SOE was nearly a year old and under considerable Whitehall criticism for delivering little of value to the wider war effort at the time that Jean Duboué’s intelligence started to arrive in Baker Street. Up to this moment almost all the secret agents SOE had dispatched to France had been sent to the Vichy zone non-occupée. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to get involved in the spying business, not just in the occupied zone, but also, given Bordeaux’s role as a submarine base, in an area of real strategic importance to the battle of the Atlantic.
SOE decided to send a secret agent of their own to Bordeaux to see what was going on.
Robert Leroy was in many ways an unsuitable person for such a pioneering and precarious mission. A former marine engineer from the Brest area, Leroy’s SOE training reports describe him as ‘shrewd … [but] suffering from the weaknesses of his class – a proneness to alcoholic indulgence and women’ – and add, in a comment which tells us more about SOE’s snobbery than it does about Leroy’s table manners, that he was ‘out of place in an Officers’ Mess’.
Under the codename ‘Alain’, Robert Leroy was landed from an SOE ‘ghost ship’ on a beach at Barcarès near Perpignan on the night of 19 September 1941. His orders were to make his way to Duboué’s contact, Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, and thence to Bordeaux, where he was to liaise with Jean Duboué, get a job in the port and assess the possibilities of attacking the German submarine pens. Unfortunately, the explosives Leroy was supposed to take with him somehow got lost during the landing, leaving him with no option but to set off on his mission without them. His journey to Bordeaux appears to have been both leisurely and bibulous, for he did not reach the city until mid-November, leaving behind a trail of debt and unpaid bar bills.
Arriving in Bordeaux, Leroy contacted Duboué, who used his influence to get the newcomer a job as a tractor driver in the docks. The new arrival quickly established a relationship with the director of warehouses in the Port de la Lune, to whom Leroy hinted that he was involved in black-market operations which could be of mutual profit to both of them. In return he had his card stamped ‘Indispensable pour le Port de Bordeaux’. This meant that Leroy, provided he wore his docker’s blue blouse, could roam anywhere he liked, safe from German checks and roll calls.
Other early information came from a fellow Breton marine engineer, who furnished Leroy with intelligence on the blockade-runners. These merchantmen were using Bordeaux in increasing numbers, unloading the precious raw materials (tungsten, molybdenum, rubber) needed by the German war machine and reloading their holds with blueprints and examples of new German technology – such as radar and proximity fuses – for the Japanese. In early 1942, Leroy sent back ‘detailed reports on the shipping and also a map of the docks’ to London. They arrived at a most propitious moment. On 9 May that year, the head of SOE and Minister of Economic Warfare, Lord Selborne, wrote to Prime Minister Churchill drawing his attention to the Bordeaux blockade-runners and their ‘most vital cargoes’ and proposing that it was now crucial to the national interest to ‘[stop] the trade altogether’.
Suddenly SOE found themselves, through the unlikely person of the ever-convivial Robert Leroy, with a ringside seat on what had just become a national strategic war target. London immediately recalled their secret agent to make a full report. It seems probable that Leroy returned to Britain via San Sebastián with Suzanne Duboué acting as his guide, for one of his first acts on reaching London on 29 May 1942 was to send a message back to Bordeaux through the BBC French Service, announcing his arrival with the words: ‘Bonjour à Mouton’.
After a full debriefing and a few days’ leave, Leroy was sent back to Bordeaux with instructions to continue his work and prepare for reinforcements. Bordeaux was about to become, along with Paris, SOE’s most important centre for spying and sabotage in occupied France.
2
The piece of paper that changed Roger Landes’s life appeared on the noticeboard of No. 2 Company, 2nd Operations Training Battalion of the Signals Training College in Prestatyn, North Wales, sometime during the last week of February 1942.
It was brief and to the point: Army Number 2366511 Signalman Roger Landes to report to Room 055 of the War Office in Whitehall on Wednesday 4 March 1942. A military rail warrant for a return journey to central London could be collected from the company office.
Given the vagaries of wartime travel it is likely that young Landes (he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday just before Christmas) went down to London the day before his interview, and spent the night at his parents’ apartment at 48 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16. Although the crescendo of the London blitz had passed by mid-summer 1941, the city’s overground rail system remained in many places unrepaired and everywhere prone to breakdown and delay. Most Londoners used the Underground to get around.
No one would have paid much attention to the small man in the ill-fitting serge uniform of a private of the Royal Signals, making his way this cold grey March day on the Piccadilly line towards central London. If he had spoken, they would have noted his heavy accent, and concluded that he was just another foreigner in a city full of foreigners – from the ‘exotic’ to the ordinary, from kings and queens to commoners – all taking refuge from the German onslaught across the Channel.
Born in December 1916 and brought up in Paris the son of a family of Jewish immigrants of Polish–Russian extraction, Roger Arthur Landes had inherited his British citizenship from his father, Barnet, a jeweller in the French capital, who, through an accident of fate, had been born in London. Sometime in the early 1930s, Barnet Landes was bankrupted by the Great Depression. Roger was forced to leave school at the age of thirteen and start work in a firm of quantity surveyors, while attending technical classes at night school. His parents emigrated to London in 1934, where they rented a small flat off Stamford Hill, an area much favoured by the Jewish community. Roger stayed on in France where, despite not having taken his baccalauréat, he managed to obtain a place at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On graduating (with the École’s Prix d’Honneur, among other prizes), he took furnished rooms in the French capital and set about learning the practical aspects of his trade as an architect and quantity surveyor.
By 1938, however, it was clear to all that war was coming. Landes knew that if he stayed in France he would soon receive his call-up papers for the French army, which, even half a century after the Dreyfus affair, still had a reputation for anti-Semitism. He left for England, moved in with his parents in Stamford Hill and secured a position as a clerk in the architectural department of London County Council. Later he was to say that his time in the LCC was one of the most enjoyable of his life.
On the outbreak of the war, Landes signed up immediately and was posted to the Rescue Service in Islington, where he used his architectural skills to assess bomb damage during the blitz. Two years later he was redeployed to the miserable, windswept, wintry conditions of Prestatyn holiday camp in North Wales for training as a radio operator. It was here in 1942 that the mysterious note on the No. 2 Company noticeboard found him and ordered him to attend the War Office on this March Wednesday morning.
Short (five foot four),