When Abwehr officers in northern France captured several members of the French resistance in late 1943, they were astonished by what they found in their captives’ belongings: detailed plans of the port of Saint-Nazaire on the Brittany coast. When an Abwehr colleague at the port saw the documents, he threw up his hands. They were precise drawings of giant submarine bunkers and locking installations then being built at Saint-Nazaire by the Germans. Allied spies, the officer complained, were forever sneaking in and gathering information about the construction. No matter what he and other security officials did, they “were quite unable to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.”
As D-Day approached, Saint-Nazaire was hardly the only German military facility in France to suffer such intrusions. Everywhere on the country’s coasts, it seemed, intelligence agents from occupied Europe were penetrating top secret enemy bases and stealing fortification blueprints and other material that the Allied planners of D-Day had asked them to gather. In effect, the agents were collecting the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle that, when put together, would give the Allies a minutely detailed picture of the German defenses they would face during the invasion. “As fast as the intelligence came in,” one British historian wrote, “it was followed swiftly by greater demands. The more the information poured in, the more the demands grew.”
Abwehr officer Hermann Giskes, who had been reassigned to France after his Englandspiel triumph in the Netherlands, was a firsthand witness to the European spies’ success. “We had no illusions about the difficulty of stopping this illegal activity,” he later remarked. “These hydra grew new heads quicker than we could cut them off….It was obvious that we were only intercepting a fraction of the material which was getting to the enemy.” He called the situation “catastrophic.” In October 1943, Life magazine noted that “practically all the Allied war plans for the invasion of Europe are based on information about the conquered territory supplied by underground intelligence systems. Most of the information would never have reached London if the exiled governments were not there.”
Although agents from throughout occupied Europe helped in the collection of this intelligence mosaic, most of it came from French and Polish operatives. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s Alliance network was particularly active, despite its recent crippling loss of agents. One Alliance operative—a French naval engineer working at Lorient, another German submarine base on the Brittany coast—provided a flood of information about the complex, including the number and movements of the U-boats based there. Another Alliance agent was hired as a workman to paint the offices of the Todt Organization, the Reich’s engineering and construction agency, in Caen, a city close to the English Channel that would become a pivotal battleground during the upcoming campaign in France. In the course of his work, the painter managed to spirit out plans for the area’s German fortifications.
Perhaps the most spectacular intelligence exploit of all was the product of still another Alliance operative—a painter and art teacher in Caen who bicycled down the coastline of Normandy and made sketches and drawings along the way. The fruit of his efforts was a fifty-five-foot-long map showing the position of every German gun emplacement, fortification, and beach obstacle along the coast, together with details of German army units and their movements. Smuggled to London in March 1944, the map proved an invaluable resource for Allied military commanders directing the invasion.
The Poles provided additional key intelligence, notwithstanding the loss of Interallié, their most important intelligence network in France. Roman Garby-Czerniawski, the Polish air force officer who founded Interallié in 1940, was betrayed to the Abwehr by his French girlfriend in November 1941, and the operation was rolled up. It was soon replaced by a new Polish-run organization called F-2, which by 1944 had nearly three thousand operatives, most of them French, working in ports, railway stations, armaments plants, and even German war production offices. Like the Alliance workers, F-2 agents provided a cornucopia of information about the German order of battle, coastal fortifications, and defense lines, as well as train, ship, and submarine positions and movements. Many of the agents were forced laborers whom the Germans had brought into places like Saint-Nazaire and Lorient to do construction and other menial jobs.
Other invaluable sources of intelligence were Polish slave laborers working in armaments factories, shipyards, and major industrial plants inside the Reich itself. On numerous occasions, the material they provided led to the Allied bombing of important strategic targets. “We can state categorically that the Polish Intelligence Service is extremely active,” a German military report gloomily noted in July 1943. “It is already operating in a vast number of protected German factories through the workers employed there. This creates great threats to the production of military matériel. Such threats are multiplied, since Polish Intelligence, supported by the fanaticism of the Polish resistance, works with much skill and is difficult to contain.”
