In the autumn of 1943, shipwrights completed the refit of a German minesweeper at a yard on the river Seine, near Rouen. It was a small warship—900 tons displacement, with a crew of forty-five, a single main gun, two machine guns, and three antiaircraft “pom-poms”—but it was especially vexing to the Royal Navy. Used by the Germans as a submarine tender, it proved adept at slipping through the Allied blockade to deliver food and water to U-boats, allowing them to remain at sea for long cruises. British warplanes found it and damaged it, but they failed to sink it. The ship was taken to Rouen for repairs, and now, in early September, it was ready for sea trials.
Officers of the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi admiralty, boarded for a shakedown cruise of about four hours down the Seine and back upstream. Everything worked; champagne corks popped; the yard manager was handed a check for 5 million francs. At 5:00 that afternoon the crew began loading 20 tons of ammunition and supplies. They finished around 9:00 P.M. and went back to their barracks. Steam pressure was maintained at 5 kilograms in anticipation of a 4:00 A.M. departure.
Along with the crewmen loading stores, a French shipyard worker went aboard in the afternoon, saying he had to make a last-minute adjustment. It was a significant one: The man affixed a three-pound lump of plastic explosive, armed with two 6-hour timers, deep inside the hull.
At 11:00 P.M. the charge went off, tearing a five-by-three-foot hole below the waterline. The ship sank in six minutes. When Gestapo officers arrived in the morning, all they could see above the water was the tip of its smokestack.
The Gestapo men quickly decided that this was an inside job, and threatened to shoot all thirteen French workers who had had access to the ship unless one of them confessed. But then the Kriegsmarine sent its own divers to have a look, and on examining the hole they concluded that the charge must have been placed outside the hull. (The explosion was on the side of the ship next to a wharf; it is possible that the shock wave bounced, causing the misapprehension.) The French workers were released. A German sentry who had been on duty on the wharf was shot. When the forty-five crewmembers arrived and saw that they would not be putting to sea after all, they displayed unseemly glee. One of them was shot as an example, and the rest were sent to the Russian front.1
The scuttling was a high point of Operation Salesman—the first Operation Salesman—a ten-month reign of terror conducted by newly minted SOE agents Philippe Liewer and Bob Maloubier. Philippe had recruited the shipyard saboteur; Bob had given him the plastic explosive and taught him how to use it.
The Salesman agents were sent from England with orders to sow destruction from Rouen, Normandy’s capital, downstream to Le Havre, the port city at the mouth of the Seine, where the river meets the English Channel. It was a horribly dangerous place for clandestine work. Rouen was the wartime headquarters of the Kriegsmarine in France. Le Havre was inside the Zone Interdite, the Forbidden Zone, a twelve-mile-wide strip along the French coast that the Germans were furiously fortifying against the anticipated Allied invasion. More than one hundred thousand enemy troops occupied the region—soldiers, sailors, and Gestapo—and among the French civilians there were informers and collaborators. Banners with swastikas hung from public buildings.
Philippe was delivered into this viper’s nest by a Lysander, the strange little plane that was SOE’s preferred aircraft for discreet work. The Lysander had fixed landing gear, reverse-tapered wings, and an ungainly profile, and it proved too slow and vulnerable for its intended role as a fighter-bomber. But it had an ultralow stall speed—the plane could practically hover—that made it ideal for landing on short strips, such as farmers’ fields.
Philippe arrived in France on the night of April 14, 1943. A wireless operator, Isidore Newman, joined him in July, also flown in by Lysander. Bob followed a month later.
Posing as a chartered accountant in search of new business, with a forged pass to the Forbidden Zone, Philippe carefully built up a network of 350 saboteurs. A dressmaker in Rouen agreed to let his shop be used as a letter drop. A garage owner offered his facility as a weapons depot, and his charcoal-burning trucks—gazogenes—for transport. Arms were typically hidden under the trucks’ charcoal supplies, as the mess discouraged searches.
The Salesman team established safe houses in Rouen, in Le Havre, and in the countryside between. Newman had the use of four apartments for his wireless set, and moved among them often. Recruits were organized in small groups and instructed to use cutouts and letter drops to communicate. All were kept in the dark about the Salesman circuit’s overall size and structure, except the man Philippe appointed as his deputy, Claude Malraux, half brother of the novelist (and Resistance fighter, and future minister of cultural affairs) André Malraux.
On the night of October 10, 1943, shortly after the sinking of the minesweeper, Bob led eight masked men to a factory in Déville-lès-Rouen where landing-gear parts for the Luftwaffe’s formidable Focke-Wulf 190 fighters were manufactured. The high walls looked impenetrable. Bob went to a small side door, the entryway to a sentry’s lodging, and banged on it.
“Police, open up!” he called.
A woman’s voice answered, “My husband is not here, and he told me not to open the door for anyone.”
“For the police, madam, you will open the door.”
The lock turned, Bob drove a knee into the door, and the terrified woman was pinioned and bound. The saboteurs went through the apartment’s back door into the factory. A French factory hand figured out what was afoot and showed them to their objective, the pumps supplying pressure for presses and hammers in the machine shops. Using plastic explosives and timed fuses, they blew up four of the six pumps. The factory was out of action for fifteen days, and ran at 50 percent capacity for the next six months.
Three weeks later, Bob sat in the Café Ripol in Rouen with lumps of plastic explosive under his armpits and between his thighs. He had instructions to blow up a power substation at Dieppedalle, but it was a frigid day and the explosive was half frozen, too stiff to mold into shaped charges. So Bob sat in the humid café, nursing a glass of calvados grog, until it softened.
