Avenue of Spies Read online

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Envoy

  Escape from the Deep

  The Few

  The Longest Winter

  The Bedford Boys

  Blood and Champagne

  Jack London

  The Liberator

  Copyright © 2015 by Alex Kershaw

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kershaw, Alex.

  Avenue of spies: a true story of terror, espionage, and one American family’s heroic resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris / Alex Kershaw.—First edition.

  1. Jackson, Sumner Waldron. 2. Jackson, Sumner Waldron—Family. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France—Paris. 4. Spies—France—Paris—Biography. 5. Americans—France—Paris—Biography. 6. Physicians—France—Paris—Biography. 7. World War, 1939–1945—France—Paris. 8. Paris (France)—History, Military—20th century. 9. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945. I. Title.

  D802.F82P37476 2015

  940.53′44361092313—dc23 2015016861

  ISBN 9780804140034

  eBook ISBN 9780804140041

  Maps by David Lindroth Inc.

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photographs by DPA/ZUMA (top left); Mondadori/Getty (top right); Roger-Viollet/The Image Works (bottom left); courtesy the author (bottom right)

  v4.1_r2

  a

  For Pete and Loraine

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Wartime Europe 1944–45

  Nazi Paris

  PART ONE: CITY OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 1 THE FALL

  CHAPTER 2 TO SAVE FRANCE

  CHAPTER 3 THE FOURTEENTH

  CHAPTER 4 DAY TRIPPERS

  CHAPTER 5 SPIES OF SUMMER

  CHAPTER 6 WINGED VICTORY

  PART TWO: ARMIES OF THE NIGHT

  CHAPTER 7 ON DOCTOR’S ORDERS

  CHAPTER 8 AVENUE BOCHE

  CHAPTER 9 THE SHADOW GAME

  CHAPTER 10 NUMBER 11

  CHAPTER 11 THE LAST SUMMER

  CHAPTER 12 THE LAST METRO

  PART THREE: NIGHT AND FOG

  CHAPTER 13 GUESTS OF THE REICH

  CHAPTER 14 THE COUP: JULY 20, 1944

  CHAPTER 15 AVE MARIA

  CHAPTER 16 DAYS OF GLORY

  CHAPTER 17 NIGHT AND FOG

  CHAPTER 18 NEUENGAMME

  CHAPTER 19 DELIVERANCE

  PART FOUR: AFTER THE FALL

  CHAPTER 20 ONE DAY IN MAY

  CHAPTER 21 HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE

  CHAPTER 22 JUSTICE

  EPILOGUE LES INVALIDES

  PHOTO INSERT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  We lived in the shadows as soldiers of the night, but our lives were not dark and martial….There were arrests, torture, and death for so many of our friends and comrades, and tragedy awaited all of us just around the corner. But we did not live in or with tragedy. We were exhilarated by the challenge and rightness of our cause. It was in many ways the worst of times and in just as many ways the best of times, and the best is what we remember today.

  —JEAN-PIERRE LÉVY

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  Detail right

  Part One

  CITY OF DARKNESS

  What Nazism, epitomized by the Gestapo, tried to realize (and almost succeeded in realizing) was the destruction of man as we know him and as thousands of years have fashioned him. The Nazi world was an empire of total force, with no restraints.

  —JACQUES DELARUE, The Gestapo: A History of Horror

  ONE

  THE FALL

  A SHELL EXPLODED. Fragments of shrapnel hit a young soldier. He fell to the ground. Before long, nurses with East Coast prep school accents, volunteers at the American Hospital of Paris, helped the young man into a makeshift operating theater. The emergency surgery was in the elegant ballroom of a casino in Fontainebleau, forty miles south of Paris. A tall man with thick dark hair, blue eyes, bushy brows, large but nimble hands, and a boxer’s face was soon at the shattered young man’s side. His name was Dr. Sumner Jackson, a fifty-six-year-old American and the chief surgeon of the American Hospital of Paris.

