Four hundred kilometers to the south and still unaware that her sister was in France, Jacqueline refused to stop working. Her health had not improved; on the contrary it was getting worse, and Southgate was becoming more and more concerned about his courier. He knew that he had to get her back to England as soon as possible but his own workload was increasing daily. He was worn out himself and, following the arrest of Auguste Chantraine and the subsequent loss of his land for aircraft operations, the Stationer circuit still had no dropping or landing zones, which meant more traveling for its leader and for Jacqueline when she was part of a reception committee, or had to escort a new arrival.
Southgate had hoped that the appearance of James Mayer (Frank), Georges Audouard (Martial) and Pierre Mattei (Gaetan), the three agents he had received on 11 February just after his own return from England, would have provided some respite but all it did was cause him more problems.
Mayer had remained in Tarbes, close to where they had landed, and fitted in very well with the local Resistance members, including Charles Rechenmann, who was setting up a new circuit called Rover, which would reduce the enormous size of Stationer. Mayer became Rechenmann’s second-in-command. Audouard had been sent to Terrasson and told to join another agent, Jacques Dufour (Anastasie),1 and help him form a group there under the leadership of a Monsieur Delord, who owned a clothing depot. When he visited the group, Southgate was very disappointed with what had been achieved. Delord seemed to have no authority over the agents and Audouard only obeyed orders when he felt like doing so. Despite his poor performance, Southgate had to send him on to Châteauneuf, southeast of Limoges, to instruct the group there in the use of bazookas, booby traps and mortars, for which he had been trained in England. While he was away, trouble started in Terrasson over the killing of two Resistance members by the Milice, the Vichy French volunteer paramilitary organization, and Dufour asked Southgate to send Audouard back to him to help calm the situation. The agent refused to return and missed an appointment in Limoges soon afterwards, so Southgate, by now at his wits’ end, asked London to order him back to England. Then he discovered that when Audouard had told him of things he had done, he had been lying—he had been with his mistress all the time; and when Southgate discovered her true identity, he was sick with worry, saying of her, “This woman frightens me to such an extent that I may find myself obliged to send her to a better world.”2 He didn’t disclose her identity but it is believed that she had Nazi sympathies, which would account for his anxiety.
He told Audouard that he was sending him back to England and that he would be leaving soon. Audouard replied that he wasn’t going anywhere. That was the final straw. Southgate sent a report to London, telling HQ:
You remember the operations on grounds Rose and Violette. You sent a plane and that plane returned to base without finding the reception committee. And it had a good reason. After having sent Martial [Georges Audouard] with the messages for the reception committee, and after having seen Martial again and learnt from him that the messages had been delivered, I heard after enquiry that Martial had never even set foot on Rose or Violette… he told me later that the orders and messages had been given. Instead of which he was with his horrible and dangerous mistress. And that is why a plane and its crew came here for nothing.
… I am rather afraid that your orders to make him return to you arrived a little too late, for Martial and his mistress had to be executed Sunday night. I shall give you later the exact details and take all responsibility for this military execution, by military men, of a military man…3
Despite this report, the execution of Georges Audouard and his lover hadn’t actually taken place. Southgate had given the wayward agent one last chance to redeem himself, ordering him to leave his mistress and await his own arrival the following Friday, but of course Audouard wasn’t going to hang around to see what Southgate would do. He escaped with the woman and was later arrested by the Germans. Luck was with him a second time as, although he was imprisoned, he survived the war.
The situation in the Stationer circuit was becoming untenable and for Southgate there were more problems to come. Agent Mattei had been tasked with finding new grounds that could be used as dropping or landing zones for agents and supplies. Southgate had sent him to Poitiers with an introduction to the bursar of Poitiers boys’ school, who would help him, and had also told him to contact another agent, Pierre Hirsch (Popaul) in Montluçon, who he hoped might be able to suggest where he could look for landing zones. Mattei went back and forth looking for suitable grounds before contacting Southgate to tell him he couldn’t find any. Exasperated, Southgate sent him away and nothing was heard from him for a week or two. Then Hirsch received a letter asking him to get either Pearl or Southgate to meet Mattei at the station in Poitiers. He mentioned a date and time but Southgate was in Montluçon at the time and when he received the cryptic message, it was too late to keep the appointment. Had it not been, it is doubtful whether he would have gone anyway, as he felt that “the whole letter and story seemed phoney.”4
Eventually Pearl was sent to see the bursar at the school to find out if he knew what had happened to Mattei. She returned in an agitated state and told Southgate that when she had arrived the concierge stopped her going into the building and told her to leave as quickly as she could, as the house was full of Gestapo officers, and the bursar and his wife had been arrested. Southgate heard nothing more from Mattei. He too had been arrested and was imprisoned for much of the remainder of the war, but he eventually escaped and managed to get back to England. In 1946, he was awarded a Mention in Dispatches for the work he had done in Corsica, where he had been before being sent to the Stationer circuit, and because “After his arrest [in Poitiers] he conducted himself with the utmost bravery and in spite of extreme pressure did not give away any of the people or addresses known to him.”5 In truth he knew very few names and addresses of the agents in the Stationer group, but had the letter received by Hirsch arrived a little earlier and been believed, he might have been responsible for delivering Maurice Southgate, the biggest prize of all, to the Germans. Hirsch certainly believed that he himself was in danger of being betrayed, as he had met Mattei and passed on the message to Southgate. He was so concerned that the circuit might have been blown that he changed his name and obtained new documents in the name of Pierre d’Hamblemont.
