In the words of André Malraux: “It was a time when, out in the countryside, we listened tensely to the barking of dogs in the depths of the night; a time when multicolored parachutes, laden with weapons and cigarettes, fell from the sky by the light of flares burning in forest clearings or on windswept plateaus; a time of cellars, and the desperate cries of the torture victims, their voices like those of children. . . . The great battle in the darkness had begun.”
Malraux was speaking at a ceremony in December 1964, recalling the fighting in France after D-Day. The occasion was the transfer of the ashes of Jean Moulin, the Resistance hero martyred by Klaus Barbie, to the Panthéon in Paris. Malraux was minister of culture at the time. Addressing Moulin’s ghost, he went on:
“Poor tortured king of shadows, behold your people of shadows rise up in the June night. . . . Hear the roar of the German tanks, racing back towards Normandy, over the plaintive cries of sheep and cattle disturbed by their passing. . . . the tanks will arrive too late. And, Prefect, as the Allied breakthrough begins . . . behold your ragged tramps crawl from their oak maquis, laying their farmers’ hands to bazookas to bring to a halt one of the finest armored divisions of Hitler’s empire, the Das Reich division.”1
A FEW ELEMENTS of Das Reich did make it as far as Normandy by the closing days of July 1944, but not in time to tip the balance of war. North of the Loire River the Allies had by then achieved complete air superiority—Operation Overlord wasn’t just history’s largest seaborne invasion, it was also the biggest aerial campaign the world had seen. Mustangs, Spitfires, Mosquitos, Thunderbolts, and other Allied warplanes flew an average of six hundred sorties a day over northern France, hunting enemy convoys with bombs, rockets, cannons, and machine-gun fire. The Germans generally could travel only by night, heavily camouflaged.
As August began, Allied tanks and troops broke out of the bocage. They marched southward into Brittany and southern Normandy, and then turned east. The drive to Paris, and on to Germany, was under way.
On August 15 a second invasion of France, called Operation Dragoon, began on the Mediterranean coast. Originally code-named Operation Anvil (as the Normandy invasion was originally code-named Sledgehammer), it is less well remembered than the D-Day landing, but it played a critical part in driving the Germans out of France and toppling the puppet Vichy regime. With Operation Dragoon the Allies secured the deepwater ports of Marseille and Toulon, and poured men and matériel ashore from troopships. The German Army Group B, overmatched, withdrew to the north and east through the Rhône Valley.
In the Limousin, in central France—between Sledgehammer and Anvil—it became clear that the momentum of the war was turning. The battle of Mont Gargan, and the rest of the German ratissage, had done some damage to Operation Salesman II. The Nazis had discovered and destroyed a couple of maquis encampments, and they had disrupted the guerrillas’ telephone and food-distribution systems. By early August, though, the SS troops had mostly left the countryside and returned to Limoges, and the Salesman operation was back up to the strength it had reached before Bastille Day. Ambushes and sabotages resumed at a lively pace. More civilians, scenting victory, clamored to sign up. Dropping supplies fast enough to keep up with demand once again became a problem.
At the beginning of August, Baker Street sent the shock troops Philippe had been requesting. In a series of drops over five moonlit nights, eighteen OSS commandos parachuted into the Haute-Vienne. The team, led by Captain William F. Larson and code-named Percy Red, was the first Operational Group inserted into France.
Philippe, Jean Claude, and Bob received the men and escorted them to a large, isolated château Philippe had managed to requisition near La Croisille. The Salesman agents found that the OSS men possessed, as expected, unusual language proficiency; unfortunately, it was in Norwegian. Jean Claude never did find out why Norwegian speakers were sent to France. It didn’t make much difference—they all spoke American English as well—except in the matter of coffee. They brought a lot of it, but they prepared it in the Norwegian manner, strong and black, which Jean Claude didn’t like very much.
Two other men parachuted in with the OG, their arrival an additional sign that the tide of battle was turning. One was a “Dakota expert,” Edgar Fraser, and the other was his wireless operator, Joseph Colette. “Dakota” was the British nickname for the Douglas C-47 transport plane, the military version of the legendary DC-3, better known in America as the “gooney bird.” Fraser and Colette were sent to scout possible landing sites for the planes. The ability to have transports land and take off would of course be a huge logistical step up from moonlight parachute drops and furtive Lysander touch-and-go missions.
Jean Claude helped Colette make his first radio contacts with London, and then spent several days driving the two men around the Haute-Vienne, Creuse, and Corrèze departments in search of likely airstrips. Near the town of Saint-Junien they came across an airfield that looked serviceable but needed improvement. Jean Claude left the men there and drove back to the château at La Croisille, where he found that the OG had wasted no time getting to work.
German troops had begun withdrawing to the northeast, toward home, where they could be expected to regroup. The OG men, alongside Salesman maquisards, set about making any movement out of Limoges as difficult as possible for the enemy, assaulting roads and rail lines and making most of them impassable. London assigned a high priority to the railway between Tours and Vierzon. During the first week in August, the OG commandos destroyed half a mile of rail, and a bridge, on that line. German troops attacked near Villechenoux to try to stop the sabotage; the OG men, in a furious counterattack, drove them off and inflicted heavy losses.
On August 10, Jean Claude was on ambush duty with the OGs on the main road out of Limoges when Philippe received a tip from informers at a railroad depot near Salon-la-Tour, where his men had piled up the two trains in June. The Germans had finally cleared enough of the debris to use one of the tracks, and were planning to send freight trains, accompanied by an armored train, from Limoges to Toulouse.
Philippe and Jean Claude quickly led the OGs to a spot a little way up the line from the Salon cut. They set up camouflaged charges and waited for the trains. By late afternoon it became obvious that the trains were not coming—the Germans had generally given up traveling after dark in the region by then—so they blew the charges and went home, disappointed.
The next day an informer brought the news that the trains were on the move. They had paused about six miles away to repair a bridge before proceeding. Another armored train, the agents learned, was on its way up from Brive, about thirty miles to the south, to assist.
That night Philippe led a group of maquisards and OG men back to the railroad line, to another deep cut near Salon. Jean Claude did not go with them, as he had reception duty and high-priority messages to transmit to London. The guerrillas placed charges and waited, hiding.
When the sun came up they saw that a concrete pylon, unnoticed in the dark, was tilted toward the tracks—no doubt a casualty of some previous act of sabotage. There was no time to straighten it, or to move the charges. At any rate, the men thought a German train would be able to squeeze past it.
An armored train came rumbling down the tracks and stopped at the pylon. German soldiers disembarked, some to repair the pylon, others to cover them while they worked. Philippe’s men held their breath, hoping their explosive charges would not be discovered.
There was a shout—a German soldier spotted one of the guerrillas.
An intense firefight erupted. Philippe’s men detonated the charges and retreated under heavy fire. Several of them were wounded. The OG’s commander, Captain Larson, was killed.
The armored train and its convoy returned to Limoges. The second armored train, on the way from Brive, was stopped by a simple expedient: A maquis group blew up a cliffside at a narrow gorge, sending several hundred tons of rock onto the tracks and blocking them completely.
Captain Larson’s body was recovered the next day. The Salesman agents gave Larson a full military burial. But as when they lost Violette, they had little time to mourn. By then Philippe was working on an ambitious new idea: the liberation of Limoges.