DESPITE HIS ARREST BY the Abwehr in 1941, Roman Garby-Czerniawski made his own crucial contribution to the success of D-Day and the subsequent Allied offensive in France. One of the colorful band of double agents used by the British in their D-Day deception campaign, he managed to help persuade Hitler and the German high command that the Allies would launch their invasion of Europe from the Pas de Calais area in northern France, more than 200 miles away in Normandy.
Garby-Czerniawski began his career as a double agent (in his case, a triple agent) soon after his arrest, when he offered to collaborate with the Germans, specifically by going to Britain and spying for them. Declaring that he would “do for Germany what he had been doing in France against them,” he promised to gather information on British aircraft and tank production, troop deployments, and, above all, Allied plans for the invasion of the Continent.
Roman Garby-Czerniawski
Agreeing, the Abwehr smuggled Garby-Czerniawski into Britain. Once there, he claimed he had escaped from German custody and was treated as a returning hero by the Polish government in exile. A few weeks later, however, he revealed the truth to the head of Polish intelligence, who, with General Władysław Sikorski’s blessing, handed him over to MI5. It, in turn, passed him on to its so-called Double Cross Committee, whose mission was to devise a plan to mislead the Germans about the location of the upcoming D-Day landings. Although suspicious at first of Garby-Czerniawski’s true intentions, the committee finally concluded that “his loyalty is entirely to his own country,” deeming him “a loyal and patriotic Pole.” They gave him the code name “Brutus.”
Of all the former German operatives in Britain whom the committee enlisted to pass on disinformation to the Reich, Garby-Czerniawski, as a former head of an intelligence network himself, was by far the most skilled and persuasive. “From their knowledge of him, the Germans will expect him to achieve the impossible or bust,” reported his MI5 handler. “Brutus is a professional spy and an artist at producing the most detailed and illustrated reports.” Judging from the cable traffic between him and Germany, it was clear that his supposed masters had complete trust in his information and regarded him as one of their top double agents. According to MI5, his reports were “studied not only by operational [intelligence] sections, but by most prominent persons in Berlin, including Hitler and Goering.”
In his first major deception, Garby-Czerniawski convinced Hitler and his men that the Allies were seriously considering an invasion of Norway, thereby ensuring that the 350,000 German troops stationed there would not be deployed to northern France. But his biggest triumph lay in a series of detailed reports to Berlin of a massive U.S. army, under the command of General George Patton, that was supposed to be training in England for an attack on the Pas de Calais. The army, of course, was fictitious, but the Germans unquestioningly accepted its existence. Even when the Allies did actually land at Normandy on June 6, 1944, Hitler continued to put his faith in Brutus, believing that the main assault would be at the Pas de Calais, thus keeping tens of thousands of German troops away from the real front.
ENSURING THE SUCCESS OF D-Day was only one of the major accomplishments of the army of European intelligence agents who worked for the Allies. Another was stopping Hitler from succeeding in his bold, last-ditch efforts to destroy London and prevent the D-Day armada from crossing the English Channel.
Although the Führer was never able to develop an atomic bomb, he came up with a plan to mount an avalanche of devastating attacks on England with two new terror weapons devised by his scientists: long-range rockets and pilotless jet aircraft armed with bombs. Since 1936, the German military had been conducting tests on what came to be known as the V2 rockets and V1 “buzz bombs” at Peenemünde, the world’s largest missile experimentation center, on Germany’s Baltic coast.
In mid-1943, Hitler gave top priority to the mass production of both weapons, pouring huge amounts of money into it and assigning thousands of slave laborers to the task. Calling the V2s and V1s “the new weapons that will change the face of the war,” he told his top military officials that by the end of 1943, London would be leveled, Britain forced to capitulate, and any planned invasion of the Continent rendered impossible. The attacks would begin on October 20, 1943, he declared. The V2 rocket would be the first to launch.
Unfortunately for the German leader, his apocalyptic vision remained just that—a dream. V1s and V2s were indeed fired at London, creating considerable damage and loss of life. But they never came close to leveling the city, let alone stopping D-Day, thanks to reports from European agents that allowed the British to disrupt the weapons’ development and production. Thanks to those spies, “no one could say we had been caught by surprise,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs.
