THE STANDISH MISSION

The declared enemies of America did not furnish the only opposition to OSS men who worked with the resistance in occupied territory. The United States never declared war on the people of France. Yet there were people in France who were powerful enemies, though they sometimes wore no uniforms.

Foremost among these was the organization known as the Milice, the Vichy French Gestapo, whose methods were more ruthless than anything the Germans could concoct. OSS men had to fight the Milice just as they fought the Germans. The story of the Standish mission provides one example of how it was done.

“Duke” is his nickname. He wants to keep his real name a secret because of what happened. He might want to go back to France someday, and besides, he says, “The war is over now, and people in this country might not understand that what I did was part of the war, that it had to be done because of the war. People might be afraid I didn’t know the war was over.” He said it seriously.

He lay on his bed in a Washington hotel room, stretched out full length, his red-pajamaed legs crossed at the ankles, his curly black head propped sharply against the wooden bedstead, one heavy brown hand tapping a cigarette into the ashtray on the stand. He was having his last two days of “rest, recuperation, and recovery.” On a chair next to the bed, on top of a neatly folded uniform, lay a typed report: “Activity of First Lieutenant—— — ——.” It was 22 pages long, with an index. But now that he had finished it, he could tell about what happened in clearer words than he had written. Anyhow, the report said very little about the girl, Renée.

“Do you know the Haute Marne country around Gramont? Well, it’s flat but the towns are small, and there are woods. We hid in the woods.

“We had to hide right away. You see, when Hill and I went in there three days before D-Day, they told us we’d find a maquis already organized, and I thought … well, I thought of hundreds of men with rifles and a colonel. Something like that. But that night when we landed there were only Alcine and a couple of his friends.

“I said in the report the situation was bad. Hell, it was bad. You know what we were supposed to do.”

That was in the report too. Right in the first paragraph:

“Briefing: You are to set up an organization to control three state highways by establishing road blocks at three strategic points. You are to block railroad lines coming to and leaving Gramont, Haute Marne, France. You are to protect certain objectives from destruction by the enemy. You are to prevent uncontrolled resistance groups from acting on their own initiative without concern for Allied plans. Further, you are to control and hold in reserve, armed groups known as maquis.”

“Well, you can see what we were up against. It had a lot to do with what happened later.

“This Alcine was a nice kid. Blond, curly-haired kid, about 22. He’d deserted from the Vichy army because he wanted to fight Germans. But he didn’t have any more idea about how to run a maquis than your sister. He came up out of the thicket that night, and I lay on the ground and covered him. I said, ‘Who is that?’

“‘This is Alcine,’ he said, ‘God, I’m glad you’re here.’

“I kept the gun on him. ‘Where’s your transportation?’ I asked him.

“‘We haven’t got any,’ he said.

“‘Where are the Germans?’ I asked him.

“Oh, they’re about here somewhere,’ he said.

“I put the pistol down, stood up and began scrambling out of the parachute. ‘Where’s the safe house?’ I asked him.

“‘You might be able to stay with my aunt,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think she’d talk.’

“I swore at him. ‘How many men in your maquis?’ I said.

“‘Two,’ he said, ‘beside me.’

Duke sat up on the bed, inhaled deeply on a cigarette and gestured with a hand on which he wore a heavy gold ring. “Hell, and I was supposed to block roads. Have you ever heard of a bigger mess than that?”

“I don’t say I wasn’t scared. A lot of guys do. Hell, I’m a paratrooper. I went to Benning before I got in OSS. But I still think a lot of the things you did in France you did because you were scared, even though you didn’t know it at the time. See what I mean?

“Well, it took us two days to get all those supply containers they dropped with us picked up and hidden in the woods. There was nobody to help us and you know how heavy they are. Alcine wanted to go around town and pick up his friends, but I wouldn’t let him. It was a small village and everybody knew everybody else. Hill and I were in civilian clothes, but even so we’d have been strange faces. Two and two’s four, you know, even in France.

