Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (17 page)

To back up her story when meeting Waem in Schenk’s apartment that afternoon, Christine took the additional risk of showing him some of the crystals used to lock her transmitter on fixed frequencies for transmissions. That they were old ones which had been damaged was irrelevant because, in doing so, she had given a Sicherheitsdienst officer proof that she was an Allied spy. She also told Waem that the local Resistance planned to assassinate him shortly, unless the Americans arrived first, in which case he would either be lynched in the post-liberation frenzy or hanged by the Americans as a war criminal for having ordered the arrest and execution of what she called ‘the three most important prisoners in France’.

The only chance of Schenk and Waem staying alive, she said, was for them to help get ‘her’ three prisoners out of the prison alive and well, in return for which she would hand over enough money for the two of them to make good their escape. Probably at no other time would her incredible story have been believed, but in the confusion generated by the invasion and rapid advance of Dragoon forces Waem and Schenk were rightly worried about their fate, if they left their departure too late.

At any point in these delicate negotiations, either of the men she was dealing with could have had her arrested and shot. Indeed, Waem repeatedly threatened her with a loaded pistol but, as the negotiations dragged on, Christine knew she had judged her adversaries correctly. After three hours’ haggling, impressed by her apparent total calm – she said afterwards that she was too busy to be frightened – Waem named his price for liberating the prisoners. He wanted a handwritten note confirming that he and Schenk had saved the lives of the three SOE officers and 2 million francs in cash as getaway money.

With no time to lose, Christine hurriedly left town and made her way to where she had hidden her transmitter, to radio news of the deal to Algiers. In what must have been one of the swiftest operations mounted in the entire war, the cash was dropped that night in the hills close to Digne. Returning to the prison the following day, she handed the money over to Waem and waited for him to deliver. Nobody knows what bluff she used at that stage to stop him simply pocketing the money, arresting her and shooting her, Cammaerts and the other two SOE men.

When footsteps were heard approaching the miserable cell in which the three men were languishing, Cammaerts woke up. It may seem strange that he could sleep in a condemned cell, but his nerves were so shredded by the months of clandestine life that he could fall asleep anywhere. He and the others had just been served the best meal since their arrest. Expecting to find themselves shortly facing a firing squad in the prison courtyard, they saw Waem standing in the doorway, wearing a Wehrmacht uniform jacket over civilian clothes. He motioned them outside with his revolver. As Cammaerts walked out, Waem said, ‘What a wonderful wife you have!’

Waem was saluted by the guards as he marched his prisoners out of the main gate and then turned right, instead of left towards the football pitch used as an execution ground by the Germans. A few hundred yards from the prison, Waem hustled them into the rear seat of a waiting car and got in beside the driver. His uniform jacket guaranteeing them safe passage past the checkpoint at the edge of town, Waem ordered the driver to halt at the first bend, where the slim figure of Christine was waiting. She squeezed into the front seat. Shortly afterwards, Waem got out and buried his uniform jacket as the first step in his personal getaway. With the car heading for the mountains, Cammaerts and his companions realised they were free.

A few days later, Schenk was assassinated by the Resistance during the liberation of Digne. His share of the ransom had been given to his wife, who tried to exchange the Vichy notes Christine had handed over for new currency after the war, but found the rate of exchange such that her widow’s ‘fortune’ was all but worthless. What she did receive was thanks to Christine’s and Cammaerts’ personal intervention. Waem, however, was a born survivor, using Christine’s safe conduct to have himself ‘rescued’ by British paras and handed over to British Field Security Police in Bari, a prisoner, but alive.

One always wonders how incredibly brave agents like Christine Granville settled down to peacetime living after the war. After all the danger and stress to which they had become accustomed, the answer is often tragic. Stranded in Cairo with one month’s salary when SOE terminated her contract in 1945, she volunteered for the missions being sent from London into her homeland, now Soviet-occupied, but these were cancelled when the first group was betrayed and all its members arrested on arrival in the country. Since her record of wartime working for Britain debarred her from openly returning home, Christine applied for British nationality in the belief that all her work for SOE would mean a welcome with open arms for a woman holding the MBE, the George Medal and the Croix de Guerre. Not so. Her application was delayed because she could not prove the requisite five years’ previous residence in Britain, as required by some nameless bureaucrat. Eventually reaching Britain as a stateless refugee after borrowing the money for her fare, she took work as a switchboard operator and sold dresses in Harrods department store before signing on as a stewardess aboard the SS
Winchester
Castle
and SS
Rauhine
.

Christine had always enjoyed sexual relationships with men – sometimes more than one at a time. As SOE’s Vera Atkins said of her: ‘[Christine] was no plaster saint. She was a vital, healthy, beautiful animal with a great appetite for love and laughter.’ Atkins also said that, like so many agents who had burned up a lifetime’s adrenalin, ‘After the war Christine was quite unable to adapt herself to a boring day-to-day routine. She lived for action and adventure.’
¹
Her free-loving lifestyle proved her undoing when a schizophrenic senior steward aboard
Rauhine
became obsessed with her. To escape him, she decided that life afloat was not for her. Her unwanted suitor followed her ashore and took a job at a London club. After persistently stalking her, on the evening of 15 July 1952 he accosted her in the lobby of her Kensington hotel and stabbed her through the heart. For this crime he was hanged two weeks after his trial that September.

