Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944. Paddy Ashdown

now complete. With five British SOE officers in Bordeaux and Claude de Baissac’s sister, Lise, running a support network in the Charente, east of the city, Scientist was now the largest and best-resourced SOE network in all of occupied France.

      Unusual cold gripped the whole of Europe in the last week of November 1942. Temperatures of minus eight degrees were recorded in Bordeaux and Toulouse. It was the advance guard of winter – the winter of Stalingrad. The parasols and tables outside Bordeaux cafés retreated out of the cold, and summer strollers in the Parc Bordelais gave way to muffled stragglers taking shortcuts past frost-scorched flower beds and the leafless skeletons of trees. In the first week of December, a light dusting of snow fell across the whole of France.

      Sometime during these weeks, a tall and handsome man with an air of authority, startlingly blue eyes and a markedly retroussé nose, knocked at the door of 34 Cours de Verdun. It was Charles Corbin, the father of Ginette, Roger Landes’s new courier. He was calling on Grandclément, ostensibly in his capacity as a policeman investigating some minor infraction of economic law (Grandclément’s cavalier attitude to finance and the law was a persistent feature of his life, both public and secret). What exactly happened during this encounter is not known, but by the end of it – in a move which would be full of consequence for both men – Corbin accepted Grandclément’s invitation to join him in the OCM. Perhaps one of the things which brought the two men together was the fact that both had expressed strong anti-communist views and had close contact with the proto-fascist Croix-de-Feu.

      By now de Baissac, comfortably installed in the Café des Chartrons, had both the expertise and the materials to mount his attack on the blockade-runners he could see from the café’s front windows. A small team of saboteurs, under Jean Duboué and Vic Hayes, began to prepare the explosive charges. The attack was set for 12 December when the explosive, timed to go off that night, would be taken on board in dockers’ haversacks while the ships were being loaded.

      Of this impending sabotage attack right in the heart of his area of responsibility, Dohse, in his office at KdS headquarters in Bouscat, just three kilometres from the Café des Chartrons, knew nothing. Indeed, the Germans had only recently woken up to the fact that they had a substantial armed Resistance, supported by London, planted in their midst.

      But Friedrich Dohse was not the only person who would be surprised by what happened next.

      When Vic Hayes’s demolition team arrived at the Quai des Chartrons a little before dawn on the morning of 12 December, they found the dock area swarming with German troops against a background of general pandemonium and chaos. Someone said that bombs had gone off on one of the blockade-runners. Suddenly, as if to confirm the fact, there was a dull thud and a tall column of water shot up the flank of a ship moored almost precisely opposite the Café des Chartrons. Already one of the other ships was leaning over, threatening, in the words of a German officer on the quayside that morning, ‘to capsize, but for her hawsers, stretched like violin strings, which are still able to hold her’.

      Throughout the morning and into the early evening the explosions continued, not only on ships alongside the Quai des Chartrons, but also on those tied up along the quays on the opposite bank of the Garonne. Fire broke out on a small oil tanker, the Cap Hadid, sending a pall of smoke over Bacalan. The Bordeaux port fire brigade were called in. What the Germans didn’t know was that Raymond Brard, the man directing the port firemen, was himself the leader of a local Resistance group. When the Germans weren’t looking, Brard ordered his men to reverse the direction of the pumps so that they sucked water into the stricken vessel instead of pumping it out, causing the Cap Hadid to settle gently on the Garonne mud, half submerged, alongside the quay.

      At first the Germans, mystified, suspected local sabotage. But Italian divers called in during the morning confirmed that the explosions had come from the outside. As the day wore on, the true story began to emerge. It had been a daring commando raid carried out by ten Royal Marines in five canoes, who had disembarked near the mouth of the Gironde from a submarine five days previously. On the first night, two of the raiders had perished in treacherous tidal rips at the entrance of the Gironde and two more were wrecked, swiftly falling into German hands. The captured Marines were interrogated, using, Berlin insisted, ‘all means necessary’.

      From the information gathered and the materials found in the captured canoe, the Germans were quickly able to piece together the details of the operation and the fact that the target was shipping in Bordeaux harbour. Nevertheless, through overconfidence, complacency, or perhaps just in the belief that no one could make it in fragile canoes down the dangerous, heavily patrolled, densely defended 110 kilometres from the mouth of the Gironde to Bordeaux harbour, the German admiral in charge of the defence of the area concluded that the raid was over and the danger had passed. But it hadn’t. Two of the raiders’ canoes had managed to slip past the German defences undetected and reach the port, as planned. On the night before the final attack, as their colleagues lay hidden in the reeds outside the port observing their targets, the two captured Marines were taken to Souge and, under Hitler’s infamous and illegal Commando Order, executed by firing squad.

      Of the remaining six Marines on Operation Frankton (more famously known as the Cockleshell Heroes raid), four were captured afterwards. They were interrogated by, among others, Friedrich Dohse, who tried to find out the names of French people who had helped them. But the Marines gave nothing. They were eventually transferred to Paris where they too were subsequently shot. With the help of the French Resistance, the final pair, the raid commander Major Blondie Hasler and his canoe partner Marine Bill Sparks, made it home over the Pyrenees.

      Hitler was furious, and sent a message through Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the commander-in-chief of the German army, scolding local commanders for failures which were ‘difficult to comprehend’, and warning that ‘the Führer expects [an end to] this carelessness which still appears to be widespread’.

      De Baissac was furious too – and with almost equally good reason. Operation Frankton had been masterminded by Combined Operations, whose headquarters in Whitehall were closer to SOE in Baker Street than Dohse’s office in Bouscat was to the Café des Chartrons. Yet neither had told the other what they were doing. ‘At the critical moment … the unfortunate Commando attack took place,’ de Baissac commented sourly, ‘charges were laid on seven ships, but the only result was that the ships, which were empty, settled one metre into the water and were immediately raised … the Bordeaux Docks are now in a state of continuous alert … the dock guards were increased to 200 men … armed with grenades and automatic weapons [who] … open fire at sight. As a result, Scientist has had to give up these targets.’

      But this did not mean that the Scientist team was idle when it came to the business of ‘crackers and bangs’. Vic Hayes (who soon earned the soubriquet ‘Charles le Démolisseur’ amongst his colleagues) and Jean Duboué assembled a team of forty or so saboteurs who they trained and led on a series of raids across southwestern France. This began just a few days after the Frankton raid with an attack on the rail network southeast of Bordeaux. Not long afterwards, railway lines were blown up at Dax, high-level pylons attacked at Facture and junction boxes demolished at Bayonne. The attacks caused a complete collapse of the electricity supply across the entire regional rail system. Following the sabotage, de Baissac’s men (no doubt with technical advice from the ardently pro-British cheminots) took advantage of the disconnections to short-circuit the railway’s electricity supply systems. The result was that, when the Germans turned on the supply again, there were more violent explosions and more serious damage. Rail traffic across the region was disrupted for days. Taken aback by the scale of the attacks coming so soon after the Frankton raid, the German authorities concluded that this was the prelude to an invasion. Panicky alerts were issued to all units, and trucks rushed to main headquarters, where they were swiftly loaded with the military archives and sent to dispersed locations outside the city.

      This spate of attacks was followed over succeeding months by raids on Bordeaux’s main power station at Pessac on the eastern outskirts of the city, on an electricity substation at Quatre Pavillons just 200 metres from the bungalow in Cenon where Roger Landes operated his wireless (Landes himself drew the sketch map for this raid), and on several small steamships in Pauillac harbour. Although Vic Hayes’s