“We went to his aunt’s house and hid there one night, and then moved out to the woods. It’s all in the report. But what I want you to understand is that we were in a tough spot right from the beginning. We had no place to stay. There was no maquis. Alcine was being hunted by the Milice. We had no transportation and we’d brought the wrong kind of batteries for the radio. I’m not trying to build it up. I know guys have been in tougher spots. But maybe you can see how the way things were had a lot to do with what happened about this girl Renée.

“The first thing we had to do was organize a maquis. There was a German garrison about 10 miles away, so we had to move carefully. Alcine put me in touch with an old French colonel who had a few men, and we had a meeting in the woods. He agreed to join me. In about a week we had some men, all armed with the stuff I’d brought, and though we weren’t big, we had big plans. I had about 25 men, and what I wanted was more.

“It wasn’t a bad nucleus. Young fellows, some of them students and some of them jailbirds who had to hide anyhow. But they all wanted to kill Germans. I told them not to worry, we’d kill Germans, but that first we had to be strong.

“We built a cabin in the woods, and I got a farmer to sell us cattle. We’d send a patrol out at night to a rendezvous on the road which ran past the woods. The patrol would meet the farmer, and bring the meat back right on the hoof. You know I used to be a fountain manager at Walgreen’s back in Chicago. Hill used to kid me about slicing up the beef, saying I should know more about it, having been in the food business before. It was one of those running gags that you don’t get fed up with. Anyhow, I made sure my maquis got plenty to eat, and that helped to get more men. There was no chance of my doing my job until I had a strong maquis.

“It was about two weeks after we landed that I first heard of this girl, Renée. Alcine had left the camp two nights running, a thing he usually didn’t do because he was wanted by the Milice. None of us could go into the village, of course, and so on the third night, when Hill and I were sending a message to London, I saw Alcine starting out again, and I asked him where he was going.

“He came over to where we were working and sat down on the grass. ‘I’m in love,’ he said. He was blushing, practically. ‘I have met the most beautiful girl in the world. Her name is Renée. Renée de Sibour. She had to leave Paris because of the bombings. She wants to join us and help us.’ He was all lit up about it.

“I said, ‘How do you know she’s all right?’

That made him sore.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’d better marry her before you bring her in here with these other hounds, or you’ll have to share her around.’

“He went off down the path to the road.

“From a security standpoint, I wasn’t too happy about it, but I’d have had a hard time stopping it. Anyhow, I thought there was no sense in being, too cagey. Things were going pretty well. The maquis was getting bigger; we had about 40 men, and more promised, and we were training hard. Pretty soon we’d be ready to do a job.

“After that, Alcine hardly ever spent a night in camp. I knew he was out with Renée.

“We were doing some training one morning about a week later, when Alcine walked into our clearing, looking sick white. I hadn’t noticed that he’d been out all night. He came up to me. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. He was almost stumbling.

“I laid my carbine down against a tree and walked into the woods with him.

“‘Yes?’ I said.

“‘My family has been killed,’ he said, ‘by the Milice—my mother, my father, and my two sisters. I know it. They burned the house and shot them when they ran. I know it’s true.’

“As near as I can remember, that’s about the way the conversation went. I don’t remember what I said to him. I asked him how he was sure, and he said he’d met a farmer last night on the road who had lived in the same village as his family and had run away because he thought the Milice was going to burn the whole town. Evidently they hadn’t, though. They had just picked out Alcine’s family, and shot them as they ran.

“I knew about the Milice. I knew it was the Vichy Gestapo, and was supposed to be worse than the German. Since then I’ve seen some other things they did. It’s funny about them, you know, because they were Frenchmen. I suppose it’s the same thing as though this country were taken over by the Ku Klux Klan. They’re Americans, aren’t they?

“Well, I didn’t know what to say to Alcine except the usual things you try to tell a guy who’s had it, and that is never very much. We talked it out, and when we turned around to walk back, I asked him when he’d last heard from his family.

