A grueling interview determined that he might have what the OSS needed, and he was ordered to show up in the headquarters parking lot the next morning for transportation to the Congressional Country Club. The name was not a joke. At one time, congressmen had actually gone there to drink and play golf, but the war had turned it into an OSS training camp. It still retained its congressional luxuries however: crystal chandeliers, leather chairs, oil paintings in expensive frames, good china.
In fact, training at the Congressional Country Club did not seem discordant to the average OSS volunteer. Before Franklin Roosevelt had picked him to run his new intelligence organization, Donovan had been a Wall Street lawyer with the kind of blue-blood, Ivy League connections that were common at the time. It was only natural that he had built his OSS out of the same privileged, clubby extended family. Most senior officers came from Ivy League—dominated professions, as did many who were present for the orientation with Jack Singlaub that October morning. To his immense relief, however, it wasn’t only the social elite he saw there. Also present were hardened-looking airborne lieutenants like Singlaub who’d come out of OCS or ROTC, as he had (the war had cut his college career short).
The welcoming colonel made instantly clear what they’d be facing:
“You’ve been brought here,” he said, “to evaluate your suitability for combat duty with resistance groups in enemy-occupied areas.... I’m talking about guerrilla warfare, espionage, and sabotage. Obviously, no one doubts your courage, but we have to make certain you possess the qualities needed for a type of operation never before attempted on the scale we envision.
“Guerrillas move fast, operating mainly at night, then disperse into the countryside and reassemble miles away. The skills required of a guerrilla leader will be the same as those shown by the best backwoods fighters and Indian scouts.” Singlaub brightened when he heard this. He had always loved outdoor sports—hunting, fishing, camping—more than the regimentation of playground and team sports. All during high school and college, he had spent whatever time he could trekking the High Sierras. He was happy in the woods and the wilderness.
“We aren’t looking for individual heroes,” the colonel concluded, “although your courage will certainly be tested in the coming weeks. We want mature officers who can train foreign resistance troops, quickly and efficiently, then lead them aggressively. If we are not completely satisfied with your potential, you will be assigned to normal duties.”
Over the next weeks, Singlaub and his companions learned, and were tested on, the basic skills of guerrilla warfare—how to move stealthily at night (over grassy fields that had once been manicured fairways); how to take out targets like railway switches, power transformers, sentry posts, and bridges. But most important, they were tested on how well they could handle what they’d be up against psychologically. Behind the lines they’d be on their own. How well would they hold up? How well could they handle the inevitable crises and screwups? How well would they handle men who were incompetent or overaggressive or nuts?
To that end, ringers from the training staff were inserted into teams in order to screw things up. How well the team handled this subordinate was often more important to their final evaluation than how well they placed demo charges on a railway trestle.
Once they had successfully passed over these hurdles, the OSS candidates were sent to what was called Area B-1. This had once upon a time been a boys’ camp in western Maryland, and later FDR’s weekend retreat, Shangri-la. After the war it became the presidential retreat now called Camp David.
Here the training emphasized tradecraft, and especially hand-to-hand combat.
For that they had probably the best instructor in the world, the British Major William Fairbairn, the inventor of the world-famous Fairbairn double-edged fighting knife (the commandos’ close-in weapon of choice) and the developer of the hand-to-hand training course for the commandos. Fairbairn’s philosophy was simple: You trained for months with a wide variety of Allied and enemy weapons until you handled any of them as instinctively as a major-league ballplayer swung a bat.
And so from early morning until late at night, that’s what they did—not to mention the morning runs, the labyrinthine and dangerous obstacle courses, the nighttime crawls through cold, rain-soaked woods to plant demo charges, or the hours practicing encryption and clandestine radio procedures.