The prime minister first received word in April 1943 of the Germans’ alarmingly rapid progress in developing the V1 and V2. His informant was Dr. Reginald Jones, a young physicist from Oxford who served as assistant director of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry and unofficially as Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare. Jones, in turn, received his intelligence from a wide array of European operatives, some of them forced laborers at Peenemünde. Although non-Germans were not allowed into the research labs or near the launch sites, the workers were close enough to observe weapons tests and the layout of the complex, including workshops, airfields, and factories.
The first detailed information about Peenemünde came from two citizens of Luxembourg conscripted as construction workers there. Each smuggled out reports about the development of the V2, including a map of the locations where it was assembled and from which it was fired. More intelligence was supplied by Polish agents, one of whom worked for a crew that installed telephone lines at a Peenemünde research facility. He confirmed that test flights of the V1 were also being carried out. When the British requested a detailed map of the entire complex and surrounding areas, Polish intelligence replied that it was “a bit of a tall order.” A few weeks later, the map arrived in London.
Of the many reports Reginald Jones received about Peenemünde, one was particularly notable. Obviously written not by a laborer but by someone close to high-ranking German officials, it contained a host of details about the V2 rocket: the identity of the military officers overseeing its trials, the sound it made (“as deafening as a Flying Fortress”), the weapon’s deficiencies, the location and description of its launching pads (“so sited that they can methodically destroy most of Britain’s large cities during the winter”). When Jones asked about the source of what he called “this extraordinary report,” all he learned at the time was that it came from “une jeune fille la plus remarquable de sa génération” (“the most remarkable girl of her generation”).
Jeannie Rousseau
As Jones discovered later, the document’s author was a lovely twenty-four-year-old blonde with a photographic memory named Jeannie Rousseau, whose father was a high-ranking municipal official in Paris. A graduate of the University of Paris and an intelligence operative for the Alliance network, she was, the Washington Post later wrote, “one of the most effective—if unheralded—spies of World War II.”
Fluent in German, Rousseau, whose code name was “Amniarix,” worked as an interpreter in Paris for a syndicate of French industrialists who often met with German military officials to discuss thorny commercial issues like the Reich’s commandeering of French business inventories. In the course of her dealings with various German officers, she overheard scraps of conversation about secret weapons tests somewhere in eastern Germany.
The Germans soon started inviting the pretty Parisian to their evening social gatherings, where they ate, drank, and talked freely about their work, which included the secret weapons. Playing the role of a coquettish, dim-witted blonde, Rousseau “teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane.” Over and over, she exclaimed, “What you are telling me cannot be true!” Finally, one of the officers had had enough of her playful skepticism. “I’ll show you,” he said, pulling from his briefcase drawings of the rockets and documents detailing, among other things, how to enter the Peenemünde test site, the passes that were needed, and even the color of each pass.
Rousseau wrote down everything she learned that night, as she did after subsequent get-togethers with her talkative German friends. Within a few weeks, she had acquired a voluminous amount of information about both the V1 and V2, all of which Alliance dispatched to London.
Having been alerted by Rousseau and many others, the British confirmed the existence of the secret weapons through a series of reconnaissance flights over Peenemünde. On the night of August 17, 1943, more than five hundred RAF bombers pounded the complex, heavily damaging its research center and production facilities and destroying all blueprints of the V2s. Although Wernher von Braun, the head of the weapons’ research and production teams, survived, more than a hundred scientists, engineers, and other staff members were killed.
As Churchill later noted, the raid “had a far-reaching influence on events.” The production and testing of both weapons were pushed back several months, long enough to prevent an attack from interfering with the Normandy landings. Fearing more bombing raids, the Germans moved the V2 tests from Peenemünde to an area near Blizna, a small village in southern Poland, that they believed was beyond the range of Allied bombers.
That may have been true, but, by moving to Poland, they were now in the lair of the most skilled, extensive spy organization in all of occupied Europe. Just a couple of weeks after the first V2 trials at Blizna, London received detailed reports about them from Polish intelligence agents. The Poles also set up a special team whose assignment was to beat German patrols to the scene of their crashed rockets, where its members would scoop up and analyze weapon fragments, pieces of radio and other guidance equipment, spilled fuel, and anything else that might be helpful to Allied understanding of the missiles.
