The Cost of Courage (9 page)

This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid sirens … The searchlight just burst into action off in the distance. One single beam sweeping the sky above me … There’s another searchlight … You see them reach straight up into the sky, and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it … One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days — or rather these dark nights — just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.

Blessed with a story that doesn’t require objectivity, Murrow becomes a good friend of Winston Churchill and a lover of his daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill.

When he returns to America for a visit in 1941, he is greeted at the dock by a crowd of fans and reporters. CBS celebrates him with a banquet for eleven hundred at the Waldorf-Astoria. Three years later, Murrow will dine with FDR at the White House on the night of the Normandy invasion.

In the fall of 1940, Murrow’s reports inspire considerable sympathy in America for the beleaguered British. But when Franklin Roosevelt decides to seek an unprecedented third term that year, he feels compelled to promise a reluctant country that he will stay out of the growing European war. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he pledges to a Boston audience a few days before he is reelected in November.

At the same time, Roosevelt continues to withhold American recognition of the Free French and de Gaulle. Churchill’s relationship with de Gaulle is always prickly; Roosevelt actually loathes the Frenchman. As Eisenhower puts it delicately in his memoirs,
Roosevelt “could not agree to forcing De Gaulle upon anyone else.”

Or as the historian Ian Ousby slyly summarized their relationships, “The familiar slur of enemy propaganda that [de Gaulle] was merely the tool of Britain or the Allies certainly found no answering echo in the hearts of Churchill or Roosevelt.”

At the beginning of 1941, Roosevelt still sees some value in maintaining relations with Vichy France, and he names Admiral William D. Leahy to be his ambassador there. Leahy even arrives with a 1941 Cadillac limousine to present to the Vichy president, Marshal Pétain. The historian Robert Paxton called the fancy American automobile “a very, very explicit act of support.”
*

American public opinion begins to rally to de Gaulle long before the president does. In a rift with Churchill, Roosevelt hopes to keep France neutral by cozying up to the Vichy regime. His actions are befuddling to the budding Resistance movement.

THE MORALE
of the French Resistance gets a huge boost from the rupture of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact on June 22, 1941. That day the Führer announces that he is invading the Soviet Union, on a line stretching from Norway to Romania. Hitler’s announcement includes what the
New York Times
calls one “vitally interested statement,” which is also a tiny source of hope — a public suggestion that German military forces will not be strong enough in the west to conquer the British Isles, as long as so many Soviet troops are stationed on Germany’s eastern flank.

The invasion transforms the attitude of Communists in France, most of whom have refrained from joining the Resistance up until now, because of the nonaggression pact. Now they will become some of the Nazis’ fiercest enemies.

The new military campaign also buoys every French citizen who remembers the importance of June 22, 1812, from history class at the lycée. That was the date Napoleon launched
his
invasion of Russia. Now, millions are praying that Hitler will replicate Napoleon’s disastrous experience on his journey toward the Urals.

A
NDRÉ
POSTEL
-
VINAY
, the man who has recruited André Boulloche into the Resistance, is lucky because his two bosses at the Finance Ministry know about his work as a secret agent, and never object to it or betray him. Thanks to their complicity, he is able to work practically full time against the Germans.

By the middle of 1941, Postel-Vinay has begun to wonder whether the information he is collecting is actually reaching London. To find out, he includes a request in one of his coded radio messages, asking the BBC to confirm the arrival of his dispatches by broadcasting “CBA-321.” One night, just back from a trip, he flips on the radio. Through the garbled sounds of the jammed transmission, he manages to make out the magic combination: “CBA-321.” At that moment, those syllables feel like a miracle “from the great beyond.”

Most of the newly organized Resistance units are dangerously porous organizations, easily infiltrated by double agents. Even the Resistance leaders who are trained in Britain before their repatriation to France receive only the most rudimentary instruction in the dark arts of espionage.