  Sumner began to examine the young man’s leg and decided there was only one thing for it. It would have to go. He needed a saw. It would be no easy operation given the poor light in the casino. A few minutes later, the boy lay in agony on a roulette table as Sumner prepared to remove his leg, carefully cutting off the flow of blood through his arteries. If Sumner made a mistake, the boy could bleed to death.

  Sumner took a scalpel and sliced across the boy’s muscles, revealing the underlying bone. With an oscillating saw he cut through the bone and filed down the rough edges before delicately laying muscle and skin flaps over the stump. It was painstaking work that took great care and concentration in the dim light, and Sumner took intense pride in his expertise. A superb combat surgeon, arguably the finest of his generation, he had vast experience, having spent much of the last war trying to repair shattered young bodies. In 1916 he had volunteered for Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps and had arrived in Flanders with other Americans who had defied U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s call for neutrality. He was assigned to a surgery near the Somme battlefield, where over ninety percent of those who “went over the top” and attacked German positions ended up being killed or wounded.

  Sumner had operated on hundreds of young men whose limbs had been torn asunder by shellfire. Twenty-five years later, he was once again doing his best to save lives, but there was something particularly unnerving about the nature of men’s wounds in this new war. It only took one German 88mm shell to kills dozens of troops if caught out in the open. Hitler’s modern weapons were designed to rip humans to small pieces of flying flesh, to turn them to hamburger.

  Sumner completed the amputation, ensuring that the boy’s leg was carefully bandaged. There was no time to rest. Dozens of other gravely wounded men lay waiting their turn. Sumner was working sometimes deep into the night—often beside a fellow American doctor named Dr. Charles Bove—sawing, cutting, stitching, trying to save as many soldiers and civilians as they could. The casino’s corridors were filled with emergency surgical cases, patients begging for water or lying in grim silence, resigned to death. Whenever Sumner straightened his back and took a drink of coffee or water, he could see yet more who had been laid out on the baccarat tables, waiting to suffer the saw. There were as many urgent cases awaiting Sumner when he returned to his base, the American Hospital of Paris, reputedly the best equipped in Europe, where he had worked since 1925. He made the journey back and forth in a white ambulance, sometimes driven by an upper-class young American volunteer, through the working-class outskirts of Paris and then to the leafy streets of upscale Neuilly-sur-Seine.

  Many Parisians could not remember such a glorious spring. The chestnuts along the Avenue Foch, where Sumner and his wife and twelve-year-old son lived in a ground-floor apartment at number 11, were a wonderful green. Breezes carried the sweet scent of purple lilacs and lilies of the valley. From a wide terrace adjoining his office on the fourth floor of the hospital, when Sumner was able
to take a break from surgery, he could see the city’s immense elegance as he stood for a few minutes relaxing, usually smoking a cigar or more often a cigarette.

  Sumner’s view of Paris, spread out before him, was fabulous, with the Eiffel Tower clear in the distance a few miles to the southeast. In the courtyard below, ambulances pulled up all that May, their bells ringing, returning from the front lines. The impossible was happening. France was falling. Anyone who could get out of Paris was doing so. Many of his American colleagues at the hospital, a cornerstone of the expatriate community since 1910, and his wealthy neighbors on Avenue Foch, several of them Jews, had already fled.

  Sumner had seen the rise of fascism in Europe, the weakness of European democracies, and the appeasement of Hitler, whom he despised. He had been convinced the previous fall, after war had broken out, that the United States would join her allies from the last war to once again put Germany in her place. Hitler would be stopped. Sumner could not believe that America would stay neutral and let Europe fall into the abyss once again. But now his worst fears were being confirmed.

  A fortnight earlier Europe had exploded as the Nazis launched a massive spring offensive in the West. Since May 10, Sumner had read headlines that grew more ominous by the day. The Wehrmacht had stormed with seemingly unstoppable force through Belgium, Holland, and northern France. Hitler’s armies were less than a hundred miles from Paris. The French were in retreat, the nation losing heart, it seemed, and the unimaginable happening. Indeed, Sumner knew, it was no longer a question of whether France would be defeated but when.

