"Madame Fourcade's Secret War," Lynne Olson

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson

April 17, 2022

 

“Although they were from varied walks of life and political backgrounds, a moral common denominator overrode 

all their differences: a refusal to be silenced and an iron determination to fight against the destruction of freedom and human dignity. In doing so, they, along with other members of the resistance, saved the soul and honor of France.”

                                                                                                                     Lynne Olson (1949-)

                                                                                                                     Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, 2019

 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo speaks to the wizard Gandalf: “’I wish it had not happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do we all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” Lynne Olson’s story is of a young woman who lived in such times and the decisions she made. 

 

Using her second husband’s surname, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into wealth and privilege to an expatriate French family in Shanghai in 1910. Seven years later, upon the death of her father, her mother moved the family back to Paris. She grew into a beautiful young woman: “Cool and elegant, with porcelain skin…” At seventeen, she married and bore two children but soon separated, as she wanted more than to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was an army captain and through him she met many young men who would serve in the war to come, including Charles de Gaulle. When France capitulated in June 1940, she fled Paris with her children to the resort town of Vichy where she became involved in espionage.

 

French resistance was divided into three groups – saboteurs who blew things up, like communication and rail lines; those who manned escape lines, helping shot-down British pilots and others escape back to Britain, and espionage – spies, messengers and radio operators who gathered intelligence on German-commandeered factories, naval bases and gun emplacements, etc. and sent it on to the Allies in London. Madame Fourcade was involved with the latter. The group she joined, and of which she became its leader, was known as Alliance and became the Allies largest and most important espionage network in occupied France. They provided schedules for departing German U-Boats from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and they supplied a fifty-foot-long map of the beaches at Normandy prior to D-Day; they radioed to London information on Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets, which allowed the Allies to bomb launch bunkers in northern France. Three thousand individuals served Alliance, of whom 438 were captured and executed by the Nazis. (Another 150 survived captivity.) Because the code names assigned each agent was an animal or bird, the organization was known to the Germans as Noah’s Ark, the title Fourcade took for her post-War memoir. Fourcade chose the name Hedgehog for herself, a small mammal, beloved by writers from Louis Carroll to Beatrix Potter, that protects itself from the fiercest predators by rolling into a ball with its spines extruding.

 

Madame Fourcade had to overcome the chauvinism of most male members of her organization, as well as those in England who Alliance served; she had to constantly move, changing her name and her appearance; she was once smuggled over the Pyrenees in a trunk to meet her British counterpart in Madrid; she was captured and escaped from a Nazi prison; she rarely saw her two children. After the war, her exploits were initially ignored: a spy was less visible than a resistance fighter blowing up rail tracks, and in the early years of the war she had coordinated with the Vichy government, which was a no-no with Gaullists. But most important, remembrances of her war-time leadership were initially shunned because she was a woman. However, as the years went on, that changed. When she died at age 79 in 1989, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides where Napoleon is buried.

 

She was proud of the role Alliance played in helping save France during the almost five years of German occupation. She led the effort to return to France the remains of those members of Alliance who had died in German prisons. In her memoir, Fourcade wrote: “The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.” It is a spirit alive today in Ukraine.

 

As Tolkien wrote, none of us chooses the time and place to be born. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born at an inauspicious time, yet she accepted the fate that was hers. Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is the tale of a brave young woman who used intelligence, guile and persistence to help free her beloved France. It tells of how ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things.

Burrowing into Books - "Last Hope Island," Lynne Olson

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                     August 21, 2017

“Last Hope Island”

Lynne Olson

“In less than a month, the British capital had become a haven for the

 governments and armed forces of six European countries conquered by Hitler…[1]”

                                                                                                            Introduction

                                                                                                            Last Hope Island

                                                                                                            Lynne Olson

Dark clouds that had formed over Europe burst in a maelstrom when Germany invaded Poland on the first of September 1939. Five months earlier, England and France had guaranteed her borders. More than a year earlier, in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. One year later, in March 1939, in violation of the Munich Agreement, Germany occupied the rump lands of the Czechoslovak Republic.

