Green light. Time to jump.
Before he knew it, Bill was out and away. He always hated a night jump. He had never trusted the Air Force to know what the hell they were doing. The cold blast of air hit him, and he waited for the inevitable jolt as his chute deployed fully. He would never get used to the alien feeling of abandoning a perfectly good aircraft. But, at least this time, unlike other times before, they were travelling light. The bulk of the drop was money, weapons, radio sets and ammunition, all neatly packed to fall of their own accord. Being a low-level drop in very little wind, it should fall roughly where they were heading. That was the theory, at least.
They were to meet the French Resistance on the ground. If the worst happened, they had enough food to get through a few nights to stash the goodies in the undergrowth and arrange contact. Bill hoped it didn’t come to that. He certainly didn’t relish the thought of even one damp night in a spiky French hedgerow. At least he had plenty to keep him occupied.
Contrary to training and all good survival planning, he had dedicated an entire pocket of his smock to two pounds of his favourite St. Bruno Flake tobacco and five chocolate bars he’d swiped during their last supper. The last time he was in Northern France, there was a noticeable shortage of decent tobacco, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. There was also no better currency when trying to win the favour of a difficult local than fine tobacco and decent chocolate.
The gentle descent allowed him to take a good look at where he might land. The Liberator’s dull hum faded into the distance somewhere, but with no moonlight, he couldn’t make it out anymore. Without visible reference points, he couldn’t tell how fast he was falling, and before he knew it, the ground was racing up fast. Dangling from the deployed canopy like the last chicken in a butcher’s window, he braced himself and was pleasantly surprised by the soft landing.
He quickly gathered his chute, removed his helmet, and unslung his Thompson. That had been a bitter argument at the stores. New policy dictated that they were to take Stens, but Bill had almost come to blows with the jobsworth quartermaster when he had refused his. There was no way he was taking a glorified plumbing pipe, with a spring weaker than a wristwatch winding, into France. It was well known the Sten could be a formidable weapon with a high rate of fire, but it was also cheap to manufacture and seemed to jam at the worst possible moments. Many an agent had been killed or captured when their Sten jammed.
Bill preferred to put his trust in the American-made Thompson. Its chunky .45 round was also far more likely to cause the enemy to have a very bad day than the 9mm of the Sten. Also, if it came down to it, Bill figured he could probably kill a man by throwing it at him, it weighed so much. They may have to leave them at the drop zone anyway, as travelling around with loaded sub-machine guns while masquerading as locals wasn’t advisable in the heavily occupied region of Paris only a few days after D-Day.
Back in the early days, of course, they were lucky to be armed with much more than a sharpened pencil. In ’41, the idea was purely infiltration. To blend in and observe. All transmissions were by dead drop and messages sent through to a wireless, as the radio operators were referred to. Now, with the invasion coming, they were trying to get the resistance better armed and had brought their own radio set. With the increased risk of a confrontation, the agents were also much better equipped to deal with the enemy.
He heard the others land almost silently, followed by the thudding sounds of the heavy canvas supply drop bags. Predictably, there was no sign of their French counterparts. Great, thought Bill. Now they would be dragging the heavy loads on their own. There were no worse timekeepers than the French.
Without a word, Jack and Lena came jogging out of the dark and squatted, still panting, next to him.
“We ditch the chutes, helmets and smocks in this hedgerow for now and start to gather up the supply bags,” Bill instructed. “Go.”
With no further discussion, they were up and moving. No sooner had they stashed their parachute gear, they were back out in the dew-soaked grass hunting out the bags. It was like looking for a piece of hay in a massive stack of needles. They carried torches but didn’t dare use them in such an occupied area. The Germans could be patrolling the lanes nearby and had no doubt heard the US Air Force B-24 that had dropped them. The RAF had arranged to bomb a nearby empty woodland to cover their sortie, and hopefully, the Germans would assume it was just a stray bomber from their mission.
