… (just friends) with whom I had many good dinners at which not a word of politics was spoken,’ Dohse claimed after the war. ‘I did not want to die on the Russian front. Life in France was much more pleasant – much more fun. One was able to enjoy all the things one could wish for.’
‘Dohse loved Bordeaux,’ one observer wryly commented. ‘His table was refined, and his mistress, beautiful. Dohse was a happy man. And those are the most dangerous.’
At this point in the war, danger seemed rather far away to Friedrich Dohse and his German compatriots in Bordeaux. True, in mid-1941, agents parachuted in by London had attacked and destroyed a power station in the Bordeaux suburb of Pessac. But the damage had been slight, the interruption of power short and, apart from a dozen German soldiers shot for their failure to protect the installation, little of consequence had resulted from the British raid. On 23 April 1941, for the first time, a British parachute drop of weapons was discovered near the little village of Cestas, fifteen kilometres southwest of Bordeaux. This caused much astonishment among the locals and dramatic reports from the local French police. There had also been RAF bombing raids on the port of Bordeaux – but these had been infrequent, haphazard and poorly targeted, often killing many more French civilians than German personnel and causing damage to many more residential properties than military installations. If anything, the raids served to fuel anti-British sentiment in the city.
Leaving aside the regular drives against the communists (there was one in June 1942, following Poinsot’s success in turning a senior communist), things on the security front were quiet and life for Bordeaux’s occupiers rather congenial.
But beneath this seemingly placid surface, things were changing. By the middle of 1942, OCM, now numbering some 800 Resistance fighters and 100 officers, had expanded to cover almost the whole of southwest France, from the Charente region west to the Pyrenees and from the Aquitaine coast south to Toulouse. Among the local Resistance organisations which had by now been fully subsumed into the OCM was the Duboué–Paillère network centred on Duboué’s Café du Commerce at 83 Quai des Chartrons. This group had grown too, and by this time consisted of fourteen active units with, between them, eight parachute sites in the area. Its new recruits included nine living along the Bordeaux waterfront. Two of these were Marcel Bertrand and his wife, who ran the Café des Chartrons at the Bacalan end of the quay. Duboué used the Bertrand café as his chief clandestine ‘letterbox’ through which he passed his reports and messages to London and to other members of his group.
Meanwhile, the new head of OCM Southwest, André Grandclément, had also been busy – recceing potential parachute drop sites, overseeing the hiding of arms, establishing escape routes, issuing orders, setting up a hierarchy of command and devising a system of secret communication. The pity was that, in almost every other way, the OCM was not secret at all. Its existence was by now widely known of and boasted about in the Bordeaux area. Grandclément’s meetings – which tended to be a cross between a meeting of the golf club committee and a cocktail party – were held regularly and in the same place – at 34 Cours de Verdun, the home he shared with Lucette. Worst of all, members of the OCM could and did belong to other Resistance organisations as well. This meant that if one secret organisation was penetrated the rot could quickly spread to endanger all of them.
In the spring of 1942 an event occurred which made it explicitly clear to the German authorities that this burgeoning underground activity was not just a local matter: London, too, was getting involved in Bordeaux.
On the morning of Sunday 3 May 1942, the weather in Langon, a market town bisected by the demarcation line in the Gironde, was as bright and glorious as a spring morning could be. At 8.38, the regular Sunday morning country train from the small market town of Luxey, seventy kilometres south of Bordeaux, puffed slowly into Langon station, which stands astride the main junction between the rural lines which serve south Gironde and the express line from Toulouse to Bordeaux. Among the passengers who climbed down onto the platform and lined up to have their papers checked was a smartly dressed man who had joined the train at 0549 that morning at the tiny railway halt in the village of Sore, twenty kilometres away. He was young and handsome, with a round face enlivened by alert brown eyes and a small, rather unkempt moustache. He carried a rucksack and a small brown suitcase and, despite the warm day, wore a navy gabardine mac, a suit (light grey with white and blue stripes), a short-sleeved pullover, a shirt, tie (blue, with red and white spots), blue socks and dark brown shoes. When his turn came, he stepped forward and handed his papers to the German customs official for inspection. The official studied them carefully and, finding something out of place, ordered the young traveller to step into the customs office for further enquiries and a search of his luggage.
It may have been Henri Labit’s suitcase which attracted the unwelcome attention – for at this stage of the war SOE was in the habit of issuing the exactly same make and colour of cheap cardboard suitcase (and, for that matter, the same make of pyjamas) to all their agents – something which the Gestapo had already spotted. Karl Schröder, the head of the small German section at Langon, opened Labit’s case to discover a radio transmitter. Labit’s response was instantaneous. He pulled a Colt automatic out of his pocket, shot Schröder dead, wounded three other guards in the room and made a run for it. Some of the wounded men gave chase, firing after the fugitive. The local gendarmes were called in. Someone reported that they had seen a man running near the town cemetery. The area was quickly surrounded and the young man was spotted leaning, seemingly wounded, against a wall with his Colt in his hand. Before the pursuers could get to him, he collapsed. By the time they reached him, his lips were blue and white foam was frothing from his mouth.
Henri Labit (alias ‘Leroy’), twenty-one years old and originally from Bordeaux, had been trained by SOE and parachuted into France the previous day with false identity papers in the name of ‘Gérard Henri Laure’. Rather than be captured, he had swallowed the ‘L’ (for ‘lethal’) cyanide tablet, which he had been given before leaving London. The Germans stood to attention alongside the young man’s body as he passed through his last agonising convulsions.
Among the incriminating papers found on the dead man’s corpse was a letter from a certain ‘Ginette’. No address was given, but there was reference to a pharmacy in Bordeaux. The Gestapo eventually narrowed their search down to a young girl called Ginette Corbin, the daughter of Charles Corbin, an ex-pharmacist turned wartime policeman, who, unknown to the Germans, was also active in the local Resistance. Ginette Corbin was Henri Labit’s cousin, and it seems clear that the letter was intended as a device by which Henri Labit could make contact with Charles Corbin and then, through him, with the Resistance in Bordeaux.
Ginette and her mother were taken to Dohse’s headquarters and interrogated. They initially denied all knowledge of Labit, until, confronted with the letter found on Labit’s body, Ginette blurted out that she was trying, for personal reasons, to hide that she was, in fact, engaged to Labit. It was a complete invention intended to avoid having to reveal that the Corbin family were, in reality, related to Labit. But it worked. Ginette and her mother were released. Next, the Germans arrested and interrogated Henri Labit’s mother, Henriette, insisting that the dead man was her son. She too denied any relationship. So she was taken down to the cellars of the château and shown the body of her son hanging on a meat hook. Mme Labit coldly examined the cadaver and declared she did not recognise the young man.
The orders given to Henri Labit before he left London were to establish a Resistance network in and around Bordeaux, identify parachute sites where weapons could be dropped, and reconnoitre amphibious landing grounds on the beaches south of the Gironde estuary. His mission was the first in a planned programme of British/French expansion into the whole of the German occupied zone, with special emphasis on Paris and Bordeaux.
On 20 April, an SOE radio operator with orders to open up wireless communications from Tours, 250 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux and also in the occupied zone, was landed on the south coast of France. He arrived in Tours on 23 June and was joined three weeks later by an ex-RAF officer called