Pierre d’Harcourt introduced Postel-Vinay to the first two Resistance units he works with. In July 1941, d’Harcourt is captured by the Gestapo in a Paris Métro station. When he is cornered by the Germans, d’Harcourt tries to run away and tumbles down a stairway. As he falls, he tries desperately to destroy the secret documents he is carrying with him. At the bottom of the stairs, the Germans fire on him, shooting him through the foot, the leg, and the lung.

Postel-Vinay learns the identity of the “charming accomplice” of the man who has denounced d’Harcourt. Postel-Vinay thinks that this accomplice is also aware of his own work in the Resistance, so now he feels like he is perilously balanced on a tightrope. And yet he still doesn’t want to “interrupt” himself.

His behavior suggests a kind of fatalism that is familiar to his co-conspirators.

Two months after d’Harcourt is shot, the Gestapo raids the apartment of Captain d’Autrevaux, the number-two man in the French military intelligence unit Postel-Vinay has been working with. D’Autrevaux happens to be away when the Germans arrive, and he manages to escape to the unoccupied zone in the south. After that, three of his associates ask Postel-Vinay to start relaying their information to London. Postel-Vinay considers this a wonderful development: He finally feels like he is making a difference.

But then another danger sign appears. In November, an agent named Wiltz, who has been d’Autrevaux’s closest collaborator, misses an appointment with Postel-Vinay. Almost immediately, Postel-Vinay receives word that Wiltz has been arrested. Now he begins to feel like he is back in the infantry, surrounded by artillery, the sounds of their explosions steadily approaching.

LATE IN THE MORNING OF DECEMBER
13, Postel-Vinay arrives home at his parents’ apartment on avenue de Villars, adjacent to Les Invalides, which houses Napoleon’s tomb. As he walks through
the front door of the building, he spots two young men coming down the stairs in front of him.

He immediately recognizes the first one: a tall, thin, blond Englishman he knows only as Paul. Paul has been an aide to Patrick O’Leary, the head of one of two Resistance groups Postel-Vinay has been working with all year.

O’Leary pretends to one and all that he is a French-Canadian officer. In fact, he is a former surgeon in the Belgian Army, whose real name is Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse.

After serving with the Belgian Army during the eighteen-day campaign of 1940, he escaped to England, where he secured a British Navy commission as a lieutenant commander. On April 25, O’Leary was on the HMS
Fidelity
when it overturned in a squall off the French coast near the eastern end of the Pyrenees, but he managed to swim to shore.

Identifying himself to the gendarme who arrested him as Albert O’Leary, an evading Canadian airman, he was sent to St. Hippolyte du Fort near Nîmes, to be with British officers. There he met Ian Garrow, a tall, dark-haired captain in the Highlanders in his early twenties, who quickly helped O’Leary escape.

O’Leary then joined one of the most effective networks of the war devoted to the repatriation of downed Allied pilots. After Garrow is arrested in October 1941 O’Leary takes charge of the operation, which becomes known as the PAO line (for his initials) and, more famously, as the Pat or O’Leary line. It eventually helps an astonishing six hundred pilots to escape from occupied France.

Postel-Vinay has met Paul once before, in Marseille. Although Paul is introduced to him as a fellow
Résistant
who is working for one of the best Resistance organizations, Postel-Vinay is immediately suspicious of him. He listens as the Englishman delivers a speech filled with beautiful principles — but everything he says rings false in the Frenchman’s skeptical ears.

Now, in Paris, Paul is accompanied by someone Postel-Vinay has never seen before: a stocky, gray, sinister-looking fellow, who keeps his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shabby raincoat.

“That’s him,” says Paul, motioning toward Postel-Vinay.

“My chauffeur,” Paul explains, indicating his unpleasant companion.

Postel-Vinay has other reasons to suspect the Englishman. A few weeks earlier he had heard about a fistfight between Paul and his boss, O’Leary. The word on the street is that the fight was about money. Postel-Vinay knows that O’Leary has an impeccable reputation, so he assumes that Paul must have been in the wrong.

