South West Secret Agents E-Book

Laura Quigley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 293

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

True tales of Second World War spies from across the West Country have been collected together for the very first time in this fascinating book. From the rescue operations as the exodus from France began to the secret guerrilla army in Devon and Cornwall, this book will amaze and intrigue with the incredible stories of Jasper Lawn of N51, the Helford Flotilla and the first escape routes for POWs, agents and crashed airmen.

Leseprobe

For my parents, Rob and Carol.They took me with them to see the world, brought me up to appreciate the past and taught me to recognise a great story. Thanks for all the adventures.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

In Memoriam

1 Exodus

2 Saving Anne de Gaulle

3 Moreau on Board

4 The Home Front

5 Edmundson and Friends

6 Lebensraum

7 Moreau in Trouble

8 Pip Jarvis in Dangerous Waters

9 Jasper Lawn’s Secret War

10 Crossing the Channel

11 Escape from Dieppe

12 Getting Home

13 Bonaparte Beach

14 Killing ‘Pimpernel Smith’

15 Gunner Rée

16 The Spy Who Never Was

17 The End of the Road

Timeline of the Second World War

Notes and Further Acknowledgements

A List of the Agents

References

Copyright

IN MEMORIAM

When people tell stories of Britain from the Second World War, they often talk of ‘the few’. I prefer to talk of ‘the many’ who risked and fought and laboured; if they had failed, there would be few of us left to write these stories. This book describes the lives of many who took part in secret operations, but there were many more, many who took those secrets to their graves, many who kept silent even after all the fighting was over. Of course sometimes there must be silence, but sometimes the world should be filled with the voices of the many.

Much of the activity of these stories is located in western Europe rather than in the south west itself, and I make no apologies for that – these stories are about the agents who brought people home and made the hazardous journeys back and forth across the Channel at a time when Europe was a fortress and at times when there seemed to be no hope of ever defeating the Nazis. And of course these stories are about the people who helped them.

At the outset, I would like to thank the following agents’ relatives and friends who have contacted me to offer stories and photographs – I couldn’t have done it without your incredible contributions. I just hope this book is a worthy tribute.

Dr Bruce Harris is associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Bond University in Queensland and the younger son of Flight Engineer Sergeant Charles ‘Chas’ William Harris, navigator of the ‘Walrus L2312’ seaplane (see Chapter 2). Sadly Dr Harris’ elder brother Richard Harris died in the 1970s in a car accident, never knowing the facts behind their father’s disappearance. Dr Harris is still investigating the Walrus’ mission and has helped me with an astonishing amount of new information for which I am very grateful. For more on the Walrus’ mission and her crew, please see Dr Bruce Harris’ excellent website: www.walrus2014.com.

Alan Hall is researching and writing about the last mission of Walrus L2312 (see Chapter 2). I’m looking forward to reading his book coming out soon, with the working title: Four Men And The Walrus. Alan has generously corrected my work and contributed a great deal of new research to the case. Any mistakes in this book are definitely my own!

Access to the wartime diaries of Captain Cyril and Doris Wellington (see Chapter 5), along with related photographs, was kindly provided by their daughters Miss Ann Wellington and Mrs Margaret Gardner – brief diary excerpts have been quoted with their kind permission. If you would like to read the original diary entries, with extracts up until November 1942, they have generously given permission for it to be reproduced on the excellent website of the British Resistance Archive, researched and hosted by the Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team (CART). You can find the diary here: www.coleshillhouse.com/wartime-diaries-of-captain-cyril-and-doris-wellington.php.

Special thanks also to Nina Hannaford, one of CART’s excellent researchers, for her invaluable work and for putting me in contact with Mrs Margaret Gardner who gave me even more wonderful information about her parents and their experiences. See the CART website for more fascinating details of all the Auxiliary Forces around Britain: www.coleshillhouse.com. If you have any more information about the Auxiliary Forces, please contact Nina Hannaford at [email protected].

Philip Jarvis is the son of Pip Jarvis of the Inshore Patrol Flotilla (see Chapter 8). Philip not only shared with me the stories on his excellent website: www.adept-seo.co.uk/inshore-patrol-flotilla/ but also let me use the photographs. Again, any mistakes are definitely my own. Thanks also to Philip’s family for their encouragement and support!

