The Cost of Courage (8 page)

André Postel-Vinay in his army uniform. He convinced André Boulloche to join the Resistance at the end of 1940.(
photo credit 1.11
)

Robert tells Postel-Vinay he won’t become a clandestine enemy of the Germans. Then he makes a fateful prediction: “I know someone who will jump right in.”

“Who’s that?” asks his friend.

“My little brother, André,” Robert replies.

ANDRÉ BOULLOCHE
has managed to return to France from Morocco at the beginning of September 1940. He is demobilized in Marseille, then quickly makes his way back to Paris, where a family reunion takes place, as joyful as it is unexpected.

He rejoins the Department of Bridges and Highways, where he worked as an engineer before he was mobilized, and he is posted to Soissons, where he is named
adjoint ingenieur-en-chef
(deputy chief engineer). This puts him sixty miles northeast of Paris.

When Robert takes him to meet Postel-Vinay, André responds just as Robert had predicted: He immediately joins the underground.
For the first time since the armistice, he has finally found a way to fight the Germans.

On the surface, André doesn’t seem very emotional. But Postel-Vinay quickly discovers that beneath a placid exterior, André is full of zeal. The two of them agree about everything that matters at this ominous moment. Neither can bear France’s defeat, they share a profound horror of Nazism, and they both feel a compulsion to do something about it. “It was absolutely unbreathable,” said Postel-Vinay. “André was very passionate, and he couldn’t sit still.”

Although Postel-Vinay is four years older than his new recruit, the two men share another quality that pushes them into this treacherous adventure: the impetuousness of youth.

“For the two of us, the Resistance was a kind of lifesaver,” Postel-Vinay explained, “because without it, life no longer had any meaning.” Their decision to join the Resistance is so instinctive, and so immediate, they barely consider the possible consequences — for themselves, or for anyone else.

THE DECISION
of these two young technocrats to join the secret war against the Germans at the end of 1940 is very unusual for Frenchmen of their class. There is hardly any other milieu more unprepared for clandestine activity than bourgeois civil servants, and at this point there is only a small number of Frenchmen actively challenging the German Occupation.

Unlike so many early members of the Resistance, these fiercely committed young men are not outsiders at all: they are neither Jewish nor foreign-born nor Communist. But they share a larger idea about human progress, which makes them passionate about the horror and the absurdity of Nazism — and the perils it poses for everyone.

By now the Third Reich has conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and
Norway, as well as France, and most people consider it invincible at this stage of the war.

However, there remain a couple of skeptics. When the Russian foreign minister, Vyascheslav Molotov, visits Hitler in Berlin in November 1940, the Führer tells him the British are finished. “Then whose bombers are those overhead?” Molotov asks. “And why are we in this bomb shelter?”

Over the next eighteen months, André Boulloche convinces his boss, Pierre Pène, and a fellow engineer, Jean Bertin, to join him in collecting information about German troop movements in the region. He reports on the work of the Germans who are constructing a secret headquarters in a tunnel at Margival, outside Soissons. This is supposed to become Hitler’s headquarters when he invades Britain, but he will not visit it for the first time until 1944, after the Normandy invasion.

Through his own contacts and those of his colleagues with local builders, André obtains the plans of more than 150 structures being built by the Germans, and he believes that they are reaching London.

He also marks off parachute fields and sets up arms depots. To make himself a better secret agent, he memorizes a book that interprets every insignia of the German Army. The book is easy to get when the Germans first arrive in France. It disappears when the Germans realize how useful it can be to their enemies.

Employing primitive spy craft, he sends Postel-Vinay letters written with lemon juice, which only becomes legible when the pages are heated over a candle. Twice a month he goes to Paris to give his information to one of Postel-Vinay’s contacts, who is supposed to transmit it to London. These trips also make it possible for him to visit his parents. But he never discusses his clandestine activities with his family, partly because he doesn’t want to influence his sisters.

MEANWHILE
, in London, Charles de Gaulle is cementing his position as the leader of the Free French. Once France has signed an armistice, the British no longer worry about offending the new French government, and Churchill is ready to grant de Gaulle formal recognition. At this point de Gaulle is still a little-known, recently promoted general, and Churchill hopes that he will attract other, more famous French personalities to his cause in London. But that never happens.

At the end of May 1940, eight hundred small boats had loaded 338,000 men into larger ships during the legendary evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, including 500 French officers and 18,000 French sailors, to prevent them from being captured or killed by the Germans. But all but 50 of these officers and 200 of these sailors will return home to occupied France, rather than stay in Britain to fight the Germans.

“Their idea was to get out of the war no matter what, as quickly as possible,” recalled Sir Edward Spears, the wartime liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle. “We had 15,000 French sailors at Liverpool. I went to speak to them. I tried to persuade them to continue the fighting. Impossible … As for what might happen to England, they couldn’t care less. That was the way it was — we were defeated, and if the French army was defeated, it was impossible to imagine that the English would survive.”

Only one deputy, one admiral, and one leading academic remain with the Free French in London, and de Gaulle notices that all of his earliest supporters are either Jews or Socialists.

A man of mythic pride, de Gaulle is infuriated by his total dependence on the British. His relationship with Churchill vacillates between prickliness and open hostility. But both men share “a love of drama and a deep sense of history” — and they recognize that they need one another. Like André Boulloche and
Postel-Vinay, de Gaulle experienced the defeat of 1940 as a searing humiliation. Some thought de Gaulle felt like a man who had been skinned alive.

There was one other thing de Gaulle had in common with the Boulloches’ ancestors — the general’s father had also believed that Dreyfus was innocent.

