EPILOGUE
Georges Guingouin was elected mayor of Limoges in 1945. He fell out of favor with the French Communist Party, however, possibly because many party officials who outranked him had less illustrious careers in the Resistance. He was expelled from the party in November 1952.
As the Cold War settled in, a segment of France’s population turned against former Communist resisters. In December 1953, Guingouin was arrested for crimes allegedly committed at the liberation. In February 1954, he survived an attempt to murder him in prison. He was released in June, and former resisters rallied to his cause. He was finally absolved of blame in 1959. He returned to teaching and lived a quiet life until he died in 2005, at age ninety-two.
HEINZ LAMMERDING, commander of the Das Reich division, survived the war and went home to what became West Germany after the country’s partition. In 1953 he was tried in absentia for war crimes in France, and sentenced to death for the massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. West German authorities refused to extradite him. He lived in freedom, working as a building contractor, until his death in 1971, at age sixty-five.
Aurel Kowatsch, the officer in charge of the SS troops in Tulle, died in March 1945 in fighting on the eastern front. Adolf Diekmann, in charge of the troops at Oradour, was killed in action weeks after the massacre there.
Oradour was never rebuilt. The French government decided that its remains should be preserved “in a ruined state,” and so they endure today, as a memorial to the victims and a reminder of the Nazi occupation’s brutality.
LEO MARKS’S POEM “The Life That I Have” was never intended for publication. But when the British producer Daniel Angel made a movie about Violette Szabo’s life, called Carve Her Name with Pride—based on the biography of the same title by R. J. Minney—he asked Marks’s permission to use the poem in the film. Marks assented, on the condition that his authorship not be revealed.
After the movie was released in 1958, the studio received thousands of letters asking who had written the poem. The studio remained mum, but it felt obligated to forward to Marks a letter from the father of an eight-year-old boy who was dying of cancer. The father enclosed a note from the boy, written in a simple code, and asked if someone could please reply.
Marks broke the code and read: “Dear code-master. She was very brave. Please how does the poem work. I’m going to be a spy when I grow up.” Marks sent a reply, in the boy’s own code, saying that he would happily explain the poem code to him just as soon as he was better. He enclosed the chess set that Violette had given him, saying he was sure she would have wanted the boy to have it. Six weeks later Marks received another letter from the father, saying that the boy had rallied, then died with the poem and the chess set on his bed.
Marks eventually published the poem in 1999, in a little booklet illustrated by his wife, Elena Gaussen Marks.
VIOLETTE SZABO’S BODY was never found. Witnesses said that her executioners tossed it into the crematorium at Ravensbrück.
After the war, a formidable SOE officer named Vera Atkins took it upon herself to travel to Europe and investigate the fates of all F Section agents who had gone missing. She obtained a statement from a Ravensbrück guard confirming the murders of Violette and her friends, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe.
Once her death was verified, Violette was awarded the George Cross for bravery in 1946. In a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, King George VI gave the medal to Violette’s daughter Tania, then four years old. Tania wore the dress her mother had bought for her in Paris on her first Salesman mission.
AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, when the brief investiture ceremony was done, a man walked out of the shadows in the rear of the room. He told Tania that her mother was a very brave, heroic woman. It was Philippe Liewer.
Little else is known about Liewer’s brief life after the war. He settled in Casablanca, Morocco. He died there in 1948, of a heart attack, at age thirty-seven.
BOB MALOUBIER, at the conclusion of Operation Salesman II, joined SOE’s Force 136, an elite commando group aiding resistance groups in Southeast Asian territories occupied by Japan. He endured a difficult campaign in Laos, where guerrillas under his command were ambushed by both Chinese and Viet forces. His old maquisard companion Jacques Dufour—the man who had driven Violette to Salon-la-Tour on the day she was captured—died slowly in his arms. At one point his men came under frequent attacks from civilians. Bob discovered evidence that three local tax collectors were actually enemy agents. He had them killed, and the attacks ceased.
The George Cross awarded to Violette Szabo was presented by King George VI to her four-year-old daughter, Tania, in a private investiture at Buckingham Palace on January 28, 1947. Tania wore the dress her mother bought for her in the heart of occupied Paris on her first mission.
Bob returned to France in August 1946. He spent the next thirteen years with the newly formed Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE). He formed a frogman unit that was so successful in training demonstrations against the French navy that the navy took it over. In 1953 he worked with the Swiss watchmaker Blancpain to develop the Fifty Fathoms watch, the first modern dive watch. As he wrote: “Our project . . . imagined a watch with a black dial, large numerals and clear indications using triangles, circles and squares, as well as an exterior rotating bezel mirroring the markers of the dial. We wanted at the beginning of a dive to position the bezel opposite the minute hand so as to be able to read the elapsed time. We wanted in effect that each of the markers be as clear as a guiding star for a shepherd.”