Sharon Lawn is the daughter of Jasper Lawn, coxswain of the N51, P11 and L’Angèle-Rouge (see Chapter 9). Sharon and her brother Raymond Lawn were very generous, sharing memories of their father, offering photos and correcting early drafts. Thanks to John Davies-Allen too for contacting me, offering resources – including the wonderful archives from www.islandrace.com (sadly no longer active) – and putting me in contact with Sharon and Raymond.

EXODUS

Maurice Southgate opened his eyes. He was in the water and the water was on fire. As he struggled to stay afloat, he realised the Lancastria was sinking and he wasn’t alone out there in the open sea. Over 2,000 desperate survivors were in the water amongst the dismembered bodies, wreckage and burning fuel.

The naval port at Brest, France. (Author’s collection)

The nearest French port, Saint-Nazaire, was over 5 miles away. England’s south-west coast was 300 miles to the north, across the Breton peninsula and the English Channel. It was June 1940 and over 190,000 of the British Expeditionary Forces and their allies – French, Poles, Belgians – were still stranded in south-western France, gathered at the harbours around Brest and desperately awaiting the flotilla of ships sent from Plymouth, Falmouth and other British ports to rescue them.

Tens of thousands of them had previously waited at Dunkirk but the priority there had been to get the fighting men away, leaving signallers, mechanics, clerks and translators like Southgate to be harassed south by the relentless invading forces. Some 5,000 British servicemen were forced to surrender at Dieppe, surrounded by German tanks before the British evacuation fleet could reach them.

Every kind of ocean-going ship available was despatched to collect the remaining forces – trawlers, destroyers, ferries, cross-Channel steamers, French, Polish, Dutch and British, even cruise ships like the Lancastria, a British Cunard liner commandeered as a troop carrier for the war.

At La Pallice, the British officer in charge requisitioned local French merchant ships to get the British and Polish soldiers over to England. Across south-western France, 30,000 Polish troops were still fighting off the German advance as they made their way under fire to the ports, hoping to get to the boats in time. Meanwhile, three Isle of Man ferries rescued 6,000 from Brest Harbour, though their departure was delayed by German mines. The German tanks and land forces had not yet reached France’s south-western shores but the Allied transports were already under constant attack by German submarines and the Luftwaffe. The Dunkirk evacuation further north was almost over, but Operation Aerial to evacuate the remaining Allied forces and refugees had barely begun.

On 17 June 1940, the Lancastria had just boarded over 5,200 troops and refugees, including women and children, brought out to her from Saint-Nazaire port in a frantic scurry of small boats. By 1 p.m., she was overcrowded with standing room only on the open decks. In fact, no one knows exactly how many were crammed on board that day – estimates range wildly from 5,000 to 9,000.

At 4 p.m., just as the ship received her orders to get underway, a German Junker JU-88 dive bomber made its run, targeting the Lancastria. The ships at Saint-Nazaire had been harassed by German air attacks all day but this time all four bombs hit their target.

One bomb exploded the Lancastria’s full fuel tank, spilling gallons of burning oil into the sea, while two bombs hit the holds. The fourth bomb plummeted down the ship’s funnel, exploding in the engine room and blowing large holes in the hull. By 4.15 p.m., the ship was completely disabled and sinking.

Desperately trying to keep his head above the waves as he watched the ship roll and sink bow-first into the water, Southgate thought he could hear voices. Someone trapped on board the Lancastria was singing as the ship went down; maybe it was a group of them, all singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Others were bellowing out ‘There’ll Always be an England’. The voices carried across the open sea as over 3,000 people vanished beneath the waves in what remains Britain’s worst ever maritime disaster.

If Southgate was one of the lucky ones, he didn’t feel like it. He had to tread water for hours as the 2,477 survivors were gradually plucked out of the water and transferred to other troop ships. The Oronsay was already loaded at Saint-Nazaire but managed to take some of the bedraggled survivors. The John Holt took 829 and arrived in Plymouth on 18 June, followed by the Cymbula who had picked up 250 ragged troops and two female survivors.

