23

Operation Salesman II was still engaging in what would today be called asymmetric warfare—chiefly ambushes, sabotage, and sniping—but the team now commanded enough men at arms to make things hot for Das Reich troops whenever they ventured out from the safety of Limoges. Attacks were intentionally random. Often a single guerrilla, or a small band, would spot German uniforms in a town square or a country lane, cut a volley loose, and then immediately blend into the background. Larger groups of maquisards began to engage enemy patrols in firefights, which grew in duration and intensity. The Germans began to refer to the Limousin as “Little Russia.” For safety they took to moving in armored convoys.

Jean Claude was especially impressed by the method devised for assaulting these convoys by a pair of cold-eyed Spaniards, part of a contingent of fierce Spanish Republican refugees. Known as Estavard and Franco, they had fought long and hard against the fascists in Spain’s vicious civil war. They had lost everyone and everything they loved in that conflict and had fled to France, joining the maquis two years before the Salesman agents parachuted in. Much of their combat experience in Spain had been at close quarters, with knives. They wore faded, filthy berets, and they had scars on the weathered skin of their faces and arms. It seemed to Jean Claude that there was not much humanity left within them, only a silent, savage determination to kill Nazis.

Estavard and Franco had an old Citroën. They cut away the car’s roof, leaving a narrow metal remnant over the doors and windshield frame. The glass was long gone. The two men would build up explosive devices out of Gammon bombs, strapping several together and loading them with jagged bits of iron. They placed these in baskets, one on the Citroën’s front seat, one in back. Then they invited a couple of other maquisards to join them, loaded up the car with Sten guns and extra clips, and drove off in search of a German convoy.

They preferred to start their assault at the top of a hill. When they spotted a convoy coming up toward them, Estavard and the others stood on the backseat, Sten guns held low. Franco, at the wheel, took off down the hill, ramming the car through the gears. The moment they reached the lead vehicle, they opened fire at point-blank range. Then they sped along the convoy, firing Stens and hurling their enhanced grenades. Vehicles burst into flames and exploded. Nazi soldiers jumped out of trucks and half-tracks, some wounded, some on fire, a few shooting back.

The run at the convoy would be over quickly. If they had done enough damage they would turn around and slowly drive back alongside the destroyed vehicles, firing at any remaining targets. Occasionally Estavard went in with his knife to finish up.

Jean Claude always wondered why an enemy vehicle didn’t simply pull out into the Citroen’s lane, which would have stopped the assault in its tracks. But it never happened. Estavard and Franco both survived the war, though Jean Claude couldn’t imagine what became of them afterward.

Strokes like these emboldened the Resistance. So too did reports from Normandy that the invasion was holding. In the Limousin, as everywhere in France, people were ready to avenge their occupation. After Guingouin and his men joined the Salesman agents, their secret army grew quickly to about ten thousand fighters. They estimated that another five or six thousand volunteers were waiting to join them, if only they could obtain enough weapons. Deliveries by late June were averaging two planeloads a night. Jean Claude sent frequent messages to Baker Street asking for more.

One night toward the end of June, London sent a message via the late Morse Broadcast alerting the Salesman team to get ready to receive a large delivery. The message stressed that it was to be a daylight drop. This had never happened before. The novelty, and the prospect of receiving enough arms to relieve their shortage, prompted general exuberance. For a drop zone the agents chose a big open field on top of a high plateau, right in the center of their territory, near a little village called Domps. London confirmed that the drop would be made on June 25, sometime after 10:00 A.M.

On the evening of June 24, Jean Claude, Philippe, and a handful of maquisards sat quietly around the wireless set in the old mill, listening to the Broadcast for final instructions. There was static that night, making it difficult to hear clearly. The BBC announcer concluded the French newscast. The opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were played, and then a voice began to enunciate the coded, seemingly random, messages personnels.

The men around the wireless became alert when the announcer said the code word for the Domps drop zone. Then, through the crackle, they heard: “We repeat, seventy-two times. . . .”