In December, Singlaub sailed for England on the Queen Elizabeth. There, his training continued, now under the auspices of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE, the umbrella organization that managed all the British unconventional warfare groups). The SOE ran clandestine training sites around the world, as well as squadrons of airdrop and reconnaissance aircraft, speedboats, and Submarines; and it maintained enough forgers and mapmakers to keep several companies of James Bonds busy. SOE espionage and sabotage teams had worked in occupied Europe for some time, but now OSS liaison teams had been placed in France and had joined the covert effort. Soon, OSS teams would be given a much larger role.
The training in England was no less grueling than that in Virginia and Maryland. Initially, the focus was on parachute training and live-fire exercises; but there was also increasing emphasis on real-life situations the teams might run into—clandestine tradecraft and living cover stories. Men who failed these tests were sent back to regular units.
After a time, three-man teams were formed—an American or British officer, a French counterpart, and an enlisted radio operator. These teams were to be air-dropped into occupied France, where they would help organize, train, and lead Maquis resistance units in support of the Allied invasion. It was hoped that by then Maquis troops would number in the tens of thousands, and that the occupying Nazi army would find itself attacked on two fronts—Americans, Brits, and Canadians driving west from Normandy, and Maquisards making life hard for the Germans in their rear areas.
In order to minimize Nazi reprisals against civilians, it was essential that the major Maquisard offensive not break out until after the invasion had been launched. And then Maquis objectives and timetables had to be coordinated with overall Allied goals. This would require considerable psychological, political, and military acuity—in a fiercely high-stress, high-threat environment.
The operation was named JEDBURGH, after a castle in Scotland, and the teams were called Jedburgh Teams.
SINGLAUB landed in waist-high brush, rolled to the ground, then picked himself up and, as he gathered his chute into a bundle, made sure that Dominique and Dennau had come down safely fifty yards away.
Darkened figures emerged from the trees, calling out softly in French. Some separated from the rest in order to grab the cargo chutes. Most of the others spread out into a periphery defense. A single figure approached, their contact, a British SOE officer named Simon. They had landed about three kilometers from a village called Bonnefond, he explained, and about twenty kilometers from a German garrison in the town of Egletons.
After months of training, Jack Singlaub was at last in occupied France. He was twenty-three years old.
Soon the three newly arrived Jeds were ready to go. The heavy radio was stowed in Dennau’s rucksack; Singlaub had slid a magazine into their submachine gun and readied the weapon; they had disposed of their chutes and shouldered their rucksacks; and Simon and the Maquis were leading them off into the night-shrouded woods. As they went, Singlaub noted with professional satisfaction that the Maquis troops were both well-trained and well-armed. They kept a good interval in their column, there was a point squad ahead, and flankers were on the sides.
HERE was the situation they faced: At that time, 8,000 Maquisards of the Force Francaises d’Interieur (FFI) operated in the region. Of these, 5,000 belonged to the well-trained and well-armed Gaullist Armée Secrete (AS), while most of the rest were Communist Franc Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). Though there was little love or cooperation between the two, Maquis attacks on German garrisons and convoys had grown since D Day.
Meanwhile, a break
out seemed near out of the Normandy beachhead. Once it came, Allied armies would race west along the Loire. An increasingly likely second Allied invasion—from the Mediterranean coast up the Rhone valley—would put further pressure on the Germans.
The Loire rises in the south of France, flows vaguely north and west to Orléans, about a hundred kilometers south of Paris, then turns west and flows into the Atlantic. The major artery passing through Correze, Route Nationale 89, connected Bordeaux on the coast with Lyon on the Rhone (which is east of the Loire and flows south into the Mediterranean). Route 89 was the main German logistics—and escape—route from southwestern France. For that reason, German forces along the highway remained potent: Better than 2,000 veteran artillery and armor-equipped troops were divided among four heavily fortified garrisons along the highway (at Tulle, Brive, Egletons, and Ussel), while specially trained mobile anti-Maquis troops, equipped with light armor, trucks, and spotter planes, continued at the ready to sweep up Free French units. The Germans intended to keep Route 89 open.