But Maurice Southgate wasn’t on any of these. Instead he found himself deposited in Falmouth on 19 June (probably by the Prinses Josephine Charlotte, see Chapter 2), two days after the sinking, with just a blanket and no shoes. An ambulance carried him to a makeshift camp where he simultaneously took a shower and lost his watch, then a coach reunited him with the remaining members of his squadron in the sergeants’ mess at the Royal Air Force station in Plymouth.

Southgate had been working as a translator for the RAF in France. Though his parents were British, he was born in Paris in 1913, spoke fluent French, married a French woman and together they’d managed a furniture design business in Paris. This, however, was before the British declared war on Germany in September 1939. Now he was happy to be safely in Britain but he was also worried about his wife, alone in Paris.

As he downed beers in Plymouth with his friends, little did any of them realise that Southgate would be soon working with his wife again in France, as one of Britain’s most successful secret agents for the Special Operations Executive. A saboteur? Who knew he had it in him?

Maurice Southgate had survived the sinking of the Lancastria, but could he survive the Gestapo?

Meanwhile, Squadron Leader Patrick Barlow was racing across France in a car, trying to catch the last British boat from Brest. He’d been in Nice on the eastern border working as a liaison officer for the French Air Force and, as the Germans advanced, Barlow was driving 400 miles across France in a last-ditch effort to get himself and his passengers back to Britain. The Nazi swastika was already flying from the Arc de Triomphe and Philippe Pétain, French military hero of the First World War, had just taken over as prime minister of the French Government and was discussing an armistice with the Germans to prevent further bloodshed. ‘Vichy France’ would soon be a reality. The political landscape of France was changing every minute as Barlow drove around the lines of refugees. Millions of French citizens, many of them all too aware of what they faced, were on the move, trying to get away from the advancing Germans with the few belongings they could carry. Along the road trudged women with prams, children, livestock, and old men pushing carts; all desperately trying to escape.

On the last leg of their journey to Brest, Barlow knew the German Army was less than 10 miles away. He drove on through the night, without lights, his passengers ready with machine guns in case they were stopped by a German patrol. They were lucky to make it to Brest Harbour, where they hurriedly boarded the Lady of Mann ferry.

As he clambered aboard, Barlow saw an old Frenchman with a Légion d’honneur rosette on his lapel forlornly watching them from the quayside. His elderly wife stood beside him, tears in her eyes, clutching their granddaughter between them. Like thousands of French civilians, they’d tried to board the evacuation ships but had been turned away.

‘Are you British going?’ the old lady cried out to Barlow, who mumbled an embarrassed response. It would haunt him for the rest of his life – the family he had to leave behind to suffer the German occupation. As the Lady of Mann docked at Plymouth at 4.50 a.m. on 17 June, Barlow was not alone in thinking he had to make it back to France some day – and soon. Thousands of the soldiers in retreat across the Channel were thinking the same thing, and hundreds of them would be making clandestine visits back to occupied France sooner than they ever imagined.

The French families weren’t the only ones left behind. The British also had to leave their wounded. ‘Walking wounded only,’ was the disappointing response as the ambulance left Lieutenant Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards on the beach at Dunkirk, still on his stretcher, just a few hundred yards from the evacuation point. He watched as the last ships left without him.

The Coldstream Guards had courageously defended the perimeter as the Germans attacked, losing 75 per cent of their own men but enabling tens of thousands of others to make it to the ships. However, when it came to Langley’s turn, he was too wounded to go. The cottage he’d been using as cover had been hit by a German shell and the roof had collapsed on him. His left arm was a mangled mess that would soon have to be amputated and he was stuck on a stretcher that would have taken the place of four uninjured men on the departing ship.

The ambulance took him back into Dunkirk, to a large house serving as a hospital. He lay there worried that the Germans would shoot him: there were rumours that the Germans were taking no prisoners. But the first German officer he met saluted him and the German doctor safely amputated his left arm. Now he was a prisoner of war, hampered by his injury but still desperate to escape.

And escape he did. After many failed attempts, and a lengthy stay in a French prison, he eventually made it back to England to be appointed liaison officer between Britain’s secret intelligence service MI6 and a newly formed group called MI9, organising the escape of prisoners of war, downed airmen and agents from occupied Europe.