One thing that provokes the suspicion of antifascist Frenchmen in London is de Gaulle’s initial reluctance to publicly embrace republicanism. This hesitancy makes some people doubt his commitment to democracy in a postwar France. Early Free French broadcasts from London are introduced with the motto
“Honneur et Patrie
” (Honor and Country), rather than the traditional republican “
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

But the general sees his position as tactical: Especially at the beginning, he tries to avoid all political labels so that he can attract the widest possible support. Not until November 1941 does he finally embrace “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” — to remain “faithful to the democratic principles … which are at stake in this war of life and death.”

The BBC broadcasts quickly become a vital part of the Allied propaganda effort aimed at France. For millions of French people, listening to the outlawed BBC is the main act of rebellion they engage in.

The British give the Free French five minutes on the BBC every night. At the same time, French-language broadcasts of the BBC expand gradually from two and half hours daily in 1940 to five hours in 1942. As the size of the organized Resistance increases in France, these broadcasts also include a growing number of coded messages, which communicate everything from the location of new arms drops by parachute to the launching of the Allied invasion in Normandy.

AT THE END OF
1940, just as André Boulloche starts collecting information for the Resistance, de Gaulle creates a department in London responsible for “action in the occupied territories.” The agents who are eventually recruited are hardly professionals. Almost anyone who volunteers is accepted, once he has satisfied British intelligence that he isn’t a double agent.

Most of de Gaulle’s earliest recruits are from French units that were evacuated from Norway or Dunkirk. At the end of June, his ranks are swelled by the residents of Sein, a rocky island off the western tip of Brittany near Audierne. The Germans don’t reach the island until July, and by then two small fleets of fishing boats have put to sea with 133 men aged fourteen to fifty-one — virtually all the able-bodied men from the island.

Each of the emigrants carries a little food, a liter of wine, whatever money their family has — and the family shotgun, if there is one. After they dock at Falmouth, de Gaulle welcomes them in London. They will become some of the earliest recruits of the Free French. “The island of Sein stands watch duty for France,” the general proclaims.

A week later, a French Army captain named André Dewavrin, who had fought in Norway in the spring, presents himself to de Gaulle at his temporary headquarters at St. Stephen’s House on the Victoria Embankment in London. Nearly all of what Dewavrin knows about spying he has learned by reading thrillers.

De Gaulle is impressed anyway — and at this point he doesn’t have a lot of alternatives. He promotes Dewavrin to major and puts him in charge of what will eventually become the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) or Central Bureau of Intelligence and Action. The BCRA is the product of a merger of two organizations de Gaulle has started after his retreat to London: the Deuxième Bureau (intelligence) and the Troisième Bureau (operations). The original task of the Deuxième Bureau is to gather as
much information as possible about German preparations for what is considered an almost inevitable invasion of England.

Dewavrin gives himself the code name of “Col. Passy,” and he eventually dispatches more than 350 agents to occupied France. Because he depends on the British for transportation and radio equipment, he has to work with the newly created Special Operations Executive, which has an RF (République Française) section to work with the Free French, as well as its own French section (section F), which carries out independent operations in France. There is constant tension among all three bureaucracies, but by the end of 1941, Col. Passy has already managed to send twenty-nine of his own agents to France.

T
hroughout 1941, André continues his work as a highway engineer and a secret agent. The two jobs go well together, because his official responsibilities make it easy for him to travel without arousing suspicion. In his clandestine life, he alternates between diverting supplies destined for the Germans and accumulating a private stock of gasoline for his Resistance unit. He also continues to collect intelligence about German troop movements, to forward to London.

The war news since the fall of France has been relentlessly bleak. The Battle of Britain begins immediately after the Nazis conquer France. Between July and September 1940, Hitler’s Luftwaffe targets Royal Air Force airfields and radar stations, to soften up Britain for what many people still think of as a certain German invasion.

On July 3, the great British iconoclast George Orwell writes in his journal: “Everywhere a feeling of something near despair among thinking people because of the failure of the government to act and the continuance of dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command. Growing recognition that the only thing that would certainly right the situation is an unsuccessful invasion; and coupled with this a growing fear that Hitler won’t after all attempt the invasion but will go for Africa and the Near East.”

Enraged by an RAF bombing attack on Berlin, Hitler switches his targets in the fall to London, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, and other British cities and ports. Beginning on September 7, London is bombed every day (or night) for fifty-seven days in a row. On September 12, the British government issues an invasion alert, but the scare fades quickly.

On November 14, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, mostly built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is almost completely demolished by a German bombardment. By this time the British have already broken the German codes. Some historians believe that no extraordinary measures were taken to protect Coventry, to prevent the Germans from realizing that the British were reading their most secret messages.

Between July and December, German bombs kill 23,002 and wound 32,138 in Britain. Nearly 3,000 Britons are wiped out in a single day at the end of December. But despite the loss of 1,173 RAF planes and 500 pilots, Britain survives the German onslaught. In the spring of 1941, the bombing campaign finally tapers off. Britain’s spirit, stoked by Churchill’s extraordinary oratory, is still intact. As Orwell and others had predicted, Hitler has turned his sights elsewhere, abandoning his cherished plan to conquer the British Isles.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
is broadcast directly into American living rooms by Edward R. Murrow. The newly minted radio
correspondent for CBS News becomes the most celebrated broadcaster of his generation practically overnight. Just thirty-two in 1940, Murrow is a master of vivid images, all of them rendered in the rich baritone of a Broadway actor. Fearless and theatrical, Murrow transfixes his listeners with live reports delivered from London rooftops, as German bombs fall all around him: