Shadow Warrior (8 page)

The massive invasion of the Normandy coast—176,000 men and 1,500 tanks on the first day alone—was a success, if a bloody one. Throughout June, the Germans managed to keep the Allied forces bottled up in Brittany, but then in late July, US general George S. Patton's Third Army broke out of the envelope, driving eastward toward Brest and southwestward toward the Loire Valley. Eisenhower and his deputy, General Omar N. Bradley, became fearful that Patton was outrunning his lines of supply and dangerously exposing his flanks. Third Army intelligence asked for more OSS teams to gather information about German plans and troop movements and to galvanize the maquis to help protect Patton's exposed southern flank. The second week in August, Colby, Favel, and Giry—Team Bruce—were alerted that they were going on a mission.
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“On August 12, after the St. Lo breakout of Patton's Third Army, we were summoned to London,” Colby remembered. “In a nondescript row house, a British officer told us we would be dropped to a maquis network led by Henri Frager, who was known as Jean Marie.” The team was instructed to parachute onto the prearranged landing zone, make contact, and then do everything possible to arm and equip the members of the local resistance. “We didn't need more precise instructions; we knew the basic drill from our training, and the mission of attacking Germans to turn them away from the Allied invasion was obvious.” Frager's network, or “circuit,” was located in the department of Yonne southeast of Paris.
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Wild Bill Donovan and the men and women of the OSS who worked for him were determined to see the conflict in Europe in black and white: the Germans and all who supported them were evil and the enemy; all who opposed the Axis powers were, if not good, Allies. OSS officers in London admitted, however, that the French resistance was a “devil's brew of politics.”
Within the resistance were Gaullists (conservative nationalists, followers of General Charles de Gaulle), communists, and those loyal to General Henri Giraud, commander of French forces in North Africa. Each of the factions wanted to become the dominant political force in postwar France. Some Allied officers, especially the British, had feared that the well-armed resistance groups might use the Normandy landings “to indulge themselves in a first-rate civil war.” Moreover, the maquis was notoriously riddled with German agents and collaborators. And so it was with Frager's circuit, code-named “Donkeyman.”
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Henri Frager was a veteran of World War I who had made a name for himself as an architect during the interwar period. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he found himself once again in uniform. After the fall of France, the soft-spoken, slender, prematurely gray Frager retreated to the countryside and, with the help of the SOE, began organizing the resistance in Yonne. By 1944, Donkeyman would include some five thousand fighters. Frager's right-hand man in this operation was Roger Bardet, who, in 1943, had been captured by the Abwehr, a German military intelligence organization. Under threat of torture and the death of his family, Bardet had agreed to inform for the Germans. In the months that followed, dozens of Donkeyman operatives were inexplicably captured. In February 1944, Bardet introduced Frager to a man named Hugo Bleicher, who posed as an anti-Nazi Luftwaffe officer interested in working for the British. Frager was completely taken in, sharing with Bleicher plans for his circuit's forthcoming operations in Yonne. On July 2, when Frager stepped off a train at the Montparnasse Station in Paris, Bleicher and several Abwehr agents were waiting for him. The Frenchman was executed three months later at Buchenwald.
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By the time of Team Bruce's briefing, none of these developments had come to light. “What should we do if we fail to make contact with Frager or his men?” Colby asked presciently. The briefer seemed taken aback, as if he had never considered such a possibility. Finally, Team Bruce was given the location of a safe house to repair to should it be unable to connect with Donkeyman. Colby and his colleagues were scheduled to take off that night from the air base at Temsford, but the weather closed in. The next day, they learned that Frager had been arrested and that the new head of the Yonne maquis was a man named Roger Bardet. He would be their contact. “We accepted the new order as simply as the first,” Colby recalled, “as though our announced hostess had taken sick and was replaced by a cousin.”