The first bags came into view. They had been packed to allow one man to move the bag short distances, so Bill swung two up onto his shoulders and walked the entire one hundred yards briskly back to the hedgerow. On his second run out, he heard the distinct crump, crump, crump of the nearby bombing run. In the dull flashes that lit the sky, he spotted the other bags and made a mental note of their locations. Every bag seemed heavier than the last.
An hour later, they had all the bags together and well camouflaged. The cold sweat started to cause them chills, so they put their windproof smocks back on. They would also provide at least some concealment if they had to wait out the following day. Next, they had to ascertain their location. If the worst had happened, they, not the French, were at the wrong rendezvous point. It was decision time. Venture out from the safety of their warm nest, or sit tight until the following night? Bill checked his wristwatch. There were still two hours until first light.
“I’ll head out towards that lane and try to work out where we are,” he said. “You two sit tight. If anything happens or I’m not back by twenty hundred hours tomorrow, proceed with plan B.”
Bill knew no further discussion was necessary. He had known his colleagues long enough. Bill was a far better soldier than he was a spy. He had been constantly reprimanded over how long he took to decode messages and was crap with a radio, but one thing he could do was blend into any environment. His French and German were flawless, and his ability to fight and shoot quickly became legendary back at headquarters.
Bill darted across the field, using the hedgerow and trees as cover to hide his silhouette. He ducked under a low-hanging branch and vaulted a small wooden gate. He even surprised himself with his agility. Maybe he was wasted in the army, and his true calling was as a gymnast. Finally, he was at the lane. He peered into the gloom in both directions and listened carefully.
Crossing the lane and heading right, he moved as quietly as possible, avoiding twigs and branches and trying to stick to the dirty edges of the track. Bending down, he noticed a handful of cigarette ends and some burnt matches. Locals? Unlikely. Probably a patrol. The trail seemed cold, but he was no Navajo tracker.
Further down the lane, he could see a farmhouse and some kind of orchard. Now he was getting somewhere. All he needed was a couple more points of interest to pinpoint where he was. He hopped the farmhouse gate and moved like a shadow into the log store lean-to on the side of the house.
Squinting into the darkness toward the fruit trees, he spotted a sight that stopped his heart. A half-concealed German 88 mm flak gun. He waited but couldn’t see any movement. How had the crew of this monstrous weapon not heard or seen their aircraft? If they had, Bill figured, at the height they came in at, one well-aimed round could have left them in a crumpled wreck in that field.
He risked a look into the window at the rear of the farmhouse and saw three German soldiers asleep in chairs, with numerous bottles and detritus at their feet. In the dim glow from a lamp, he could see they were breathing but couldn’t make out their uniforms.
He moved through the trees towards the gun and waited. No movement. He dropped onto his front and crawled the last few yards. Ignoring the shell boxes, he grabbed a few bits of paperwork from an empty ammo box, then changed his mind and replaced it when he saw five German ‘potato masher’ grenades neatly stood in a row. He checked they had their primers and dropped them into the ammo box with the papers, then made good his escape back to the lane.
He pushed through the hedgerow, this time preferring to travel on the field side of the foliage. He stopped, pulled his smock over his head, and checked his linen map with his torch. Then, orienting it with his little button compass, he sought out the little farmhouse and the lane past the orchard in the red glow.
He had a few of these linen maps, one showing the drop zone and surrounding area, another overview of the area around Paris, and the final one of the city centre itself.
“There!” He had spotted it. Even the gun emplacement was annotated with a question mark. The intelligence was good, but the sodding Air Force had done it again! They were a clear mile from the proper drop zone.
“Useless bastards,” Bill muttered, clicking off his torch.
He hoped the French would stick to the plan and wait until the following evening before moving off.
After dropping the ammo box with Jack, Bill and Lena had checked their weapons and begun working their way cross-country towards the drop zone rendezvous. The ground was wet but reasonably firm underfoot. They covered the mile carefully in just under half an hour. Bill checked on Lena, who was on her first proper operation, to ensure nerves weren’t getting the better of her.