At the height of the Cold War Bob was sent by the SDECE to Austria, assigned to identify which targets—tunnels, dams, power plants, bridges—should be blown up to immobilize the country in the event of a Soviet invasion. He then established a recruitment program and a training school for Central Europeans, infiltrating them as spies into the USSR and running their operations.
Bob’s final French government intelligence assignment involved overseeing assassinations of North African leaders in revolt against France. During this period he and the SDECE became entangled with organized crime. At one particularly dangerous time Bob was being hunted by the French Mafia; the Unione Corse, or Corsican Mafia; and Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, all at once. His boss instructed him to disappear—with full salary—in Montevideo, Uruguay, until things cleared up. Doubting that French Intelligence would be able to ensure his safety, Bob took off in his Cessna and flew to Léopoldville, Congo, instead. Ordered back to France, he quit the intelligence service.
Bob found a job running lumber camps deep in the jungles of the Congo. He set up and ran a security force for that country’s first prime minister, Léon M’ba. He worked for French oil companies in North Africa and the Mideast. It’s safe to say that not all of Bob’s professional activities were as morally unambiguous as his work with SOE in France during the war.
Bob returned to Paris in the early 1980s. He wrote several colorful books about his adventures, and was cast in a small role in a movie by Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme, released in 2010. On June 5, 2014, the day before the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He died the following year, of pancreatic cancer, at age ninety-two.
JEAN CLAUDE GUIET enjoyed a few giddy days of dining, drinking, and dancing in Paris after the Hispano-Suiza was stolen. Military policemen patrolled the city looking for deserters and spies, and Jean Claude—a twenty-year-old man in civilian clothing—was stopped and questioned several times. He dodged arrest with the help of his two sets of papers, but when he was stopped by a joint French-American patrol, the jig was up. Unwilling to risk being considered AWOL, which carried substantial penalties, Jean Claude produced both sets of documents and tried to explain himself. The MPs took him to their headquarters to figure out who he really was.
In short order, an older Englishman, also wearing civilian clothes, hurried in. Whatever papers he presented had an immediate impact, and Jean Claude was released into the man’s custody. Accompanied by two French MPs, they went to Jean Claude’s lodgings, where Jean Claude packed up his things and said a hurried good-bye to Bob. It would be fifty-six years before they met again. Jean Claude didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to Philippe, who was out. They never saw each other again.
Jean Claude’s escort put him on a crowded C-47 for a flight to London. Jean Claude didn’t find out who the man was, but he recalled his words: “Well, whoever you are, SOE Baker Street was very happy to make your acquaintance again and especially relieved to learn that you had survived.”
After a long debriefing at Franklin House, SOE gave Jean Claude a choice. He could parachute into Berlin, pose as a captured French slave laborer, and blow up factories until the Nazis surrendered. Or he could go home to Massachusetts, take four weeks’ leave over Christmas, ship out for OSS jungle survival training on Catalina Island in California, and then go fight the Japanese in China and Burma. He picked the second option.
Jean Claude was sent home in a private first-class cabin aboard the Queen Mary. He reunited with his parents in Northampton, and spent his leave with them there. On the day after Christmas 1944, he went to Washington, D.C., where he joined a group of seven other OSS veterans for a cross-country train journey—in a boxcar with a toilet and a wood-burning stove—to Catalina Island.
Once their jungle training was complete, the agents traveled to Miami and boarded a C-47 for an epic flight to China. The plane stopped to refuel in more than twenty locations—including British Guiana, Belem, Ascension Island, Accra, El Fasher, Aden, Karachi, Agra, Colombo, Khandy, and Calcutta—before finally arriving in Hsian, China.
Jean Claude’s experience in China and Burma was harsh and dark, and much of what he did there remains classified. He was attached to OSS Detachment 101, fighting behind enemy lines in Burma. According to U.S. government records, Detachment 101 was astonishingly effective: The unit killed 5,428 Japanese soldiers and rescued 574 Allied personnel, while losing only 22 Americans. In China Jean Claude fought with Group 10 and Team Ibex, part of an OSS effort to use Chinese troops in guerrilla operations against the Japanese occupiers.
One of the silk squares issued to Jean Claude—known as a blood chit—with messages asking for help in several languages. The exact translation of the Chinese message reads: Dear Respected Soldiers, Civilians, and Friends of Greater China, We are American Air Force coming to China to assist in fighting against the Japanese. Please provide assistance and rescue and please report to the nearby Allies. The US government will definitely thank and reward you! Great American China-Aiding Air Force
No. 17860.
