CHAPTER FIVE
We arrive at Brive-La-Gaillarde via the N20, turning off by Noailles and entering by the Avenue Edmund Michelet, the same route as that taken by Das Reich. Turn left under the railway bridge and head for the SNCF Station (2). This is a good point from which to orientate your visit to Brive, for as the accompanying map shows, most of the SOE and Resistance sites are within easy walking distance. Before coming to the Station, as you enter the town, you will see, to your right, the Grottos of St Anthony of Padua (1). A visit here is very rewarding, not only for the site itself, but for the several tablets commemorating the use of the Grottos as arms caches associated with Henry Peulevé of Circuit AUTHOR.
Your first port of call is Le Centre National d’Études de la Résistance et de la Déportation Edmund Michelet, 4 rue Champanatier (3). Located in what was his own home, Edmund Michelet is one of the great heroes of the Resistance. Ten exhibition rooms, a library and audio-visual services are served by a helpful and friendly staff including an English-speaking Archivist. References to SOE are mainly on the 2nd and 3rd floors and an excellent map room enables the visitor to visualise the city at the time of the Occupation.
Grottos of St Anthony of Padua, Brive, site of Peulevé’s arms cache.
Street plan of Brive-la-Gaillard
From here the following itinerary is proposed:
1. Walk back to the Station via the Place de la Liberté (4) for the memorial to Edmund Michelet.
2. Turn up the Rue Dumyrat and pass the Hotel Champantier. This was Peulevé’s and Poirier’s safe house (5).
3. From here, in front of the Station, you have the Hotel Terminus, once Gestapo HQ (6).
4. Then, turn down Avenue Jean Jaures (originally Avenue de la Gare) and at No 26 you have what was Maurice Arnouil’s Bloc-Gazo factory, the HQ for F Section’s AUTHOR and DIGGER Circuits and the scene of innumerable Resistance meetings and events (7).
5. At the bottom of the Avenue you will find the church of St-Sernin where Jacques Poirier attended every Mass one Sunday morning after spending a ‘very cold’ night in the open countryside and having failed to make immediate contact with Peulevé (8).
6. Moving into the centre, visit the Liberation Monument in Place du 15 August 1944 (9). Across the road the big Lycée building was used to house German garrison troops (10). The nearby Medical Centre saw clandestine operations on wounded Maquis (11) and (12) the home of Dr Lachèze.
Doctor Lachèze, who operated on George Hiller (MAXIME) after his grievous wound from a dum-dum bullet on the Causse de Gramat, worked in this hospital and was responsible for the first ‘flying ambulance’ to bring medical aid to wounded Resistants. He told me of the first ever arrival of penicillin in France, flown in by SOE to heal MAXIME: its container is still in the Cahors Resistance Museum. See page 44.
Doctor Lachèze
After that, rejoin your car and set out for Tulle, taking the Pont de Buy to the north west of the city and turning east onto the Boulevard President Kennedy and the N89. As you arrive in Malemort, slow down and draw into your right after the Rue M de Vars. You are opposite No 171 Route de Tulle (13).
The monument at Pont de Cornil.
Few travellers on this busy, dusty road would appreciate the significance of No 171 Route de Tulle. Here, on 21 March 1944, the Gestapo arrested Major Peulevé, Louis Delsanti, the radio operator Louis Bertheau and Roland Malraux, brother of André Malraux, betrayed by a neighbour who suspected them of being black marketeers. They were in course of transmitting to London. After imprisonment in Fresnes and deportation to Germany, only Peulevé returned alive from Buchenwald. It was immediately following this disaster that Captain Poirier took over and set up Circuit DIGGER, the successor to AUTHOR. See page 80.
Tulle
From here, continue along the N89, a fast road which twists through increasingly volcanic heights, paralleling the River Corrèze and the railway line. Half way to Tulle, at Pont de Cornil, you will observe a monument on your right. Pull off the road here. The monument records the surrender of Tulle, 16 August 1944, by Captain Reichmann to four representatives of the Resistance.
Lieutenant Dennis (Left) holding the German surrender document for the Corrèze with (left to right) Lieutenant Jacquot, a Resistant, Jacques Poirier and Colonel Guedin, at the time of the surrender of Brive.
Continue on to Tulle but drive slowly and carefully as the traffic is fast here and you will soon arrive at the Champ des Martyrs of the Resistance. A panel will warn you: drive past the site and pull in before the garage on your right. (For visitors leaving Tulle for Brive there is a small lay-by opposite the site but the same caution should be observed and you will have to cross the road on foot). Here the victims of the 9 June 1944 hangings are buried.
Champ des Martyrs, Tulle, on the N89.
