Georges Guingouin had been living in the woods for a long time. His thick glasses and flat feet gave him a decidedly nonmilitary air, but he called himself a colonel, and he had taken up guerrilla warfare in the Limousin long before the Nazis ordered the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the compulsory work decree that drove so many Frenchmen into the Resistance in 1943. Guingouin sometimes called himself “the first maquisard in France.”
Guingouin was a Limousin native, born in Magnac-Laval, a village in the Haute-Vienne, in 1913. His father was killed fighting the Germans on the western front in World War I when Georges was just a year old, and he was raised by his mother, a teacher at an elementary school. He became a teacher himself in the 1930s, and also a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). This was not by any means a fringe affiliation at the time. Communism was not imported wholesale into France, but rather was grafted onto the living stem of a militant, antifascist, trade-union movement. The first French confederation of workers, the Confédération Générale du Travail, was created in Limoges in 1895, and was dominated by the PCF right up to the mid-1990s. In 1936, when Leon Blum became the country’s first Socialist prime minister, his Popular Front government included 72 PCF representatives in Parliament (out of 608 seats). Guingouin became the secretary of the Communist Party of the small commune of Eymoutiers.
Conscripted into the French army when the war began, Guingouin was wounded above his left eye in June 1940 and taken to the military hospital at Moulins-sur-Allier. When that city came under German attack, he left his hospital bed to help with its defense. Afterward, discharged from the army, Guingouin made his way back to the Haute-Vienne and resumed teaching, at a school in Saint-Gilles-les-Forêts.
Guingouin was a doctrinaire Communist and a loyal PCF member, but he was no apparatchik. He was above all a principled, independent-minded militant. And so, when the Nazi occupation took hold of France, Guingouin found himself at odds with both the Vichy collaborators on the right, and the PCF on the left. The Vichy regime purged Communists from government jobs, and Guingouin was fired from his teaching position. Because the Hitler-Stalin pact was in effect at that early stage of the war, the PCF took a neutral stance vis-à-vis the German invaders; it instructed party members not to take sides in the “imperialist” war. Guingouin thought that was nonsense. He wrote and circulated a manifesto denouncing the Nazi occupation.
Then, in February 1941, he vanished into the forest outside Châteauneuf-la-Forêt to live as an outlaw.
Guingouin was joined by a handful of like-minded militants, and before long they had a substantial, well-hidden encampment about five miles from Sussac. At first they focused on propaganda. Paper was hard to come by, and they had to make ink by mixing soot into linseed oil, but they produced pamphlets urging resistance, and distributed them to farmers on market days.
Their numbers grew, albeit slowly at first. They engaged in small acts of sabotage, such as blowing up a baler to keep hay and wheat out of the hands of the occupiers. They destroyed the boilers at a rubber factory near Limoges. They cut a railway line between Limoges and Ussel. They discovered that a subterranean cable linking a Bordeaux submarine base with Berlin ran by Limoges, and they severed it.
In 1943 their numbers swelled after the German imposition of forced labor. Guingouin grew so bold as to assert his own administrative authority in the region, defying the Vichy government. He disliked the price gouging that went on in the black market. He set fixed prices for agricultural goods and posted them in villages.
He signed the documents: “Le Préfet du Maquis.”
By the time the Salesman team made contact with him in their second week in France, Guingouin had more than three thousand men under his authority. It was by far the largest maquis group in the region. Philippe knew at once that Guingouin’s army of outlaws would be the key to Operation Salesman’s success, and he proposed to provide them with weapons if Guingouin would put them under his command.
Guingouin would have none of it. In his mind the Salesman agents represented the Allies, whom he distrusted fundamentally: He feared that they would suppress Communism after the war. He had no love for de Gaulle and his FFI either.
Philippe persisted. In intense discussions over the better part of a week, he stressed to Guingouin that he was indifferent to local politics and cared only about winning the war. Even if the Salesman team represented the Allies, he argued, Guingouin ought to cooperate fully, just as the Russians were.
Jean Claude suggested trying flattery. The team radioed Baker Street and arranged for thousands of leaflets to be printed and air-dropped throughout the region calling for “Allied active participation under Guingouin’s leadership.”
Guingouin was unmoved.
While negotiating with Guingouin, the Salesman agents did what they could with the men they had. Success bred success. As they showed that they could procure weapons in quantity, and that they could wield them with real expertise, more fighters joined up—especially after word spread about what Das Reich had done at Tulle and Oradour. Bob began sending out groups of trained guerrillas to blow up bridges and power lines on their own. The demand for armaments grew, which meant more and larger supply drops.
The Salesman agents set up encampments in the woods. They divided their maquisard volunteers into companies of sixty men. They allotted one Bren gun for every four fighters, and one antitank weapon—either an American bazooka or a British PIAT gun—for every ten. They appointed quartermasters and medics, and set up telephone lines linking the encampments to each other and to Philippe’s headquarters in Sussac.
Jean Claude began scouting drop zones far afield from his rock hut. One day he took a bicycle and rode out to a likely spot he had heard about. He left his bike at the side of the road and made his way through a brushy thicket. Just as he was beginning to inspect the field that lay beyond it, he heard the sound of a truck. He turned and saw that it was a German patrol, drawing up alongside his bike. With no time to hide, he walked back to the roadside, ostentatiously buttoning his fly. He reflected that he was lucky the patrol was not French Milice, as they would have been suspicious of any Frenchman who moved into bushes to relieve himself when he could just as easily have done so by the side of the road.