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The following evening—August 14—Team Bruce boarded a converted B-24 bomber named
Slick Chick
for a rendezvous with they knew not what. Only one thing was certain: the mission would be dangerous. Just weeks before, the German High Command had broadcast a warning to would-be saboteurs and guerrillas: “Whoever on French territory outside the zone of legal combat is captured and identified as having participated in sabotage, terrorism, or revolt is and remains a bandit or franc-tireur [guerrilla] and shall consequently be shot, whatever his nationality or uniform.” In fact, the leader of one of the first Jedburgh teams to drop into Brittany, Major John Bonsal, had been stopped at a German checkpoint, identified, and executed on the spot. Of course, being shot might be the most comfortable fate awaiting captured Jedburghs.
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The men who delivered the Jedburgh teams to occupied France were unique, as was their equipment. The pilots—code-named “Carpetbaggers,” officially the 801st Bombardment Group—were volunteers who flew into enemy territory at very low altitude with no lights. Their planes were camouflaged with nonreflective black paint, and all but two of the gun turrets, the ones in the top of the fuselage and in the tail, were removed. Inside, the bomb racks were replaced by specially designed shelves on which sat containers holding submachine guns, grenades, explosives, radios, and boots—the paraphernalia of guerrilla war. The only light inside the B-24 was a small bulb that glowed green, furnished for the navigator so that he could read his maps. Finally, ground crews covered the aperture where the belly turret had been removed with a plywood trapdoor. Colby and his mates would parachute one by one via these “Joe holes”—Joe being the name that Allied parachutists gave themselves—to be followed by the supply containers.
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At 12:45 hours, the pilot announced that the target area was in sight. He circled once, descended, then circled again, at 1,500 feet to make sure he was over the correct location. Satisfied, he gave Team Bruce the go-ahead signal. “The parachute snapped open with a reassuring jolt,” Colby wrote in his memoirs. “We were on our own now, two Free Frenchmen and myself, floating down through the balmy August midnight into the heart of German-occupied France. And I suddenly realized that something was seriously wrong.” The maquis had been instructed to set three bonfires in a triangle; the flames the parachutists saw were in a straight line. Favel thought the fires were from a burning village, but they turned out to be
from a train the Allies had bombed.
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Colby and his mates landed not in a sparsely occupied countryside, but in a town some 25 miles short of their planned drop zone in Yonne. The trio frantically manipulated their chutes to avoid chimneys and rooftops, finally coming to rest in a garden. Their landing was noisy enough, but after the men came the supply containers, which clattered down on the tiled roofs. Awakened, the residents circled around and assured the visitors that they would not be betrayed.

Team Bruce learned that it had landed in the village of Montargis. The locals informed Colby and his colleagues that there was a large German garrison in the nearest town whose soldiers would certainly be alerted by the commotion. The Jeds decided that they would not have time to gather up the supply containers before enemy troops arrived, and so they headed off to the southeast through the open fields. They had side arms, codes, maps, instructions, and 250,000 francs each; they could always radio for more equipment when they met up with Bardet and his men. The immediate task at hand was to avoid the Wehrmacht.
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For a time, Colby, Favel, and Giry followed the tracks of the ruined railroad, but then for security reasons they veered off. They could not have proceeded more than 5 or 6 miles when dawn began to break. By then, of course, the Germans had discovered the supply containers and guessed what was up. With the area crawling with Nazi patrols, the Jeds hid in a shallow ditch. “It was a warm summer day,” Colby remembered, “the air thick with the scent of manure and wild flowers; bees and flies buzzed around us drowsily and one by one we would doze off for a few moments, each with his own private thoughts.” When night fell, they set off again, using their compasses to set a course for the safe house, the location of which they had been given in London. As they journeyed through the starless, moonless night, a terrific thunderstorm blew up, drenching the men and turning the fields into a morass. For fear of becoming separated, the three tied themselves together with their pistol lanyards. A couple of hours after midnight, with lightning flashing and the rain still pouring down, Team Bruce heard voices ahead and then spied the lights of a farmhouse. It was too late for the local families to be up and about. With his comrades covering him from the shadows, Favel knocked on the door. The voices stopped. “Qui est là?” (Who is there?) “Un français,” Favel replied. The door opened. At last some luck. The inhabitants were maquis, and among them was a British radio operator just arrived from London. Colby, Favel,
and Giry immediately notified headquarters of their situation, and the radioman set about contacting the leadership of Donkeyman.
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The next day, another group of resistance operatives arrived in a battered Citroën powered by a charcoal-burning engine. For civilians in occupied France, gasoline was virtually unobtainable; during their training, the Jeds had been taught how to convert engines to run on fuels other than gasoline. From one rendezvous and hand-off to another, the Jedburghs proceeded until they arrived in the village of Sommecaise, where they were ushered into the community's only café. It was filled with heavily armed maquis. Colby, Favel, and Giry were led to a table where a thin man with coal-black hair was sitting, a bottle of red wine and a plate of food in front of him. He eyed the three for a moment and then rose and introduced himself as Roger Bardet. “Where have you been?” he asked. “We've been waiting three days. We had the signal fires ready, but no plane came.”
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After Colby explained about the missed dropped site, Bardet ordered food and drink for the new arrivals. Then Colby got down to business: “We're here to help you fight the Germans,” he said, pulling out his map and spreading it on the table. Where are the Nazis? How many of them are there? How many men do you have under arms? Bardet replied that he had some five hundred members of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and was in contact with several other bands of approximately the same size. About the number and location of the enemy, he seemed consistently vague. If London could send arms, he said, more men could be recruited immediately.

Colby would later write that he never suspected Bardet was a German agent, but he remembered feeling from the outset that something about the man was not right. “He had the look of a minor civil servant, a petty functionary, going through the motions instead of leading,” Colby wrote. In the days and weeks that followed, Colby's distaste for Bardet would only grow. The Frenchman never initiated action and always found reasons to oppose the proposals of his more daring colleagues. Colby got the feeling that Bardet's subordinates were paying him lip service out of respect for Frager's memory, but were in fact acting on their own.
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While Giry occupied himself with communications, Colby and Favel turned to their specialties. Bardet's men were organized into companies and squads. The Jeds trained the men on the weapons they had available before moving on to small unit tactics. The Germans were garrisoned in two nearby towns, and enemy convoys were lightly guarded. Soon the
maquis were staging hit-and-run attacks on the convoys, with Colby and Favel advising them every step of the way. Bardet continued to block any larger-scale operation, insisting that London had instructed him to lay low and await word before leading a general offensive.
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The Jeds were soon introduced to one of the most important members of the Donkeyman network, Marguerette “Peggy” McKnight, code-named “Nicole.” She had been recruited by the SOE in March 1944, when several agents had overheard her speaking near-perfect French in a London restaurant. At the time, she was working as a shorthand typist. When the SOE approached her about serving as a spy and courier in occupied France, she volunteered immediately. The British were in a desperate hurry; D-Day was fast approaching, and London needed as much information on German gun emplacements and troop movements as possible. Peggy's training was therefore short and intense. Most of her fellow recruits were allowed a minimum of four parachute jumps before being inserted. Because of bad weather, Peggy experienced only one, and that was from a basket suspended under a giant football-shaped air balloon. Some of the Jeds who had to jump from such a contraption found the experience terrifying. When leaping out of an airplane, the backwash from the propeller popped the chute open almost immediately. There was no backwash from the balloon. All but the last 150 feet of the 700-foot drop was free-fall.
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“Nicole” parachuted into France on the night of May 6, 1944. Leading her reception committee were Henri Frager and Roger Bardet. Over the next three months, Nicole lived on the edge. The Frager-Bardet circuit would recruit, train, raid, and spy and then disband to avoid detection and capture by the Germans. “The first time I met Roger, I took an intense dislike to him,” Peggy McKnight later recalled. “He never looked you straight in the face. . . . [He] looked to me like a hunted man.” There were other traitors in the midst of the Yonne-Normandy maquis. Peggy was with Frager at the village of Cezy near Sommecaise when the maquis chief confronted and shot Richard Armand Lansdell and Alain de Laroussilhe, two French collaborators who had just botched an assassination attempt on another Donkeyman leader. The twenty-one-year-old Englishwoman excelled as a courier, routinely moving through German checkpoints by automobile to deliver messages to other resistance camps. Following the Normandy landings, she acted as a liaison between Allied command posts and the maquis.
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