Great Escapes (33 page)

On arriving at Arthur’s house, Jack was introduced to the Resistance leader’s wife, Jeanine. Inside the house was one of the American B-17 crew, the rear-gunner named Jetty, together with a German deserter. Over dinner that evening Arthur and his wife conversed in German with the deserter and in French with Jack Gouinlock, who in turn translated the French into English for the American.

The following morning it was all change again. This time Jack was housed in an apartment above a tobacconist’s shop. The owners of the shop, M and Mme Victor Volders, also lived in the apartment with their twelve-year-old son René, and it was with this family that Jack was hidden. Jack discovered later that almost the entire street was heavily involved in working with the Resistance and almost every house had an escaping airman or airmen in it. Opposite the Volders’ apartment lived an old lady named Miss Julia, who, during the First World War, had worked as a spy for the Belgian government. Now deemed to be too old for active service she helped the Resistance by offering her home as a safe house, and was harbouring two of the B-17 crew. Jack carried on correspondence with the two Americans via René, who delivered letters back and forth.

To enable the families to feed their ‘guests’ the Resistance had supplied them with forged ration coupons, which they had been given by allied Intelligence in London.

Time went on and then at the beginning of September news came through that the allies had broken the German resistance and the German army was in full retreat. To Jack Gouinlock it appeared that it would be just a matter of days before the allied troops entered the area. Then suddenly German soldiers appeared rounding up hostages. Word filtered through that two German soldiers had disappeared completely in mysterious circumstances and the military wanted answers. A lorry appeared outside the Volders’ shop and soldiers jumped out and battered down the door that led to the apartment. Jack realised that he was trapped and decided to bluff it out, after all, he had identification stating that he was Jean Victor Joseph Boland, a Belgian citizen.

The Germans burst into the apartment and forced him downstairs and into the street at the point of a bayonet. They were not interested in his protestations about being a Belgian citizen; in fact they did not even ask to see his papers. He was bundled into a column with about thirty other male residents of the street. The group was then marched off out of the town and into the countryside.

At one point the column was halted and two Belgians, who Jack later learned were members of the Resistance, were dragged out and subjected to a severe beating with rifle butts and boots. The two bleeding, battered men were dragged back into line by other Belgians and the march continued. As dusk came, the Germans stopped the column at a nearby farm and requisitioned a barn to be used as lock-up. The German officer shouted at the men in German just before the door was closed and locked. Jack asked one of the other prisoners what the German had said and a cold shiver went right through him when the man told him that they were to be shot in the morning as a reprisal.

All through the night there were moans and weeping coming from the prisoners. Some prayed, others cursed the Germans and the war. At dawn the door to the barn was flung open and the men were marched out. They were handed shovels and told to work in pairs to dig holes 6ft long and 6ft deep. Jack chose an elderly quiet man as his ‘partner’.

As they started digging, Jack watched the officer talking earnestly with two NCOs. In the distance the rumble of guns firing could be heard getting closer and closer. At noon the holes had been dug and the group waited anxiously for what was to happen next. Two of the guards then stepped forward and pulled the two men who had been beaten the previous day and placed them in front of two holes. At the command of the officer the other soldiers lined up. At a given command their rifle bolts rattled as they pushed bullets into their rifle chambers. At another command they raised their rifles to their shoulders followed by the command ‘
Feuer.
’ A volley of shots rang out in the still, cold air and the bodies of the two men fell backwards into the open graves.

Jack Gouinlock felt sick and despite the warmth from the sun he shivered visibly and closed his eyes. The officer turned to the remaining prisoners and Jack waited for his turn to stand in front of the grave that he and his companion had dug. The officer looked long and hard at them all, then said simply, ‘You are free to leave.’