On boats and planes from Gibraltar and Lisbon, heading into ports and airfields in Devon and Cornwall (primarily Falmouth, Plymouth and Dartmouth), there were over 10,000 such escapes during the Second World War.

From his little office in London, Jimmy Langley co-ordinated at least 3,000 of these, overcoming the many logistical problems of guiding them into south-west England with little, if any, additional help. Each and every successful escape was a personal triumph, with Langley worrying about the fate of each fugitive and the welfare of every agent he sent into Europe to help the escape lines.

After the war, hundreds of survivors would talk of the momentous day they were recruited or rescued by the one-armed man.

SAVING ANNE DE GAULLE

Captain Norman Hope landed at Plymouth Roborough Airport on 17 June 1940. On paper, he was from the Naval Intelligence Directorate. In fact he was a member of the top secret Section D, established by the Foreign Office and MI6 in 1938 in response to the growing threat of Nazi Germany.

Hope’s mission: to rescue the family of General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces.

Section D worked closely with a secret research group studying the guerrilla war methods of Sinn Fein in Ireland and the effectiveness of sabotage against an enemy invader. By mid-1940, their clandestine operations were exploiting ‘irregular’ techniques on a scale never previously imagined. The list of their inventions reads like a James Bond script – the mass distribution of exploding German cigarettes being one of their more bizarre – and small incendiary devices were a speciality.

Before the war, Captain Hope had worked in Indochina and South America for the Asiatic Petroleum Company, a conglomerate of Shell and Royal Dutch Oil. Most of his colleagues in Section D were also non-military personnel, with backgrounds in law, industrial research and major corporations with contacts abroad. Some believe that Hope, who was fluent in French and Spanish, had a second secret mission – tasked not only with rescuing the de Gaulle family but with undertaking a visual reconnaissance of the fuel storage facilities at Brest, checking they had been completely destroyed by evacuating Allied Forces. The German military would need fuel after their rapid progress across France and effective demolition of the fuel reserves in France would delay a German invasion across the Channel.

An old cartoon by Illingworth depicting Charles de Gaulle. (Punch, 29 September 1948)

As Charles de Gaulle established himself in London as head of the French in exile, the mission’s priority was to rescue Madame de Gaulle and her children, still trapped in France under imminent threat of being captured by the Germans.

Charles de Gaulle in person. (Library of Congress, LC-USW33-019091-D)

To many during the Second World War, General de Gaulle seemed arrogant and rather aloof. In fact, British Intelligence was so worried about his personality that they paid Richmond Temple £300 a month to improve the general’s public image. Even to his family, de Gaulle could seem distant and unemotional, showing affection only to his youngest daughter Anne, born with Down’s Syndrome in 1928. Madame Yvonne de Gaulle was hit by a car just before Anne’s birth in Germany, leaving Anne with injuries that left her unable to walk unaided for the duration of her life.

The family travelled a great deal during de Gaulle’s career even before the war, living in Lebanon, Algiers and Germany, and Anne had always travelled with them, with a governess on hand to keep her safe. De Gaulle described her as ‘my joy’ and would read to her at bedtime and rock her to sleep.

While in Germany, the family quickly realised what ‘eugenics’ meant for their little girl; even in parts of France, there was growing support for the sterilisation of disabled people and the Nazis took the eugenics programme to horrific extremes. The de Gaulles understood the dangers of the fascists’ ideology.

As France fell to the Nazis, French ministers discussed terms with the invaders, creating the fragile administrative zone of ‘Vichy France’. But de Gaulle argued against working with the Nazis. At the time he was a relatively unknown French officer, new to politics, and few in the French leadership would heed his warnings. But his was a personal calling: his family were prime targets, so he contacted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to negotiate a London-based French Government in exile. Churchill saw this dynamic, if sometimes discourteous, Frenchman as a powerful ally, giving hope for continuing Anglo-French resistance against Hitler’s forces.

In June 1940, de Gaulle was travelling to an urgent meeting with Churchill, but at Bordeaux there were no aircraft available. Instead he made his way west by road to Brest Harbour where French destroyer the Milan was ready to take him to Plymouth.