It turned out that the soldiers weren’t Germans either, but Wehrmacht conscripts from some conquered land, Jean Claude couldn’t tell which. They demanded to see his papers. He handed over his forged identity card—the first time he had shown it to anyone. It passed muster.
The officer in charge asked Jean Claude in broken French what he was doing in the middle of nowhere with a Michelin map in his hand. Jean Claude, thanking his lucky stars that he hadn’t marked the map, said he was searching for a farm he had heard about where he might find eggs, meat, and butter. The soldiers were excited to hear this, which created a complication: Jean Claude had to persuade them that he really didn’t know where the farm was, and wasn’t keeping its location from them. As he spun out his story, Jean Claude recalled later, he made an important discovery: His nervousness fell away, and he found himself lying with ease and conviction. He even showed his map to the commanding officer, asked where they were, and where he thought the farm might be. He was calm. Dissembling felt normal.
The soldiers got back into the truck, wished Jean Claude luck, and jokingly asked him to bring something back for them if he found the farm. Then they drove on.
In addition to his DZ duties, Jean Claude began to take part in roadside ambushes, though he was assigned to relatively safe positions. To his surprise, not all the targets were truck convoys; he was astonished at how much the German army still relied on horse-drawn vehicles. The main ambush weapons were the Sten gun and the Gammon bomb, a hand grenade with a canvas bag attached to it that could be filled with shrapnel, plastic explosive, or anything at hand. Gammons were effective at stopping vehicles and stunning soldiers, although Jean Claude found that German troops recovered quickly and responded with discipline. The ambushes seldom halted traffic for long, though they were able to slow it by forcing the Germans to use the confusing secondary roads.
Jean Claude also helped Bob, on occasion, teach recruits how to handle their new weapons. Guns arrived packed in Cosmoline, a sticky grease, which had to be laboriously removed with soap and water because gasoline, the preferred solvent, was scarce. Jean Claude didn’t know the French words for many of the weapons’ parts, but he could demonstrate how to strip, clean, and reassemble them. He also showed trainees how to handle TNT, plastics, Primacord, blasting caps, fuses, fog signals, and other instruments of demolition.
By late June Bob’s squads of saboteurs had blown bridges at Saint-Germain and Pierre-Buffière. They destroyed high-tension power lines, cutting off the electricity supply for the submarine base at Rochefort. And they blew up so many railroad tracks on their nightly raids that northbound rail traffic—from Bordeaux and Toulouse to Limoges and Paris—was significantly impaired.
The trouble with severing railroad tracks was that they wouldn’t stay severed. It typically took the Germans no more than two days to repair them. For this they used a truly monstrous machine: an armored train, fitted with machine guns, that pushed ahead of it a flatcar carrying hostages. It would rumble up to the site of a breach and off-load new sections of track, which workers would fix in place. The train was impervious to small-arms fire. Bob and Philippe nicknamed it “La Casserole.”
A tip from an informer gave Philippe the idea for a way to do lasting damage to the major railway line connecting Paris and Toulouse. The line had two parallel sets of tracks. The informer, a railroad employee, reported that two Nazi trains were scheduled to pass each other in a deep cut—a man-made gorge—south of Salon-la-Tour, the village where Violette was captured. It was a tricky spot: The two sets of tracks made a tight turn through the cut, which had high, nearly vertical sides. The northbound train would be making a steep climb, the southbound one a slow descent.
Philippe and Bob rounded up thirty men and moved out to Salon-la-Tour, about twenty miles from Sussac. They skirted the village and continued on another half mile or so to the gorge. They posted lookouts in a wide circle. Philippe, Bob, and three others entered the cut and walked to its midpoint. They buried an enormous quantity of plastic explosive beneath the tracks. They ran detonator wires under gravel and weeds to plungers they concealed in bushes. Philippe ordered the men to scatter once the charge had blown, and meet at a rendezvous point he selected.
Less than an hour later two trains appeared, one at each end of the gorge. They were big ones, moving slowly through the narrow space. Once they overlapped, the saboteurs pushed the plungers. For a long moment they couldn’t see what happened—the blast was so powerful that it created a vast cloud of thick dust, filling the gorge completely. When the dust began to settle, a twisted mass of steaming iron and steel slowly came into view. Both engines lay on their sides, crippled—and right across the two sets of tracks. The attackers fled in triumph.
It was eight long weeks before the Germans could reach the cut with rail cranes big enough to move the demolished locomotives and finally clear the tracks. During that time the northbound movement of Nazi tanks and troops was diverted to auxiliary tracks and roads, which the Salesman maquisards ambushed daily.
The show of force at Salon-la-Tour was followed in short order by another, even more important breakthrough. Whether motivated by the impressive scale of that attack, or by a shortage of supplies, or by a sense that much was beginning to be accomplished without him—or by a combination of all three—Georges Guingouin decided to cast his lot with Operation Salesman. Guingouin “was very bold and outspoken in his desire to collaborate with me on the condition that I had no political motive,” Philippe wrote afterward in a report to Baker Street. “I was just as bold, and stated that I was only interested in winning the war, and that providing that he undertook to attend to all targets which I might designate, I would arm his troops to the best of our ability. After some arguing he accepted the agreement, and from that day he has never failed to execute immediately all orders from London, as well as to attend to all targets.”