dax. Later in the month Bouillar’s men destroyed a number of electricity transformers near Bayonne and, with the help of Schmaltz’s cheminots, mounted a sabotage attack on the Gare Saint-Jean. The main telephone cable from the German control centre in the port of Bordeaux was cut in seventeen places and then ‘repaired’ in such a fashion that it was impossible to detect the damage. The cable remained out of action for the rest of the war.
The month of April was exceptionally dry across the whole of southern France and the May weeks which followed were gloriously sunny, with an unusual sharp, vertical quality to the light which seemed to exaggerate the blue of the Garonne, lapping placidly against the Bordeaux quays. It was perfect weather for lovers strolling in the city’s boulevards and for vignerons watching their grape flowers turn into fattening buds, which swelled by the day under a benevolent sun. But the farmers of the region complained about the lack of rain.
During these brilliant weeks, Roger Landes put the finishing touches to building his fighting organisation. He set up his headquarters in Marguerite Faget’s house in Rue Guynemer and arranged his forces in three elements, which he called ‘echelons’. The first of these was a headquarters echelon, commanded by Landes himself. This consisted of a communications section (wireless, couriers and letterboxes – including one in Spain which was used to pass documents, maps and plans back to Britain) and a local liaison and intelligence section which had agents in the police and local administration. At one stage Landes was ‘running’ both the chief of police and the head of the gendarmerie as agents, without either knowing the other was working for him. The headquarters echelon also had access to a small arms and supplies depot in a private house in Bordeaux, a car belonging to François Faget (whose reputation as a ‘strong Vichy supporter’ entitled him to keep a vehicle), twenty safe houses, two ‘dead’ letterboxes and four ‘live’ ones (in a butcher’s shop, a grocer’s, a wine merchant’s and a clothing store).
In addition to Landes’s headquarters, there was also a sabotage and guerrilla echelon commanded by Christian Campet. This was made up of a transport and logistics section, responsible for finding arms depots and obtaining lorries and cars as required; a section which undertook the reception of parachute drops; a number of independent sabotage teams; an escape section with its own evasion line to Spain; a courier section served by fifteen couriers, postboxes and safe houses; and even a medical section complete with doctors, other trained medical staff and two rudimentary clandestine ‘house hospitals’ in Bordeaux.
The third ‘echelon’ of Landes’s force consisted of eight fighting units each with their own commander, transport and parachute reception teams. These consisted in total of a hundred individual fighting groups of ten men (called dizaines) which could be combined into five larger units which Landes called corps-francs (free-standing fighting units).
Keeping this fast-growing and heterodox organisation together and paying its key members was a considerable administrative task – and an expensive one. At the height of his operations Landes had a budget of 3 million francs a month, which London parachuted to him on a regular basis. This enabled Landes to replace a haphazard system of payment and reimbursements with something more structured and formal. Ordinary Maquisards were not paid, though clothes and living expenses were provided for. Landes’s key leaders, together with those who undertook special tasks, did however receive regular stipends. Campet received 10,000 francs a month, rising to 15,000 in August 1944. Bouillar and Dussarrat were paid rather less. Wireless operators were also entitled to payment as were those on parachute reception teams, who received 500 francs a night whether the drop was successful or not. The dependants of those killed, deported, under arrest, or sent away from home on duty were paid (usually by postal order) up to 5,000 francs a month, according to need.
The burden and responsibilities of managing all this fell almost entirely on Landes’s shoulders. He organised and attended hundreds of individual clandestine meetings, every one fraught with danger. These were often held in people’s houses, but also in woods and open fields (one favourite meeting place was a field known as the ‘goat field’ after the solitary goat which grazed contentedly in one corner). During these early months of his Aristide mission, Landes was regularly working twenty hours in twenty-four, sustained by Benzedrine sent from London and his habitual sixty cigarettes a day.
By the end of May, it was done. In just two months, starting from almost nothing, despite all the rigours, dangers and distractions of a clandestine life, despite being hotly pursued by the Gestapo and despite risking daily betrayal by his colleagues, Landes had assembled a lightly armed and rudimentarily trained fighting force of more than 5,000 Maquisards, who were intensely loyal to him and ready for action. As one close observer described: ‘Dohse had succeeded in dismantling all the [Resistance] movements, and made Bordeaux little more than a city of hostages. The only exception to this was the group led by Landes.’
Landes’s preparation was completed just in time. On 1 June, the announcement section of the BBC French Service programme ‘Les Français parlent aux Français’, included the phrase: ‘forewarned is forearmed’. It was the alert code to warn the Resistance in the southwest that they should listen out carefully to their radios over the next few days; something big was about to happen. Everyone knew that D-Day was now very near.
Three more messages were broadcast by the BBC that night. Each was an SOE code indicating which pre-set programmes of sabotage Aristide should prepare to launch in the early hours of D-Day, with the purpose of sowing chaos in the German transport and communications system and holding up German reinforcements moving north to the invasion beaches. The messages – all on a classical theme – were: ‘Jupiter met Mercury and the flood began’ (prepare attacks on the rail network); ‘Venus, you magnificent and heroic woman!’ (prepare guerrilla attacks on German headquarters); and ‘Cupid fires his arrow and love begins’ (prepare to sabotage the enemy’s telecommunications infrastructure).
On the afternoon of 3 June, Landes called his Maquis commanders to a meeting in a modest two-storey townhouse at 30 Rue de Méry, a narrow Bordeaux backstreet just a kilometre and a half from Dohse’s office in Bouscat. Here over the next twelve hours, the former architect’s clerk laid out his plans and briefed his commanders on their tasks for D-Day.
Among those present were Christian Campet; Marguerite and François Faget; Landes’s radio operator Michel Expert; Roger Schmaltz (the head of the St Jean cheminots); Pierre Capdepont (cheminot leader in the Gironde), André Bouillar; Léonce Dussarrat’s representative; a representative of de Luze’s men from Arcachon; and Pierre Chatenet, the leader of a group of fighters at Mérignac. It was not until the early hours of the following morning, 4 June, that the meeting broke up, leaving each leader to slip away into the darkness and begin preparing their forces for the great day when, at last, the liberation of their homeland could begin.