For a moment the only sound that could be heard was that of the distant guns, then as one they all moved and started to run back towards the town. Jack glanced behind him as they went and noticed that the Germans had already climbed aboard a lorry and were speeding away. He reasoned that the Germans had let them go because of the allied army that was now approaching with speed. They would treat the execution of innocent civilians as unjustified and an act of terrorism, and would exact retribution for it. But the shooting of the two Resistance men could probably be justified at the extreme end of the rules of war.

As the group reached the edge of town, Jack saw René Volders at the front of the crowd waving to him. The boy led him to where the rest of the family was waiting and they all headed back to the Volders’ apartment. They passed a number of German soldiers on their way back packing their equipment onto lorries but they were not interested in the family, only the need to get away from the advancing allied army.

The streets were virtually empty as the remnants of the German army retreated. The Volders waited in their apartment to see what was going to happen, when suddenly the unmistakable sound of a Jeep engine became music to Jack Gouinlock’s ears. Looking out of the window he saw an American Jeep coming down the main street with four dishevelled soldiers aboard, armed with machine-guns and carbines. They were an advanced reconnaissance party. The streets suddenly filled with people and British, American and Belgian flags started to flutter from almost every window. Standing in the middle of the street, Jack Gouinlock could not believe his eyes at the number of allied airmen that emerged from houses. He had known that Liége was one of the main centres of the Belgian Resistance movement but the hundreds of allied airmen now in the streets proved the extent of the town’s involvement.

With the invasion of Europe imminent, the Resistance organisations that were struggling to help the ever-increasing number of escaping and evading aircrews looked to
MI
9 for a solution. The decision was taken to hold them in hiding until the invasion had taken place.
MI
9 were faced with the problem of organising the Resistance organisations and the escape lines into collecting all those aircrews that were in the ‘pipe-line’, and moving them into a holding area. The area selected formed a triangle taking in the towns of Le Mans, Chartres and Vendôme.

What was needed was a co-ordinator and
MI
9 persuaded a Belgian pilot, who was serving in the RAF, by the name of Lucien Boussa (codenamed
‘Cousine Lucienne’),
to go to France and set up and organise a holding camp. A fluent French speaker, Boussa was teamed up with a French radio operator by the name of Francois Toussaint. Lucien Boussa had been selected because as a serving officer in the RAF he would be fully conversant with everything to do with the force and would be able to detect any German that may have infiltrated the groups of escaping aircrews.

Lucien Boussa, together with his radio operator, was parachuted into France at the beginning of May 1944. Francois Toussaint was taken under the wing of a local Resistance group, whilst Lucien Boussa made his way to Paris to meet up with the leader of the Comète Line, Baron Jean de Blommaert. Within hours of their meeting, a message arrived from England saying that the invasion was imminent and that the escape lines were to close down with immediate effect. They were told to hide all the airmen until after the invasion when arrangements would be made to move them all out.

Lucien Boussa then contacted the head of the French Forces for the Interior of Eure-et-Loire, Maurice Clavel (Sinclair), who in turn contacted two of the leaders of the ‘Liberation Movement’, Pierre Poitevan (Bichat) and Rene Dufour (Duvivier). They in turn contacted the head of the Resistance organisation for the Châteaudun region, Omer Jubault (Andre). Andre was a former
gendarme
who, together with another
gendarme,
Robert Hakspille (Raoul), had been running the local Resistance group for some time. An informer had compromised their involvement and both men had gone on the run and banded together a number of Resistance fighters. The men knew the region like the back of their hands and on being contacted and made aware of the situation approached all the landowners surrounding the Forest of Fréteval looking for areas within the forest where they could hide groups of men and arms. Farmers, bakers and many other tradesmen were approached and asked to provide food and water for the men.

On 18 May, Lucien Boussa and his radio operator Francois Toussaint arrived at Châteaudun. They were met by members of the Resistance and spirited away on bicycles for the 20km ride to the Forest of Fréteval. On arrival at a small gamekeeper’s cottage behind a dense section of the forest, Lucien Boussa made it his headquarters. Omer Jubault took Francois Toussaint a further 10km to the home of a local doctor, Doctor Chaveau, where radio transmissions were to be made. Omer Jubault’s two children, Ginette and her brother Jean, became the couriers for all the messages between the two sections.

