Re-discovering an American heroine in France

The story of Betty de Maduit

A photo of Betty after the war, given to her fellow resistant Claude Robinet

In March 2019 a parcel arrived. I few days before I’d received a telephone call from an elderly lady from the United States. She had read my book Under A Darkening Sky, and had somehow found out that I was writing a sequel. I haven’t actually got around to this yet, but will do so one day. Other jobs just keep on getting in the way. Anyway, the lady said that she had a lifetime of letters she had exchanged with an American woman resistant in France, with a fascinating wartime story. Would I be interested?

What a silly question!

She promptly put the material in the post. When I unwrapped the parcel a few days later I was astonished, for not only did it come with the letters, but with maps and photographs. The letters were to my correspondent from Betty de Maduit. Amazing! I knew a little of Betty’s work as a resistant following research in France for both Operation Suicide and The Jail Busters (especially because of my familiarity with the papers in Caen of the BCRA spy Gilbert Renault – aka Remy) who had known Betty very well, but beyond that I knew nothing. I was immediately hooked. Several trips to France with Mrs Lyman later, interviews with Betty’s friends and family, help from other historians (especially Keith Janes) and some devilling around in the archives in Paris and the United States, I was able to put pen to paper.

Here is the story I managed to uncover.

We need to start by setting the scene. Resistance was very slow to start in France following the cataclysm of June 1940 but one area of work that did began quickly was the réseaux d’évasion. A variety of groups or networks popped up to help soldiers left behind after Dunkirk, or airmen shot down thereafter, to evade their German (and Vichy) pursuers and make their way back to Britain. Escape lines were initially ad hoc and unorganized, but in time developed their own structures, organization, training and coordination. They often emerged in unplanned and spontaneous ways as French civilians came forward to provide succour to men attempting to stay out of German captivity and, if they could, find their way back to Britain. In time whole ‘lines’ of civilian helpers – passeurs – were established in a wide variety of réseaux to coordinate the escape of these men. Most réseaux emerged spontaneously in the occupied countries of Europe, by men and women who had no previous experience of such work. Only as the war progressed did formal British and American organizations such as MI9 and MIS-X become established to coordinate the rescue effort.

The most obvious and therefore most popular – and dangerous – escape route out of occupied Europe was through neutral Spain, which for those shot down over northern Europe entailed travelling long distances across both occupied and Vichy-held France. Captain Airey Neave, for example, escaped from Colditz Castle on 5 January 1942 and made his way by train and foot to Switzerland four days later. He was then spirited out of France via an escape route headed by the Belgian military doctor Albert-Marie Guérisse, operating under the pseudonym of ‘Pat Albert O’Leary’, who ran the Pat O’Leary réseau, often abbreviated to ‘Pat Line’ or ‘PAO’. It was the first properly organized escape line in France, managing to carry over six hundred escapers and evaders to safety before Guérisse was betrayed by a traitor within the organization – Roger Le Neveu, known to many as ‘Roger the Legionnaire’ – and arrested on 2 March 1943. Professor M.R.D. Foot and James Langley’s account of MI9, the organization established by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to assist in the evacuation of Allied personnel from the continent, suggest that over 5,000 Allied servicemen were repatriated to Britain as a result of the work of escape lines during the war. By the time of the Normandy landings in June 1944, some 1,500 Allied servicemen had crossed the Pyrenees to Spain. In time it ran a secret army of passeurs across a wide range of réseaux behind enemy lines. Where they could, MI9 attempted to support, train and sustain these networks, which often operated like birds in winter, with few resources and very little money, eking out a precarious existence amid the frozen wastes of Nazi occupation. London helped to provide cash, radio operators, agents and training, as well as leadership to give often isolated passeurs a firm sense of direction and a feeling that the risks they took were contributing to an eventual Allied victory. Nightly BBC radio programmes were used to send messages to agents in the field. MI9 routinely used SOE’s F Section’s training school at Beaulieu in the New Forest, and its parachute and survival training schools, to prepare servicemen for the rigors of evasion. It also collaborated effectively with SOE in the design and development of all sorts of useful material: silk maps, a range of tiny compasses, language cards, explosive devices and escape kits, which contained emergency rations, local currency and survival aids.

