Agent Josephine, page 41
Nearby lay the figure of the young sailor from Brittany, face up and stone-cold dead. As best he could Modica told them what had happened. The road had been straight, running flat through the desert, and he was unable to explain how they had come to crash. It was a mystery. Maybe he had fallen asleep at the wheel? He just didn’t know.
Even as Sergeant Modica spoke, Abtey was gripped by a dark sense of unease. A while before, they had paused at an isolated British encampment to enjoy a cup of tea. Abtey had got out his cigarettes, offering them to the others. He’d stuck a match, lit his own, then another and then a third – that being the cigarette of the young man who was now dead. The words of Major Bacon, his SIS handler in Lisbon, came back to haunt him: Never three… or the youngest will die. Abtey had given that young sailor the fateful third light, and if he hadn’t persuaded Josephine to return to her place in their vehicle, she too would have been caught in the accident, with unimaginable consequences.
It was a dark day. The body was fetched by some British MPs and taken to the morgue in nearby Alexandria, while the injured Modica was rushed to the local hospital. Finally, late at night the reduced tour party limped into Alexandria, Josephine’s face lit by the moon and seeming ‘hollowed out with grief’.27 If anything, Abtey felt even worse. Shortly, they buried the unfortunate victim in Alexandria’s military cemetery.
This epic odyssey brought Josephine closer to the death and horror of war than ever, with profound consequences. ‘The powdered, pampered Josephine’ of the pre-war years was a stranger to her now, she would declare. With death a constant companion, life had attained a far deeper significance, this closeness to suffering forcing her to dig deep to find compassion and ‘tenderness’.28 She did so for all of her performances, but especially at the hospitals, which were overflowing with Allied wounded.
From Alexandria to Cairo and onwards through Jerusalem, Damascus and finally to Beirut, the capital of the Lebanon, the tour continued. At all points Josephine danced and she sang. But equally, as she was feted by high society, diplomats, royalty and Arab chiefs alike, she talked, and most importantly, she listened. So too did her partner in espionage, Abtey. Across the entire region the momentum for liberation was building. It seemed unstoppable. The report they compiled made all of this clear, as it did the pressing need for the Allies to keep a lid on the unrest, at least until the war against the enemy could be won. The transition to independence needed to be smooth and untroubled, and managed properly so as not to erupt in a paroxysm of violence.
By early November 1943 they were back in Cairo, having raised over 3 million French Francs – a staggering amount in today’s money – for the French Resistance. Equally, they had garnered a thick file of intelligence, and were keen to spirit it into Colonel Billotte’s hands, and from there to de Gaulle. It proved impossible to do so, and mostly due to the obduracy of some of those serving at de Gaulle’s intelligence HQ, in Algiers. There, a mysterious figure trashed the reports they sent by coded radio messages, consigning them to the dustbin. This was happening, even as angry crowds stoned the windows of the Egyptian minister’s house in which they were being entertained, and mobs hit the streets demanding all they had been promised under the Atlantic Charter, and chiefly freedom from colonial rule.29
Faced with animosity and antagonism from Algiers, and blocked from getting their reports to Billotte, Josephine and Jacques decided they would have to deliver them in person. On 15 November 1943 the much-reduced party – most of the troupe, including Fred Rey, would follow later – departed Cairo, to retrace their steps across North Africa using the one battered jeep that remained. Upon reaching Alexandria they paused to place flowers on the grave of the young naval officer who had died in the jeep accident, and to pay their respects.
They also managed to track down the jeep that had run off the road, realising that it should be possible to get it just about roadworthy. Sergeant Modica was due to be released from hospital, and he volunteered to get back behind the wheel. The jeep still looked a wreck, with its windscreen gone, no spare wheel and only one headlamp which was distinctly boss-eyed. Even so, two vehicles were far better than one for such a journey.
