Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [168]
THIRTY-NINE
The Underground Railway
ON 9 FEBRUARY 1944, MAX SHOOP, a governor of the American Hospital and chairman of its legal committee, sent a cable from Geneva to hospital president Nelson Dean Jay in Washington:
Just have news of American Hospital, January 12th letter to Thavoz [sic] [Miss M. Thevoz, former chief nurse, had returned home to Switzerland after the German invasion] that Hospital full, 1st floor occupied French soldier patients, next 2 reserved civilians, 4th floor west terrace built into few patients rooms, food problem difficult but same old Chef also still there, Bergeret chief Jackson come [sic], not one window yet broken.
Nelson Dean Jay wrote to another governor on 14 February that he did not ‘understand Shoop’s reference to Dr Jackson although it is a relief to know he is still there’. In a second letter to Allen the same day, he added, ‘Please say that none of us can make out the reference to Jackson but from the message we assume he is at the Hospital which is good news for we were afraid he had been interned.’ The board attributed the confusing ‘Jackson come’ to a corruption in the radio cable, but Shoop may have been deliberately enigmatic. He was working undercover in Geneva for his old law partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, Allen Dulles. Dulles was the Office of Strategic Services’ chief in Berne, Switzerland, responsible for coordinating American operations with the French Resistance and gathering intelligence on the German military’s order of battle in France. After fifteen months in Switzerland as OSS Agent 284 with the code name ‘Mike’, Shoop could not have been unaware of Dr Jackson’s role in the Resistance.
In Paris, the Jacksons’ existence was becoming more precarious. Their health suffered from lack of nutrition, and Sumner contracted pneumonia. He wrote to a French friend in the United States, a former surgical nurse named Elizabeth Ravina, ‘about starvation and the family’s dire need of clothing’. Clemence Bock’s diary recorded, ‘He was drawn and careworn and went about in an old army sweater with a hole that showed his elbow when he took off his long surgical coat. He went back and forth to Neuilly on a bicycle.’ All he had to keep warm while cycling through rain and snow that winter were an old flying helmet and some fur gloves.
At the American Hospital, Otto Gresser came to see Jackson’s clandestine activities as routine: ‘He from time to time hid one or two airborne American or British soldiers who had been shot down but weren’t killed. He would hide and take care of them. Of course, it was very serious. This continued for a long time and I remember very well in full war there were two British soldiers in the corridor of the Hospital. ’ Although some of the hospital staff knew that Jackson was aiding the underground escape network, no one appeared to have denounced him to the Germans. If General de Chambrun had any suspicions, he kept them to himself. But, by the spring of 1944, too many people knew the secret.
The danger to American and British airmen did not cease when they left the American Hospital or any of their other refuges in Paris. They had to make their way, accompanied by men and women whom they did not know and with whom they often could not speak a common language, from one town, one village, one safe house to another, until they reached the Spanish border. The frontier region beside Spain lay in the Forbidden Zone, where controls were more rigorous than anywhere else. German troops with hunting dogs patrolled the Pyrenees mountain passes through which the airmen had to walk, sometimes for days, to reach neutral Spain. In April 1944, Sumner Jackson, Drue Tartière and other American and French civilians were dispatching more Allied air crews to the underground railway, but they did not