The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (30 page)

As these night-time deliveries were dependent on ‘Charlotte’, the rather romantic code-name for the full moon, and the moon-period that lasted a few days either side, Christine enjoyed some surprisingly busy nights in the remote fields and grazing pastures of rural south-west France. Occasionally the team might find themselves surrounded by cows as the curious animals came to get a closer look. Once while waiting for a drop, Francis saw other figures wandering around a building in the middle of ‘their’ field. Creeping up behind them he found himself facing a man with a Sten submachine gun just like his own. ‘We looked at our Stens and we said, I think we must be on the same side’, he told Christine, laughing.
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But usually it was quiet work, with just the sounds of insects and low calls between the team as they prepared to light the torches, bicycle lamps or the small creosote and oil fires made in biscuit tins that guided the supply planes to the drop site. Sometimes the moonlight was so bright that the men joked they should have brought newspapers to help pass the time before the sound of an engine – memorably described by Ben Cowburn as ‘a 5000 hp roar of defiance’ – finally heralded the arrival of a small dark shadow in the sky.
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It was not unusual for at least one of the parachutes to fail on these sorties, especially if the flight came from Algiers, where a shortage of silk meant that parachutes were sewn from heavier Egyptian cotton. If a chute failed completely, its metal container hit the earth with such force that it would be practically unrecognizable. Even when no one was killed or injured as a result, excavating these flattened containers was demoralizing work, as once prised open they usually only offered up rifles with their butts broken, or the barrels bent. Cardboard packaging, also used by the teams in Algiers, would often break up in mid-air, sometimes showering Christine and the team with explosives and detonators and leaving much of the munitions unusable. But on good evenings they might find eight or nine undamaged containers, and many more of the lighter packages, which had treats shoved among the supplies: cigarettes, tobacco, slabs of chocolate, jars of butter, tins of food, warm clothes, and even notes of encouragement.

Once collected, the containers and packages were stowed in old houses or under fodder in barns, in caves or in wells. A few nights later the team would be back, unclipping the containers lengthways like ripe pea-pods, and checking their haul. Christine then arranged the deliveries: guns, ammunition, explosives, detonators and chocolate for small bribes to the sabotage teams; silencers to those men ‘who could not be trusted to use a knife successfully’; extra Stens, heavier arms, clothes and any parachute silk that could be made into clothes or tents to the Maquis; radio batteries to Albert, whom she daily blessed for saving her from the necessity of putting her own wireless training to the test; bicycle tyres, ration cards and cash to Francis.
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There was never enough of anything, but the only items missing from the shopping lists sent to London were extra lethal tablets. A contact in the hotel where the Luftwaffe local HQ was stationed had floated the idea of lacing the soup. ‘No’, London pencilled against the suggestion; that level of indiscriminate killing was taking things too far, even for the makers of exploding bicycle pumps and detonating horse manure.
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As a courier, Christine was also responsible for conveying messages between the well-dispersed members of Francis’s network, and between them and the Maquis. Travelling almost constantly through enemy-held territory, within a few weeks she had made contact with the more than fifty cells of the Jockey circuit, making her the only person besides Francis who knew all the key personnel. She ‘worked hard’, Francis noted, and had quickly become invaluable.
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For security, all messages were delivered in person and usually from memory, although Christine would sometimes carry an annotated cigarette paper that, if need be, she could easily lose, or even swallow. As a woman she avoided the suspicion that any able-bodied man moving around France by train now generated, but the constant travelling was suspicious in itself and with her dark eyes and hair she was still an obvious target for Nazi guards on train or road controls. Francis suggested she cycle but she absolutely refused, telling him that bikes made her ‘shudder’ and she would ‘rather make twenty parachute drops than accompany him twenty yards on a bike’.
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Staying in cheap lodging houses, and always dressed in a modest but immaculate blouse and skirt, Christine spent the whole time trying to play down the glamour attached to being a British agent in France, the very glamour that Francis admitted he found ‘a tremendous advantage’ in the field.
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Good communications were vital, not only to coordinate operations, but because resistance circuits were networks ‘irrigated by personal trust’.
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It was not just about personal security; it was about staying sensitive to the various political allegiances of the different groups: Communists; Socialists; Gaullists who like their general felt that nobody should operate in France without their knowledge and consent; regular soldiers ‘who were the best of them’; those Francis called the ‘Dynamic Active’ who were attracted by pure patriotism and the need for action; and the natural outlaw element whom he described as ‘Marseilles gangsters in port-loafers with a taste for adventure’.
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The Communists were criticized for taking overt actions that might lead to civilian reprisals, but when it came to getting things done they were generally considered the most effective, and not above hijacking an operation, stealing the explosives and equipment for the job, and doing it first.