The men stared at one another. Could it possibly be? Seventy-two planeloads of weapons? They were by no means certain that they had heard correctly. Some thought they had heard “soixante-douze” (seventy-two), but others were certain that they had heard “douze” (twelve). Still others were convinced that they had heard “soixante” (sixty). They talked it over excitedly and concluded that the higher numbers couldn’t possibly be correct. But they had no time to radio London for confirmation, so they set about rounding up what was for them a huge reception committee—enough men and vehicles to carry away a large number of planeloads, possibly greater than twelve, though almost certainly short of seventy-two.

Word spread quickly. By 8:00 the next morning, in addition to the reception committee, hundreds of civilians—men, women, and children—filtered out of the forest onto the plateau to see the show. Within an hour, three very large signal fires burned in a straight line down the plateau’s center. Piles of grass, hay, and green cuttings were stacked next to the blazes, ready to be tossed onto the flames to indicate the wind direction. The civilians made an ebullient, noisy ring around the edge of the DZ.

Jean Claude was so accustomed to nighttime drops that without thinking about it he stood by the fire at the head of the line with a flashlight in his hand, ready to give the Morse recognition signal. He was expecting the usual Liberators or Lancasters to come in low, one at a time.

Instead, shortly after 10:00, there came a distant roar. Reception committee men threw greenery onto the fires, converting them to smoke pots. Jean Claude looked up and saw planes flying so high they looked like toys, higher than he had ever seen planes before, at perhaps five thousand feet. There were seventy-two of them—American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers—flying in tight formation.

Operation Zebra, the first daytime drop of armaments to Resistance fighters in France, took place on June 25, 1944. Half of the delivery went to the Salesman circuit on a plateau near Domps, pictured here.

The crowd on the ground erupted in cheers as clouds of parachutes opened and drifted down. Onlookers surged onto the drop zone, then quickly retreated when they saw that some containers were dropping like bombs, bouncing and breaking open as they hit the ground. The B-17 aircrews, with their sophisticated Norden bombsights, aimed their canisters far more accurately than the Americans who had made nighttime drops, but they still sometimes forgot to attach the static lines. Five or six dozen containers fell untethered. One landed near the spot where Jean Claude stood, bounced, broke open, and spilled its load of ammunition into a fire. Very soon, as people stared up in wonder at the hundreds of parachutes floating peacefully down, exploding ammunition amplified the general excitement.

Just as the last of the bombers passed overhead, two P-51 Mustang fighters flew down to buzz the steep edge of the plateau. As they flashed past, flying so low that the spectators were almost at eye level with the pilots, a group of maquis fighters stood at present arms. The pilots waggled their wings in response.

Then the reception committee got to work. The trucks the guerrillas had brought to cart away the containers were far too few for the job, so civilians fetched farm wagons drawn by horses and oxen and merrily helped out. (The parachutes themselves, made of precious silk, were rolled up and taken away for wives and girlfriends.) It took days to locate all the containers and move them to central collection points. When they were counted, the Salesman agents found that they had received a staggering 860 containers.

Jean Claude and the others didn’t know it, but they had just taken part in a milestone in the war—Operation Zebra, the Allies’ first daytime supply drop in Europe. The delivery was made by a massive armada of 180 B-17 bombers from the 3rd Air Division, flying out of Suffolk, escorted by Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts. In Operation Zebra, weapons and supplies were dropped to Resistance groups in four locations in France. Nearly half went to the Salesman circuit.

As the reception committee collected the supplies and carried them away, a squad of men was assigned to gather the containers that had been damaged when their parachutes failed to open. Among these they found two that, in a freak accident, had smashed together and broken open at the edge of the DZ. One was fully loaded with C-4 plastic explosive. In the other were small wooden boxes containing carefully packaged blasting caps. The boxes had shattered, and in the commingled mess, loose caps had become embedded in the exposed explosive. If the caps were stepped on, or even gripped too tightly, the whole works could explode. But the reception party knew how desperately the maquisards needed those blasting caps. Without requesting authorization, because he was certain Philippe would refuse it, Jean Claude helped two other Resistance men gingerly pick the caps out of the C-4.