Das Reich (2 page)

In the text, I have taken for granted a little knowledge of Vichy, the Nazi Empire and the SS, and I have not retraced ground that seems to me well-travelled concerning special operations, the training of agents for SOE and so on. There are a host of admirable personal memoirs by former agents, some of which I have listed in the Bibliography. In this book I have sought to tell some of the unknown stories of the secret war.

This is not a history of Resistance or special operations. It is intended to be a portrait, at a critical moment of the war, of one of their great dramas. It is an attempt to establish the context of events. What manner of men and women on both sides did these things? How and why did they do them? There is much stupidity, cruelty and tragedy below, but there are also great heroism and achievement. Some people protest today that too many books continue to appear about World War II. I believe that those of us who write them have no cause to be ashamed as long as such extraordinary stories as this one are still untold.

Guilsborough Lodge,

Northamptonshire

May 1981

At 9.15 p.m. on 5 June 1944, as the first ships of the Allied invasion fleet came within sight of the Normandy shore, the French Service of the BBC began to broadcast its customary
messages personnels
. Through more than three years of tragedy, pessimism, defeat and occupation, through the long struggle to create an armed opposition movement within France, the
messages personnels
had been among the most vital, emotion-charged weapons of Resistance. In flats and farmhouses in the cities and countryside of France, little knots of men and women clustered to listen, at risk of their lives, amidst the static and crackle of distance and German jamming, to the voice of London: ‘
Charles est très malade . . . Marcel aime Marceline . . . Il n’y a pas de bananes . . . La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu . . . Yvette a dix doigts . . .
’ Some of these phrases were as meaningless as they seemed. But many others each night gave
résistants
from Brittany to the Pyrenees, from the Vercors to the Ardennes, their private, prearranged signal to expect a rendezvous with a Lysander on a field outside Paris, a parachute arms drop on a hillside in the Corrèze, or a new wireless operator’s arrival in the Gers.

On 1 May 1944 a most unusual set of
messages personnels
were broadcast. They covered the whole of France, and indicated that the Second Front could be expected within weeks. On 1 June, a second series was transmitted, giving a warning of days. On the afternoon of 5 June, the chief of Special Operations Executive, General Gubbins, and the London chief of the American Office of Strategic Services, Colonel David Bruce, called together on General
Koenig, the Free French officer designated chief of all Resistance operations in France after the invasion. They went through the formality of asking his assent to the transmission of the ‘Action Messages’ that night.

For the rest of their lives, former Allied agents and
résistants
would forget much about World War II, but none would ever forget his or her ‘action message’ on the night of 5 June 1944. George Starr’s message was ‘
Il a un voix fausset
.’ It was his wireless operator, a little English WAAF named Annette Cormeau, who came down from the bedroom where she kept her set to report the news to the little group in the kitchen of a farmhouse at Castelnausur-l’Avignon, in the heart of Gascony. Starr – SOE’s Hilaire – was sitting among the Laribeau family, with whom he lived. He was a laconic, iron-tough mining engineer from Staffordshire who in the past twenty months had built one of the largest SOE networks in France. He was not given to extravagant displays of emotion. He simply grinned and said: ‘That’s it, then’, and began to summon men from other houses in the lonely little hamlet to drive and ride into the night, passing word. Within a few hours, the first explosions on the railways indicated the opening of the attack on communications. As the night advanced, men began to arrive on foot, by bicycle, and charcoal-driven
gazogène
. Exhilarated chatter and laughter echoed among the houses as they broke out the arms hidden in the church and began to pass them out, filling magazines and stripping Brens and Stens of their protective greasing.

Jacques Poirier’s message was ‘
La girafe a un long cou
’. He received it among the
maquis
with whom he was quartered in the lonely dignity of the Château Le Poujade, high above the Dordogne valley. The Germans had relinquished control of much of the Dordogne many months before, confining themselves to occasional punitive sorties. Under his codename Nestor, Poirier was SOE’s agent for eastern Dordogne and Corrèze, in which he had arranged arms drops for several thousand
maquisards
, most of whom were now bursting to make use of their weapons. Poirier
immediately took to his car. That night of 5 June, and through the days that followed, he raced from
maquis
to
maquis
in the woods and hills, pressing on them the request he had been making for weeks. ‘Make as much mess as you can.’

Most of the
résistants
to whom he spoke had never in their lives heard of the Das Reich, the 2nd SS Panzer Division some eighty miles southwards around Montauban in the Tarn-et-Garonne. It was only on the rarest occasions that SOE’s agents, far less
maquisards
, had access to military intelligence from London. They had no means of communicating with other groups except with chronic delay, by courier or personal visit. On the morning of 6 June, the thousands of
résistants
gathering with their arms in the Lot, the Dordogne, the Corrèze and the south-west knew little except that ‘
Le Jour–J
’ had come. They expected to fight but few guessed against whom.

