Read Online Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Douglas Boyd
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attack … He ran great risks in looking after four RAF officers who had been brought down in the neighbourhood, and accompanied them to the Spanish border. In the course of his efforts to obtain the release of these officers, he raided a German military garage and took ten Gestapo motors which he used frequently. He also procured a Gestapo pass for his own use in spite of the fact that he was well known to the enemy. 3
Back in Britain, Ortiz was decorated with the first of two Navy Crosses he was to earn. The citation read in part:
For extraordinary heroism … in connection with military operations … in enemy-occupied territory. Operating in civilian clothes and aware that he would be subject to execution in the event of his capture, Major Ortiz parachuted from an airplane with two other officers of an Inter-Allied mission to reorganise existing Maquis groups and organise additional groups in the region of Rhone [sic]. Although his identity had become known to the Gestapo with the resultant increase in personal hazard, he voluntarily conducted to the Spanish border four Royal Air Force officers who had been shot down in his region, and later returned to resume his duties. Repeatedly leading successful raids during the period of this assignment, Major Ortiz inflicted heavy casualties on enemy forces greatly superior in number (and) upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. 4
In the confusion of missions on the ground, with some officers taking orders from SOE, some from OSS and some from the Gaullist BCRA, Section F’s most important agent in south-east France was Francis Cammaerts, son of a Belgian father and a British mother. His height of 6ft 4in earned him the local nickname ‘Big Feet’ and made him embarrassingly tall when trying to lose himself in a crowd of much shorter southern French people. Uniquely among those who had the sheer unrelenting courage to volunteer as an agent in occupied France, he had started the war by registering as a conscientious objector. He later explained this:
My generation grew up in the shadow of the horror of the trenches, millions of men killed pointlessly trying to gain two or three hundred yards of ground. Like many of my peers, I thought, this must not happen again. There was only one thing we could do: not take part. If everyone did that, we reasoned, there would be no one to go to war.
There were many people in Britain equally innocent in 1939. Working as a teacher in London at the time of Dunkirk, Cammaerts saw his pupils taking drinks and food to wounded soldiers whose trains were halted in sidings near the school. Realising that the parents must disapprove of their children being taught by a man who refused to fight, he then took work as a farm labourer, as approved by the Conscientious Objection Tribunals. After getting married, he came gradually to understand that his moral stance was dubious when his country was involved in a total war. The final straw came when, three weeks after the wedding, his brother was killed flying with the RAF, after which Cammaerts called an old classmate from Rugby school who was known to be ‘something to do with intelligence’ and asked what he could do to help the war effort, stressing at the time and afterwards that he would refuse to obey orders to kill anyone.
Speaking French as fluently as English, he was rapidly put in uniform and posted to Scotland for commando training. On the moonlit night of 22 March 1943 he was one of two passengers in an RAF Lysander, camouflaged green and grey to make it difficult to spot from above against a background of low cloud, and with a long-range tank slung like a huge bomb below the fuselage. Trying not to think about the dangers that awaited him on the ground, Cammaerts found it an unreal experience, keeping a keen eye out for any attack from astern in the pilot’s blind spot:
As we flew I could see night fighters – friend or foe I could not tell – swishing past so
Back in Britain, Ortiz was decorated with the first of two Navy Crosses he was to earn. The citation read in part:
For extraordinary heroism … in connection with military operations … in enemy-occupied territory. Operating in civilian clothes and aware that he would be subject to execution in the event of his capture, Major Ortiz parachuted from an airplane with two other officers of an Inter-Allied mission to reorganise existing Maquis groups and organise additional groups in the region of Rhone [sic]. Although his identity had become known to the Gestapo with the resultant increase in personal hazard, he voluntarily conducted to the Spanish border four Royal Air Force officers who had been shot down in his region, and later returned to resume his duties. Repeatedly leading successful raids during the period of this assignment, Major Ortiz inflicted heavy casualties on enemy forces greatly superior in number (and) upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. 4
In the confusion of missions on the ground, with some officers taking orders from SOE, some from OSS and some from the Gaullist BCRA, Section F’s most important agent in south-east France was Francis Cammaerts, son of a Belgian father and a British mother. His height of 6ft 4in earned him the local nickname ‘Big Feet’ and made him embarrassingly tall when trying to lose himself in a crowd of much shorter southern French people. Uniquely among those who had the sheer unrelenting courage to volunteer as an agent in occupied France, he had started the war by registering as a conscientious objector. He later explained this:
My generation grew up in the shadow of the horror of the trenches, millions of men killed pointlessly trying to gain two or three hundred yards of ground. Like many of my peers, I thought, this must not happen again. There was only one thing we could do: not take part. If everyone did that, we reasoned, there would be no one to go to war.
There were many people in Britain equally innocent in 1939. Working as a teacher in London at the time of Dunkirk, Cammaerts saw his pupils taking drinks and food to wounded soldiers whose trains were halted in sidings near the school. Realising that the parents must disapprove of their children being taught by a man who refused to fight, he then took work as a farm labourer, as approved by the Conscientious Objection Tribunals. After getting married, he came gradually to understand that his moral stance was dubious when his country was involved in a total war. The final straw came when, three weeks after the wedding, his brother was killed flying with the RAF, after which Cammaerts called an old classmate from Rugby school who was known to be ‘something to do with intelligence’ and asked what he could do to help the war effort, stressing at the time and afterwards that he would refuse to obey orders to kill anyone.
Speaking French as fluently as English, he was rapidly put in uniform and posted to Scotland for commando training. On the moonlit night of 22 March 1943 he was one of two passengers in an RAF Lysander, camouflaged green and grey to make it difficult to spot from above against a background of low cloud, and with a long-range tank slung like a huge bomb below the fuselage. Trying not to think about the dangers that awaited him on the ground, Cammaerts found it an unreal experience, keeping a keen eye out for any attack from astern in the pilot’s blind spot:
As we flew I could see night fighters – friend or foe I could not tell – swishing past so
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