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With Guingouin’s men and London’s arms, the Salesman agents were now in command of a large guerrilla army. They grouped the fighters in three main encampments—“hedgehogs,” Jean Claude called them, military shorthand for mutually supporting strongpoints—in a ring around Limoges: one to the southeast, one to the southwest, and one to the northwest. They worked out a system for purchasing, storing, and distributing food. The whole operation was overseen by Philippe, and sustained by supply drops that Jean Claude coordinated with London over his wireless set. He was still anxious every time he switched it on. A small plane had started making frequent flights overhead within a week of his arrival; once or twice it even seemed to circle.

After the June 25 daylight drop, the pace of assaults and demolitions grew ferocious. By the first week in July, Operation Salesman had won effective control of a big swath of terrain: all of the Haute-Vienne department outside Limoges; most of the Corrèze; and parts of the Creuse, Dordogne, and Charente departments. Many times each day, the countryside rang with the sounds of collapsing bridges, detonated railroad tracks, and attacks on northbound German troops. It didn’t take long for the maquisards to run through the explosives and ammunition they had received. Moonlit nights were busy; drops came at a rate of between four and eight per night in July. Operation Salesman received some 1,600 containers that month, and still it wasn’t enough.

Now more than ever, Jean Claude wanted to get out of his rock hut and into battle. Philippe and Bob had worn their uniforms since arriving in France, for the faint possibility of protection they might provide in case of capture, and also presumably for the aura of command they conveyed. Jean Claude, who was supposed to remain inconspicuous, had worn his civilian clothing. But now he availed himself of an enlisted man’s olive-drab uniform that arrived in one of the drops. Somewhere he found insignia, a second lieutenant’s bar and a U.S. insignia, but only one of each, rather than the two required. It wasn’t until the following month that he was able to get properly outfitted—and to obtain, at last, a pair of the jump boots he longed for.

After much hounding, Philippe finally consented in early July to give Jean Claude a combat role—on the condition that he train a qualified, London-approved wireless operator to take his place. That sounded like a tall order, considering all the preparation Jean Claude had undergone to qualify for Operation Salesman. But he set about training a pair of assistants who knew some Morse code. Jean Claude handled the enciphering and deciphering of messages, while the assistants began receiving the Broadcast.

SOE agents in Sussac on the morning of July 9, 1944, including members of a circuit code-named Tilleul, who parachuted in the night before. Jean Claude is third from left; Bob is second from right; Jacques Dufour is at far right; and at center, giving the V for victory sign, is Jacques de Guelis.

Then Jean Claude had a fantastic stroke of luck. He came across a man, identified only as André, who had served as the wireless operator for General Maxime Weygand, the commander of the French army at the time of the surrender in 1940. André was proficient in Morse. After conferring at length with Baker Street, Jean Claude gave him a crash course in SOE communications protocol. Baker Street tested André’s competence and recorded his “fist.” Before long André was decoding messages, and in time he was encoding as well. Jean Claude retained responsibility for inserting the security identifiers into messages, but André took over a good portion of the transmissions. He spoke no English, but it made no difference, as long as he was able to convert one set of symbols to another accurately and swiftly. Jean Claude had “managed to transform myself into [Philippe’s] personal reserve communication link,” he wrote later.

André was kept busy transmitting requests for arms drops to London. The need for fresh weapons kept growing, especially as the emboldened maquisards began augmenting their hit-and-run guerrilla tactics with more conventional kinds of warfare, like sending out patrols to hunt for Germans. Baker Street sent instructions to destroy a towering railway viaduct at Pierre-Buffière, and to sabotage wolfram mines near Saint-Léonard and Bellac. (Wolframite was the main source of tungsten, useful for making armor-piercing ammunition.)

Just as the maquisards in central France were coalescing into a real fighting force early that July, however, the invading armies in Normandy reached a precarious point. Allied troops had clawed their way ashore and secured beachheads, but when they tried to push inland they ran into an unexpected obstacle. For centuries, Norman farmers had cultivated land using dense, tall hedges—bocages—with sunken lanes running behind them, to separate pastures. The hedgerows served many purposes—controlling water, blocking wind, penning cattle—but now they turned out to have another attribute: They gave the Germans an almost ideal defense against Allied tanks.

The Allies could neither see over the hedgerows nor maneuver through them. The Germans, on the other hand, were able to employ the country lanes as trenches. They fired at the lightly armored undersides of Sherman tanks using the Panzerfaust, a weapon that was like an American bazooka, only better. Eventually, U.S. combat engineers hit upon the idea of welding long, steel “tusks” to the fronts of tanks, and these “rhino tanks” were able to tear through the hedgerows. But that took time. More than a month after D-Day, the Allies were still bottled up in Normandy, trying to break through the German defenses at Saint-Lô and Caen. It became a matter of vital importance to deliver arms in quantity to the maquisards behind the lines, enabling them to delay German reinforcements and occupy the maximum number of enemy troops.

On the morning of July 14, Bastille Day, nine wings of American B-17s—more than 320 bombers in all—took off from nine air bases in East Anglia and gathered in a massive formation over southern England. Approaching the English Channel they were joined by a huge fighter escort—328 Mustangs and 196 Thunderbolts. It was an astonishing show of air superiority: crossing into France in the early morning light, the parade of planes looked to some on the ground like a gleaming constellation on the move. Passing southwest of Paris, the formation was attacked by a squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters; the Americans swatted them out of the sky. When they reached the Loire Valley, the bombers split into groups and dropped 3,780 containers—nearly 500 tons of supplies—to seven maquis contingents.

Jean Claude, Philippe, and Bob received their share of the drop—thirty-five planeloads—at a DZ on a high plateau near Sussac, in the foothills of Mont Gargan. In many ways it was a replay of the first daylight drop. The reception committee lit bonfires on the plateau (Jean Claude did not bring a flashlight this time). Excited civilians ringed the DZ. When the men tending the fires heard the high-altitude throb of the B-17s, they threw greenery into the flames to make smoke signals. As before, some containers whose static lines had been left unhooked came crashing down and broke open, spilling loose ammunition into a bonfire.

On July 14, 1944—Bastille Day—Allied bombers delivered the largest arms drop of the war, using blue, white, and red parachutes, the colors of the French flag. A provocation the Nazis couldn’t abide, it sparked a ferocious enemy response.

In one important way, however, this drop was different. As hundreds of parachutes bloomed high overhead, the people on the ground gasped with surprise and delight. The parachutes were blue, white, and red—a tribute to the flag of France, and to the Resistance. They hung suspended for a long time, as they were deployed at such a high altitude. A couple of American fighter planes flew down low and buzzed the edge of the plateau. This time the Frenchmen on the ground sang “La Marseillaise.”

The Bastille Day drop, the largest of the war, was code-named Operation Cadillac. In France it is remembered as the parachutage tricolore, after the name of the French flag. Like people all around the country who witnessed it, the Salesman agents were moved and impressed. Which of their London spymasters, they wondered, had dreamed up such a boost to morale?

They never found out. Before long, however, they were cursing him.