  Operating on severely wounded young men consumed all of Sumner’s waking hours. When he did have time to wipe his brow, take a long gulp of coffee, and drag on a cigarette as he gazed to the south from his terrace, he could not help but think about his fifty-two-year-old wife and their son, Phillip, at home on Avenue Foch, a couple of miles from the Eiffel Tower.

  After twenty-one years of marriage, Sumner was still utterly devoted to Swiss-born Charlotte Sylvie Barrelet de Ricou, whom Sumner had always called Toquette. She was petite with sandy brown hair and the lean physique of a keen tennis player. In her youth, she sometimes boasted, she had beaten the best French tennis player of the time, Suzanne Lenglen, who had won thirty-one championship titles. After the last war, Sumner had taken her back to New England, but she was so dreadfully unhappy, missing Paris and her family so much that she fell ill. “It’s me or America,” she finally demanded. Sumner chose her, abandoning a good job in a Philadelphia hospital and returning to Paris, where he was forced to spend years studying French and taking endless exams in order to practice medicine in France, much to his bitter frustration. He was in fact compelled to repeat six of his seven years of medical school. Finally, at age thirty-five, he had been able to earn a living as a doctor once more.

  Toquette had been more than worth the sacrifice. The youngest of six children whose father was a successful Swiss lawyer, she had a remarkably powerful spirit. Sumner also greatly admired her courage and stamina. She had won a Red Cross award for four years of service in bloody surgeries in World War I and shared his belief that one should give back, not just take, in a civilized society. He had first met her when she was a feisty twenty-eight-year-old nurse working at his side in a hospital on the Rue Piccini in Paris in 1916. “The first time I kissed your mother,” Sumner jokingly told his son, “was in a linen closet at the Rue Piccini….It was a very long kiss.”

  Toquette was witty, spoke flawless English, and quickly discovered that the equally pithy Sumner also loved to swim, sail, and play tennis. Soon, thirty-one-year-old Sumner, whom she called Jack, was seriously wooing her, often visiting her family home in Enghien-les-Bains, an upscale suburb of Paris. Neither Toquette nor her family needed any persuading, and the couple was married at the family home in Enghien in November 1917. Over a decade later, their son, Phillip, known to all as Pete, was born on January 10, 1928, in the American Hospital. Phillip’s birth when Toquette was thirty-nine, after she had all but given up hope of conceiving, prompted a raucous party with several bottles of Bollinger 1921 champagne being drunk to celebrate the new arrival.

  Sumner and Toquette had since doted on their only child, and he had grown up very much aware that his parents had a great love for each other. Toquette did all she could to make Sumner happy, determined he would never regret his decision to forsake his family (he was close to his brother, Daniel, and sister, Freda) and a life in America for one in France. Yet on the outbreak of the Second World War, the previous September, Sumner and Toquette had once again been forced to decide whether they should stay in Europe or leave. Sumner had thought it best they go to America for Phillip’s safety. But Toquette had insisted on staying. The idea of living in the United States again filled her with almost as much dread as the approaching Germans.

  Eight months later, Toquette was just as determined to stay in Paris, close to her family. And Sumner still faced an agonizing choice. Should he continue to do as his wife wanted? Or should he ignore her wishes and take his family back to America while there was still time to escape?

  —

  FLAMES JUMPED into the sky. Near Amiens in northern France, an ambulance driver tried to make his way past burning buildings, avoiding downed telephone wires, rotting horse carcasses, and bomb craters, pitiful evidence of the immense ferocity of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. It was early on May 18, 1940, when a well-spoken Princeton graduate, thirty-two-year-old Donald Coster, looked up from the ambulance and saw German planes, wave after wave of them. There were the whistles and screams of bombs falling. Stuka dive-bombers with inverted gull wings attacked, dropping five-hundred-pound bombs, leaving behind a blanket of acrid, sickening fumes. Coster made it to a hospital in Châteaudun just as the bombing became most intense. Terribly afraid, the volunteer ambulance driver took shelter in the hospital’s basement.