On the way, he visited his dying mother one last time. He would never see her again. His wife, three children and Anne’s nurse had already made it from the family home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to the then relative safety of an aunt’s house on the shores of Carantec near Roscoff. As he boarded the Milan at Brest on 15 June 1940, de Gaulle arranged for an officer to deliver passports to his family. De Gaulle ensured that the French nuclear scientists, including Marie Curie’s son-in-law, and their supply of ‘heavy water’, were also on the Milan heading to Plymouth – the history of atomic warfare might have been very different if the Nazis had captured these French scientists.

Philippe Pétain, prime minister of Vichy France. (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-21605)

The talks with Churchill went well and de Gaulle flew back to France the same day to discuss last-minute plans with the French Government, but the majority of French ministers were already decided on an armistice and Philippe Pétain was made prime minister. De Gaulle was now a ‘marked man’ and considered a traitor; faced with the threat of arrest by the French officials he made a daring escape to England on one of the few remaining planes not bombed at Bordeaux.

As they flew over the Breton peninsula, the countryside was on fire. At first de Gaulle thought the Germans were attacking, but in fact the remaining Allied Forces had set alight the British fuel storage facilities to prevent them from falling into German hands. Over La Pallice, de Gaulle witnessed a final horrific image of the fall of France – the French steamer Champlain with British soldiers on board had hit a German mine. He could see thousands of tiny figures struggling in the water. Her thirteen crewmen perished. The stricken ship was on her side, sinking to the seabed.

General de Gaulle escaped but he knew his family at Carantec were now in grave danger. The British tried to contact Madame de Gaulle to have her take the family to Brest, about 50 miles west, where they could be evacuated by a British destroyer. But suddenly all communications with Carantec were down. The Germans had arrived.

THE WALRUS

Carantec is an ancient village on the shores of Morlaix Bay, with wide sandy beaches at low tide. Only a seaplane would manage to reach the family and be large enough to carry the five passengers: Madame Yvonne de Gaulle, their children Philippe (19), Élisabeth (16) and Anne (12), as well as Anne’s governess Marguerite Potel.

In Plymouth Sound, RAF Mount Batten was re-established as a seaplane base in the late 1920s. In 1940, the small Blackburn Sharks flying boats there had already evacuated men from Dunkirk. Also there was a Supermarine Walrus L2312 seaplane belonging to No. 15 Group Communications Flight, based at Roborough Airfield about 10 miles inland. The Walrus was exactly what Captain Hope was looking for. Now he just needed a crew.

Flight Lieutenant John ‘Dinger’ N. Bell, just 24 years old, was next on the duty roster and accepted the call, though he had no details of the actual mission until his ‘secret passenger’ Captain Hope arrived in Plymouth. A very experienced pilot, Bell had already flown a Walrus while in Australia and had successfully piloted Sunderland seaplanes into Brest, so was the perfect candidate. John Bell was from a family of three brothers from Farina in northern South Australia who had all volunteered to join the war effort in Britain. Farina, sadly, is now a ghost town and tragically only one of the three Bell brothers survived the war.

A Supermarine Walrus in the hangar. (Author’s collection)

Flight Sergeant Charles ‘Chas’ William Harris (31) joined them as navigator. Harris had over 900 hours’ experience successfully navigating aircraft across the Channel. He and Bell had already completed two missions together that month; they were a good team.

Both Bell and Harris were from No. 10 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force, stationed at RAF Mount Batten from April 1940. No. 10 Squadron was considered something special and were arguably the best Australian pilots in the war. Flying a Sunderland seaplane was an honour that came to very few but it was an honour earned and it certainly wasn’t glamorous. In all weathers – and the weather in the Channel was atrocious – these pilots and their crews were constantly on patrol, hunting German submarines and on alert for air-sea rescues. For a sixteen-hour patrol over the Channel the Sunderland carried over 11,600 litres of fuel. They completed 42,951 flying hours, with dozens of enemy submarines destroyed and hundreds of Allied lives saved. The seaplanes of RAF Mount Batten and their courageous Australian crews flew further and more often than any other aircraft of the war.

Returning at night, the dark waters of Plymouth would be lit by rockets as the seaplanes descended, guided by this vivid flare-path. These flying machines were so massive – their wings 112 feet across, weighing 58,000 pounds when loaded – it took thirty ground crew to pull a Sunderland seaplane up the slipway and into the hangar at Mount Batten.

