Carole Seymour-Jones - She Landed by Moonlight: The Story of Secret Agent Pearl Witherington

Contents

Carole Seymour-Jones was born in Wales. She was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for her biography of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of TS Eliot. Her most recent biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, A Dangerous Liaison, received widespread acclaim. Carole is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Surrey, and former Deputy President and chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, the writers charity.

She has three children and lives with her husband in London and Surrey.

A Dangerous Liaison (Century, 2008)

Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T. S. Eliot (Constable Robinson, 2001)

Beatrice Webb: a Woman of Conflict (Allison & Busby, 1992)

Journey of Faith: The History of the World YWCA 19451994 (Allison & Busby, 1994)

Refugees (Heinemann, 1992)

Homelessness (Heinemann, 1993)

Another Sky: Voices of Conscience from Around the World, co-editor (Profile, 2007)

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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Carole Seymour-Jones

The right of Carole Seymour-Jones to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 72463 9

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To the memory of

M.R.D. Foot

19192012

Friend and mentor

Map of Former F Circuits

O NE day in May 2012, while following in Pearls footsteps in France, I hired a car and drove from Chteauroux to Limoges. I took a detour west, to the martyr village of Oradour-sur-Glane. There I walked down the hill in bright sunshine, past the empty, ruined houses into the skeleton of the church in which the women and children of the village were burned alive by the Waffen SS on 10 June 1944.

A shaft of sunlight fell on an altar, and something caught my eye: a pair of calcified clogs, the wooden sabots worn by women of the time. They were a mute reminder of their owner, a woman dying, clutching her child to her legs, shielding him in her skirts as the flames crackled around her and the smoke extinguished her breathing.

The image of those clogs stayed with me. They became a symbol of the courage with which Pearl Witherington, a former secretary, faced the terror of the Nazi war machine. Avec mes Sabots, was her favourite marching song when she was on the road with her maquisards, facing the Waffen SS soldiers of the Das Reich division, the same division who had killed the 642 victims of Oradour.

Oh, oh, oh, avec mes sabots, sang Pearl, as she led her band of Frenchmen into battle. The song she chose, Avec mes sabots, was also the marching song of Joan of Arc. To Pearls companions, her lover, Henri Cornioley, Major Clutton of Jedburgh Julian, and perhaps to her men, Pearls visionary leadership in May September 1944 was reminiscent of Joans. Pearl never said so. But she fought under the same flag of freedom, the Cross of Lorraine, to rid France, the country she called home, from oppression.

The clogs were crude, wooden footwear, worn by peasant women whose brothers put down their scythes and sickles, left their fields and their cattle to answer Pearls call to arms in June 1944. It seemed an unequal match: peasants against Nazis. But the men of the Indre, newly armed by Pearl with unfamiliar weapons, Sten guns and rocket launchers, learnt fast. Comrades in arms, the British and the French, and many Commonwealth citizens Mauritians, Canadians, New Zealanders took on the Gestapo, the German repression columns and the SS Panzers.

The agents of SOE have, rightly, been called amateurs, brainchild of the greatest gentleman amateur of all, Winston Churchill. The Resistance has been equally maligned, the credit for victory in 1944 solely ascribed to the regular forces. But Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, said SOE circuits and the maquis were worth several divisions. Thanks to them, the Germans lost control of their rear during Overlord, and it was the men and women of the Resistance who liberated France south of the Loire.

This is Pearls story, but it is also theirs.

Carole Seymour-Jones

March 2013

Note Eisenhower to Major General Gubbins of SOE, 31 May 1945.

T HE stars are growing fainter in the night sky as the Halifax bomber approaches the dropping zone. In the belly of the bomber, Secret Agent Pearl Witherington, a.k.a Agent Marie, clings to the fuselage, feeling, not for the first time, like Jonah inside the whale. The aircraft banks sharply and she almost loses her balance. They have crossed the Loire and the Cher rivers by the light of the moon, and are circling the landing ground at Les Tailles de Ruines, north-east of Valenay, in central France. The roar of the four engines is deafening, the smell of oil and petrol from the spare cans overpowering. Pearl has lost all feeling in her feet, for it is icy cold and her ankles are tightly bandaged to prevent them breaking on the impact of landing. She crouches beside the exit hole, ready for her parachute drop, and glances at the despatcher who will give her the signal to jump.

Her heart beats furiously. Any moment now he will shout Action stations!, the light will turn red, then green, and he will tell her Go! She takes a deep breath. This is the culmination of all her dreams of returning to Occupied France, the fulfilment of hours of training ever since she, a twenty-nine-year-old British secretary, volunteered to join the Special Operations Executive in the spring of that year, 1943.

The black bomber is losing height. The engine note changes as it circles the DZ for the second time. Is something wrong? The pilot and navigator are peering into the darkness, straining for the first sight of the lights of the reception committee below, but there is no dim-but-reassuring-glow from torches lashed to sticks in the landing ground. The pilot has dropped as far as he dares through the cloud, down to 500 feet, and he comes around for the last time before Pearl hears his voice over the intercom: Mission aborted.

With a sigh, she swallows her disappointment as the bomber turns tail and heads for the Channel.

Had Pearl but known it, on that night of 15 September 1943, the Germans were chasing the Resistance through the woods of Les Tailles de Ruines directly beneath them, and Hector, the SOE circuit chief whom she was to join in the field, had been forced to scrub her reception: at the last moment, he had cancelled the order to set out the landing lights. The pilot, likewise, had prioritised Pearls safety.