With winter now upon them the desert had turned bitterly cold, and especially when moving in open-topped vehicles, with the result that the jeeps’ occupants looked even less presentable than their wheeled transport. Josephine shivered under a thick woollen cap with ‘donkey ears’, and with the giant Tricolour hugged closely around her. Si Mohammed Menebhi was wrapped in a khaki Berber djellaba – a thick woollen robe – with the hood pulled up over the top of a fez, a traditional felt hat. Abtey wore one coat over another, and had long yellow gloves pulled up to his elbows, while Sergeant Modica looked positively bursting at the seams – ‘like a real Michelin Man’ – with a thick wax camouflage raincoat thrown over all.30
They pressed ahead, but just before they reached Tobruk the jeep driven by Abtey collapsed onto its side, with one of its suspension springs cracked in two. There was almost no water left in the radiator or fuel in the tank. Just then, like an impossible apparition, Josephine spied a seeming mirage. A vehicle melted out of the haze. It turned out that a unit of Austrian Jews – die-hard anti-Nazis fighting in the Allied cause – was stationed in the desert near by. They agreed to repair the stricken jeep, on one condition: ‘Miss Baker comes to sing at our camp…’31 The deal was struck, Josephine did as promised, and the next day they got back on the road.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to his recent injuries Sergeant Modica was plagued by exhaustion. Abtey was forced to take over driving his jeep, as Josephine took the wheel of the other. Passing Benghazi, they pushed into the Sirte desert once more, but shortly Abtey’s vehicle blew out two of its tyres. Josephine set out in her vehicle, seeking help. She returned with a ‘curious figure, nonchalantly lying on the hood of the jeep’32 Dressed in torn and patched trousers and battered shirt, he had a faded cap on his head topped off by a large pom-pom. He slid off the vehicle and with some glue and spare rubber got to work repairing the burst tyres.
‘A great guy,’ Josephine explained. ‘He’s an English soldier, a de-miner, who lives with a comrade in a hut, along with a dog and a black rooster called Achilles, who he’s trying to keep alive until Christmas.’33 The hut was so bare and plain, its only luxury was a tiny radio which they’d scavenged from an abandoned tank. Every morning, they’d set out with their kit to clear the desert of mines. ‘Three months ago, they were four. The other two were blown up: one, the day after his arrival, the other two weeks ago. That doesn’t stop them from whistling all the time…’
Once the soldier was done fixing the tyres, he called over to the superstar: ‘Josephine! You have to pay for the repairs!’
‘Of course! Of course!’
‘Well! Would you agree to sing on the BBC, on Christmas Eve, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”?’
‘Sure!’
‘Don’t forget. We’ll be listening…’34
That Christmas Josephine would keep to her side of the bargain. But shortly after making that BBC broadcast, she would learn that the soldier who had so gallantly repaired her tyres had been blown up by a mine on Christmas Eve…
On the approach to Misrata, still 1,500 kilometres short of their destination, the engine of Abtey’s jeep began to knock alarmingly. A British Army truck towed it to their base, which by luck was near by. That night Josephine and her entourage slept in the back of that truck, as they waited for the jeep to be repaired.
At dawn, a British officer poked his head through the canvas: ‘Miss Josephine Baker?’ he demanded, in mock dismay. ‘What are you doing in this miserable tumbril? Come down at once, your breakfast awaits you. When you are such a person, how is it possible to hang out like a gipsy!’35 (A tumbril is an open-backed wooden cart, often used to convey the condemned to the guillotine.)
That day, Abtey’s jeep was fitted with a new engine and Josephine’s vehicle was completely overhauled. By the evening, the workshop had been transformed into a makeshift theatre, and Josephine proceeded to dance and to sing. The following morning, they discovered that the British soldiers had painted in bright lettering across the front of Josephine’s spruced up vehicle: ‘JOSE’S JEEP’. It was a fine and a beautiful way to part company with those who had made them so very welcome.
They set off for Algiers, but what awaited them there was a very different kind of reception. Upon arrival, they delivered their intelligence dossier, just as intended and damn the consequences, but there were many who wanted to bury the message that it embodied. To some – those intent on France retaining her colonies and the supposed ‘glory’ that came with them – it contained a series of deeply inconvenient truths. They were determined to ‘shoot the messengers’, at least metaphorically.