At any one time during the war at least five hundred escapers and evaders were at large across Europe, all making their way individually or with help towards the Pyrenees or, in 1944, toward evacuation by Motor Gun Boat off Brittany. Many réseaux d’évasion were coordinated by agents appointed and sustained by MI9 in London and supported by the apparatus of both MI6 and SOE. They became quite elaborate affairs. Airey Neave, who joined MI9 after successfully completing his own home-run, estimated that during the war some twelve thousand people across occupied Europe supported the escape lines. Men, women and children became involved in various ways: in hiding evaders, arranging identity documents and work and travel permits, accompanying them on public transport, acting as lookouts for German patrols, securing food, clothing and shoes and providing medical care for the wounded. Couriers would collect escapers and evaders from outlying areas, and then accompany them by road or train to hubs or collection points, where they could be prepared in groups for the final assault on the Pyrenees.

It was an exceptionally dangerous undertaking for the French passeurs who engaged in this activity, as indigenous police and security forces, working under German instructions, were constantly on the lookout for this type of illegal activity. For those escapers and evaders captured or recaptured by the Vichy police or the Germans, a short stay in prison would, on the whole, be their lot until transported to a POW camp. For a résistant, however, the penalty was death, preceded, if one was unlucky, by imprisonment and torture. For their family members, it often meant arrest as well, and deportation to a death camp in the east.

Few réseaux, however, survived intact for long, as the multifarious intelligence agencies of the Reich – the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), the Sicherheitsdienst (Himmler’s Security Service, the SD), the Abwehr, the Secret Field Police and even the Luftwaffe security organization – sought to eradicate this evidence of rebellion and destroy those involved.  General Otto von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France, produced thousands of posters to be pasted across the zone occupée setting out the penalties for supporting escapers, and the financial benefits of collaboration:

All men who aid directly or indirectly the crews of enemy aircraft shot down by parachute or having made a forced landing will be shot in the field. Women who render the same type of aid will be sent to concentration camps in Germany. People who capture crews . . . or who contribute, by their actions, to their capture will receive up to 10,000 francs. In certain cases this compensation will be increased.

The Germans proved remarkably successful in their efforts to capture or kill passeurs. James Langley estimated that three died for every escaper who successfully reached safety, a casualty figure of 15,000. The Germans were skilled at infiltrating Resistance networks. Indeed, the capture of many résistants and the collapse of many réseaux was due to the work of traitors. The eventual demise of the Pat Line was attributable to traitors, notably the French traitor and German infiltration agent Roger Le Neveu. The entire Dutch section of the SOE in Holland was controlled by the Abwehr in June 1942 and remained in German control for eighteen disastrous months, at great loss of life. The Germans even infiltrated agents into the escape lines.

We now get to Betty.

The renovated Bourblanc in 2019, showing the corner tower

It was through the Pat Line that the Roberta (‘Betty’) de Mauduit was introduced to this dangerous world in March 1943. Betty, born in the United States in 1891, had first travelled to France in 1925 on the RMS Olympic, sistership to the Titanic, and again in 1927 on the Cunard Line’s SS Carmania, while working for the 5th Avenue fashion store Peck & Peck. On her second trip Mrs Peck had sent her to France to study fashion design at the new Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. While at sea on her first voyage she had met the Comtesse de Mauduit, who introduced her to her son Henri, studying in Paris to be a colonial civil servant. Henri and Betty married in Paris on January 19, 1928. Betty was now 36 years old. An ancient pile – the Chateau du Bourblanc – in the village of Plourivo in Brittany, was purchased to become the family home in 1931, although with various foreign postings they didn’t live in the house until 1935. Their social circle was a literary, cinematic and artistic ‘beau art’ crowd in Paris, with a lifelong friendship group that included the writers Pierre Benoit, Francis Carco and Joseph Kessel, together with the painters Andre Dignimont and Anne Cherie Charles. When war came in 1939 Henri and Betty were living in the Ivory Coast (where Henri had been posted since 1938); they managed to return to Plourivo in October 1940, five months after the fall of France, crossing La Ligne de Demarcation into the zone occupée.