Jean Claude often lived with local tribes deep in the jungle. He learned several dialects, though he lamented later that he had been unable to master the clicking sounds that some of them called for. Survival was made complex by enemy troops, local bandits, bloodsucking slugs, scorpions, and tigers. China was politically treacherous too. Jealousy, competition for funds, bureaucratic complexities on the ground, and unclear direction from Washington led to power struggles between the OSS and the U.S. Army. One day Jean Claude, emerging from the Chinese jungle after a particularly difficult operation, was ordered to report to OSS headquarters in Hsian. He was informed that he was up for two counts of court-martial, and that Army MPs were on their way to arrest him. He was charged with mailing letters in a foreign language, which was against regulations. Jean Claude had written two letters in French. One was to Grandmère—French was the only language she knew. The other was to Bob, and in that letter Jean Claude had criticized the treatment of Chinese Nationalist troops by their officers, violating a rule against disparaging allies.
The OSS headquarters staff in Hsian had been informed of the charges before Jean Claude emerged from the jungle, and had contacted Wild Bill Donovan. Donovan had recommended that Jean Claude make himself “unavailable” until the charges could be resolved. Told of this, Jean Claude grabbed his pack, carbine, ammunition, an extra canteen, and a sleeping bag, and hurried to the motor pool, where he found a large army truck and climbed in—not realizing that there was a howitzer attached to its trailer hitch. He joined a small convoy just leaving for Chengdu, and struggled to keep the truck on the rough road for what turned into a 1,100-mile drive.
Arriving in Chengdu, he was informed that the court-martial charges had been reduced to a fine—$88—and that he was being sent out of the Pacific theater. Within an hour he was loaded into a plane for Calcutta. There he caught a freighter down the Hooghly River to begin a three-month voyage back to the United States.
Discharged from the OSS, he went back to Harvard and graduated eighteen months later. He renewed his acquaintance with a beautiful young woman he had met during his freshman year, Gertrude Alice Flaherty, who was a part-time student at Boston University. They married in Cambridge, Massuchusetts, in 1948. Jean Claude’s parents disapproved of the union—they thought Gertrude, having grown up poor in North Adams, Massuchusetts, a hardscrabble mill town, was an unsuitable match for their son—and did not attend the ceremony. Jean Claude’s brother, Pierre, served as best man.
Jean Claude obtained a professorship at Ohio State and worked toward a Ph.D., but his insistence on flunking all his students was too much for the university, and his contract was not renewed. He went to work for the CIA.
The records of Jean Claude’s career as a cold warrior remain classified. He undertook clandestine operations in Asia, the South Pacific, and elsewhere. The work meant uprooting his family frequently; Gertrude, their daughter, Claudia, and their son, Dan, coauthor of this volume, usually traveled with him. It appears that he left government service in the early 1960s. The family settled in Denver, and Jean Claude spent the remainder of his career ostensibly working at aerospace and defense contractors, including Melpar, Martin Marietta, and Honeywell. He never said much about what he did for them.
Jean Claude was a proud, discreet, highly trained agent, but in some important respects he did not fit the profile of a Cold War operative. He was an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, having fought alongside many nonwhite Americans. He spoke up for immigrants, having served with many in the OSS (and of course he was an immigrant himself). He favored equal rights for women, having gone to battle with strong, capable women in the most challenging conditions.
Gertrude and Jean Claude were activists in the anti–Vietnam War movement from its earliest days. They worked with the American Friends Service Committee and the Unitarian Church to organize protests. Routinely, at demonstrations, men with short-cropped hair, dressed in sport jackets and ties, would walk up to Jean Claude, stop a few feet away, and take his photograph. It was assumed that they were from the FBI.
Gertrude and Jean Claude’s home in Denver became something of a refuge for antiwar activists. When Jane Fonda gave a speech in Denver in 1970, they put her up for the night. They also provided lodging, food, cash, and transportation for eighteen-year-olds fleeing the draft en route to Canada. Once a month they hosted Mary Simmons, a Minnesota woman whose son, Pete, was serving time in a Colorado prison. He was one of the Minnesota 8, a group of war protesters who had broken into Selective Service offices and destroyed draft records. Whenever he was asked about his ardent opposition to the war in Vietnam, Jean Claude would say, “I was there and I know the truth. Our government is lying to its people about Vietnam and our boys are dying needlessly.”
Jean Claude died in 2013, at home, a week after his eighty-ninth birthday.