Yet via Colonel Billotte’s good offices, the two intrepid special agents finally managed to get their warnings into de Gaulle’s hands – that French North Africa was a powder keg primed to blow.
Even so, a cold wind was blowing through the world of French intelligence, and Josephine’s days of spying were numbered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A Song For Buchenwald
Six months after completing her epic North African tour, Josephine prepared to board a French Air Force Caudron C.440 Goéland – ‘seagull’ – light aircraft, for a flight north across the Mediterranean, to set foot on French soil once more. She had been away for three-and-a-half years. It was the eve of the June 1944 Normandy landings, and at the behest of one of Eisenhower’s deputies she had been asked to fly to Corsica, the island lying just off the coast of southern France and the first French department to have been liberated by the Allies. The US military had established seventeen airbases across the island, which had earned the nickname the ‘USS Corsica’.
Her mission was to perform to the troops stationed there, as they prepared for a massive series of air-operations in support of Operation Dragoon – the Allied landings on the shores of southern France, designed to open up a new front against the forces of the enemy. Josephine’s very presence on French soil would serve as a powerful symbol for the coming liberation of Europe, acting as a spur to those Allied troops charged to drive out the forces of the enemy. But the flight across the Mediterranean was not without its risks.
With rancour and resentment still swirling around de Gaulle, and with the rump of Vichyite hardliners fighting for their reputations, their liberty and very possibly their lives, Josephine had been warned that de Gaulle faced on-going assassination plots. In recent months there had been that aircraft that had taken off from British soil carrying de Gaulle, only to suffer a cataclysmic malfunction and an emergency landing. It was only due to the pilot’s incredible skill that all aboard weren’t killed. An investigation concluded that the aircraft had been sabotaged. Unidentified ‘German agents’ got the blame, but de Gaulle wasn’t convinced. He feared those trying to kill him were far closer to home. Accordingly, Josephine had been warned that she should avoid travelling on any of de Gaulle’s personal aircraft, for fear of sabotage.1
For her Corsica tour – for her highly-symbolic return to France – she had reassembled her A Team: Jacques Abtey and Ferdinand Zimmer had both been released from their duties. The morning of their departure, they gathered at the airport, only to hear the long-awaited news that the Normandy landings had begun. It was 6 June 1944 and a force of 150,000 Allied troops were even then fighting their way ashore on the northern French coastline. Josephine and her crew were overjoyed at hearing the news, but they were somewhat less enamoured by the means of air transport that awaited them. The Caudron C.440 Goéland was a twin-engine aircraft of underwhelming performance, especially compared to the sleek American-built Glenn Martin plane parked near by.
In typical style, Zimmer demanded that they take the Glenn-Martin. He was told in no uncertain terms that the Goéland was a perfectly fine aircraft, and that the pilot and co-pilot were among the best. They waited for Josephine’s trunks to be loaded into the cramped interior, then clambered aboard. As the plane went to take off, it seemed to struggle even to get airborne. All aboard had their hearts in their mouths as it lumbered ‘like a drunken bumblebee’ towards the trees at the end of the runway… clearing them, but only just.2
As the heavily laden aircraft clawed into the skies, the weather was radiant, the views breathtaking. A swathe of mountains, desert and emerald coastline rolled out before them, much of which the three travellers had experienced up close and personal, as they had nursed their jeeps across punishing terrain during Josephine’s series of tours. Since their last, which had ended in Algiers the previous November, Josephine and Abtey had mostly turned their backs on the world of intelligence and espionage, as they were drawn into the ranks of the Free French armed services.