Ironically, Mayer, the only one of the three agents to give Southgate no problems at all, was the only one who did not survive. He was arrested in May 1944 and a few days later so too was the Rover chief, Charles Rechenmann, who had given such sterling service to Southgate and Stationer. They were both taken to Fresnes and then on to Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were executed on 14 September 1944.
Because of the number of problems Southgate had had with the circuit and the fact that Mattei had not identified a landing zone before his disappearance, Jacqueline remained in France throughout March, even though back at SOE headquarters Buckmaster was still demanding to know when she was going to return home. She was becoming steadily weaker, although still working and maintaining that she was fine. To add to Southgate’s woes, Pearl was also ill, suffering from rheumatism, which kept her immobile for a while.
Then Alexandre Schwatschko (Olive), a 24-year-old Romanian-born aircraft expert, arrived. Southgate reported that he was “a big fellow, risks anything, (a bit too much even) who thank goodness can take care of himself… very helpful in his work. I gave him carte blanche and a few weeks later his first Lysander operation was a success.”6 This operation had been to organize a ground where a tiny Westland Lysander aircraft could land and take off, and then get London to send the aircraft to fetch Jacqueline and take her back to England.
For in April, she had received yet another order from Buckmaster to return to England. This time she knew when she was beaten and for the good of her health agreed with a heavy heart to leave. The last thing she wanted to do was to endanger the circuit to which she had devoted the past 15 months but, in a last act of defiance, she confirmed her intention of returning as soon as she felt better. She made one last exhausting journey to Paris, still unaware that her sister was there. They had been apart for nearly a year and a half, and it would have been wonderful for them to have spent even a few hours together, especially as the demands of the task Didi had undertaken there meant that she was living a very isolated, lonely existence. But their reunion was not to be and soon Jacqueline was heading south for Montluçon, where she stayed at the home of the Bidet family, a trusted safe house, while waiting to hear from which field she would be leaving for England.
At last news came through that a Lysander would be fetching her from a landing ground at Villers-les-Orme, a few kilometers to the northwest of Châteauroux. So she said goodbye to the Bidet family and went to stay at another safe house, a farm close to the ground, to await the aircraft’s arrival. Here she met one of the two people who would be her traveling companions, a Frenchman known only to Jacqueline by his code name, Regis. The name meant nothing to her; she had never met him before and had no idea of his true identity or the work he had been doing for the SOE. She therefore did not know that Regis was the Wizard circuit leader, Jean Savy—Didi’s boss.
Savy was going back to England because of what he had discovered. This was the trip that he had asked Didi to arrange for him so that he could personally deliver information too sensitive to relay to London by wireless. While traveling in northern France near Creil, approximately 60 kilometers northeast of Paris, he had come upon a quarry at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, used by the Germans as an ammunitions dump. After talking to his contacts and looking for himself as much as he was able, he had discovered that the quarry actually contained around 2,000 rockets, ready to be fired at southern England.
It had been known for some time that the Germans were developing a rocket capable of carrying a 1.25-ton warhead that could travel long distances and destroy large areas of London and other towns and cities in southern England. In August 1943 the site at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, which was believed to be at the heart of the experimental development, had been hit by bombs dropped by the RAF, and the feeling was that this had put back the program for a considerable time. The truth was that while the damage to the site had been great and several hundred workers had been killed, production had been disrupted for only a matter of weeks and the rockets, known as V-1s, remained a serious threat. In the winter of 1943 further launch sites for the V-1s had been discovered in the Pas de Calais area but still no rockets had been launched against England and no one knew when it was planned to launch them. Savy realized that a haul as large as the one he had found had the potential to destroy much of London. Horrified, he was anxious to get to London as soon as he could to make the authorities aware of this.