“‘Not in nearly a month,’ he said. ‘Not since you came and we began to work. But I wrote to them. I wrote to Mother only a week ago.’

“‘Did you?’ I said. ‘Who mailed the letter?’

“‘Renée mailed it for me,’ he said.

“‘Did she mail any other letters?’ I asked him.

“‘Three,’ he told me. ‘She offered to mail letters home for any of the boys, and I told some of them about it. The other letters were for families too.’

Duke got up off the bed and walked across the room. He was sturdy, and needing a shave made him look tough. He dug a fresh pack of cigarettes out of a duffle bag in the corner, lit one, came back and sat down. “You see, I knew then. I couldn’t tell Alcine, of course, because I couldn’t prove it. But somehow I knew. I decided that I was going to meet this Renée.

“You knew we were attacked after that. It’s in the report. Our security had been good. The German garrison didn’t know we were in the area. Somebody told them. I know now who it was.

“It came sometime late in June, about the twenty-third, I think. One of the guards sent back a signal that Germans were approaching our woods, down the road we used to pick up supplies. I sent Alcine to investigate while I rounded up the men, saw that they had their weapons, and figured a safe withdrawal route. Alcine took two men with him, but I warned him not to fire at the Germans because there was no proof they knew we were there.

“About five minutes later I heard shooting. I got the men together and we struck north through the woods. We’d walked about two miles when I heard dogs. I climbed a tree and I could see the Germans spread out fanwise, about 50 of them, firing at random into the underbrush. There were three dogs, tracking our scent.

“There was no sense in fighting. They’d call up reinforcements and mop us up, and I’d never get my job done. The thing to do was to try to save the maquis.

“We ran for an hour, all out through the woods, and we finally came to a little pine wood just on the edge of the Forêt D’Arc. I wouldn’t let anybody stop to rest. We buried the weapons, and hid all the equipment. Then I told them to break up and go off by twos. I gave each man a thousand francs and set a rally point at the home of Alcine’s aunt for ten o’clock that night.

“Hill and I got to the rally point on time. Alcine was there, happy as a kid. He had killed two Germans and was so proud of it that when I bawled him out for disobeying my orders not to fire, it didn’t even faze him. One of the men who had gone with him had been wounded and captured and the other had run away.

“We waited, and after awhile some of the men came in. Not all of them, though. Some of them had just given it up for good, and those who did come were pretty scared and ready to quit. We’d lost our camp and the Germans knew we were in the area. It looked like just about the end of my maquis and my mission.

“We sat for awhile and talked, and I asked each one if he had any suspicions about who had given us away. Nobody did. It was while we were talking in the house that one of the fellows said he was quitting to go and look for his family. I asked him why.

“‘They were burned out by the Milice last night,’ he said, ‘20 kilos from here. The postman in the village told me on my way here. He doesn’t know if my mother and father are alive or dead.’

“‘Did you mail a letter to them by Alcine about two weeks ago?’ I asked.

“He said he had. Alcine remembered too. He had given it to Renée.

“‘Go ahead,’ I said, and I gave him some money. Then I told the rest of the men to go off in pairs and meet again at the house in a week. I tried to be optimistic. I said our maquis wasn’t finished.

“After they’d all left except Alcine and Hill and me, I told Alcine that now I would like to meet Renée.

“I met her the next morning. Alcine brought tier to the woods, and I stood behind a tree to watch and make sure they weren’t being followed. I nearly forgot about it when I saw her, following him along the trail. I guess she must have been about 20. She was tall and dark-haired, with her hair touching her shoulders, and she had a blue ribbon around it. She had on a light dress and low-heeled shoes and her legs were brown. She was all right, about as all right as I’ve ever seen.

“When they’d walked a little way past me, I whistled and they turned around. I stepped out from behind the tree. Her face was brown and oval and she had long eyelashes.

“I don’t remember what we said. Just hello, I guess. She looked right at you when she talked. I tried to steer the conversation towards the maquis, but she didn’t seem interested. I said, ‘We’ve had a very hard time,’ and she said, ‘I’m so sorry, we must all try to help.’