  After about an hour, the sound of bombing ended. There was a tense silence. Coster knew the Germans were close by, approaching Amiens itself, one hundred and fifty miles north of Paris. Like millions of French, Coster had tried to escape their lightning advance. That was why he was now cowering in a cellar beside several dozen doctors, nurses, and wounded soldiers. The bombing began again. This time the explosions were much closer. Coster felt them like “punches” against his chest. It was quiet once more. He could hear his heart beating fast and then came the sound of heavy jackboots on cobblestones. For several minutes Coster waited, expecting grenades to be thrown down into their shelter. He stood up and climbed the steps leading out of the cellar.

  Daylight blinded Coster as he left the shelter and walked into a courtyard. For the first time he caught sight of a German soldier. The storm trooper was aiming at a line of French prisoners backed against a wall. They were civilians. The German looked as if he was going to finish them off. Coster waved his identification card at the German, who instantly turned his gun on him and was about to pull the trigger when someone called out in German, begging the soldier to spare Coster and take him to his commander instead.

  Coster and some of his fellow ambulance men, under guard, walked fifty yards or so until they reached a main junction on the road to Amiens. There was a roaring of engines, a clanking of tank tracks. A Panzer column was moving into the city—the tip of the Nazi spear thrusting toward Paris. There had been no more mobile and powerful force in the history of war, and Coster looked on in awe. The column seemed to stretch forever and moved so fast, the tanks thundering by at forty miles an hour, bristling with heavy weapons, the eight-foot-high steel behemoths surely unstoppable. Armored cars followed, pulling camouflaged antiaircraft guns, their 20mm barrels pointing skyward. One tank rolled toward a barricade farther down the road and smashed through, making light work of heavy logs. “Nothing invented by man, you felt with a shock of despair,” recalled Coster, “could possibly withstand this inhuman monster which had already flattened half of Europe.”

  A German officer ordered Coster to help at a nearby hospital an
d bring in wounded from the battlefield. In a field of high grass were many English dead rotting in the sun, their faces purple and black. There were a few men whose wounds were already gangrenous, and they gritted their teeth as they called for help from where they lay amid dozens of dead cows with huge bloated stomachs. The stench was nauseating. Three hundred British soldiers had been riddled with bullets from the Panzers’ machine guns. Fewer than thirty had survived.

  A German approached as Coster helped the wounded. He thought Coster was a British soldier, mistaking his uniform, and snatched his gloves away. Coster stupidly tried to grab them back and the German whipped out his pistol and aimed it at his stomach. Coster pointed to the band on his arm, showing the symbol for the American Field Service, a volunteer ambulance unit.

  “Amerikanisch,” said Coster.

  To Coster’s surprise, the German officer stood to attention, saluted Coster, shook his hand, and then left without another word. Other German soldiers nearby talked with Coster. They regarded Americans with bemused contempt, especially President Roosevelt, a vacillating windbag compared to their glorious, decisive Führer. One of them said: “We never see any of you on our side.”

  There was more good news from the front—for the Germans. After advancing through southern Belgium, the Germans had crossed the Meuse River and pierced the French line at Sedan. The Allies had been forced to retreat toward the port of Dunkirk. Disaster loomed. Nothing, it seemed, could stop the Nazi juggernaut as it barreled toward Paris.

  TWO

  TO SAVE FRANCE

  AT THE AMERICAN Hospital in Neuilly, the chaos and crisis worsened. One of the patients was RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey, who had been hit in the neck by a German bullet. He would later recall Sumner and the other colleagues, in particular Jackson’s close friend, sixty-five-year-old Dr. Thierry de Martel, France’s leading neurosurgeon, who had operated on Richey with great success. De Martel had a noble face, short gray hair, and had an aristocratic, intellectual air. With Sumner and others all through that late May of 1940, he had removed German shrapnel from Allied soldiers’ skulls. Never before, not even during the darkest days of World War I, had de Martel and his close friend Sumner worked such long hours; all of Paris’s hospitals were now flooded with the badly wounded.