The memorial reads:
PASSER-BY
–
On the evening of 9 June 1944
in this corner of earth for ever sacred
but which was only a depot
for refuse were ignominiously buried
99 young men savagely
hanged by the SS of Das Reich Division
by order of General Lammerding
To them have been piously brought
some ashes of their 101 comrades
deported and never returning from the Death Camps
–
MEDITATE
REMEMBER
Jean-Jacques Chapou
The tragedy of Tulle follows a complex path: where does the whole truth lie? The Maquis attack on Tulle, which began at 5:00 am on 7 June, is detailed on M Dautrement’s maps in the Michelet Museum at Brive. It would seem that both French and German sources are more or less in agreement on the initial stages and Max Hastings gives a concise account in his book Das Reich. We can only summarise the events which unfolded as Louis Godefoy (RIVIÈRE) and Jean-Jacques Chapou (KLEBER) of the FTP, with their considerable Maquis forces, confronted 750 Germans of the 3rd Battalion, 95th Security Regiment, 500 Milice and innumerable SD and other German units. By the following day the Maquisards, having inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, were in control of the town. But by attacking Tulle before D-Day, and defying the BBC messages personnel and the pleas of the Armée Secrète, the attack was doomed. The arrival of Das Reich at 9:00 pm on 8 June sounded the death knell for the liberators, who had failed to post lookouts.
French peasants, forewarned by Brigade RAC, flee the imminent arrival of German forces near Royan, June 1944. A scene typical of the flight from Das Reich.
The school in Tulle on fire during the heaviest fighting. Viewed from the Military School at Marbot.
The route you have followed to reach Tulle from Brive is perfect ambush country, but none was made. Das Reich reconnaissance unit, under Major Heinrich Wulf, consisted of some 500 men in 100 half-tracks and lorries. They arrived opposite the railway station, switched off their engines and waited. Suddenly, gunfire erupted all around them, triggering a fierce firefight. The FTP lost seventeen killed and twenty-one wounded. The official German report finally listed nine dead and thirty-one wounded of Das Reich but a further sixty-two bodies of garrison troops are listed. It was later reported that among the German dead there were signs of mutilation and desecration. However, since mention of this does not appear in the Day’s Regimental Report, it is most probably disinformation supplied later so as to go some way to ‘justify’ the reprisal hangings.
On 9 June, a proclamation was posted throughout the city:
Forty German soldiers have been murdered in the most abominable fashion... policemen and gendarmes have made common cause with the communist gangs... forty German soldiers have been murdered... 120 Maquis will be hanged... for the future, three Maquis will be hanged for every soldier wounded, ten for every soldier killed...
Tulle was to experience the horror of SS reprisal; methods developed in Russia and perpetrated to counter partisan activity and to totally demoralise the civilian population.
For the visitor today it should be emphasised that entry into and circulation within the city is by no means easy. Getting lost myself a helpful policeman said, ‘Après la guerre, Monsieur, Tulle était ecrasée!’(After the war Sir, Tulle was flattened). Roads have been switched, railway tracks torn up, many buildings demolished, enormous new edifices erected, and the work is still going on. The traffic is dense and much of Tulle is on a one-way system. However, it is easy to park near the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation, 2 Quai Edmund-Perrier, near the cathedral. (Map 2, reference points 3 & 4).
Although not directly involved in the hangings, Christian Tychsen arrived at Tulle 9 June when they were taking place. He would take command of the Division from Lammerding in Normandy. Tychsen was ambushed and killed by the Americans, 28 July, 1944. He was a well liked and respected officer and a post war Das Reich veteran’s association bore his name.
The first map of Tulle opposite concentrates on the area associated with the notorious hanging of ninety-nine hostages, ostensibly in reprisal for the reported murder of forty German soldiers but actually part of the SS pacification Plan Lammerding. Arriving via the Avenue de Docteur Valette (off the N89) park across the Bridge of the Martyrs (8) in the cul-de-sac Rue Dr Faugeron. From here explore on foot the Memorial (9), the Pont des Martyrs, the Place Faucher (5) and the environs of the Balcons de Tulle where the hangings took place. The SS set up their HQ in the Tivoli Restaurant, at that time a quasi-rustic site. The Tivoli name remains (4) but the area is completely redeveloped. The GIAT factory is the site of German resistance against the initial attempt to liberate the town and the School is the one from which the garrison troops surrendered to the FTP (2). The screening of the ‘hostages’ took place in the factory yard (3); they were assembled at points 6 and 7; the first hangings were at the corner (10) and then across the bridge. Many of the old buildings have gone, some were in course of demolition during my visit in 1999. Here much depends on the visitors’ ability to imagine the past but, given the tragic nature of this past, one need not dwell long. Every year the anniversary is commemorated, sprays of flowers being placed on the sites.
A death squad of the SS taking reprisals from the civilian populace. Neither the place nor the SS unit involved is known but it occured on the Eastern front.
The cold blooded proceedings at the Tulle road bridge (later named Pont des Martyrs) sketched by an SS witness over a photograph.