Fierce patriots, Betty and Henri were emotionally, intellectually and politically affronted not merely by Frances’ defeat, but by the slave status imposed on it by Germany thereafter. The loss of personal and national liberty was an affront – for Henri by blood, and for Betty by adoption – to everything that liberté, égalité meant to their sense of nationhood. Their natural instinct was to fight back. With Betty’s encouragement, therefore, Henri determined to make his way to Britain to serve with General de Gaulle, and made good his escape, with four others, by small boat on 29 January 1941. On their first night at sea they were picked up by the British destroyer HMS Kelly, commanded by Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, on patrol in the English Channel. Henri agreed that Betty would stay behind to look after Bourblanc, under the express instructions not to get involved in any resistance activities. His primary concern was that she would be punished for the fact that he had illegally left France to fight for Free France, if the Germans discovered his absence. Henri told his biographer that by the end of 1940, when it was apparent that Hitler would not be in a position to invade England, that Betty expressed confidence that the RAF would soon be launching aerial counterattacks on the Reich and its occupied territories. When that happened, she would look out for any downed British fliers, and hide them in their 40-bed chateau. She was certain that her status as an American citizen would give her sufficient protection. Betty certainly made the most of her status as an French-American aristocrat, although her fearlessness brought her to the attention of the German authorities. Early in the occupation German soldiers entered the house when only her housekeeper was at home. After walking around the place like conquerors they left after brazenly stealing a couple of valuable carpets. Undaunted, Betty headed straight for German headquarters in Saint-Brieux, marched into the commandant’s office, and demanded their return.  They were back at Bourblanc the next day, with apologies.

Betty couldn’t keep her promise to Henri for long. Her natural sense of affront at the German occupation, and at the privations foisted upon the populace as a result of military occupation, grew rather than diminished. Unsurprisingly, during that first year she found herself drawn into resistance activities. The catalyst was Claude Robinet, a young résistant keen to find his way to England, who worked as part of a local reseau code-named Georges France 31 – which gathered information for MI6 on German coastal defences. Looking for somewhere to keep low, one of Henri’s cousins, and Robinet’s comrade, Alain de Clermont-Tonnerre, recommended in October 1941 that he ask Betty. Robinet stayed at Bourblanc until January 1942, drawing Betty into his intelligence gathering activities, and ultimately his escape to England on board the Korriganne, which left Paimpol on 15 January 1942. The remainder of that year passed relatively quietly, Betty busying herself as president of the committee established by the mayor of Plourivo to provide support to families whose menfolk remained prisoners in Germany. Betty, however, showed her independence of spirit (and perhaps incaution) by throwing a fête at Bourblanc on each July 14 – Bastille Day – right under the Germans’ noses.

The events that were to thrust Betty directly and dangerously into the work of the réseau d’évasion came in early April 1943 when she received a visit from a 26-year-old activist by the name of Georges Jouanjean. A newly joined member of the Pat O’Leary Line, he was in desperate need of somewhere to accommodate the growing number of Allied aviators who were congregating in Brittany prior to being spirited in small groups by train south to the Pyrenees. He had taken it upon himself to establish an escape line for downed Allied aviators when, four months previously, he had assisted the escape to Spain of two airmen who landed close to him after parachuting from their burning aircraft. Jouanjean had asked Doctor Ménard, the mayor of Plouézec and a friend of the Mauduits, for advice. ‘Ask Betty’ came the response. Jouanjean was himself a French Army POW who had escaped from German captivity in 1942. Trying to find a way to get to England to continue the war, he had now decided that the best way to fight back against the enemy was to assist in the recovery of evaders, a dangerous activity that, if caught, would result in swift trial and execution. By means of asking around, and letting it be known in places where he hoped résistants might congregate, he was introduced to Louis Nouveau, a member of the Pat O’Leary Line who was looking to establish a branch of the network in Brittany. Nouveau entrusted Jouanjean with the task, both men unaware that the network had already been fatally compromised by the Abwehr agent, Roger Le Neveu.