From the RAF came engineer Corporal Bernard Felix Nowell (25), an expert on the equipment. Nowell had some last-minute training on the machine gun and operating the radio set while airborne and managed some sleep for a few hours before they got ready to set off. Even the commanding officer of No. 10 Squadron didn’t know where they were going or why – with their secret orders directly from Winston Churchill – but he knew they had the best team available.

On 18 June 1940, the Walrus, with Hope, Bell, Harris and Nowell aboard, took off from RAF Mount Batten at 2.55 in the morning, engines roaring across Plymouth Sound, the spray phosphorescent on the dark water. As the seaplane lifted into the clear night sky, Hope and the crew knew this was a dangerous mission into chaotic territory.

Walrus L2312 was never heard from again. The log entry simply states ‘Failed to return’. Two days later, the Operations Record Book for No. 10 Squadron records the men as missing.

Later that same day, 18 June, de Gaulle made his first radio broadcasts from London, declaring: ‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ There was still no word of his family. On 19 June, the Germans occupied the Brest peninsula, including Carantec, and General de Gaulle must have believed that his family was lost.

Short Sunderland V seaplanes. (Author’s collection)

On 19 June a Belgian officer of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) named Van Riel, also from Section D, arrived in Plymouth to make another attempt to rescue de Gaulle’s family and investigate the disappearance of the Walrus L2312. He assumed the rather unimaginative name ‘Vann’ for cover purposes and acquired a Motor Torpedo Boat (MTB 29), a new 70-foot Vosper commanded by Lieutenant C.A. (‘Kit’) James. They landed at Carantec at 6 a.m. on 20 June to discover the Germans had arrived just twenty-four hours before them, and there was no sign of Madame de Gaulle or her children.

German aircraft had already spotted MTB 29, so they had no time to explore the coast or gather more information. A quick return to Plymouth was their only option, but what had happened to the de Gaulles?

A LUCKY ESCAPE

On 17 June 1940, as news of the Germans’ imminent arrival reached Carantec, Madame Yvonne de Gaulle travelled to Brest in a car driven by her sister. She visited the British vice-consulate to ask after her husband and discovered that the situation in Brest was dire. The Germans were approaching and the British were planning to blow up the navy yards, scuttle any remaining ships and destroy any fuel dumps to prevent them falling into enemy hands.

Brest Harbour. (Author’s collection)

The destruction of the port was scheduled for 18 June 1940, so Madame de Gaulle had no time to lose. Quickly, she returned to her children at Carantec, borrowed money from her aunt and they all headed back to Brest, driving through the night to catch the very last troop transport leaving in the morning of 18 June. She later described the nightmare of having to leave their luggage behind as they boarded the already overcrowded ship. By 11 a.m., German aircraft were bombing Brest, so it was a lucky escape.

In the chaos, it is difficult to identify which ship transported them across the English Channel, but only the journey of the Belgian Prinses Josephine Charlotte – a requisitioned Dover ferry – fits the known facts. She was ‘picking up stragglers’ from Brest Harbour at 8 a.m. on 18 June and was probably the last ship to leave before the demolition of Brest. She was then redirected to Saint-Nazaire to collect refugees there which means, by strange coincidence, Josephine Charlotte also probably brought home Lancastria-survivor Maurice Southgate (see Chapter 1).

Madame de Gaulle and her family safely arrived in Falmouth on 19 June 1940, ironically the same day that Vann and his MTB 29 had set sail from Plymouth to rescue them.

There’s a story that Madame de Gaulle had a choice of two ships at Brest, one Polish, the other British, and she chose the British ship simply because of her husband’s allegiance with Britain. This was fortunate as, it is said, the Polish ship was attacked and sunk on its way to Britain. In fact, the Josephine Charlotte was Belgian and Madame de Gaulle and her son both mention a Belgian crew in their accounts. The story goes that the Polish ship had already sailed before they arrived, but there’s no evidence of such a ship. The only ship which had been at Brest and which was soon to be sunk was the Meknes. This ship left Brest in the early hours of 18 June, transporting 3,000 troops safely to Southampton, and was subsequently attacked and sunk by the Germans as it returned in July 1940 with French soldiers being repatriated to France (see Chapter 3). The Meknes, however, was a French ship and at no stage did it carry Polish crew (instead it was transporting French troops to Britain). Moreover, it was sunk on its return journey, not on its way to Britain.