Cammaerts, on the other hand, had the benefit of British nationality, but still found it hard to get a suitable job after de Gaulle was securely established as head of government of the Fourth Republic and insisted on the withdrawal of SOE, OSS and other Allied officers from France. In Cammaerts’ own words, he was over-promoted, yet knew nothing of military life. Nor did he want to. Despite Buckmaster’s personal recommendation, he was twice rejected for posts, being blacklisted by the Foreign Office because his father was not British
by birth and the posts could not be given to someone who could thus obviously not be trusted with confidential information!
Such stupidity, which Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was unwilling to correct, proved that Colonel Blimp was alive and well in London’s post-war corridors of power.

A period of service in uniform with Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force (SAARF), tasked with preventing massacres before liberation of concentration and death camps in Germany, included a visit to Ravensbrück, where his courier Cecily Lefort had been gassed only a few months before. On 1 July 1945 SAARF was disbanded, after which Cammaerts spent the last seven months of his military career as liaison officer between Lieutenant General Sir Brian Robertson, the Deputy Military Governor of the British zone of occupied Germany, and General Koenig, Military Governor of the French zone. His own modest assessment was that the job was a waste of time since, although he saw Koenig every day, Robertson only agreed to see him once.

Cammaerts then took the post of deputy director of the Allied Reparations Agency at the princely salary of £2,500 per annum. This eighteen-month stint based in Brussels, far from the cares of austerity Britain which was recovering from the war with agonising slowness, was a re-bonding period for him, his wife Nan and their children. When their fourth child was born, her father insisted on naming her Christine after Christine Granville. When talking about this with her eldest daughter, who thought it was an insensitive thing to do, Nan said later, ‘Among the young men … who went off to the war, the ones who allowed themselves to have affairs survived better.’
²

Cammaerts’ main contribution to the agency was a survey of staff duties which concluded that he and the other nine directors had little work to do, while drawing salaries that would globally have employed 600 lower-grade staff, all of whom were overstretched. Practising what he preached, he sacked himself and returned to his teaching career in Leicester, modestly insisting that his work as principal of the City of Leicester training college was far more important than what he had done during the war.

Talking of wartime colleagues who suffered what would now be termed ‘post-traumatic stress’, this extraordinarily stable man said, ‘Ten of my closest friends from those days have committed suicide, some straight after the war, some thirty years later. Who knows what happens to the human mind when put under that sustained pressure?’
³

Notes

1
Interview with Madeleine Masson.

2
Jenkins, R.,
A Pacifist at War
, London, Arrow, 2010, pp. 236–7.

3
Interview with Jeremy Clay reprinted in
Leicester Mercury
, 30 June 2009.

FROM THE SKY CAME DEATH

On 12 July General Gabriel Cochet of the Free French informed his American contact in Algiers, General B.F. Caffey, that the Luftwaffe was carrying out intensive photo reconnaissance of the Vercors and rapidly building up German ground forces in the region. The same day, Cochet despatched one of his officers to MAAF HQ in Naples to request General Ira C. Eaker, commanding all Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, to give the situation on the Vercors priority consideration.

On 13 July, news came from Resistance sources in the Rhône valley that the German garrison at Valence had been substantially reinforced. From the town of St Romans came news that an SS general had set up his headquarters there with troops experienced in anti-partisan warfare. At Valence-Chabeuil airfield, sixty-six aircraft of various types had been counted hidden under concealment and reconnaissance flights over the plateau had been stepped up.

That day, General Cochet himself flew from Algiers to Naples to ask General Eaker, who had 3,000 aircraft conveniently based in Corsica and Sardinia, to bomb the field at Valence and remove one serious threat to Operation Montagnards. Cochet played on the fact that Eaker’s bomber fleets included aircraft flown by pilots of the Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres (FAFL) – the Gaullist air force – but none of these had the range to cross the Mediterranean and reach the Vercors.
¹
Passed on to Eaker’s deputy, British Air Marshal John Slessor, Cochet specifically asked for a mission to hit Valence-Chabeuil and was promised that everything possible would be done.
²
It was a somewhat Delphic reply.

In fairness to Eaker and Slessor, their tactical priorities at the time were ground support missions for the Allied forces in Italy, now stalling as they came up against the reinforced Gothic Line after suffering casualties approaching 200,000 dead and wounded in the Italian campaign. Since German forces on the European fronts usually respected the status of Allied soldiers taken prisoner in uniform – with the exception of snipers, who were routinely shot on capture by both sides – there was no reason why officers at MAAF should know that the 4,000 men and women in the Vercors would be treated differently, if taken prisoner, and shot out of hand after torture. However, Cochet’s persistence impressed Eaker, with terrible consequences that neither man could have dreamt of.

With half of Huet’s force still without weapons, on 14 July – the national holiday commemorating the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution – Picirella was on duty at the airstrip near Vassieux, where he was an eyewitness to a massacre. The mood early that morning was summed up by 20-year-old
maquisard
Paul Borrel: ‘On 14 July we had a parade by the Chasseurs Alpins mountain troops. It was sensational.’ A survivor of this terrible day said afterwards: ‘We looked to the sky for our salvation, but from the sky came death.’

It came because someone on Eaker’s staff with zero understanding of the situation on the ground was trying to make amends for the long delay in supplying the plateau. A fleet of B-17 bombers with a protective canopy of fighters wheeling above them was tasked to drop 1,200 canisters of arms and ammunition on the landing strip at Vassieux. To do this in daylight, in full view of the German forces surrounding the plateau, was an open invitation for them to take appropriate action.

Cammaerts and Christine were watching the celebrations below the plateau in the town of Die, and clearly saw the mass of aircraft manoeuvring throughout the drop. Shortly after the Allied aircraft had flown away, a single German fighter dived down on people dancing in the square at Die, machine guns blazing. Everyone dived for cover, except Christine, who stayed where she was, apparently unmoved by the danger. Picirella’s diary tells the story on the plateau: