Shadow Warrior (9 page)

After barely escaping from a German roundup, she began stowing a submachine gun in her Citroën. Peggy did not immediately confide in the members of Team Bruce concerning her suspicions about Bardet, but from the time she hooked up with Colby and his colleagues at Sommecaise, she took orders only from them. In truth, she became the fourth member of Team Bruce.

Like Lawrence during the early days of the Arab revolt, Colby was in dire need of a man on horseback, a natural leader to whom the resistance could rally. He found him in the person of “Colonel Chevrier” (Adrien Sodoul), a sixty-year-old former army officer in the French reserve who in peacetime had practiced law in Metz. At their first meeting, Chevrier imperiously informed the Jedburghs that he had been appointed by none other than Charles de Gaulle to be maquis commander for the entire Yonne district. At the time, his followers numbered no more than twenty, but that quickly changed. Where Bardet was secretive, aloof, and passive, the colonel was, in Colby's words, “flamboyant, charismatic, constantly on the move.” Within days, Chevrier was in touch with all the other resistance chiefs in the department, who together commanded some two thousand fighters. Colby mediated between Bardet and Chevrier, persuading the two men to agree to rule by committee. Chevrier soon came to dominate the Yonne directorate the way de Gaulle had come to dominate the Free French National Committee (the French government-in-exile). With the Allied breakout at St. Lo in mid-April and Patton on the move, Roger Bardet had come to see the handwriting on the wall. In hopes of covering his tracks, he became one of the more active and dependable resistance leaders.
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Chevrier reiterated what Bardet had said when he and Colby had first met—what the resistance needed above all else were arms and ammunition. By now, Giry had received a new radio from London. Team Bruce, together with Chevrier, picked the best drop zones, generally secluded fields and pastures in the countryside. Giry would radio the coordinates of the location together with some innocuous code phrase, such as “Le vin est rouge” (The wine is red). Every evening the men of Team Bruce would listen to the BBC news broadcast to France, paying special attention to the
messages personnels
that followed the program's theme, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. If they heard the code phrase, they knew that the drop was to be that night
at that particular location. During the first two weeks of operation, Team Bruce coordinated more than a dozen drops, which provided thousands of rifles and carbines, machine guns, and bazookas to resistance fighters. Donkeyman doubled and then tripled in size. “Straight fighting job ahead,” Team Bruce reported to London on August 21. “Sabotage platoon changed to heavy weapons.”
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As Patton's Third Army advanced relentlessly toward the Third Reich, tens of thousands of German soldiers were on the move south of the Loire River in an effort to reach the fatherland ahead of the Allied armies. Only a shallow river separated the Americans and as many as 100,000 enemy soldiers. Patton was not concerned. “Forget this goddamned business of worrying about our flanks,” he told his staff. “Some goddamned fool once said that flanks must be secured and since then sons-of-bitches all over the world have been going crazy guarding their flanks.” When the commander of his southernmost unit expressed concern about the tens of thousands of Wehrmacht across the Loire, Patton advised, “Just ignore 'em.” Patton was not as foolhardy as it seemed. The Allied code-breaking operation Ultra had revealed that the Germans south of the Loire had strict orders to extricate themselves from France as quickly as possible in order to defend their homeland.
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Patton may not have been worried about his right flank, but his superior, General Bradley, now commander of the Twelfth Army Group, was. In an effort to slow Patton's advance, the Wehrmacht was employing Germans who spoke perfect, Americanized English. They would talk their way into Allied camps and once there, shoot officers, blow up ammunition dumps, and in general create havoc. At Bradley's direction, Third Army intelligence sent word to Donkeyman that it needed assistance, and Colby and Favel made their way through German lines to find out exactly what the US forces required. Colby carried no identification papers, only a cyanide pill. At the first American outpost he and Favel encountered, he announced that he was Major Colby of the OSS. For his efforts, he was handcuffed and taken to headquarters. The officer in charge asked him where he had trained. “Fort Benning,” Colby replied. Where was the post office, the laundry, the theater? When the correct answers were forthcoming, the handcuffs came off and the conversations began. Colby's interrogator was Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, a man who would later partner with Colby in Vietnam. Eventually, the Jeds were forwarded to Patton's
headquarters, where they provided as much information as they could on enemy troop movements and promised more intelligence as well as maquis harassing actions to prevent a German attack on the Third Army's flank.
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Upon their return to the field, Colby and Favel had Giry radio London, asking that their region be given priority for air drops. With additional arms and equipment in hand, the maquis stepped up its attacks. On August 26, Giry reported to London: “Americans contacted and coordinating. Giving information, holding towns and acting local security. Auxerre, Avallon, Joigny, held by FFI. . . . Continually attacking groups of retreating Germans.” Typical was an operation in which US troops, the maquis, and Team Bruce cooperated in assaulting a column of 1,500 German troops making its way from Montargis to Auxerre. The force was too formidable for the resistance fighters to handle alone, so Colby asked the nearest American units to help. C Troop of the 2nd United States Cavalry led the assault. As the American tanks smashed the enemy formation, the FFI lingered on the edges, picking off stragglers and providing intelligence. There was another reason, Colby recalled, for American troops to take the lead. If the Germans believed that they were dealing with the FFI, whose captured members they had systematically tortured and executed in the past, they would fight to the finish rather than surrender. When the firing stopped, only a handful of the enemy had survived, and the resistance had captured a large cache of arms, ammunition, and fuel.
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As the lead tank battalion of the 4th Armored Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Abrams, drove east, Team Bruce had its maquis blow up one bridge after another, some to protect the Americans' flank and some to cut off retreat by elements of the Wehrmacht that had been trapped. Much of the crucial intelligence that flowed into Colby's camp and subsequently to the Third Army came from Peggy McKnight. On a typical outing, she bicycled some 40 kilometers from Gien past Briare and Cosne on the Loire, reporting back on bridges that had been destroyed, the location of enemy troops, and the state of the local resistance.
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As the Germans retreated, the FFI was assigned an additional job by SHAEF. Chevrier, whom the Allies had officially recognized as the principal maquis leader in Yonne, and his men were to occupy and govern the liberated towns along the Germans' escape route. On August 26, Chevrier's forces rolled into the provincial capital of the neighboring department of Auxerre. All the while, Colby and Favel moved in and out of the colonel's
headquarters, advising, coordinating, supervising more air drops, and participating in an occasional firefight.
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The liberation of Yonne and the Loire was accompanied by one continuous celebration. Joyous crowds of villagers greeted the Jeds and the maquis. They were kissed by the women, hugged by the men, showered with flowers, and treated to an endless round of banquets featuring the local cuisine, gallons of wine, and tearful, patriotic speeches.