“How are you holding up?”
“Fine, do you think the French will have waited?” replied Lena, focussed only on the task at hand.
“They’d better had.”
He had to be sure the French hadn’t been captured, and it wasn’t an ambush they were about to stroll into. After circling the area and doubling back, Bill spotted the Resistance fighters waiting near the field’s corner. He removed the red filter from his torch and, with a short double flash, received a reply, and they made their way to the huddled group.
After the customary nervous exchange of passwords and confirmations of identity, they all shook hands.
“We will make acquaintance properly at home, yes?” said the group’s leader in clearly-strained English. He was a handsome man, stout and tall, and about the same height and build as Jack, with a neat moustache. Stick him in a brown suit with brogues, and he would have looked like the spivs Bill had often seen near the market in Spitalfields. It was one of the few places where you could still get most things, for a price, of course. Like the rest of them, including Bill, he was dressed in circa 1930 French peasant couture, with a moth-eaten jacket and old, poorly repaired boots.
It was important to blend in, and SOE even had a department that produced European-weave fabrics and artificially aged them. The Gestapo had taken to inspecting the fabrics of those arrested to check for British fabrics. By 1944, everything was flawless, from the false ID papers to the ration coupons. They could have convincingly passed off the king himself as a French peasant girl.
“Please, my friend, we can converse in French.” Bill wanted everything to be as clear as possible, thus avoiding any mistakes in the plan.
“Very well, comrade.” Bill couldn’t help but note the French word camarade here. It could be used to mean friend, but as with much of the Resistance, they were probably communists or at least left-wing socialists too. Bill had never cared for politics. He didn’t care who was in charge, as long as he was left alone. He drew the line, however, when governments decide they want to round up an entire race of people and enslave them, or worse. The way Bill saw it, if the government’s boot is on your throat, it doesn’t matter if it is the left or the right one. “We will split here,” the leader said. “You take Andre with you in the truck. The rest of us will return to town on the bicycles.”
“Sounds like a good plan. Are you certain the truck won’t draw too much attention?” inquired Bill.
“No, that is all covered. Good luck.”
“This truck is well known in this area,” said Andre, grinning, his teeth showing through his thin lips. With his pale skin and pointy features, he looked in the glow of the truck’s dash, not entirely unlike Nosferatu. It almost made Bill feel uneasy. Hurtling along country lanes, bouncing up and down at every pothole like a sadistic roller coaster, didn’t make him feel any better. “The Boche all know we collect from the farms and take supplies back into the city. There are many orchards and farms, so we collect fruit, cider, meat, and run it back to the city. Here.”
Bill inspected the papers Andre handed him. They were like a gold-plated, get-out-of-jail-free card. It was clearance to run supplies, food and alcohol for La Coupole Brasserie on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, signed by General von Stülpnagel himself.
The average German soldier liked nothing more than to drink, rut like a hog and get himself well-fattened whenever humanly possible, not necessarily in that order. Bill recalled La Coupole from one of the brochures he’d seen before, during intelligence briefings. They were given out to German soldiers on leave in the city, listing all the German-friendly cabarets, cinemas, bookshops, bars and restaurants.
It was widely known how well the businesses of Paris were prospering under the occupation. Before France was annexed entirely, the Vichy French Government had originally paid three francs per seat to cinema owners to close them off permanently to all but their German masters. There was even a list of bordelles for use by the Germans, amusingly to Bill, right next to a list for sexual health clinics.
The collaboration with the invaders was staggering, and Bill knew they would have to be extra cautious in the city. He had worked with the French and among the Germans before, and they were off to a good start. For now, with their flawless identity papers, a pass to give them access into the city with a vehicle, a small arsenal of weapons, and his pocketful of tobacco, he was filled with confidence.