The truth was that behind what was, at first sight, an imposing front, there lay a weak man in everything except his attachment to his daughters – especially little Ghislaine. The chief drivers of his personality were vanity, a hunger for recognition and the certainty that, despite the low opinion of his father and the moderate opinions of his contemporaries, there was nevertheless some important purpose to his life to match his hitherto unrecognised talents.
On 24 September 1939, just days after war broke out, Grandclément met a pretty young divorcée who worked in the same office building in Bordeaux. Not long after, the two became lovers and in due course he declared Lucette Tartas – vivacious, intelligent, firm in her views, and in many ways much stronger than her lover – his ‘official mistress’. In this capacity, according to the curious French custom of the time, Lucette was recognised by the family and his wife. Myssett, her heart broken, took to the country with the two girls and began an official separation from her husband.
The love affair between Grandclément and Lucette Tartas was deep, genuine and endearing. ‘Their love for each other dazzled … like a couple straight out of one of those pre-war musical comedies,’ one contemporary observed.
Weeks after meeting Lucette, and despite his physical incapacity, Grandclément managed to pull enough strings to be declared ‘fit for service’. He joined the battle for France, fighting with an infantry regiment engaged in the frantic attempts to stop German armour breaking through the Ardennes forest. Here he showed considerable military ability and was mentioned in dispatches for bravery. But this too did not last. When France surrendered, he was demobilised and returned to the role of a humble insurance agent in Bordeaux.
By 1940, with burgeoning medical expenses for the treatment of Ghislaine, the Grandcléments were once again in difficult financial straits. It was all too much for Myssett, who now sued for divorce. But by early 1941 the insurance business started looking up again – so much so that in September of that year André and Lucette were able to move house. They rented an elegant and spacious apartment at 34 Cours de Verdun, in a fashionable neighbourhood of central Bordeaux and just opposite the main headquarters of the special French police brigade under Pierre Poinsot.
By now, the public face of André Grandclément was hiding a deeper and much more dangerous life. The war had finally provided him with a secure political anchorage. He was, he decided, conservative, republican and, like many of his class (especially the fascist-leaning revolutionary group known as the ‘Cagoule militaire’ in the army, with whom he had both connections and sympathy), intensely patriotic, right-wing and nationalist. To start with he was a fervent supporter of Pétain’s Vichy administration. But, though he remained loyal to Pétain himself, he became disenchanted with the armistice and the Vichy government and began looking elsewhere for an organisation which would give him the opportunity to resist the German occupation, whilst remaining true to the right-wing authoritarian France in which he believed.
Sometime in 1941 Grandclément began to get involved in Resistance activities, working at a senior level in two relatively minor covert organisations. It was the beginning of a new enthusiasm in his life. But it was not enough. He needed something larger to match his talents.
In September 1941, a school teacher from Bordeaux set up a local branch of an underground organisation called the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM). The OCM’s roots lay in a group of eight French ex-army officers who had set up a minor escape line to London in August 1940. By 1942 the organisation had expanded from these small beginnings into a vast, hierarchical, rambling movement made up chiefly of ex-army officers, intellectuals and government servants, covering the western half of the German occupied zone. Its activities included gathering intelligence, organising arms depots, managing escape routes, minor sabotage, setting up Maquisard units and hunting down collaborators.
This was the kind of secret network that immediately appealed to André Grandclément’s sense of scale, romance and adventure – and these were his kind of people, too: ex-military, Catholic, conservative, strongly anti-communist and in many cases anti-Semitic as well.
Jean Duboué and Léo Paillère, the neighbours from the Quai des Chartrons who were by this time sending regular secret intelligence reports to London, were also early members of the OCM. Indeed from late 1941 Paillère was its chief of staff in southwest France. But in 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned for six months for black-market offences involving no less than 1.5 million francs’ worth of Armagnac and illegally distilled eau de vie. The regional OCM was left without a leader. OCM’s national head in Paris, Colonel Alfred Touny, sought a replacement and solicited the advice of two key southwest OCM members, both of whom just happened to be close to André Grandclément. One was his old Jesuit College friend, Marc O’Neill; the other, his uncle, General Paul Jouffrault (who was already head of the OCM in the Vendée). Both agreed that André would be perfect as the new head of the southwest chapter, which covered a vast swathe of France, from the Loire valley to the Pyrenees.
This was a fateful and extraordinary decision. For, apart from high-level family connections and an ex-school friend in the right place at the right time, André Grandclément, though a good organiser and a patriot, was temperamentally completely unsuitable for the task with which he was now entrusted. For Grandclément, however, his moment had arrived at last. Here was a role worthy of his talents as a mover of men and a shaper of events: a position of truly national importance. And if the Allies landed in 1943, as everyone believed they would – possibly even nearby, in the Gulf of Aquitaine – then here was a role which would assure him a place in history, too. What would his father, the admiral, think of that!
In the spring of 1942, as Roger Landes was busy training as a spy, and Friedrich Dohse was setting up his counter-espionage department in Bouscat, André Grandclément, the thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman, was given the leadership of the largest and most powerful Resistance organisation in southwest France. The change in him was immediate and dramatic. ‘With Lucette on his arm, André Grandclément was now a man who was utterly content and sure of himself,’ wrote one close observer. ‘He was no longer the insurance agent always complaining about life’s unfairness and injustices … Now he was living another life, with entirely new aims. Now he was fighting for his country and need no longer concern himself with such petty matters as finances and money. The transformation in him was complete – both morally and physically.’
5
The cold of January 1942 held on tenaciously into February and March. The vines of the Médoc and the plane trees of Bordeaux remained stubbornly and unseasonably bare.
These had been frustrating months for Friedrich Dohse. Constrained by the passive obstructionism of his boss, Herbert Hagen, and open hostility in KdS Bordeaux, he was also held back by the fact that, until a special decree was issued by Hitler on 1 June 1942, the Gestapo (soon to be rechristened, in French argot, ‘La Georgette’) were not formally permitted to operate in France.
But Dohse was not a man to waste time. Using the skills he had learnt in the criminal police in Hamburg, he spent the first few months of 1942 gathering information, creating a filing system and recruiting staff to his new department. Here too he had to cope with interference from his German intelligence colleagues – in this case the Abwehr, who made determined attempts to poach his new recruits; things got so bad that he finally had to ban their officers from all contact with his team.
Despite