Letter from the Midi
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN Letter from the Midi YOU PROBABLY saw pictures of those intrepid American septuagenarians parachuting into Normandy on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Ten weeks later, more...
...I never met him...
...American and French forces, with British support, liberated Marseille and thrust inland to capture Grenoble and Lyon...
...or a Pyrenean cafe that was a safe house for intelligence and liaison people en route to Algiers or London via Spain...
...The advancing Allied forces were helped by French Resistance units, which ambushed the Germans wherever possible and sabotaged their communications...
...And D, a Spanish anti-Fascist who mended dangerous roofs and married a Belgian refugee who turned his shimmy cottage into a home: She vanished soon after the Armistice, and he had a bad fall...
...I asked one veteran if the name Rocard meant anything to him...
...Special Operations Executive flew him to England, where he became the Free French Navy's director of research and an adviser to other Allied services...
...Our local TV weather prophet is forecasting storms...
...When, in 1946, bureaucratic politics undermined Jones' position within the British spyworks establishment, Rocard wrote a brilliant essay supporting him—in sizzling French and for internal circulation only, of course...
...On September 12, they linked up with French troops who had landed in Normandy...
...but for me, as for most people who know his story, Rocard is a great name...
...During and after the War, the well-guarded doors of the SIS headquarters were always open to Yves Rocard...
...or the ruins of a lonely farmhouse once used by the Resistance...
...Even the European Union is becoming the plaything of deadbeat politicians, always more attentive to their party's backwoodsmen than to its civilized members...
...Not many people here remember the secret war, but some recall stories of characters and events told by older folk...
...And a cabaret singer...
...Yves Rocard, whose roots were in the Southwest, was a professor of physics at the Sorbonne...
...He woke the next morning to find an amazed crowd staring up at him as firemen raised a ladder to his bedside...
...And E, who trekked to a British consulate with a captured German report, but had difficulty getting in because he was so bedraggled...
...In his 1978 book Most Secret War, R. V Jones, another outstanding scientist, describes Rocard as "a fine physicist and a very gallant man—as staunch a friend as Britain could ever find...
...The lessons of the anti-Nazi struggle helped us resist Stalinism and Maoism...
...Rocard's work, described in Whitehall as one of the finest intelligence achievements of the War, gave UK secret services a salutary jolt...
...and I'm still an optimist...
...Yves Rocard, the politician's father...
...Ten weeks later, more of them swirled down in the Midi (southern France) to celebrate the Allied landing there in mid-August 1944...
...Here I hesitate because this sounds like B-movie territory, though I have reason to believe she did good work...
...A fine man...
...Scientific intelligence had been neglected by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS...
...Of course...
...In La Limatte (Var), Rimont (Ariege) and elsewhere the Germans killed civilians and destroyed houses in the hope of intimidating France's "secret army...
...The Midi campaign was briefer than the Normandy one, but vitally important...
...There was only one scientist on its staff when the fighting broke out...
...It is still moving to see Rimont, today gay with flowers...
...It was too dark and dangerous for him to move, so he stayed put and fell asleep...
...Yet nationalist and other idiocies are again creeping out of the sewers of some European, African and Mideastern societies...
...Soon afterward...
...Much of his floor was destroyed, but his bed survived, as if on a balcony, overhanging the rubble...
...By now, Nazi officers realized the War was lost, and as their morale sagged they became enraged by this "terrorist" harassment...
...The flags of June and August have been furled...
...In London, Rocard lived for a time at the top of a tall house in Queen's Gate that was bombed while he was in bed...
...There was C, an English radio operator whose girlfriend (acquired in the Midi) joined him in London after the War—and married his commanding officer...
...In the Resistance from the start, he risked his life obtaining technical details of advanced German air-navigation and radar systems to calculate their potential...
...In one such cafe, tiny Allied flags cohabited in a wineglass on a high shelf for many years, until the wartime owner died...
...Thanks to this unique alliance of American, British, French and other armed forces, secret agents, and ordinary people, Nazism was defeated...
...She still looks contagiously happy, though...
...His data, sent to London, helped save many an airman and civilian...
Vol. 77 • August 1994 • No. 8
