Andrée's War (30 page)

During the course of my research and writing, I have learnt much about Vichy, Pétain and particularly the horrors suffered by the Jewish people in France. And although I have spoken to people who were heavily involved in the French Resistance, I have also been told several times not to judge history, not to criticise Pétain's decision to sign an armistice nor to form a government of collaboration because I was not there. It is neither my place, nor my intention, to judge political decisions taken over seventy years ago, but I note Max Hastings' observation in
All Hell Let Loose
: ‘The plight of the Jewish people under the Nazi occupation loomed
relatively small in the wartime perception of Churchill and Roosevelt. One seventh of all fatal victims of Nazism and almost one tenth of all wartime dead, ultimately proved to have been Jews. At the time their persecution was viewed by the Allies merely as a fragment of the collateral damage caused by Hitler.'

There have been other discoveries that have surprised me. I was always aware of Andrée's staunch, unrelenting admiration for General de Gaulle, whom she always considered to be one of France's greatest leaders. I remember the fierce arguments between my parents in 1963 when de Gaulle vetoed Britain's entry into the common market and the ensuing arguments during his presidency. I had not expected to find myself admiring him also – but through her eyes I have seen more of le Général, a man who gave hope to the French people during their darkest years and who fought fiercely against Allied proposals to impose foreign control over France following its liberation. A man who never accepted the legitimacy of the Vichy government and who eventually restored France's honour and status.

I was also surprised to learn from Andrée's diaries that she had gone out to dinner on two separate occasions with a German Wehrmacht officer from Police Headquarters. In conversations with me she had always been so insistent that she never fraternised with the enemy, but here was an indication that life is nuanced, not black and white. Perhaps under other circumstances she might have developed a relationship with one of them. And perhaps – had she not been friendly with him and other German colleagues at Police Headquarters – she might not have escaped her interrogators in Bordeaux all those years ago.

There are many questions that remain unanswered. As I wrote more though, I found myself returning to one particular question repeatedly. Why had it taken so long for Andrée to be given France's highest award, the Légion d'honneur?

There were not many people left to ask, sadly. During our conversation in 2010, François Clerc had stressed the gender differences back in the 1940s: how dominant men had been and how women were simply expected to fall in line with their male counterparts' instructions, and certainly not to demand recognition for their achievements.

In his book
Qui étaient les premiers résistants?
, Alain described his sister thus:

She is a pretty brunette and her views on life are simple. When it comes to discussing the political situation, she happily takes on my views. She always thought that it was completely normal to do whatever I asked of her because she knew that waging war was something the men had to deal with… She is French through and through and that means everything to her. You know exactly where you stand with her, she was always there, ready to help us, and what was an even greater asset to us was that she never initiated anything.

My initial reaction was anger in response to such an arrogant, chauvinistic and misguided attitude. But over time I have mellowed: I have known Alain and François all my life, and some of the other members of the Orion Group for many years. They are some of the bravest and most resourceful men of their generation – and their views on woman were of their time. Once the war ended, they had careers to build and they were determined to establish their achievements in the Resistance as an important foundation for future life. As Hastings has observed: ‘The manner in which they had conducted themselves defined their standing in their societies for the rest of their lives.' Women like Andrée were not expected to behave similarly, and she herself was so modest about her own accomplishments that it never occurred to her to put herself forward in the same way.

Alain once wrote that Andrée had confessed to him that she was more scared of his disapproval than of the Nazis. It is typical of both her fearlessness in the face of great challenges and her enduring adoration of her brother. I decided to write this book as part of my efforts to raise money for research into Alzheimer's and to support those suffering from the disease. I have set up a fund in my mother's name: the Andrée Griotteray White Charitable Trust. I can only hope that, if Andrée knew about this book, she would approve of me using her remarkable life as a platform to raise awareness of a very cruel disease.

Francelle Bradford White
London, May 2014

 

 

 

 

 

The Andrée Griotteray White Charitable Trust (Registered Charity No.1157258) has been established in Andrée's name to fund research into any form of Alzheimer's disease or dementia and to provide support to those suffering from it. All royalties and any net profit the author receives from sales of this book will go directly to the charity.

B
ecause Andrée Griotteray married an RAF officer in 1947, it has often been assumed in Britain that she was an SOE agent. This was not the case; le réseau Orion was a France-based resistance network which operated independently for much of the war. Afterwards, Orion was officially listed by the authorities as falling under the direction of the Bureau Central de Renseignement et d'Action (the intelligence section of the Free French Army), which was headed by Colonel Passy and General de Gaulle in London.

While there were, of course, similarities between the work of SOE and that of a network like Orion, there were also some significant differences – and it is for that reason that I have included this section comparing the two.

SOE agents received over six months' intensive training in the UK before being parachuted into or travelling by sea to France. Orion agents, by contrast, had no formal training; this was a non-professional network set up and managed by Frenchmen and women living in their own country, working in surroundings familiar to them. Despite the lack of professional training, Alain enforced strict rules about security – some essentially common sense, but others based on advice given to him in Marseilles in 1941 by the brother of his brother-in-law, Jean Morin, who had been a member of Sinn Féin. Despite its different methods, SOE felt similarly about security; Dr Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, was quoted as saying: ‘We have got to organise movements in enemy occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Féin movements in Ireland'.
²²

SOE sent 470 agents into France during the Second World War: 118 did not return. Of the total 470, thirty-nine were female agents, thirteen of whom died in action.
²³
Orion, meanwhile, lost only two of their eighteen
full-time agents listed in the records at the Ministry of Defence. They were a young bunch; by the end of the war, all but four were still under twenty-four. The group also worked with about sixty other agents, all of whom it is believed survived.