In mid-August, French and American forces landed on France's Mediterranean coast and began making their way up the Rhone Valley. Team Bruce played a key role, transmitting information on local conditions and enemy positions as these new forces and the Third Army linked up. By September 14, the drama had all but ended. “All Germans gone from whole area,” Team Bruce radioed London. “No further need of arms.” After the war, Roger Bardet would be arrested and convicted of treason. Bill Colby would be awarded the Bronze Star and eventually the Croix de Guerre for his actions in France.
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On September 17, Team Bruce received orders to proceed to Paris and await further instructions. The Frenchmen could now use their real names. En route to the capital, Favel—that is, Camille LeLong—Colby, and Giry—Roger Villebois—took a slight detour so that Villebois could rendezvous with an old flame.

Paris was a swirl of Allied uniforms and joyous civilians. The celebrations that had awaited Team Bruce in village after village in Yonne were going nonstop in France's liberated capital. Colby managed to rendezvous with other surviving Jeds, including Robert Ansett, a fellow Columbia law student. Ansett had been part of a team that had captured fleeing French collaborators, some of whom were high-ranking officials of the now defunct Vichy regime. In the process, Ansett had come into possession of Vichy vice premier Pierre Laval's black Cadillac. Just before boarding his flight to London, Ansett bestowed the luxurious auto on his friend as a Jedburgh legacy.

In the midst of the partying, Bill found time to visit his father, Elbridge, who was then serving on the staff of General Courtney H. Hodges's First Army.
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The colonel was immensely proud of his son's exploits, and perhaps a bit envious. There was still more fighting to come, however, and the father said goodbye to his son with a mixture of anticipation and dread.