“She asked me where I lived, and I told her I lived in Paris, that my house had been bombed before I came away. She looked up at me and said she was sorry again. She sounded as though she meant it.

“I said I’d like to see her again. I didn’t want to push it too much, but I could see she wanted it. She said, ‘Why not tonight? I have a car, and we can go for a drive.’

“I felt like I was back in high school in Illinois, like I was supposed to blush.

“Alcine wasn’t liking it very well. He said, ‘I’m busy tonight,’ in a huff. The huff didn’t seem to bother her.

“She was waiting for me on the road that night in a Citroen. I put on a blue coat I borrowed from Alcine’s aunt, and I washed up. I even wore a hat. Before I left I told Hill that if I didn’t come back, he should take over the mission, and try to reorganize the maquis. He was pretty down in the dumps, but I think he knew what I was doing.

“We just drove that night. She was wearing a white hair ribbon and a loose white dress, and no stockings. It wasn’t my idea to make love to her. She wanted it. We came back about midnight and sat in the car for a long time, parked on the road where she’d met me. There was a bridge just on the bend ahead, with no side walls to it. I remember exactly how it looked.

“She was young, of course, and a lot of her conversation was young. I said something about a nice night and stars, trying to fit her patter, and she said she’d had them all once—you know, sort of corny kid conversation.

“I said, ‘Did you?’

“She said, ‘Yes, I was in love once before. Don’t think it wrong of me. He was a German soldier. He’s dead now.’

“I told her she couldn’t expect me to be sorry.

“You know what she did before I left her that night? She told me that if I wanted to write a letter to my family in Paris, she’d mail it for me.

“Before I met her the next night, I told Hill what the plan was. He agreed with me. It was another good night. In one way, you know, she was like any other girl. She was good-looking, and so she was worried about being intelligent. I told her she had the deepest mind of any girl I’d ever met. She loved it. If I’d told her she was beautiful, she’d have been bored. She already knew that.

“I made love to her again. I told her we’d get married. I knew she didn’t believe it. What she really wanted and why she did what she did I don’t know. Thrills, maybe.

“We had some drinks in the car parked on that same spot on the road. I put half a pill in the second drink. It was a sleeping pill, the heavy kind they give you in case you get caught and can’t stand torture. Later when I got caught by the Gestapo, I thought it was a good thing I’d used half of it, or I might have been tempted to swallow the whole thing. Anyhow, it wasn’t enough to hurt her. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I went for her purse.

“The proof was there, all right. I suppose if it hadn’t been, I’d have found out later, some other way. I was sure of it, anyhow. There was a letter from Gestapo headquarters confirming the receipt of three addresses, and there was a Gestapo identification card assigning her to the French Milice.

“Then I did a foolish thing. You see I’d already made up my mind what to do, and instead of doing it, I thought about it. When you know what you’re doing, thinking’s a mistake. I thought of all the angles, and just made it tough for myself. I always came back to the same conclusion.

“She’d wreck our maquis. I knew of four people she’d killed already and maybe more. If I let her go, she’d get us all sooner or later. She’d get me. But it wasn’t that so much. It wasn’t revenge, or fear, because I could have run away. I was an American soldier with a job to do. She was the enemy. I couldn’t do my job while she was alive and that was all there was to it.

“I shot her in the head with a .32 pistol. Then I got a shovel out of the back of the Citroen, and I carried her into the woods, and I dug a hole and buried her. I covered the spot with leaves and branches. I went back to the car and pushed it up to that bridge and into the river, which was deep. Then I cut back through the woods, and went to bed. So far as I know, nobody ever knew what happened to her, except Hill, who didn’t have to ask, and me. We never told Alcine.”

Duke got up off the bed, flung off his pajamas, and headed for the shower. His bare back still bore the marks of a Gestapo beating he had received when he was captured and imprisoned months later.

“It made sense to me,” he said. “But then, you better not use my name. People forget about a war.”