On the other hand, the terrain gave a big advantage to the Maquis. The Massif Central was rugged, offering plentiful choke points. Both road and rail lines through Correze ran along narrow valleys. There was God’s own plenty of bridges, viaducts, culverts—lots of targets. And to make matters more interesting, an Allied breakout from Normandy would cut off the Germans in southwest France, while an Allied sweep up the Rhone would close the box and trap them. The time was growing ripe for a major Maquis uprising in the Massif.
Airdrops had equipped the Maquis with modern weapons. They wanted—and needed—more, but it was a good start. Team James’s job was to train the Maquis units in the use of those weapons and to be the liaison between the Maquis and Allied headquarters for further weapons drops. They would also be involved in sabotage and ambush operations as needed. And, not least, they’d be expected to lead the Maquis troops against the Germans, in whose eyes the Jedburghs were spies and not soldiers. If captured, they could expect torture and execution. (Poison pills had been issued to those who wanted them. Singlaub did not.)
As they marched to the farmhouse that would become their first command post, or PC—poste de commandement, as the Maquis called it—(it was the practice to move PCs frequently), Simon pointed out landmarks and explained the current situation to the three Jeds: “All the local German garrisons are surrounded,” he said. “They won’t come out at night for fear of ambush. But Egletons is a tough nut—a reinforced company of Hun infantry, with at least a platoon of SS, occupies a commanding position over the Correze valley. The proper lot of machine guns, several antitank guns, and maybe some mortars. They’ve also got a wireless, so they’re in contact with their division HQ in Clermont-Ferrand.” Clermont-Ferrand was the base for one of the Wehrmacht specially trained anti-Maquis units. “The German garrisons at Brive and Tulle are larger than the one at Egletons,” Simon continued, “but we have more Maquis companies surrounding them; they don’t have a wireless; and we’ve cut all the phone and telegraph lines.” He grinned in the moonlight. “Poor buggers don’t know what we’re up to.”
It was an interesting situation for guerrillas. The enemy was reeling, nervous, vulnerable, yet far from defeated, and still very deadly. The time was ripe for forceful actions, yet overconfidence could ruin everything.
Soon after dawn, there was a war council. Present were Jack Singlaub, Dominique, Simon, Captain Wauthier (he and his SAS troops had arrived earlier after a long hike through the woods, somewhat more lightly equipped than they’d hoped, having lost through various mishaps four of their cargo pods), and the local Maquis commander, a tough, smart, and very professional former French regular army officer whose nom de guerre was Captain Hubert. Hubert had arrived not long after Wauthier, driving an ancient Renault whose better days long predated the war, and commanded a 3,000-strong Gaullist AS unit called the Corps Franc de Tulle.
Once the SAS guys and several squads of Hubert’s Maquis set up perimeter defense around the PC, the council began. Hubert in particular had important matters to discuss, chiefly:
His troops were poorly armed. Only about a third of his men carried weapons—captured German Mauser rifles, Schmeisser submachine guns, and a handful of British Sten guns and pistols. The best-armed Maquis in the Correze were the troops of the region’s AS commander (whose nom de guerre was Patrick). An enormous American airdrop, with more than seventy B-17s taking part, on Bastille Day, July 14, had provided Patrick with enough rifles, Sten and Bren guns, grenades, pistols, and a few bazookas and British Piat antitank weapons to equip his own 2,000-man unit, but had left few leavings for Hubert.
Nevertheless, Patrick had put these forces to excellent use. His unit had set up permanent ambushes at three points along Route 89, had completely surrounded the German garrison at Brive, and blocked the southwest approach to the Correze valley, while a smaller but equally well-armed AS unit had blocked the valley’s northeast entrance.
Not only did Hubert’s troops crave a piece of this action, but many of them, he added pointedly, had been waiting for weapons for three years, ever since they’d escaped the Nazi Blitzkrieg. “My men are ready to fight the Boches,” he said. “But we cannot do it with naked hands.”
