The spy who saved me
This article first appeared in the Leicester Mercury in 2005
By Jeremy Clay
The car groaned under the weight of the stashed weapons and explosives as Francis Cammaerts sped through the darkened country lanes of occupied France.
The secret agent was on a delivery run, transporting the raw materials for the sabotage attacks that his army of resistance fighters were springing on the Nazi forces from St Etienne to Nice.
Suddenly, a roadblock loomed from the gloom up ahead. Troops waved Francis and his resistance comrade to a halt.
They had been stopped many times before: routine checks by uninterested or dunderheaded guards. But these were dressed in black; it was the SS.
“They told us to get out and started to search the car,” remembers the 88-year-old former Leicester teacher. “The boot was full, and not even locked.”
An American bomber had been shot down nearby, the soldiers told them. Everyone was on the look-out for the crew.
The car was almost comically overloaded: even a cursory glance showed it was hiding something. As Francis stood back with a pounding pulse, a soldier leaned in to the car and began savaging the rear seat with his bayonet.
“My friend spoke German,” says Francis, the former head of Leicester’s teacher training college in Scraptoft.
“He said, ‘You don’t think we have sewn the crew of a bomber into our seats do you?’
“Then he roared with laughter, and they roared with laughter too, shut the car door and told us to go on our way. It was probably my closest piece of luck.”
By 1944, Francis Cammaerts, a conscientious objector who was drawn into the perilous world of wartime subterfuge thanks to his fluent French, had become a pivotal figure in the resistance against the Nazis.
He had raised an underground army of 10,000 and schooled countless volunteers in the dark arts of bombing and ambush.
His campaign of covert warfare reached a climax in the run up to D-Day, when the saboteurs of the resistance played an invaluable role in the invasion.
“The Germans in Normandy expected help to reach them within three days,” he says at his home in Le Pouget, in the south of France.
“They only got it in three weeks. There were two main supply roads through the Alps. They were shut to the Germans. No German went through after June 1.
“I think that was our outstanding success.
“We prevented a big part of the German reserve being able to help defend Normandy.”
Again and again, the armed cells ushered into existence by Francis and his comrades punched the underbelly of the occupying forces.
But each success, each disruption, brought yet more heat on the resistance and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents who aided them.
It was a life defined by danger.
“I was very rarely in the same bed for more than two or three nights,” says Francis, who went by the codename Roger.
“I was on the move the whole time. I was a guest in at least 60 to 70 homes.
“These were the true heroes of the resistance – the housewives.”
“They risked not only their own skin but their children’s, their grandchildren’s, their parents’, their friends’ – everyone’s, whereas I was risking nothing at all, except myself.”
Capture, when it eventually came, came thanks to a tiny – but critical – error, spotted by an eagle-eyed interrogator.
Francis and his comrades were returning from a rendezvous in a Red Cross car. They had reached the Provençal town of Digne when the air raid sirens sounded.
“At a bridge a kilometre from Digne, we reached a roadblock.
“They stopped us and examined our papers. We told them we were all hitch-hikers, and that we didn’t know each other.
“That was perfectly normal at that time. But just as we were going the chap in charge of the Gestapo arrived.
“He looked at our papers then he found something. He’d noticed that we had bank notes with sequential numbers. Yet we were supposed to be strangers. It was silly, really, a silly mistake.”
The group were immediately arrested.
“I was put through a lot of questioning,” he says, “though I wasn’t tortured.
“They didn’t know who I was. But I didn’t know they didn’t know that I was an agent.
“They had to take a decision themselves: we had bombed everything around, the communications were all out.
“There was nothing they could do except execute us, and that was going to happen soon.”
But help was at hand. The resourceful SOE agent Christine Granville – Francis’ second-in-command in south-east France – heard of the arrests and approached an intermediary in the Digne police.
He demanded a huge ransom of two million francs. Granville signalled the Allies at Algiers, and it was ready in 24 hours.
It bought the aristocratic Granville an introduction to the head of the Gestapo in town.
She marched in and told him: “You have the three most important prisoners in France.
“If you don’t release them you will undoubtedly be shot as a war criminal.”
It was August 1944. The relentless approach of the Allies, who had by now also landed on the south coast, was enough to concentrate his mind. It was an audacious rescue plan that was as bold as it was brazen.
But just hours later the Gestapo man – a Belgian, like Francis’ father – was persuaded.
“He said ‘all right, provided you protect me’. He made a bargain. Us, for an amnesty for him.”
In a prison cell nearby, Francis had slept through his four days of captivity.
“I was so tired. We’d been on the run for so long.” He knew nothing of the bribery plan.
“So when the Gestapo man came into the cell and told us to follow him, we thought we were going to the wall.
“I just thought ‘This is it. It’s something you’ve looked in the eye of ever since you started on this lark. If it’s going to be now, it’s going to be now’.
“But when we got outside and there was Christine, beckoning with an ambulance waiting to drive us away.”
It was an unlikely escape. But Francis speaks of his brush with death as he does of all his undercover wartime service: with matter-of-fact ease.
“I think it was an advantage of the job not to be liable to be jumpy or excitable,” he says.
“But for all the pressure of my time in France, there were moments when it was humorous. You couldn’t live with that level of anxiety otherwise.
“They’d call it stress now,” he adds, with a rueful smile.
And maybe it had a lasting effect. “Ten of my close friends from those days have committed suicide,” says Francis. “Some straight after the war, some 30 years after.
“Who knows what happens to the human mind being put under that sustained pressure?”
Postscript
In 1952, Christine Granville was stabbed to death in the lobby of a London hotel by a demented admirer.
Francis received a letter from Belgium. It was from the Gestapo man, offering his condolences.
Francis recalls: “We had our bargain, but I wrote back saying, ‘I am not your friend, nor your correspondent’.”
Comments
by maggiehorton
Monday, August 08 2011, 1:53PM
“I was preveleged to be a student at Rolle College, Exmouth, in the 70s when Francis was the principle. He was such a gentle giant, an unassuming man who commanded total respect whether chairing a meeting or drinking a pint of guinness in the college bar. I can understand how he would gain total loyalty from anyone who came in contact with him. He was a wonderful man who will never be forgotten.”