His name is Bob Maloubier.
The real life 008.
The parallel with James Bond is needed.
At 91, the man keeps an incredible bagou (french for cross talk) , his charm is as huge as his mustache and a taste for champagne.
But , it’s still a good idea …to watch that knife.
After a lifetime traveling the world and mounting crooked shots on behalf of the French secret service , he is back where it all began.
Chance or fate, his country house in Normandy is close to where he parachuted into enemy held territory the first time in WWII. He’ll be dead by 92
Bob’s father, working as a press attaché for a car manufacturer, is offered two places by his company in a vehicle fleeing Paris.
Bob’s mother refuses to leave her son behind, but the young man convinces her, he will be able to cycle out of the city quicker than they could drive.
Several days later, after 400 miles, the family is reunites at Saintes, north of Bordeaux.
There his father gives Bob 1,250 francs, half of what he had managed to save, and told him to flee to England and take up arms against the Germans from there.
Escape proves impossible to arrange, so in February 1941 Bob Maloubier joins the new army Berlin permitted the Vichy government to form.
He is determined to be a pilot and fly to freedom, but is posted instead to ground duties in Tunisia.
Only with the Allied victory in North Africa is he finally able to cross the lines.
There he is introduced to an SOE officer, Jacques Vaillant de Guélis, who recruites him into the organisation.
From Algiers he is shipped, via Gibraltar, to Britain.
Just 20 years old, he arrives with an essential mission, which Winston Churchill summarized a few years ago with a slogan: “Set Europe on fire!“
Bob does not work for De Gaulle and his BCRA (Central Intelligence and Action Bureau).
As he recounts in his autobiography, Churchill’s Secret Agent (Tallandier, 2011), he was recruited by the British, in Algiers where he arrived the previous year, wanting to join in London.
He belongs to the ultra-confidential Special Operations Executive (SOE), the “baby” of Churchill, in charge of the “subversive” action.
In the face of defeated Europe, the Old Lion imagined sending agents to the field to lead a guerrilla war from the inside, with attacks as an “asymmetrical” struggle, as we say today.
In each occupied country, it sends small teams of three people – an explosives specialist, a radio liaison, a group leader – whose mission is to derail trains, jump bridges, destroy factories …
During the Second World War, 13,000 people will work for the SOE.
Only a minority are agents on the ground, the rest working in support from England.
The French section will have about 350 agents.
Today, Bob Maloubier is one of the last two still alive.
In this summer of 1943, the D-Day is getting ready, everyone knows it.
Where and when, nothing is certain, but it is necessary to weaken the fortifications of the wall of the Atlantic set up by Rommel.
Bob receives by underground radio the name of the industrial targets he has to aim for : a factory that manufactures aircraft landing gear parts, another that supplies electricity to the industrial area of Rouen (station 17), and – its most beautiful blow – a submarine supply ship at Le Havre.
“I provided the explosive to one of my guys, who worked at the port. He put it in the hold. The next day, we only saw the flag of the ship coming out of the water! “
He arrives in London in early 1943, and is introduced to the head of SOE F Section, Maurice Buckmaster, before being sent to Wanborough Manor, near Guildford, which is requisitioned by the organisation.
“Special Training School 5”, as Wanborough is known, is designed to weed out candidates not up to the job of being parachuted behind enemy lines.
Apart from training in unarmed combat, Maloubier learns to use small arms and explosives and to make radio transmissions.
There are also five practice parachute drops.
At midnight one night in mid-August 1943, Maloubier is dropped into Normandy, 20 miles south of Rouen, where he becomes part of the Salesman network.
His principal work is to train locals and receive supply drops; his cover is a publicity agent called Mollier, originally from Marseille (one of several aliases), now working the region between Paris and Rouen.
Passing from place to place by bicycle, staying only a night or at most a few days in farms and barns, Maloubier teaches recruits how to use pistols, machine guns, grenades and explosives.
He is equipped with numerous false papers, created in London.
But some are quickly shown to be useless; the paper is too thin, the color is wrong – one even spotted as a fake by a shopkeeper.
Replacements, crafted by Resistance contacts, are of a much higher quality.
Fortunately, according to Maloubier, French who carry out the vast majority of checks are friendly and their searches perfunctory.
At one checkpoint Maloubier is asked: “You don’t have a 7.5mm gun in that bag do you?” Maloubier replies that he does not, as his gun was of another calibre, and is waved through.
In the early hours of June 6, 1944, Bob Maloubier and his group boarded a Halifax, Royal Air Force bomber.
Destination: France behind the German lines and more particularly the Limousin.
But here, June 6, 1944, there is no one to receive the SOE commando.
The plane turns around.
“It was noticed over the Channel there were a large number of boats, but even he was kept from knowing where he was landing.