The much decorated Vincenz Kaiser of the Der Führer Regiment took part in the hangings.
Map 2 Tulle. From the Pont des Martyrs drive along the one-way route along the Avenue Victor Hugo and past the Victor Hugo College (2) previously the École Normale which the Maquis captured from the Germans just before the arrival of Das Reich. Cross the River at Pont Chisinet and follow the River back on the Quai E Perrier to visit the Resistance Museum (3) and the Cathedral (4) where Circuit ALLIANCE installed their wireless transmitter. Then turn right into Avenue General de Gaulle and pass by the Hospital (5) where the German wounded were treated resulting in a ‘no reprisals’ order by the German commander. Continue on past the Cemetery (6), where ten to twelve soldiers were said to have been shot, before leaving for Uzerche and Limoges by the N120 (7).
Street plan of Tulle 2
The Memorial on Avenue Alsace-Lorraine, Spays of commemorative flowers on les balcons de Tulle, Rue des Martyrs, placed every 9 June.
Abbé Jean Espinasse
In October 1944, after the horror and tragedy of Tulle, the ninety-nine victims were exhumed from their temporary burial site and reburied with full honours at the Champ des Martyrs at Cueille. Also commemorated here are the many deportees who never returned.
Just before we leave Tulle it should be noted that the town contains twenty-eight Resistance memorials and no less than thirty four streets and squares named in honour of its heroes. Some are inside buildings, for example that in the Cathedral to the Abbé Charles Lair who was responsible for the ALLIANCE radio transmitter in the belfry. Several Guide books are available at the Museum detailing these memorials.
As we drive up the N120 for Uzerche we pass through an area which was scattered with Das Reich camps at the time and which were inspected by Lammerding before he spent the night of 8 June in a flat above the pharmacy of M Laporte. The old N20 brings you into Uzerche across the bridge with the pharmacy on your right. Opposite is the plaque commemorating the FTP hanged there by order of Lammerding, Edouard Chiuvejnaet.
From Uzerche you join the N20 for Limoges and continue along it until you approach Le Martoulet near the Forest of Magnac. Here you are entering SALESMAN 2 and VENTRILOQUIST territory and Violette Szabo country. We will now strike off into remote countryside, the details of which route follow in Chapter 6.
Circuit: SALESMAN 2
Dates: April 1943 – August 1944
Principal Department: HAUTE VIENNE.
After a remarkable clandestine career in Antibes, Périgueux, Mauzac, Rouen and Le Havre, Geoffrey Staunton (Philippe Liewer, HAMLET) parachuted in yet again on 7 June 1944 with Robert Maloubier (PACO), the American wireless operator Guiet and Violette Szabo (LOUISE). HAMLET made contact with Colonel Guingouin, the local FTP leader, with a view to unifying his forces under the FFI banner, as he had been ordered by General Köenig, C-inC, FFI. Violette Szabo (the subject of Chapter 6) had been a Woolworth’s sales assistant, was a complete tom-boy and a deadly shot, described by Vera Atkins as ‘incredibly beautiful’. Staunton, with a delegation of four other Allied officers, received the capitulation of Limoges on 21 August 1944 from General Gleiniger (see Chapter 7). Staunton was awarded the MC and Croix de Guerre.
Philippe Liewer (HAMLET)
Muriel Byck (VIOLETTE)
Circuit: VENTRILOQUIST
Dates: May 1941 – November 1942 and March –
August 1944.
Principal Departments: HAUTE VIENNE,
DORDOGNE and CORRÈZE.
We now arrive in Philippe de Crevoisier de Vomécourt’s (GAUTHIER) extensive VENTRILOQUIST country, scene of the very first SOE agent landing in France, GEORGE NOBLE, Georges Bégué, on 5 May 1941, and of the first arms parachutage on 13 June 1941. Other agents were to join him: J B E Hayes (sabotage), Dennis Rake (an ex-Ivor Novello singer), Blanche Charlet (CHRISTINE) wireless operator, Muriel Byck (VIOLETTE) a twenty-two year old Jewish girl who succumbed to meningitis and died in Philippe’s arms at Romorantin on 23 May 1944. Her name, inscribed on the war memorial there, is one of the very few SOE agents to be commemorated in south west France. Amongst VENTRILOQUIST’s many achievements may be noted sixty-five parachutages; more than thirteen bridge blowings; thirty-four German planes destroyed, some in midair; thirty ambushes and Maquis battles; along with massive rail cuts. From D-Day on there was no normal rail traffic in this Circuit’s area.
GAUTHIER was awarded the DSO, the American DSC, the French and Polish Croix de Guerre, the French Medal of the Resistance and was made an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur.
Philippe de Vomécourt (GAUTHIER), at a post war parade at Orleans Cathedral, receives a decoration from Marshall de Lattre de Tassigny.