Perhaps the story refers to the Ulster Monarch, part of a fleet of ships returning from a failed offensive in Norway and bringing French and Polish troops back into France as part of a last-minute effort to defend the country from German invasion. The Ulster Monarch arrived at Brest on 17 June, far too late for any major assault on the German Army. Nonetheless the French troops decided to remain to fight in France while the 400 Polish troops elected to stay aboard, setting off for Falmouth around midnight on 17/18 June.

Or perhaps the ‘Polish ship’ was the Sobieski which had formed part of the same fleet as the Ulster Monarch. The Sobieski left Saint-Nazaire to the east of Brest in the early hours of 17 June 1940, carrying 2,890 troops and arriving safely in Plymouth. It may have dropped in at Brest on the way, possibly on 18 June, but there’s no record of this. Also on 18 June, the trawler Murmansk was part of the minesweeping operations at Brest when she was grounded and the crew had to be rescued. Other than that, there seems to be no evidence of a Polish ship sunk en route to England, though many of the evacuation ships were attacked crossing the Channel.

In all the confusion, however, the British authorities seem unaware that Madame de Gaulle and her family were safe in Falmouth. Just after midnight on 25 June 1940, the commander-in-chief of the Western Approaches, based in Plymouth and organising the evacuations at that time, radioed the officer in charge of the last evacuation from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France’s southern-most port. The commander was anxious to know if ‘Colonel de Gaulle’s party’ had embarked at St Jean de Luz. Eight hours later they received the disheartening reply – all French parties had been refused permission to board the last ships because of the French armistice with Germany. The allegiance of French citizens could no longer be trusted.

Liberation of Paris, 1945; note the banners in support of de Gaulle. (Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsac-1a55001)

They’d lost the family of Charles de Gaulle. All rescue missions, it seemed, had failed. It must have been a devastating blow, believing at that moment that General de Gaulle’s family was likely in German hands.

However, Charles de Gaulle was better informed. On the 19 June, the entire Free French Forces comprised just two men – de Gaulle and his Lieutenant Geoffroy de Courcel – living in two rooms in a hotel in London. The telephone rang. De Courcel answered and was so overcome by the sound of the voice at the other end that he simply handed the phone over to de Gaulle. It was Yvonne de Gaulle calling her husband to say they’d arrived. They’d found rooms at the Landsdown Hotel in Falmouth but had had no idea where Charles de Gaulle was until their son Philippe spotted an account of his father’s speech in an English newspaper.

Charles de Gaulle replied in typically stoic fashion, delighted but apparently unconcerned: ‘Voila! There you are! Take the next train to London. I’ll meet you at Paddington Station.’ And at last they were joined by a third member of the Free French Forces – Philippe.

The Second World War may have been very different if de Gaulle had not had such particular affection for Anne, his youngest daughter. On 22 June, de Gaulle repeated his call to arms on BBC Radio: ‘I call upon all Frenchmen who want to remain free to listen to my voice and follow me.’ His cry of freedom was for her.

THE FATE OF THE WALRUS

So what happened to Walrus L2312 on 18 June 1940? It wasn’t until 18 October 1941 that there was any news of the Walrus’ crew. The War Organisation of the British Red Cross and the Order of St John of Jerusalem wrote a letter to the Air Ministry, saying they were caring for two young French boys who has escaped to England and told them the story of a crash they’d seen at 4 a.m. on 18 June. The boys had a number of ID tags and a visiting card belonging to Flight Lieutenant Bell.

Months later, a member of the French Resistance arrived in Britain carrying Captain Hope’s wristwatch and some of his papers. Later still, the Red Cross found the graves of the four crewmen of the Walrus in the churchyard at Ploudaniel on the Brest peninsula, about 40 miles south west of Carantec, being carefully tended by local citizens. The graves of Bell, Nowell and Harris were clearly marked, but the fourth body was unidentified. All they’d found was a paper signed by a Sergeant Bennett at Mount Batten. Perhaps Norman Hope had been travelling under a false name.