At nightfall he and five of his men scaled the wall of the substation and made their way inside. They rounded up the guards and workers—as it was a Sunday night, only a few were on duty—and locked them up. They affixed eight lumps of Bob’s thawed explosive to transformers and switches, lit a 45-yard fuse, and pedaled away on bicycles. The blasts put the substation out of action for six months.
The Salesman team carried on in this way at a lively pace into the winter. They blew up a submarine repair facility in Le Havre. They burned barges on the Seine carrying war matériel. They derailed a German troop train, killing 196 soldiers and wounding several hundred more.
On the night of December 20 they ran into their first bit of bad luck. The moon was bright, and London had scheduled an arms drop. Bob set out for the drop zone on a motorbike. On the seat behind him was a Salesman recruit, a forger with an office job who had asked to see a bit of action.
Riding out of Rouen into the countryside, they were overtaken by a Mercedes sedan. It stopped short in front of them. The moment Bob braked to a halt, his rider leaped off and ran away in the dark. German soldiers got out of the car and demanded an explanation. Bob said he knew nothing, the man was just a hitchhiker he had picked up. The soldiers ordered Bob into their car, to take him to the police station in a nearby village for questioning.
One of the Germans tried to kick-start Bob’s motorbike. The engine wouldn’t catch. The soldier kept at it unsuccessfully and finally exploded: “Französische Mechanik, Scheisse!” (“French engineering, what shit!”)
The soldiers ordered Bob to get out of the car and help. He mounted the bike and, pretending to retie a shoelace, reached down and opened the hidden fuel cutoff valve he had closed when he stopped the machine. He stood on the kick-start lever and the engine came to life.
A soldier climbed onto the seat behind him, pressed the barrel of a Luger against his neck, and told him to proceed to the village. The Mercedes followed.
When they reached the village square, the Mercedes stopped in front of the police station. Bob threw his motorbike into a skid. His rider fell to the ground. Bob picked up the bike and hurled it on top of the man, then sprinted away down a side street. Shots rang out. Bob made it about fifty yards before a 9mm bullet pierced his liver and lung.
In shock, Bob kept running. The street became a dirt path. He covered another third of a mile. Stopping to catch his breath, he heard barking in the distance. The Germans were coming after him with dogs.
Coughing and bleeding, Bob pressed on. He came to a canal and saw a chance to throw the dogs off his scent. The night was frigid, but he plunged in, waded across, and climbed up the mud bank on the opposite side. He lay down in the middle of a field. His clothing froze, and he prepared to die.
Much to his surprise, Bob awoke shortly before dawn. He struggled to his feet, walked nine miles to Rouen, reached his safe house, and collapsed. A doctor told him later that the freezing cold had probably stopped his blood loss, saving his life.
He lay near death in the safe house for days. His men didn’t expect him to survive; their main concern was how to dispose of his corpse, as a coffin would be far too conspicuous. They made plans to fold up his limbs before rigor mortis set in, so that they could fit his body into a burlap sack and dispose of it.
But Bob rallied. SOE sent a supply of sulfa drugs in a parachute drop. Soon Bob was well enough to walk.
In February, Philippe Liewer was scheduled to return to Baker Street to brief his commanders and receive fresh orders. He took Bob with him to recuperate. They were picked up in a moonlit field by a Hudson, a nimble light bomber, and flown back to London.
That’s when Operation Salesman ran into its second bit of bad luck, this one much worse.
Philippe left his deputy in Rouen, Claude Malraux, in charge of the Salesman circuit in his absence. It isn’t clear exactly how the Gestapo found him. They might have picked him up at a letter drop and tailed him. Someone might have claimed the reward that was on offer for information about the recent rash of sabotage. Malraux might have been indiscreet: A report in the SOE archive notes that he “seems to have behaved in [Philippe’s] absence in the most insecure manner, spending long hours in bars, and getting at least twice thoroughly drunk in public.”
Whatever the reason, Gestapo agents arrested Malraux on March 7, 1944. They caught him with documents detailing Salesman’s operations, compromising the whole circuit. The next day they came for Newman, the wireless operator. They seized his radio and codes before he could send off a warning message to Baker Street.
The F Section spymasters in London, unaware that anything was amiss, set about preparing the next phase of Operation Salesman—vitally important now, as the invasion of Normandy was just a few months away. They gave Bob a brief leave to recover from his wound, and then sent him to an SOE school in Hertfordshire for advanced arms training. They sent Philippe to the RAF station at Ringway, near Manchester, to receive the parachute training he had skipped earlier.
At Ringway Philippe met another agent who was finishing up her SOE instruction: Violette Szabo. She was limping, having sprained an ankle badly on one of her first jumps, but her spirits were high and she was eager to be sent into action. She and Philippe got along well, and it was decided that for her first assignment she should join the Salesman circuit as its courier.
F Section arranged for Philippe and Violette to be flown to France during the March moon. Through coded radio messages, a drop zone and time were fixed, and a reception committee was organized. Philippe and Violette boarded their plane and prepared for takeoff.
They were taxiing down the runway when the flight was canceled. Baker Street had received an alarming message from an SOE circuit many miles away from Rouen, in the Corrèze. It said that a woman named Catherine, Claude Malraux’s girlfriend, had reported to agents there that the Salesman circuit was blown. The Germans were using Newman’s radio set and his codes in a game of bluff. Had their flight departed, Philippe and Violette would have been delivered straight into the hands of the Gestapo.