He also knows that Paul usually works in the unoccupied zone. So it feels odd to see him here in the north, where his pidgin French and pronounced English accent can hardly provide him with much cover if he is detained by the Germans.

Pondering all of this, Postel-Vinay realizes that these two have just been knocking on the door of his parents’ apartment.

“Let’s talk outside,” Postel-Vinay suggests, hoping to get them away as quickly as possible. He leads the way, as Paul and the other man follow silently.

On the sidewalk, Paul explains that Patrick O’Leary’s organization has been split into two parts: one to look after downed British airmen, and the other to collect intelligence for the British. Paul says he is working with the intelligence unit, and the stranger accompanying him is actually his new boss.

“Bring all the information you’ve collected to tomorrow’s meeting,” says Paul. “Even the stuff you’ve already sent to Marseille. We have a new radio post here in the occupied sector, so you won’t need to go to Marseille anymore.

“I’ll be back to pick you up at nine tomorrow morning,” Paul continues, “with a beautiful fake identity card on the windshield of
my car.” Since Germans are almost the only people allowed to drive in Paris now, this boast hardly bolsters Postel-Vinay’s confidence. Yet he agrees to meet Paul anyway.

In the afternoon, Postel-Vinay gets a visit from Bernard Vernier-Palliez, a young man who has studied for a job in the Foreign Ministry and has been recruited into the Resistance by André Boulloche, after André is signed up by Postel-Vinay. Vernier-Palliez is transporting a case filled with weapons, including a German Mauser — a job often consigned to Resistance women, because women are less likely to be suspected as arms smugglers.

Vernier-Palliez asks Postel-Vinay if he can keep the weapons for him for a while. Once again, Postel-Vinay agrees, even though he strongly suspects that this is not the ideal moment to perform this favor.

Then he spends the rest of the day gathering all the information he can for tomorrow’s meeting.

Of course Postel-Vinay knows that Paul may be planning to betray him. But his judgment is clouded by exhaustion, and he continues to behave as if he isn’t in serious danger. Part of him thinks it’s a terrible idea to meet Paul tomorrow. But is that because he has real reasons to fear a trap? Or is it paranoia, the product of constant danger? During the last twelve months, he has taken many risks, and he has often thought that he was in danger. But he has always come through okay. Perhaps this is making him believe too much in his own luck.

Postel-Vinay thinks it is difficult to believe in the perfect treason until you have experienced one yourself. He imagines the ideal traitor would do you in with grinning flair. But he finds it hard to imagine such a person in real life. Paul’s story about the organization being split in two does sound plausible. And the new radio transmitter he described in the occupied zone is exactly what Postel-Vinay has been looking for.

There is one other large question weighing on him, the same one that troubles many of his fellow young
Résistants
: If he runs away, will his parents be arrested in his place? Those big posters in the Métro are constant reminders that every relative of a
Résistant
is now subject to arrest.

Postel-Vinay sleeps badly. The next morning, his sister, Marie-Hélène, is the first person to arrive at their parents’ apartment, at eight thirty. Like the Boulloche sisters who work with their brother André, Marie-Hélène participates in her brother’s clandestine activities. Until today she has always managed to bury her fears about her brother’s fate. But after he tells her about Paul’s visit, she begs him not to meet with him again.

Postel-Vinay does his best to calm her down. Then his sister leaves the room to speak with their parents. At that moment, Postel-Vinay turns around to remove a loaded six-shot Enfield pistol from the closet. He slides it into the inside pocket of his overcoat. In his other pocket, he places a bulky envelope with all the intelligence he has gathered for Paul.

When his sister returns, he tries to mock her fears. But then he blurts out, “If Paul betrays me, I’ll kill him! And then I’ll kill myself.” He thinks this is the first really good idea he has had all morning.

As soon as he walks out into the street, a black car pulls up beside him. Paul’s “chauffeur” is in the driver’s seat, with Paul next to him. When he tells Postel-Vinay to climb into the empty backseat, that somehow feels reassuring.