On September 27, 1939 Poland surrendered. Within months, Denmark and Norway were occupied. In May 1940, Germany invaded western Europe; shortly thereafter Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands surrendered. On June 22 France signed an armistice, which allowed Germany to occupy the northern part of the country, including the Atlantic coastline. A collaborationist government, with its capital in Vichy, assumed power in the south.

After ten months of War, Germany appeared invincible. Alone among the democracies of Europe, stood England. Representatives of the seven countries mentioned in the footnote, along with small contingencies of their armies found their way to England, to “Last Hope Island.” There they established governments in exile, provided troops, pilots to the RAF, and worked with MI6 and SOE (Special Operations Executive) to infiltrate their countries, rally an underground and keep hope alive. Theirs’ are the stories Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London, Troublesome Young Men and Those Angry Days, tells, ones of of heroism and betrayal, agonizing defeat and finally, victory – at least for those countries that remained in the West.

Much of the book is about exploits of the resistance, bands of brave men and women who sabotaged German troops and equipment and passed on intelligence. Almost 100,000 died or were taken prisoner. Some revisionist historians have questioned the value of the work they performed, claiming that it was “boots on the ground,” mostly American, that finally defeated Hitler. Perhaps so, but in May 1945, General Eisenhower wrote to SOE head Colin Gubbins: “In no previous war, and in no other theater during this war, have resistance forces been so closely harnessed to the main military effort.” Air Chief Marshall Arthur Tedder echoed his words: “Its (specifically French resistance forces) greatest victory was that it kept the flame of the French spirit burning throughout the dark years of the occupation.”

Readers will be awed by the bravery of everyday people who fought to rid their countries of brutal oppressors. The book will also bring tears of rage about those abandoned for political reasons. We learn of the long game played by Churchill. Sitting between Roosevelt and Stalin at Tehran in March 1943, Churchill later recalled: “Here I sat, with the great Russian bear on one side of me with paws outstretched, and, on the other side, the great American buffalo. Between the two sat the poor little English donkey.”

One of the books most poignant passages deals with the Warsaw uprising. With their armies at the gates, the Soviets allowed the massacre of the Poles by the Wehrmacht. Churchill and Roosevelt understood that to defeat Hitler required a compact with the devil, Stalin – a man as evil as Hitler. The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of civilian and battle deaths[2]. Their reward was Eastern Europe – seven countries, plus East Germany, with a population of almost three hundred million people, all destined to live another 45 years under a police state.

Her story is one of people from different nations that stood together against tyranny and oppression. Ultimately victory was theirs, and freer and more democratic societies emerged, at least for those in the West. Ms. Olson quotes the writer Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, Holland’s most decorated resistance fighter: “We stood together, we died together, brothers and sisters in the classic sense.”  “What meaning.” Ms. Olson adds, “could the War have if it did not result in radical change in society, leading to a more just and equal world?” That it did for the West, but not for the East.

The book ends with a call for unification. But I suspect that is, as Hamlet put it, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Reality suggests Europe will always be more of a salad bowl than a melting pot. But that does not have to portend war and division. Cultural and societal distinctions are innate; they are ancient, and difficult to abandon. What is needed is tolerance, respect, and an understanding of one another’s history, cultural differences and boundaries. We do not have to be brothers in blood to live peacefully. In countries ruled by laws, peace can be based on civility and deference.

Lynne Olson has done a masterful job in bringing to light events hidden by time – irritating, in terms of bureaucratic in-fighting that too often proved deadly, but inspirational in what they say about the character of those who when faced with annihilation stayed and fought for their countries against terrific odds. With “Last Hope Island” as their refuge and guiding light, men and women of the resistance fought in fields and on farms, as well as in villages and cities, to rid their countries of Nazi tyranny. This is their story.

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[1] The six countries were Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg and Norway. The seventh was France, represented not by government officials, but by a junior general officer who came, in time, to represent France – Charles de Gaulle.

[2] Exact numbers are impossible to determine, but estimates are that total Soviet Union casualties during the Second World War amounted to about 13% of their pre-War population. That would compare to 0.94% for the United Kingdom and 0.34% for the U.S. Germany’s, for comparative purposes, were just over 8%. Poland suffered the most, with total casualties of about 17%.