In the early summer of 1944, a V2 fell on a riverbank near Blizna but did not explode. Before the Germans could retrieve it, the Poles hid it, then took it apart and spirited the parts away. The head of the team, an engineer named Jerzy Chmielewski, later somehow transported the dismantled missile to an improvised landing field two hundred miles to the southeast. The British dispatched a plane from Italy to pick up the parts, along with fragments from other crashes, and carry them back to London.
Initially, the V2 was to be used almost simultaneously with the V1, which could have had calamitous consequences for England. But thanks to the raid on Peenemünde and continued difficulties with the V2’s production and testing, the Germans repeatedly had to postpone its use. Instead, as Churchill and his men discovered from reading Jeannie Rousseau’s reports, the V1 was to be deployed first.
In the fall of 1943, a flood of information poured in about the construction of what appeared to be launching sites in a number of locations near the northern French coast. Shaped like ski jumps, they all seemed to be pointing directly at London. One French agent, who worked as a draftsman at one of the sites, copied all its blueprints and sent them to the British capital.
Beginning in December 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, operating from bases in Britain, launched massive bombing raids to knock out the V1 sites wherever and whenever they appeared. The Germans finally gave up on their construction, switching to prefabricated mobile launchers. It was from those platforms that V1 bombs were finally fired at England, beginning on June 13, 1944, eight months after Hitler’s planned launching date and one week after the Allies successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy.
“Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”
For nearly three months, thousands of the pilotless missiles—called “buzz bombs” because of the noise they made—showered down on London and its outskirts, killing 5,500 residents, injuring some 16,000, and destroying about 23,000 houses. Most people considered the new onslaught to be far worse than the Blitz. In his memoirs, Churchill recalled the unbearable strain that the V1s exacted on his war-weary compatriots: “The man going home in the evening never knew what he would find; his wife, alone all day or with the children, could not be certain of his safe return.” The V1, noted Evelyn Waugh, was “as impersonal as a plague, as though the city were infected with enormous, venomous insects.”
But though the losses were heavy and the fear and worry excruciating, the damage caused by the V1s was considerably less than it might have been. The British could not prevent them from being launched, but in the fifteen months that they had known about the weapon’s existence, they had been able to plan countermeasures to greatly lessen its impact. Adaptations were made to the Allies’ fastest fighter planes to allow them to overtake the missiles and either fire at them at close range or tip them over with a wing. The pilots who engaged in this extremely dangerous “aerial shooting gallery,” as one flier called the midair interceptions, grew to be quite adept at it. Of the more than 8,500 V1s fired at London, fewer than 30 percent overall reached their targets. By August, less than one bomb in seven—about 15 percent—got through to the London metropolitan area, thanks in large part to the fighters and also to the improved performance of antiaircraft guns located on the English coast. Early in September 1944, the V1 campaign came to an abrupt end when Allied troops fighting in France overran the areas containing the buzz bombs’ launching sites.
Londoners, however, enjoyed only a few days of relief. On September 8, from sites in still occupied Holland, the Germans unleashed the V2 rocket, a forerunner of modern missiles, which tormented the British capital until just a few months before the end of the war. To most people, the V2s—which traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence—were even more terrifying than their predecessors. More than five hundred of them exploded in and around London, rocking the city like an earthquake and killing nearly three thousand people.
Again, though, the death toll and scale of damage were far less than they would have been had Germany been left unhindered. Without the delays caused by the Peenemünde raid, the rockets would have been fired months earlier and from shorter ranges. After the Allies overran northern France in midsummer, the Germans were forced to launch the V2s from improvised platforms in Holland, nearly twice as far from London and with much less accuracy. “Although we could do little against the rocket once it was launched,” Churchill observed, “we postponed and substantially reduced the weight of the onslaught.”
Roman Garby-Czerniawski helped add to that effort. When asked by the Germans about the accuracy of the missiles, he told them, falsely, that most of the rockets were falling several kilometers short of London. German scientists then changed the V2s’ trajectory, causing many of them to overshoot the capital and explode in less populated areas.
AFTER THE WAR, Churchill paid tribute to the “excellence” and “gallantry” of the countless European intelligence agents who had risked everything to ensure the success of D-Day and help save London. Yet most of them had engaged in their perilous work without ever learning if it had had any effect at all. Many years later, Jeannie Rousseau would describe the “lonesomeness, the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on—or passed on in time.”