While these events were underway, MI9 was stepping up its efforts to systematize the escape line effort, parachuting south of Paris on 21 March 1943 Vladimir Bourychkine (‘Val Williams’, code named ‘Guillaume’) and his pianiste, the French-Canadian soldier Raymond Labrosse. Their task – Operation Oaktree – was, in conjunction with the Royal Navy, to organize the evacuation of evading and escaping allied airmen by sea from the remote Breton coastline, using skills and techniques the Royal Navy had been developing since 1941 for dropping off and collecting agents from these ragged shores. Using information from the men whom Jouanjean had looked after and who had returned to Britain, Williams sought out the young résistant. In the meantime, in order to help hide and look after the growing number evaders across Brittany, Jouanjean approached Betty.

Notwithstanding Henri’s warning to stay away from such things (which, of course, she had already conveniently ignored with her involvement with Claude Robinet), Betty did not take much persuasion from the young man who came to visit her in March 1943, stipulating only that Jouanjean not divulge her name to anyone else. She went to meet the eleven hidden airmen, crammed in two houses 15-miles along the coast at in Saint-Quay-Portrieux. She found them playing poker, and after assuring herself that they were genuine Americans – rather than German stooges – they travelled that night to Bourblanc under the cover of darkness, first catching the train to Paimpol before walking to the chateau along a path that led through the undulating farmland of the region. Within days four others had arrived from as far away as La Pie-en-Paule and Carhaix- Plouguer, giving her fifteen evaders, American, British and Canadian flyers, all waiting their opportunity to be sent south to Pau, and thence over the Pyrenees into Spain. Two of the evaders was Second Lieutenant Robert Kylius, Bombardier, and Technical Sergeant Claiborne Wilson, Air Gunner, two of three survivors (the other seven were killed) on a 306 Bomb Group B-17 brought down near Ploërmel on February 16, 1943 returning from a bombing raid on the huge German U-boat pens at Saint-Nazaire. With their fellow evaders they were to spend three weeks at Bourblanc, leaving for Spain on May 31. When one of MI9's agents – the Parisian lawyer Paul Campinchi, codenamed ‘Francois’ – was asked by Williams to recruit helpers, he journeyed to Brittany to investigate the possibility and visited Bourblanc with Jouanjean. He was astonished at what he found,. He reported to Williams that Betty – whom Airey Neave in his history of MI9 was to describe as this ‘most valiant lady’ – was hosting ‘a whole regiment’ of American and British airmen in her house – he said 39 – with a further fifty or so holed up in a variety of individual hiding places across Brittany. That made at least ninety allied flyers hiding incognito, courtesy of small groups of often unconnected Breton families. For all they knew there were many more, all in the need of assistance, and a plan to evade south to the Pyrenees. It’s not clear whether Betty was ever told just how many evaders were currently – or expected to be – in circulation in Brittany, and would require her hospitality. Perhaps she might have hesitated if she knew just how many would end up passing through the doors of her beloved Bourblanc.

From the outset Betty knew the importance of keeping the presence at Bourblanc of these unwilling tourists a secret, revealing her role only to those to whom the knowledge was essential. During his stay at Bourblanc, Claude Robinet had impressed on Betty the fundamentals of security, including keeping those in the know to the absolute maximum, even to the extent of warning about the glow of cigarettes at night. She must never, ever, speak of her work to anyone. Before Henri had left for England, they had discovered that a builder whom they had engaged to repair the attic had failed to do his job properly, leaving a yawning gap in the floor. Their dog, an inquisitive Samoyard, disappeared while exploring, and to recover the animal Betty discovered to her amazement the ideal hiding place built-into the fabric of the chateau. A four-foot-high space sat between the ceiling of the top floor, and the floor of the attic, a space of which both had previously been completely unaware. If it was not obvious to them, they thought, after having owned the chateau for 10-years, it would be even more difficult to find by others. The dog, sitting in this cavernous space happily wagging its tail, had unwittingly found the ideal hiding place, one large enough, it seemed, for scores of men. When Val Williams visited Bourblanc on April 10, the numbers hiding in Betty’s attic had risen from the 15 she had first brought, to the 39 reported by Paul Campinchi at the end of March. William’s plan was to arrange a sea operation using Royal Navy Motor Gun Boats from the Plage Bonaparte near Plouha the following month (some 11-miles across back roads and farm tracks from Bourblanc), although this was dependent on he and Labrosse being able to establish radio communications with London, their transmitter being destroyed when its parachute failed to open when they landed a few weeks before. 