Captain Marius Guedin, lately of the French 60th Infantry Regiment, was one of the few Resistance leaders who had been convinced for months what his men should do. He was a native of Brive-la-Gaillarde, the beautifully named town at the foot of the hills of the Corrèze to which he had returned in 1942 from captivity in Germany. Guedin had been one of the first to begin working towards creating a local Resistance movement, and although he had the bespectacled appearance of a diffident university don, he pursued his plans with fierce single-mindedness. He developed a close relationship with a succession of British agents who came to his area, of whom Jacques Poirier was the latest. He rejected the overtures of De Gaulle’s agents who came to see him, and who sought to exert a measure of direction over the local
Armée Secrète.
By June 1944, his chief in the departmental AS, Colonel René Vaujour, claimed to have some 5,000
maquisards
and secret
résistants
under his control. Guedin was effectively their field commander. He was convinced that, when the invasion came, the Das Reich would move north through his sector to reinforce the German counter-offensive. In March 1944 he gave orders to his men: on D-Day, they would deploy company by
company to cover the bridges of the river Dordogne in south Corrèze and northern Lot. In the early hours of 6 June, throughout the region men who had been secret
rèsistants
for months or years left their homes and their families and began to walk or bicycle to the various rendezvous. Guedin’s
maquisards
, already living openly without the law, broke their camps and moved to join them as his couriers brought the news.

But many others who were to meet the Das Reich Division had no foreknowledge. All through the afternoon of 5 June, at a splendid Georgian mansion in Bedfordshire named Hasell’s Hall, a pretty, dark-haired girl and a cheerful young man in battledress chattered, laughed and pieced jigsaws together without knowing each other’s names. The man was a twenty-two-year-old officer of the Special Air Service named John Tonkin, who had already fought in North Africa and Italy, and made a remarkable escape from German hands to rejoin his regiment. Now he was to be parachuted into France to prepare a landing ground for forty of his men to follow, and attack German communications from a base far behind the lines, south of Poitiers. The house, he wrote later in a letter to his mother,

It was an odd little fluke of war that Tonkin’s men should within the week have directed an air attack on petrol trains intended to move the Das Reich, while the girl, twenty-four years old and with
one mission to France already behind her, should have been captured and sent on the road to execution by the division. Her name was Violette Szabo.

Vera Atkins, one of the most celebrated of SOE’s Baker Street staff, also spent the long day at Hasell’s Hall, after the postponement of the invasion, and thus of their drop, for twenty-four hours. That night, she drove with the girls to the secret aerodrome at Tempsford. Violette Szabo, she said, ‘. . . looked incredibly beautiful, in white marguerite earrings and a marguerite clip that she had bought in Paris on her last mission . . .’ One of the SAS officers approached Vera as they waited, and asked her to take his cufflinks and send them to his mother. Then the Halifaxes taking the British officers and agents to their several destinations disappeared into the darkness at the end of the runway; Vera returned to her car, and at last to Baker Street. There was no celebration of D-Day. They were all much too tired.

At the headquarters of the Der Führer Panzergrenadier Regiment, one of the two armoured infantry brigades of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, on the morning of 6 June a brief signal was received from divisional headquarters at Moissac: ‘Since the early hours of the morning, the invasion has been taking place on the Channel coast. Preparations are to be made for a march.’

In the early afternoon of 6 April 1944, in the conference room of his headquarters in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler and his staff discussed what further units they dared strip from the Eastern Front to reinforce France against Allied invasion. The transcript of their conversation is mangled, but when they begin to discuss the future of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, the Das Reich, the import is clear.

Thus it was that some 2,500 survivors of Battle Group Lammerding, rump of one of the finest armoured divisions Nazi Germany had created, found themselves ordered to abandon the mud and floods of Russia in the spring thaw, and entrain for a move across Europe that would finally lead them to Tulle, Oradour-sur-Glane and Normandy. They left behind their few remaining tanks, vehicles and guns, together with the memory of countless thousands of their dead in frozen graves from the Pripet marshes to the Cherkassy pocket. With infinite gratitude for their deliverance, they began to roll away through East Prussia, on the long journey from the eastern to the western extremity of Hitler’s empire.

It was the high point of German fortunes in the East in 1944. The weather had forced a temporary halt in campaigning. The Russians decided to defer their next offensive until the Allies landed in France. Hitler had a priceless opportunity to shorten his line, to withdraw to defences in depth while he moved men to meet the threat in the West. Instead, as always, he held his ground. His shrinking armies straggled along a front of 1,650 miles. In the centre, divisions averaging only 2,000 men were holding sixteen-mile sectors of the line. Between July 1943 and May 1944, Germany lost forty-one divisions in Russia – almost a million casualties between July and October 1943 alone, 341,950 men between March and May 1944. Even in the months following the Allied invasion in Normandy, German casualties in Russia continued to average four times the number in the West.