The Saboteur by Paul Kix

Author:Paul Kix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

On May 7, two Halifax bombers idled on a runway outside London, crews loading three tons of arms, explosives, wireless devices, and radios into their bellies. With midnight approaching, La Rochefoucauld and his radioman squeezed into one of the planes. Moments later, they took off.

Once at cruising altitude, the pilot turned around to tell Robert he could take a nap; they wouldn’t be to Bordeaux until nearly dawn, and their landing site was ninety miles south of there. But “I didn’t sleep a wink during those tense hours,” he later wrote.

Bordeaux was a different beast than the Yonne, more volatile and yet more cosmopolitan, and La Rochefoucauld was a different man now, still eager to fight but aware too of the consequences. This mission would be more dangerous than his last. The Nazis already had large parts of the “old” factory in Saint-Médard operating—its output had armed the French during World War I—and with each day, Robert assumed, the plant gained more functionality.

Bordeaux itself accentuated the peril of the assignment. The city had a reputation among Resistance fighters as a place where Nazi repression was at its worst. Bordeaux’s port was a significant U-boat base. Its SD agents had been there since August 1940, longer than in any other provincial city, and these men now knew the region well. The Resistance leader Albert Ouzoulias said Bordeaux was “a cemetery of the finest fighters.”

In part this was due to Friedrich Wilhelm Dohse, who oversaw the regional German police structure, coordinating all espionage, counterespionage, and security activities for the Nazis across southwest France. His portfolio included the military intelligence of the Abwehr and Feldpolizei, and the secret policemen within the regional SD offices. He was precocious, thirty-one in the spring of 1944, and in surviving photos bald and grimacing, as if the responsibilities of his post had aged him. Dohse spoke fluent French, dressed extremely well, and had single-handedly dismembered Bordeaux’s largest Resistance group, Scientist. “This is a man who got results,” a Bordeaux police officer later said. “He was an evil man.”

The plane drew ever closer to Bordeaux. Soon it flew over the reclaimed marshes on which the city lay, where even the topography worked against résistants: The surrounding hills scrambled many of the wireless transmissions sent to London, and so drops like this one moved to the forests south of Bordeaux, to clearings in the terrain that only locals knew. La Rochefoucauld’s landing would occur in the neighboring southern department of Landes, in a town called Mugron, amid its vineyards and groves of pine and fifteen hundred sleeping residents.

The plane swooped low, nearly skimming the tree line, five hundred feet off the ground. The pilot saw a formation of lights in an opening in the forest—the local résistants—and established radio contact with them. The bird swirled round and headed back for the formation, and La Rochefoucauld moved to the plane’s hatch and stared at the red light opposite him. He waited, just as he had done in the Yonne, for the light to turn green.

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