Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [30]
In early 1939, a new French intelligence service, created three years earlier within the Ministry of the Interior to monitor the 17,000 Germans in Paris, recruited Bullard as an agent. An ancien combattant with an impeccable war record, fluent in French and speaking good German, the nightclub and gymnasium owner was an ideal spy. So many Germans flocked to his gym and club that he was bound to hear something. His police handler, Georges Leplanquais, assigned a 27-year-old Alsatian woman, Cleopatre ‘Kitty’ Terrier, to work with him. Fluent in German, French and English, she had loyalty that was beyond doubt–the Germans had murdered her father during their wartime occupation of Alsace. Gene and Kitty were a good team. When Germans dropped into Le Grand Duc, Bullard was always nearby.
Of course, they figured, no Negro could be bright enough to understand any language except his own, much less figure out the military importance of whatever they said in German. So, as the Nazis talked together at my tables and I served them, they were not at all careful about discussing military secrets within my hearing. These I promptly passed on to Kitty, who could slip unnoticed out of the bar, if need be, and pass along everything important to headquarters.
French intelligence recruited another prominent African-American, Josephine Baker, who passed along information on German clients at the theatres and nightclubs where she sang. When war came in September 1939, Paris was blacked out at night. This finished the nightclub business in Montmartre, and many of its more famous musical residents–including singer and club owner Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith –left. Bullard closed his nightclub and gym. A wealthy American woman, June Jewett James, offered him work as a major domo and a home for his daughters at her chateau in Neuilly. While there, he sent Kitty Terrier any important information he heard from Mrs James’s visitors. At one formal party, Bullard wore his full dress army uniform with medals. Among the guests was Dr Edmund Gros, who said, ‘Bullard, I didn’t know you had the Médaille Militaire.’ Bullard shot back, ‘I thought you kept all my records just as you keep the scroll issued me by the French government as it was to every member of the Flying Corps.’
When the curfew was relaxed to midnight in February 1940, Bullard went back to Paris and reopened Le Grand Duc. In late May, the Germans launched their blitzkrieg of the Low Countries and cut through France at shocking speed. Kitty Terrier warned him, ‘Now, get out of Paris as fast as you can.’ Bullard knew that his skin colour would make him a target for Nazis, who were even more race-obsessed than the white ‘crackers’ he had grown up with in Georgia. They might also discover he was working for French intelligence. The Germans interned African-American jazz musicians, despite their status as neutrals, as they found them in their advance on Paris. Trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent to a camp at Saint-Denis, where he formed a twenty-five-member classical orchestra. Bullard agreed to leave Paris as Kitty asked, but not to escape the Nazis. He went to fight them, as he had from 1914 to 1918. Bullard asked Kitty to care for his daughters and keep an eye on his apartment. Kitty helped him to pack the food and books he was carrying on his back when he walked from Chartres to Le Mans on 14 June 1940, just as the Germans were occupying Paris.
In Le Mans that hot summer afternoon, Bullard tried to fill his empty canteen with water, but he could not get to the town pump through the crowd fighting for a drink. The next morning, he found the 51st Infantry Regiment in Orleans. The commanding officer greeted him, ‘Bullard! Is it really you?’ Major Roger Bader had been Bullard’s lieutenant in the 170th Regiment at Verdun. Bullard’s memoirs recorded the events that followed:
Major Bader assigned me to a machine gun company and ordered me to install machine guns on the left bank of the Loire River opposite German infantry on the right bank and to take charge of a section. We managed