When Dominique asked him for detailed requirements, after which contact would be made with London, Hubert (ever the professional) instantly produced a typed list, which he had already long ago prepared. And then he continued, turning even more serious: “There is another matter,” he said carefully. “The FTP has recently come into this neighborhood in force, especially south of the highway, in the hills around Egletons—the area which has been my own operational area. They are commanded by a onetime schoolteacher and army corporal who calls himself Colonel Antoine. Antoine commands 3,000 well-armed troops,” having received their weapons during the massive American Bastille Day airdrop. “Previously, they operated in the Department of Lot-et-Garonne to our south. But now they are here.
“Antoine is not at all interested in cooperation with us,” Hubert continued, not hiding his scorn. “He is very political. Yes, he wants a public victory over the Boches. But he certainly does not want to share the victory with us.”
Hubert’s implication was simple and ominous. If Hubert’s troops weren’t brought up to the armed strength of Antoine’s, the Communists had a good chance of gaining the credit for liberating central Correze, in that way setting the stage for their postwar political agenda. Many FTP soldiers were good, brave, and dedicated, and had fought hard and taken many casualties, but they were poorly trained—more an armed rabble than a well-disciplined fighting force. Even if they wished to coordinate operations with the AS, which they showed little inclination to do, coordination with them would not come casy. Needless to say, relations between the Communist FTP and the Gaullist AS were tense.
Meanwhile, Hubert went on, word had come from higher up that General George Patton’s Third Army had at last broken out from Normandy and was driving cast at full throttle between the Loire and the Seine. That meant his southern flank was exposed—a situation that typically left Patton unconcerned: “Let the other son-of-a-bitch worry about flanks,” he told an aide. Be that as it may, his right flank was exposed, and the FFI had been given the job of protecting it. Specifically, their mission was to blockade the German forces south of the Loire and west of the Massif Central.
Meaning: The political strain between the FTP and AS had instantly turned dangerous. The blockade would require carefully coordinated actions. But if groups like Antoine’s maintained an independent, politically motivated strategy, and continued to resist cooperation, the Germans could crush each center of resistance in turn, like beads on a string. This would also inevitably mean bad news for civilians because of savage Nazi reprisals.
Just after D Day, a pair of over enthusiastic Maquis botch-ups had brought on Nazi massacres in the towns of Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle. In Tulle, the Nazis hanged nearly a hundred men from lampposts. In Oradour-sur-Glane, the
SS jammed hundreds of men into barns and garages and hundreds more women and children into the town church, then machine-gunned the men and set fire to the barns, garages, and church. No one inside—men, women, or children—survived the flames. After that, they looted the town and killed the few people who’d tried to hide in cellars. They left behind a ghost town.
No doubt about it, Hubert had made a powerful case—military, political, and humanitarian—for getting weapons for his troops. Dominique and Singlaub promised to do what they could.
Later that morning, word came that an OSS operational group had blown up a rail bridge on a northern spur to the east-west line connecting Bordeaux with Lyon, while another band of saboteurs had taken a hydroelectric plant out of action. This cut off power both to an arms factory in Tulle and to the electrified rail line between Correze and Bordeaux. Other Maquis commanders had their eye on Route 89 bridges and were asking for explosives.
This presented Lieutenant Singlaub with a problem. Though the bridges were legitimate targets, closing the highway was not a good idea. The Route 89 corridor through Correze was terrific ambush country, while a closed Route 89 would simply drive the German traffic north toward the more open country near the Loire—and expose Patton’s flank. Conclusion: It was best to keep pressure on the German garrisons along Route 89 but to leave the bridges intact and keep the highway open. This decision soon became the first Team James operational order to the Maquis.
OVER the next days, Dominique and Singlaub reconnoitered, paying special attention to the German garrisons at Brive, Tulle, Ussel, and Egletons—heavily defended, with sandbagged windows, barbed-wire entanglements, and machine-gun emplacements. Well-trained and disciplined Maquis forces had isolated each of these garrisons; barricades and roadblocks had been set up. Soon there would be coordinated attacks.