At Bourblanc the men slept in the attic, with strict instructions to remain away from the windows during the day, or to show lights upstairs at night. Even though the chateau was surrounded by a thick wall of trees, no risks could be taken with local gossip about what was going on ‘at the big house’, stories that might unwittingly find their way back to the authorities. On the first sign of an alarm the men were shown how to sweep up their possessions and disappear into the cavernous hideaway, which would be closed behind them. Betty had two staff to help at Bourblanc at the time, Yvonne Le Blay who looked after the general housekeeping and the gardener, Louis Martin. With the sudden increase in house guests a local girl, Yvonne Guillou, came during the day, mainly to help in the kitchen. Only the two Yvonne’s knew of Betty’s clandestine work with the evaders.

The administrative and logistical challenge of looking after so many secret visitors proved to be a gargantuan exercise, involving many discreet parts, and taking up Betty’s every waking minute. It was as stressful as it was exhilarating. Jouanjean had built a trusted circle of helpers around him, and Betty did likewise, trusting her instincts and the friendships she had built up in the local area since she and Henri had purchased Bourblanc in 1931. Betty’s biggest problem was food. Although her own gardens produced large amounts of fruit and vegetables, catering for groups of hungry young men created its own challenge. She was determined to provide one large, wholesome meal each day, usually eaten late at night when the darkness would reduce the chances of any unexpected visitors. But getting enough food just for one main meal a day was not an easy task, made more difficult in the face of a deliberate German policy to reduce food stocks across France and to place the citizenry on slightly better than starvation rations. Quietly Betty engaged local farmers and shopkeepers who knew she could trust; not one let her down. Flour and bakery products were supplied by Job Le Bec, a miller from La Pie en Paule, 50-miles away, near Carhaix-Plouguer. Le Bec had been an early collaborator with Jouanjean, and had a small gazogène truck. Marie Floury, of Plourivo, whose father ran a taxi service from the village, appropriated flour from an old mill where she worked on the River Leff, a few miles south of Plourivo, giving it to Betty to feed the hungry mouths in her attic. The proprietor of the local hotel and restaurant in Plourivo, the Hervé Legrande, Hervé Yves, close friends of the de Mauduits from before the war, provided vegetables, fruit and meat. Hervé’s daughter, 21-year old Marcelle, would bicycle the 36-miles to Guincamp several times a week – a 4-hour round trip each time – to exchange foodstuffs from her garden for essential supplies not otherwise to be found in the countryside. Meat, extremely scarce, was also provided by a variety of butchers, including Thérésien in Plourivo, Le Gorju in Paimpol and Bob Pennec, a wholesaler of pork and cooked meats, who lived in Rostrenen, close to Job Le Bec. On at least one occasion Betty managed to acquire a calf, which one of her evaders expertly slaughtered at night, Betty storing the meat in the wine cellar. Pennec was an active member of the Pat O’Leary Line, whose house was also used regularly to house evaders, and who was to be caught up in the arrests of the Pat Line that were soon to sweep the réseau into the quickly-filling German concentration camps.