Savy and Jacqueline remained at the farm near Villers-les-Orme for three days, waiting for the aircraft to arrive. For some reason—Jacqueline never found out exactly what it was—they could not listen to the messages broadcast by the BBC, which would have told them when to expect their transport. It may have been because the farm owners were nervous about using their wireless set when there were workers around. They certainly didn’t want the farmhands to know that Jacqueline and Savy were at the farm, which meant that the pair had to spend the first two days concealed in one of the outbuildings. On their third day it was thought too dangerous for them even to hide in an outbuilding and they were concealed in the hay until nightfall, only being allowed back into the farmhouse for something to eat at around 10 p.m.
Even if security had been less strict, and Jacqueline and Savy had been permitted to speak about their own work and that of their circuit members, it is unlikely that she would have discovered from him that Didi was working with him in France. Perhaps Savy knew that Didi had a sister but would not have been told that Jacqueline also worked for the SOE in France. Even if he had suspected that she did, he would never have realized that Jacqueline and Didi were sisters as they did not resemble each other physically. And so the three days passed slowly and Jacqueline never knew that her companion could have told her how her young sister was coping in enemy-occupied Paris.
The other passenger who would be traveling to England arrived close to the departure time. She was Josette Southgate, the wife of Maurice, who was leaving her homeland, having remained in Paris while her husband traveled around the country with his Resistance work. Mrs. Southgate had given all the money she had, 200,000 francs (then equivalent to approximately £1,000), to her husband to use for Stationer. It was agreed that this would be regarded as a loan and would be repaid in London so that she would have some money with which to keep herself while in England. She intended to stay with her mother- and father-in-law, who were by then living in Slough at 33 Sussex Place.
When the Lysander finally landed Jacqueline was amused to see a chalked message on the side of the fuselage, which Buckmaster had written himself, hoping that it would ensure her compliance. It said, “Jacqueline must come. This is an order.”
As the three travelers watched the small airplane taxiing towards them and saw the inbound passengers scramble to the ground with their baggage as it stopped, Jacqueline was amazed to see that one of them was her best friend from her days in the SOE training school, Lise de Baissac. The two women hardly had time to say a quick hello as they passed each other before Jacqueline, Josette Southgate and Savy climbed on board. The door was quickly closed and they were soon rattling across the field; then the pilot, Robert Taylor of 161 Squadron, lifted the Lysander up into the darkness of the night sky and headed towards England.
The Lysander was due to land at RAF Tangmere on the south coast of England, but when it approached the area the pilot found that the airfield was covered by a blanket of fog, so he continued inland until he reached the airfield at Dunsfold in Surrey where, now low on fuel, he made a good landing. Home at last, Jacqueline returned to Stamford Hill to try to pick up the pieces of the life she had left and regain her previously good health. Josette Southgate went to Slough to her in-laws’ house and Jean Savy delivered the news of his deadly discovery.
As a result of Savy’s revelation and the firsthand details he provided of the quarry and its contents, the RAF, after more than one bombing raid, completely destroyed the site and the flying bombs. But the quarry at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent was only one of the sites containing the rockets and, in the early hours of 13 June 1944 the first of the V-1 rockets, which came to be known by Londoners as “doodlebugs,” was launched against London, from another site in northern France. It landed in Grove Road, Bow,7 and destroyed a railway bridge, which carried the main line from London to the east coast, and several houses, killing six people. The first few raids were undertaken to test the range of the V-1s but soon they were raining down on the south at regular intervals, causing terrible damage. During the first two weeks of the doodlebug raids, 1,600 people were killed and 4,500 seriously injured. Given the panic that was caused by these rockets, and the large number of casualties in London and the southeast of England, Savy’s rush to stop at least one of the sites from launching its weapons had been completely justified and he had brought the news not a moment too soon.
Savy’s hurried departure had, however, left Didi in limbo. Four days before he left, another wireless operator, Jean Gerard Maury (Arnaud), had been sent from England to assist in receiving and sending the numerous messages that were expected in the run-up to D-Day. With Savy gone, the Wizard circuit had two wireless operators but no leader and no one to do the work that had prompted its being set up in the first place. After the flurry of activity during the first few weeks of Didi’s time in Paris, she suddenly had nothing to do. While she had become used to her solitary existence, part of what made it bearable was the knowledge that her work was making a difference to the course of the war. Time weighed heavily upon her and she found it difficult to fill the endless empty hours each day. Her only wish was that she would quickly be assigned to another circuit, but she could not be certain that it would happen. When she checked for messages each day she prayed that she would receive news of a new assignment and would not be returned to England.