- D-Day
I only learned it when we arrived! He explained.
The second trip, the next day, will be the good one.
“SET EUROPE ON FIRE! “
Their goal: to federate the local resistance and arm it to delay as much as possible the progression of the Das Reich division – the same one that was sadly illustrated in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane – towards Normandy.
Bob Maloubier and other members of the group are well received by Georges Guingouin’s Limousin friars.
But the maquis are poorly armed: Maloubier and his group then organize the biggest weapons drop made in France during the Occupation in Sussac.
Less than two months later, August 21, Limoges is released by the Guingouin, men now well equipped.
Security is much tighter, however, around the bridges of Rouen, where a 700-tonne supply vessel is moored.
The boat, freshly painted after an expensive refit, has proven to be a thorn in the side of the British Navy, as it allows U-boats to stay far out at sea without returning for fuel and food to inshore waters, where they are threatened by RAF attack.
The Kriegsmarine, delighted with the refit, throws a party to celebrate.
Unknown to them, however, one of Maloubier’s men, Hugues Paccaud, had worked on the refit.
Maloubier had given him a three-kilogram explosive charge, and shortly after the German revels end the same night, the U-boat supply vessel is blown up and sank.
“I came down to have a look at the damage the next day,” says Maloubier.
“People were joking: ‘Well these Germans really are clever. Now they have underwater ships to resupply their submarines.’ ”
SAVED FROM DEATH
For five months, Bob Maloubier weaves his network in France .
Exceptional longevity, while the average life of SOE agents on assignment is six weeks. it could not last .
At Déville-lès-Rouen in autumn, Maloubier’s crew attacks a factory producing landing gears for the German Focke-Wulf 190 fighter.
“We knew that there was a gardien who could get us into the factory through his lodgings,” said Maloubier.
Unfortunately the gardien was absent at the time of the attack.
His wife refuses to let Maloubier’s team in, so Maloubier adopts his best German accent and orders her to open up.
Once inside, they are guided to the heart of the factory by willing French workers.
Having set their charges and made their escape, the sabotage team, numbering seven or eight, returns to the farm of another conspirator, where Maloubier triggers a celebratory feast by putting a bullet through the head of a cow.
Shortly after he knocks out an electricity substation, on December 20 1943 he is arrested by a German patrol while on a motorcycle after curfew.
None of the Germans could ride the motorbike, however, so Maloubier is forced to ride it to the German headquarters with a guard riding pillion pointing a gun at his back.
Captured, he manages to escape ,Maloubier throws his passenger to the ground and rides off, but he is hit by a bullet that pierces his liver and lung.
Spitting blood, panting, he runs off at full speed, crosses a canal to escape the dogs and collapses in a field, regaining consciousness to find that the search for him had been called off.
Outside, it is minus 10 degrees.
“That day, I died, he says …. Or rather, he would have died of hemorrhage in normal weather.
But the cold stops the bleeding.
“I woke up the next day, a sheath of ice around me.
He crawls to a doctor, managing to make it to a safe house in Rouen where he was tended to by Salesman’s aged doctor, who visited nightly and issues a few pills to fight any infection and trying his best to save him, with little hope.
Maloubier does not know, however, that the doctor considers his case desperate, and the network was making plans to dispose discreetly of his body when he dies.
One woman is asked to stitch two potato sacks together in which the corpse would be concealed, and load it with chains so it could be dumped in the Seine.
But after eight days Maloubier is still alive.
A few months later, he is back on his feet, is evacuated to London to complete his recovery in February 1944 .
Just before, in March the same year, Salesman is penetrated and several of its members are arrested, disrupting its plans for pre-D-Day sabotage operations.
Maloubier is parachuted back into France, this time to the Limousin, 24 hours after D-Day, to assist the Maquis.
He is accompanied on the mission by Charles Staunton, the former head of the Salesman network, and Violette Szabo.
But just days after their arrival Szabo is captured and imprisoned in Limoges.
Staunton and Maloubier travel to Limoges to plan a rescue operation, scheduled for June 16.
Early that morning, however, Szabo is transferred to be interrogated and sent to be killed in Ravensbruck excution date: February 1945 , she is murdered at age 23.
In the Limousin, Maloubier’s duties involve organizing and receiving supply drops from the air; at the end of June a flotilla of Flying Fortresses makes one of the biggest drops of the war.
Almost 1,000 containers of arms, fuel, food and banknotes help to turn local fighters into a highly effective force.
As the German grip on Limoges crumbls, Maloubier prevents reinforcements arriving by blowing up roads and bridges and is among the first forces to liberate the city.
While the SOE agents put “Europe on fire,” His Majesty’s secret services are working from England to another plane, essential to the success of the D-Day landing: Fortitude.