Resistance groups supported and cultivated by the SOE needed to maintain wireless contact with their handlers, and this was often achieved with the help of specialist wireless operators. Without the wireless they had no means of coordinating their arms and ammunition drops, for onward delivery to the French Resistance for acts of sabotage. To relay intelligence back to London, they had to use radio transmitters. The wireless operator was always the agent's weakest point; the Germans kept a close watch on every wireless wavelength. It could take a team of armed direction finders as little as twenty minutes to get within a few yards of a radio operator.
²⁴

The Orion Group never used radio transmitters; Alain considered them too dangerous. They were bulky and heavy, so could not be disposed of quickly, which made them risky to use. Instead, he used couriers. Through their extensive native network, Orion agents passed their material from one to another and ultimately out of the country and into the hands of the British and US intelligence services. It was a slow process, admittedly. When, on occasion, speed was of the essence, they used transmitters belonging to the Resistance arm of the army – the Organisation de la résistance de l'armée. ORA members always handled the actual transmission, as Orion couriers weren't trained to use a radio transmitter. Orion's main instructions, given by d'Astier de la Vigerie, was to make contacts and obtain information which they thought might be useful to British intelligence and the Overseas Strategic Services, but this was a general guideline rather than a specific command, as may have been more common for SOE agents.

All Resistance agents in France during the period had to be on their guard for moles in the pay of the Gestapo or Vichy; there were roughly 2,500 German agents active in France, some 6,000 French agents, and an estimated 24,000 people informing on their friends, neighbours and colleagues.
²⁵
Orion couriers didn't need to worry that the Germans would suspect they were not French, but otherwise they ran similar risks. The only protection they had was basic training in operating a pistol, but they
rarely carried guns. Instead, Alain schooled them in the importance of simple rules – changing meeting places regularly, avoiding restaurants and bars, exercising due caution when meeting strangers, never giving away much about themselves. Most importantly, if an Orion courier ever felt he or she was in danger, they were to destroy immediately any intelligence they were carrying: the safety of each agent was more important than the intelligence they carried.

Andrée always said she knew nothing of SOE's existence until after the war; when she learnt of their work she felt she had been safer than them because she never went near a radio transmitter, a fear confirmed by Clare Mulley in her book about SOE agent Christine Granville,
The Spy Who Loved
: ‘wireless operators had a life expectancy of only six weeks'. It is worth remembering, however, that Andrée served in the Resistance for the entire duration of the war, running a far greater risk of being picked up over the longer period. There was no set period for SOE agents – it depended on their mission, though Mulley says: ‘France was one of the most dangerous theatres of war where few SOE agents were expected to last more than three months before being brought back to England if they had not already been caught'.

Andrée was always able to talk openly about her Resistance work, and her efforts were recognised by the French and US governments after the war. Yet her son's mother-in-law, Lady Meriel Howarth, née Brabazon, was not allowed to talk about the four years of work she did at Bletchley Park for many years after the war, as the thousands of people who had been employed at Bletchley were forbidden from discussing it. It has been hard for our family to accept that Andrée and Meriel's grandchildren will know much about what one grandmother achieved, but very little about the other's personal contribution.

I
n researching and writing this book, I have been struck by the complicated concept of ‘the Resistance'. Despite being referred to as a single entity, it was never that straightforward. Andrée's story is one small part of a bigger web of many, many individuals, each determined to defend their country with countless acts of courage, large and small. With that in mind, I wanted to add a brief note (and by no means an exhaustive or definitive account) about the various spontaneous and individual forms of protest in occupied France, which later became collectively known as the Resistance.

A 2009 television documentary made by one of France's leading television channels showed how, a few days after the Germans invaded France, French men and women all over the country almost instantly began to carry out small acts of defiance against the occupying forces. There was no formal structure or organisation at this point – this was individuals using their own initiative, with no idea of what others elsewhere were up to. Without knowing it, these men and women became the founders of what would later become known as the Resistance movement.

Actions varied enormously, from small gestures such as ignoring a Wehrmacht soldier by crossing the road so as not to have to look at or acknowledge him (as Andrée records doing in her journal in Paris a few days after the city had been occupied) to small acts of sabotage such as putting sugar in the petrol of a Wehrmacht car or cutting down telephone wires. Some openly insulted German officers or soldiers while others gave cigarettes or food to prisoners of war. Members of the trade unions went on strike and people started creating false identity certificates. A form of passive resistance began to develop as men and women all over France
observed neighbours or colleagues, but deliberately turned a blind eye to anything that might be related to resisting the Germans. As François Clerc, Orion's deputy leader, said: ‘You might not go into work for three days but no one ever asked where you had been.'

In the early days of the occupation several groups of people started to produce anti-Nazi pamphlets and news-sheets, similar to Alain's
La France
, both to inform readers about non-censored information and to encourage them in turn to resist. After the protest on 11 November 1940, when 5,000 youngsters rallied at the Étoile to demonstrate against the occupation of their country, the Head of the Gestapo in Paris sent a note to Berlin on 12 December 1940 to inform them that: ‘The French population is not under control.'

From his base in London, General Charles de Gaulle exhorted his country to resist and organised La France Libre – the Free French Resistance movement. Over time, larger groups emerged in France, such as Gilbert ‘Rémy' Renault's Confrérie Notre-Dame, Marie Madeleine Fourcade's Alliance and Maurice Duclos's Saint-Jacques were born.