Team Bruce was scheduled to drop into Alsace on the Franco-German border, but the Wehrmacht evacuated the area before the operation could be launched. Colby recalled that his one year of college German did not qualify him for a drop into the Reich—and so he repaired to London and requested assignment to China, where the war with Japan was still raging. It was not to be.
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W
hen Colby arrived in London in October 1944, it appeared that the war might be over by Christmas or shortly thereafter. Allied armies were driving across France and had penetrated into Belgium and the Netherlands. But the Reich's disintegration was illusory. The führer was gathering his forces for a fight to the end. Soon the Germans had established a stable front and, unbeknownst to SHAEF, were preparing for a major counteroffensive that would eventually become known as the “Battle of the Bulge.” The Allies would survive that counterthrust, but it was a near thing. Eisenhower would resume the offensive, but Allied forces would not cross the bridge at Remagen into Germany until March 8, 1945. Meanwhile, the Red Army had swept into Finland, pushing some 150,000 German soldiers into Norway. The OSS was given the task of keeping those forces bottled up in Scandinavia so they would not become a factor in the final battle for Germany. A popular uprising in Norway, such as the one that had occurred in France, was not feasible. At one time, there had been some 350,000 German troops in the country. At its largest, the Norwegian Home Force had numbered 40,000, with only half being armed.
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In December 1944, Gerry Miller, the OSS officer in charge of the Jedburghs, summoned Major Colby to his office. Would he be willing to take command of the OSS's Norwegian Special Operations Group (NORSO)? Miller asked. A hundred Norwegian Americans had been operating in occupied Europe and were currently out of a job; OSS wanted to turn them into Jedburghs and then drop them into Norway to sabotage the Nordland Railway—the railway over which the German High Command was planning to transport 150,000 crack ski troops to the fatherland. Colby
immediately accepted. He was bored, tired of waiting for the assignment to the China-India-Burma theater. As an afterthought, Miller asked, “Do you ski?” Colby assured him that he did; as captain of the Burlington, Vermont, ski team, he had traversed the Green Mountains, skiing down its slopes and then climbing back up them with his equipment strapped to his back (this was in the days before mechanized chair lifts). Colby had no idea at the time how valuable that experience would become.
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Some of the NORSO volunteers were part of the larger Norwegian exile force that had fought alongside a dozen other exile units from Nazi-occupied countries. The Norwegians' leader had been the colorful and audacious Colonel Serge Obolensky, who had served in the St. Petersburg Imperial Guards and was a personal friend of Wild Bill Donovan. Others were Norwegian Americans tapped by the OSS for sabotage work in Scandinavia; they had been training since 1943, but at the time of Colby's appointment, they were resting and recuperating at Dalnaglar Castle, an ancient Scottish redoubt in the foothills of the Grampians. More than a hundred of the Norwegians and Norwegian Americans had volunteered, three times the number the operation would require. As with the Jedburghs, they would have to be weeded. They were all tough, hard men, tougher than he was, Colby would later remark. But they accepted his decisive, understated leadership. Some had gone through the course at Benning, but for those who had not, there was parachute training. On Saturday evenings, NORSO's only time off, the trainees consumed vast quantities of single-malt whiskey. Colby thanked his stars that the nearest military police station was 50 miles away. Sometimes he drank with the men; sometimes he retired to peruse his copy of
Seven Pillars
.
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By mid-January, Major Colby had chosen the thirty-five men who would make the long and perilous journey across Scandinavia to the far reaches of Norway. The Carpetbaggers could fly their blacked-out B-24s only during the full moon, when the planes could navigate by the light reflected off rivers and lakes. Bad weather postponed the first attempt. At February's full moon, Miller and Colby dispatched an advance team under Captain Tom Sather. It included a skilled radioman, Borge Langeland, who would help to guide the B-24 to its destination. Just as the plane neared its drop zone, however, fog set in, and the team had to turn back. Only by jettisoning every piece of equipment, indeed, everything that was not bolted down, did the B-24 manage to make it back to Harrington, its home field
in England. March's full moon found NORSO desperate. With each passing day, more German troops were moving down the rail line from Narvik in the north to Trondheim, where they were transported by ship to the embattled Reich. Colby and his men had selected a drop site and were prepared to go when the Norwegian exile newspaper in London reported that the area had been occupied by German troops. With the help of Herbert Helgeson, a Norwegian resistance leader who had been smuggled out of Norway through Sweden, NORSO arranged for another drop site. Finally, on March 24, Gerry Miller drove out to Harrington to wish Colby and his men bon voyage.
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