Above all, Christine had to keep the men motivated while continually reinforcing Francis’s policy of sticking to targeted hit-and-run operations and deferring any overt uprising until the Allies had landed in the south, when their combined work would have maximum impact. It helped that she made friends everywhere, partly because she was brave and reliable, and always willing to stop and listen, but also because she was an outsider. Christine’s motives were clear: she was, like the French, working with the English voluntarily to defeat a common enemy, but she remained, to Francis’s deep admiration, ‘a completely independent human being, answerable to nobody’.
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In addition, she was more experienced than just about anyone there, a professional among amateurs. Francis soon noticed that ‘any society Christine moved in, a group of formidable orthodox French officers, or a group of extremely simple peasants working under Communist leadership, the same reaction would be felt: here is someone we can rely on without asking a single question, with no hesitation … she was admired by people who’d only met her for two or three minutes, as being someone quite out of the ordinary’.
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Christine was able to talk to anyone, from any walk of life, with neither false humility nor haughty self-satisfaction. In fact she seemed to disregard herself entirely, always giving her full, flattering, attention to those she was with, and fixing them with her ‘searchlight’ gaze as effectively as she had the officers in Cairo.

As well as the active groups, Francis believed that the great majority of the French population were passive resisters. SNCF railway staff provided overalls, spanners and travel passes, actively sabotaged tracks and locomotives, drained engine oil, and misrouted German troops and supplies. Large numbers of the Gendarmerie supported the resistance, too, and would occasionally arrest members of the Jockey circuit on one side of Nazi checkpoints only to release them safely unsearched on the other. Only a tiny proportion of the population, ‘a very bad type indeed’, Francis wrote bitterly, actively collaborated.
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These ranged from barbers, barmen or brothel-keepers paid to inform on their clients, to the Milice, the uniformed paramilitary police force created by the Vichy government – possibly the most loathed of all Free France’s enemies.

On a hillside overlooking Guillestre, a few days after de Gaulle had issued instructions to the resistance to execute every member of the Milice, a Jockey team brought a
milicien
to Francis. The man’s hands were tied at the wrists. A few questions elicited his name, that he was just twenty years old, had joined the Milice of his own accord, and did not know what this meant for him now. Francis told him it meant execution. Then he shot him in the back of the head. The young collaborator was buried on the spot. ‘I had to do that because I couldn’t ask someone else to do it’, Francis later said with obvious difficulty about the execution.
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With no facility to keep the man a prisoner, and the names and addresses of the circuit compromised, the principled pacifist had had no other option.

Over time, the Jockey cells had become cleverer and more daring in their operations. It was far more effective to put a train out of action inside a tunnel, requiring the engine to be pulled out before repairs could be made, and if the crane coming to the scene could be hit too, so much the better. Christine supported certain sabotage attacks, helping to disrupt most of the roads and the main railway lines along which the Germans were sending reinforcements north, including the Route Hannibal and the Route Napoléon. As well as trains, the circuit was now attacking aircraft, bridges and oil and petrol depots, and increasing their ambushes on Wehrmacht troops. Smaller ‘mosquito bite’ operations, involving ripping down phone lines, pouring sand into oil containers, and changing the destination labels on German supply trains, kept up the groups’ spirits while they waited for the delivery of munitions. By midsummer even a tree across a road could cause the enemy hours of delay as they searched the surrounding woods, firing into the undergrowth. An excellent shot, Francis always carried a Mauser. He had been issued with a Colt .45 both times he left for the field, only to watch one thrown into a river the night he arrived, and report the second as ‘lost’. Christine, whose revolver had smashed on arrival, preferred not to carry a gun.
*