A young Belgian intelligence agent made the same point at the end of a report about German radio communications that ended up on Reginald Jones’s desk. “We have been working so long in the dark that any reaction from London about our work would be welcome to such obscure workers as ourselves,” the operative wrote. “We hope this will not be resented since, whatever may happen, you can rely on our entire devotion and on the sacrifice of our lives.” Shortly thereafter, the Belgian was captured by the Gestapo and later executed.
Dozens of other agents suffered similar fates. The French artist who drew the fifty-five-foot map of the Normandy coast, for one, never knew about the triumphant outcome of his work. With fifteen other resistance members, he was arrested and on June 7, 1944—the day after the Normandy landings began—was shot. Jerzy Chmielewski, the Polish engineer in charge of dismantling the V2 rocket downed near Blizna, was caught by the Gestapo and executed in Warsaw in August 1944.
In a poignant irony, several of the operatives who had reported to the British about the V1s and V2s at Peenemünde were killed when the RAF bombed the complex. “A substantial proportion of our bombs fell to the south of the establishment itself,” Jones recalled, “and particularly on the camp which housed foreign laborers, including those who had risked so much to get the information through to us.”
Another Allied bombing raid—on a German factory making electronic components for the V2’s guidance and control systems—resulted in the deaths of hundreds of inmates at Buchenwald. The factory, where many of Buchenwald’s prisoners were forced to work, was adjacent to the concentration camp.
The man who made that raid possible was Pierre Julitte, once a staff officer for Charles de Gaulle in London and now himself a Buchenwald inmate. Tired of Free French intrigues, Julitte had returned to occupied France as an intelligence agent in 1942 and been captured a year later. After being sent to Buchenwald and assigned to work in the factory, he quickly realized what he was assembling: parts for a guidance system for “a self-propelled projectile, navigating in space and remote-controlled by radio,” which turned out to be the V2. Julitte smuggled out a report to de Gaulle’s London headquarters in which he described the components and urged that the factory be bombed, knowing that he and his coworkers would probably die if the Allies did as he suggested.
The raid, which was conducted on August 24, 1944, destroyed the factory and killed some five hundred workers. But Julitte was not among them. Although he had had no advance warning of the raid, he managed to get out of the factory as the bombing began and was only slightly injured.
Jeannie Rousseau, meanwhile, continued her reports to London, which now included intelligence she collected while making occasional business trips to Germany with members of the industrialist syndicate for which she worked. By the spring of 1944, she had become so important to the Allied scientific intelligence effort that British officials decided to bring her to London for an extensive debriefing. She was to be picked up by a boat off the coast of Brittany, but the operation went awry and she was captured by the Gestapo.
Rousseau spent the last months of the war in three German concentration camps, among them Torgau, whose inmates worked in a factory making armaments, including parts for the V2. When she arrived at Torgau, the twenty-five-year-old Frenchwoman refused to set foot in the factory and convinced a number of other newly arrived inmates to do the same. “We will go and pick your potatoes but we won’t make your bombs,” she told the camp’s commandant. She was confined to a punishment cell for several weeks, where she received daily beatings.
Rousseau’s war ended at Ravensbrück. Weighing only seventy pounds and close to death, she was rescued by the same Swedish Red Cross team that evacuated Mary Lindell and dozens of other Ravensbrück inmates. She was taken to Sweden, where she slowly recovered her health. In 1946, she returned to France and married Henri de Clarens, a French aristocrat turned resistance fighter who was himself a survivor of Auschwitz.
After more than thirty years of staying out of the public eye and trying not “to stir up old memories,” Rousseau, now the Vicomtesse de Clarens, agreed to a meeting in 1976 with Reginald Jones, who informed her in detail of the extraordinary contributions she and other intelligence agents from occupied Europe had made to the eventual Allied victory. Her encounter with Jones, whom she fondly referred to as “dear Reg,” was “a great personal experience but also shed a light on the past,” she later wrote in a foreword to Jones’s wartime memoir. “From what he tells us, our efforts were worth it.”