Josephine had been appointed as a Second Lieutenant in the Women’s Air Force Corps, with the role of Propaganda Officer, under commander Alla Dumesnil-Gillet, who’d won a Croix de Guerre in 1940, and who was to become one of Josephine’s foremost champions.3 Having volunteered for special forces, Abtey would end up serving in the regular French military as the liberation of Europe got under way. But the long and punishing desert tours had taken a heavy toll, especially on Josephine, and that winter she had been struck down by yet another debilitating sickness. There were rumours that she may even have been poisoned, and she certainly had her enemies.4
In many ways, these troubling winter months of 1943–44 were the closest that Josephine had ever come to death. So dire was her condition that Colonel Billotte had ordered Abtey to abandon all other duties and to remain by her sickbed, doing all in his power to save her. Eventually, after yet more surgery, she had won through, though it had proven a Herculean trial. She would joke that the doctors may as well have inserted a zipper in her abdomen, so many operations had she undergone. By her own estimation she had teetered on the very brink – her life had been hanging by the faintest of threads.5
Across occupied Europe the war was entering its final desperate stages, wherein the excesses of the Nazis would become ever more execrable. Many of those who had played a part in Josephine Baker’s war would be mired in the darkness. Hans Müssig – their chisel-faced Lisbon fixer extraordinaire – would be captured by the Gestapo, though somehow, miraculously he would turn the table on his captors and weather the worst of their predations. Sadly, Father Victor Dillard, the Jesuit priest and war hero who had dispatched young Le Besnerais to Château des Milandes with his precious suitcase stuffed with intelligence, would not.
In the autumn of 1943, the venerable father had volunteered to go to Germany, posing as a worker in the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) programme – the deportation of hundreds of thousands of French men and women to Germany, as forced labour. Once there, he had practised openly as a priest – indeed, that had been his sole purpose in volunteering – and in spite of the aggressive programme of de-Christianisation and Nazification that permeated the STO. Arrested by the Gestapo’s specialist anti-ecclesiastical section, in April 1944 Father Dillard was condemned as a ‘spy’ and deported to Dachau concentration camp. He would die there, resisting to the last.6
Now, in early June 1944, as the Goéland droned northwards and the sleek form of a Spitfire swooped in to serve as escort, it seemed as if all was set for the triumphant return to France of Josephine and her crew, having braved the long years of struggle. That was until the Goéland’s first engine spluttered, coughed and then died. As the propellers came to an ominous standstill, the plane seemed to chug ever onwards, a little slower and a little more ponderously perhaps, but still somehow clinging to the skies.
Abtey went forward to investigate. ‘The left engine is dead,’ the pilot told him. ‘But one is enough. I promised the General to drop you off in Ajaccio and I will do so.’7
The rugged Corsican coastline was visible up ahead, with Ajaccio, its capital, lying on the western flank of the island. Steadily losing altitude, the Goéland pitched towards a narrow gap in the Corsican mountains, swerving between two massive cliffs, a ‘granite wall whose top was at our height’ looming first on one side and then the other.
‘Never will we pass,’ Zimmer remarked, as, with extraordinary calm, he pulled out a comb from his pocket and began to tidy up his hair.8
The gap loomed closer, ‘a damned wall coming at us at an incredible speed’, as Abtey would describe it. Josephine and her crew squeezed shut their eyes and prepared for the worst.
At the very last moment the pilot coaxed an extra gasp from the one surviving engine, and the Goéland appeared to buck up for an instant, clearing the rock walls by a whisker. Below them stretched the Corsican sea, and with each passing second it seemed to be drifting closer. The cover of the one surviving Renault engine started to blacken, blister and smoke, as the heat thrown off by the over-stressed mechanics became too much.
‘Hold on!’ the pilot cried.
They drifted still lower. Again, with his signature calm Zimmer went forward and started to build a barricade out of Josephine’s tour cases, sheeted over with the giant Tricolour, as a rampart to prevent her from being thrown forward. That done, he stood with his back braced against the aircraft’s bulkhead, facing Josephine, so as to shield her with his body. Abtey poked his head into the cockpit, eyeing the onrushing sea. He intended to yell out a warning when they were about to ditch, so all could brace themselves.
Seconds later he did just that, as the Goéland was lit from end to end in a blinding flash of white, a massive plume of water being thrown up as the aircraft’s belly ploughed into the waves. As they came to a shuddering, hissing halt, so one of the aircrew smashed the windows out with an axe, and one by one the survivors clambered onto the Goéland’s wing. By an odd quirk of fate the airframe was almost entirely of wooden construction, so it should stay afloat for a while at least.
