Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [157]
R went to Nantes, upriver from Saint-Nazaire but outside the Forbidden Zone. It was as close as he dared travel to investigate the feasibility of the mission. In Nantes, he contacted another Resistance operative code-named Dorsal. This bicycle shop owner told R how Saint-Nazaire was protected by anti-aircraft batteries and Luftwaffe fighter squadrons. To get into the town, a visitor needed a special Ausweis from the Germans. Although few people were permitted, the Germans allowed students to visit the seaside town on school holidays. R’s solution was to send a schoolchild.
In Paris, R went to see Sumner and Toquette Jackson. They had worked with his Goélette network for more than a year and were used to unusual requests. But the proposal R put to them was startling even to these veteran résistants: R wanted to borrow their son. Until then, his parents had shielded 15-year-old Phillip from danger and had once reprimanded him for painting anti-German graffiti. The boy was unaware that Allied airmen took shelter in the hospital and that his avenue Foch home was a Resistance mail drop. Whenever Resistance members met at the Jacksons’ home, Phillip was sent to his Aunt Tat at Enghien. His parents had taken every precaution to protect the boy. Yet, when R told them that London needed Phillip’s help in Saint-Nazaire, Sumner and Toquette agreed.
R’s plan was to smuggle Phillip into the port town with a camera, but he would first need a safe place to stay. Toquette remembered an old friend from Saint-Nazaire, Marcelle Le Bagousse. Marcelle and her husband, a railway cheminot, had moved from Saint-Nazaire to the countryside nearby at Pontchâteau to avoid Allied bombs. Their farmhouse was just outside the Forbidden Zone, and Phillip knew the family already. He would be welcome there, but he would still have to get into the port town and back again with the photographs. R arranged for Verdier, the Goélette courier whom they knew from his visits to collect and drop off Resistance messages, to accompany Phillip on the train to Nantes.
Phillip and Verdier left early in the morning by train from the Montparnasse station with sandwiches, a container of wine mixed with water and a forged Ausweis. When they arrived in Nantes, they went to the house of agent Dorsal. Dorsal gave the boy a Kodak box camera, a simple device with a fixed lens, to hide in his lunch bag. Phillip then rode in the backseat of Dorsal’s old Citroën, while Verdier sat in front holding a machine pistol in case the Germans stopped them. It was, Phillip recalled, a dramatic, fast drive on a dangerous road. The two men dropped him at the train station in Pontchâteau, where Mme Le Bagousse met him and took him to their farm. Phillip gave M. and Mme Le Bagousse the presents his mother had wrapped for them: salami, a bottle of claret and some gabardine cloth. To their teenaged daughter, Erika, he presented a copy of La Fontaine’s Fables.
While Phillip was unpacking, M. Le Bagousse saw his camera and immediately seized it. Possession of a camera so close to Saint-Nazaire could get them all shot. He hid it somewhere in the house. Deprived of his camera, Phillip had no idea how to complete his mission. He could not tell the truth to his hosts, who might send him straight back to Paris. The family gave the boy lunch. Afterwards, Erika took him on the train to Saint-Nazaire with her father’s railway worker’s pass clearing them through the German security