All in all, the Jockey circuit was proving a ‘serious menace to the enemy’, and Francis’s personal leadership in both organizing and carrying out the actions was endearing him greatly to his men, and to Christine.
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Delighted to be in the field again, with a renewed sense of purpose and a regular rush of adrenalin, Christine was thoroughly enjoying herself and, Francis noticed with a hint of pride, even ‘in the most difficult situations, she would sometimes be shaking with laughter’.
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Christine and Francis were the perfect partners in crime. Needing next to no direction, she was soon in effect acting as his second-in-command, usually on her own initiative, and becoming notably cooler the tighter the situation. ‘Christine is magnificent’, Francis signalled Brooks Richards in Algiers a few weeks after her arrival. ‘What couldn’t I have done if she had been here three months ago!’
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His wire almost crossed with one from Christine filing her own, similar report. ‘Dear Brooks, “Roger” is a magnificent person. The unity of the whole of the south of France depends upon him’, she enthused before demanding, ‘you must support him and back up his prestige’.
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Brooks Richards didn’t mind the lecture; he trusted Christine’s judgement, and was delighted that this difficult but brilliant agent was so effectively employed.

Magnificent, magnificent. There was a strange symmetry to the partnership between Christine and Francis. Both were highly trained but essentially self-motivated, guided above all by a deeply held moral code. Both were superb at self-preservation, positive, popular, cool-headed in a crisis, but at the same time hugely vulnerable, being hunted by a Gestapo who not only had both of their photographs but were offering large sums for their arrest. And both were absolutely dedicated to their countries’ shared cause: the defeat of Nazi Germany. The British would later maintain that Francis was ‘one of the most successful agents we ever sent into France’, and his partnership with Christine would make SOE history.

11: THE BATTLE OF VERCORS

On the beautifully clear morning of 14 July 1944, less than a week after arriving in France, Christine and her new friend Sylviane Rey took part in a defiantly patriotic Bastille Day parade in medieval Die, in the Drôme valley. Although it was not yet half past nine, the air in the little mountain town was already warm and the tables outside the café-bar were busy, when the now familiar drone of engines made Christine glance up. Soon everyone was watching in awe. Seventy-two silver American ‘Flying Fortresses’, with a fighter escort circling round the heavier four-engine bombers, were coming in, very low, twelve in a line, bringing supplies to the Maquis camps up on the wooded plateau of the Vercors. The planes ejected their containers which separated, caught on their parachutes and drifted momentarily in the haze. The local curate estimated there were over a thousand red, white and blue chutes, the different colours indicating their contents but also making a powerful statement on the first Bastille Day since the Allied invasion of France. It was a historic moment. In June, thirty-six British-based American Air Force Liberators had brought a few hundred containers, but this was the largest daylight sortie of the war, and the Allies’ greatest effort to help the French Maquis. The seventy-two planes at Vercors were part of a force of 400 Flying Fortresses organized by Gubbins with authority from General Eisenhower. ‘The effect of these great planes flying in swarms low over the centre and south of France, dropping their loads to selected areas’, Gubbins wrote proudly, ‘was like an electric shock of stimulation.’
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Certainly Christine, Sylviane and half the village were galvanized to set off at once and help collect the supplies.

Up in the Vercors hills the maquisards were elated, literally shouting in joy. ‘The sky was filled with a hundred Allied planes glittering in the sunlight’, one recorded. The planes flew over the landing strip while fixing their positions, and then circled round again, flying low this time, and ‘sowing hundreds of parachutes which burst open in the blue sky like the corolla of white flowers, descending joyously … it was a magnificent fête!’ ‘A splendid spectacle!’ another wrote in his diary, ‘the noise filled the whole plateau and must have been heard in the plain of Valence.’
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Then the planes dipped their wings in salute, catching the sun one last time, and ‘vanished into the clouds’. More containers were dropped in this sortie than in all the preceding months, over a thousand altogether, and among the Sten guns, ammunition and clothes were boxes of cornflakes and packets of American cigarettes tied with tricolore bands and handwritten messages: ‘Bravo lads. Vive la France!’
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