All the Resistance groups in the area were put on full alert and their priorities switched from harassing the enemy to the setting up of camps within the forest for the forthcoming airmen. It is a miracle that the Germans never suspected anything, but such was the national hatred for the Germans and the expectation that the liberation of France was imminent that secrecy was top priority.

The unbelievable problems in helping these allied airmen cannot be overemphasised. Food was rationed well below normal sustenance levels with only just enough to keep families alive, yet somehow food was obtained to feed these extra men without complaint.

Clothing was another problem. Tokens were required to purchase any form of clothing, so when an escaping airman was placed in the hands of the Resistance the first thing that had to be got rid of was his uniform. Once this had been disposed of, the man had to be re-clothed with anything available. Some of the clothes do not bear description: torn, dirty and ill-fitting are just some of the more polite adjectives used by some escapees. Footwear was another problem, as most of the aircrew wore flying boots and these had to be got rid of immediately so as to avoid detection. This problem was alleviated in the Châteaudun area when a local tanner provided leather to a shoemaker in d’Amboise, who then proceeded to make basic shoes in a variety of sizes.

The first of the escaping airmen arrived at the end of May at the railway station at Châteaudun. The acting stationmasters were Jeanne Demouliere and her husband, who were both members of the local Resistance group. Lucien Boussa made his headquarters there initially so that he could monitor the groups as they came in. This was a risky decision to make because on the opposite side of the tracks in a small chateau was a German command post. However, as the station was quite a busy one and used by a large number of people, the escapees filtered through unnoticed.

The first group of fifteen airmen was met by local townspeople, who split them into groups and took them to various homes. After ten to fifteen days they were escorted by other local people, using different routes and varying methods of transport, to the camps in the forest. Every so many kilometres the guides would be changed so as not to draw attention. The groups were monitored at all times by members of the Resistance, some of whom were waiting in the forest camps for their arrival. The risks these local people took were immense because had they been caught there is no doubt that they would have been either shot or sent to concentration camps. Despite the risks there was no shortage of volunteers.

Tents were constructed in camps dotted around the forest. One of the camps was concealed in dense woodland close to a natural spring, which gave the airmen an abundant supply of fresh water. It was also in close proximity to a farm owned by one of the helpers, Jean Fochard and his family.

The farm was also used as a food warehouse for the airmen in the forest. The whole district was involved in one way or another. Some hid airmen before they were taken to the forest, others supplied food (this was undertaken mostly by farmers) and others supplied or created clothes for the airmen.

By 10 June all the airmen who had been hidden in various homes in the district had been delivered to one of the number of camps set up in the forest. Cooking food in the camps was initially the cause of some concern because the smoke could be seen not only from the ground but also from the air. Using charcoal, which was made by one of the helpers and delivered to the camps by his wife, solved the problem. All the furniture used in the camps was made from the resources of the forest itself. Tables and chairs were constructed of tree trunks and branches, beds were made from interwoven branches and mattresses were stuffed with moss and grass. From the air the camps had to be concealed, as German spotter planes occasionally flew over the area, as did allied aircraft who may have thought that the forest was being used to hide tanks and infantry and might have selected it as a target.

The tents had to be camouflaged and all activity stopped when any aircraft were heard flying over the forest. The camps organised themselves into a military routine to prevent boredom and maintain discipline. A series of lookouts were posted around the perimeter of the forest using any high ground available.

As the number of airmen increased, the rules within the camps were rigidly adhered to. Keeping noise to a minimum was of paramount importance as there were a number of German units still operating in the surrounding districts, including a German ammunition dump, and one mistake could mean the downfall of the whole operation. It is to the credit and dedication of everyone concerned that the Germans never discovered the existence of the camps in the forest.