This is the code name of a gigantic operation of disinformation, to make the Germans believe that the D-Day will take place elsewhere than in Normandy.
To the north, the goal is to swallow to the enemy while in Scotland, a fourth British army – which does not exist – is ready to attack by Norway .
In the south-east of England, it is to invent the First United States Army Group, which would prepare an offensive in the Pas-de- Calais .
ARABEL, THE DOUBLE AGENT COMING FROM SPAIN
An improbable little Spaniard will play a decisive role in its success.
What fly stung Juan Pujol Garcia?
Outraged by the victory of Hitler, opposed the Franco dictatorship, he has a day and in 1941 and heads to the Embassy of Great Britain in Madrid, after developing a a full fledged loathing of both the communist and fascist regimes in Europe during the Spanish Civil War, Pujol decided to become a spy for the Allies as a way to do something “for the good of humanity”.
He initially approached the British three different times, including through his wife (though Pujol edited her participation out of his memoirs).
They laugh at him, not knowing where this olibrius ( welsh for oddball) comes from. Thrice rejected , he tells himself , he may be more likely to be accepted if he becomes … a German agent at first.
He succeeds, returns to see the Allies, offers them to be a double agent.
New rejection, until an American takes a close interest in this strange Juan Pujol Garcia and convinces his British counterparts of the use that can be made of him.
Double Trouble :
Finally Arabel arrives in Britain, and under tight control, Arabel – his British code name – sends multiple messages to the Germans, inventing a network and collaborators, completely fictitious. From time to time, he gives correct information, to gain their confidence.
When the Landing arrives, everything is in place: the war of attrition of SOE on one side, that of disinformation of the double agents of the other.
On June 6, Arabel – with the direct approval of Churchill – attempts a master stroke: at 3 am, he sends a message warning of an important landing on the beaches of Normandy.
Its liaison office in Spain being closed at night, the officers on the spot will receive the information only too late. But their confidence in Arabel is now complete.
TO SKIP TWO BRIDGES BY NIGHT
Two days later, they are ready to believe when the real landing takes place in the Pas-de-Calais.
- Some of the first German prisoners captured in the invasion of Normandy on June 9,
“The current offensive is a trap … Let’s not throw all our reserves …“, he warned by radio.
The German High Command immediately ordered the units of reinforcement going towards Normandy to turn back.
Not only that, but the Germans were so convinced that Juan Pujol Garcia was a loyal hero to the cause that even in December 1944 – five months after the deception at Normandy – the Germans awarded him the Iron Cross.
Meanwhile, on June 7, Bob Maloubier and his crew fly from England.
Destination: Limousin .
Objective: to sabotage the rise of the formidable division Das Reich, which goes to the rescue towards Normandy.
At the rate of two bridges a night, Bob slows down their progress. “I was blowing bridges at night. The next day, an armored locomotive of the Germans came, they repaired, withdrew … and I started again the night after.
In total , Das Reich will be fifteen days late.
Between the German reinforcements stranded in the Pas-de-Calais and those immobilized by the ambushes of the SOE, the allied troops benefited from an inestimable respite.
Later, in Paris, Maloubier is reunited with Buckmaster and his father.
Common point in this battle: Winston Churchill, and his taste for twisted shots.
However, in France, the existence of SOE has long been ignored. De Gaulle did not want to hear about it : after the war, he did everything to silence the exploits.
As SOE F Section is wound up, Maloubier is transferred to the French intelligence service, known cryptically as the Direction général des études et recherches, before signing up for more behind-the-lines operations with Force 136, SOE’s wing in south-east Asia.
He returns to France in August 1946.
After the war, he joins France’s counter-intelligence service, the SDECE, where, in 1952, he co-founds its special forces unit of combat divers.
He serves for 15 years, in Indo-China but largely in Africa, as France’s colonial empire crumbles.
Among many operations, he claims to have recruited and trained assassination teams who – in exchange for a French passport – are willing to eliminate arms traffickers supplying rebels in Algeria or the Far East.
“I never executed anyone myself,” he insists later.
Ordered to organize a bombing in central Cairo during the Suez crisis, Maloubier finds himself alone with the explosive after the man he recruited for the job fled.
“The problem was I had no idea how long was left before it was due to go off,” he says later. “I had to drive out of Cairo, through the traffic, and bury it in the desert. It went off as I returned to the car.”
Maloubier leaves the secret services in 1957 to work in Gabon, where he will eventually train the president’s personal guard.
Afterwards he does security work for oil companies in Nigeria and Liberia.
The Resistance had to be exclusively French.
And seventy years later, Bob Maloubier knows he will be invited to the commemoration ceremonies … by the British, not by the French.
They will mark his time after the war, at 22, Maloubier joined the French secret service and helped establish the military’s specialist diving unit in 1952.