Apart from food, the biggest problem was keeping her visitors occupied, and out-of-sight. It is a tribute to her diligence that not even Louis Martin, the gardener, knew of his secret visitors until she was forced to tell him on the day of her arrest. Men would be brought to Bourblanc in ones and twos at night, by Jouanjean or another member of the Pat Line, and taken upstairs via the turret in the courtyard. There they would be briefed by Betty in the strictest terms on procedures to be taken on the sounding of an alarm, or the arrival of the French police or German security authorities. She allowed them out, two-by-two, each night for a walk in the grounds, but only after searching their pockets to make sure they weren’t carrying cigarettes, the glow of which could give their presence away. Many evader’s records recall her strictness. It had a purpose. Although Bourblanc sits quietly in wooded countryside, it was hard in rural France to remain inconspicuous: the least change in routine or scenery is easy to spot by those on the lookout for anything unusual. Betty was terrified of these young men being too blasé about security, describing some of them after the war as having an Alice in Wonderland mentality, with no concept of the danger their care was presenting to their helpers. As Betty observed to Gilbert Renault, ‘They were very dangerous guests’ because they thought that because they were now with the resistance, they were safe, ‘and that the war was already over!’

I had a lot of trouble with them, because it was very difficult for me to order them [around]...’

In fact, Betty was disheartened to hear lots of grumbling about the strictness of her security regime, and during Val Williams’ visit on April 10 he read the riot-act to the humbled evaders, explaining the risks Betty and her staff were taking on their behalf. She was their Commanding Officer, he told them, to be obeyed in every respect. If they didn’t like it, he told them, they would be given some bread, francs and sent on their way, to fend for themselves. There was no more complaining.

To maintain security the men were confined to their rooms during the day, although one of the chateau’s jewels was its massive library. To many evader’s satisfaction, Betty had a large collection of Westerns and detective novels. Many men spent their time at Bourblanc catching up on their reading.

Jouanjean’s plan was that Bourblanc acted as a staging post for the evaders. As soon as he had managed to arrange a package, the men would leave on their long journey south, via Paris. Leaving in darkness, following the track across the De Mauduit’s neighbor’’s farm (which belonged to résistant Joseph Prigent), was just under 3-miles to the train station at Paimpol, which would take them to Saint-Brieuc or Guincamp, where they would catch the train, using tickets purchased for them in advance by Mme Marie-Jeanne Guilaine, to Paris.

More than once Georges Jouanjean observed the stress that her unheralded visitors was placing on Betty. The strain was palpable. In his unpublished memoir, Jouanjean recalled arriving at Bourblanc late one evening in the pouring rain, having travelled from Carhaix with four parcels in tow, hoping to leave them in Betty’s care:

I left the airmen in the porch... Betty was busy in the kitchen (it was evening). Always so welcoming, I felt at once that she had some problems. She was tired and perhaps exhausted; the airmen that she houses are always there, about thirty of them. As I decided to confess to her that I had four more airmen with me, she interrupted me, “Clear off: I don’t want to see you any more, above all stop bringing any more [evaders]. Get out and don’t come back again!”

Georges waited outside in the rain with his miserable ‘parcels’ for several uncomfortable hours. It was clear that Betty was feeling the strain of her new responsibilities, and felt overwhelmed by the potential onset of new ones. Jouanjean’s memoir amusingly recounts how he waited until she had gone to bed, before slipping into the house and offering her – with a wink – some company for the night. She laughingly relented, hearing that the evaders were outside sheltering as best they could from the rain, and they were brought into the house.

Betty did everything possible to make her visitors’ stay a memorable one. Claiborne Wilson’s 25th birthday fell while he was in Brittany. When she found out, Betty organized a party for all those in the house, together with assorted helpers. Of the 39 at the party, 30 were transiting evaders. Georges Jouanjean was also there, recalling that they all sat down to eat close to midnight, on… ‘a beautiful evening at the end of May 1943.’

The evening began calm, warm, and gentle. In the large room of the château three very large tables, placed end to end, were covered with white tablecloths with red and blue edging. The plates were white, others were blue and others were red. On the walls were French, American and British flags. Betty with her exquisite taste had arranged everything. We were all very clean and had even succeeded in making our clothes presentable. Betty was ravishing in her simple dress. We had dined until almost three in the morning.

Another evader, Michael Fitzgerald, perhaps on the same occasion, who had been escorted to Bourblanc by Val Williams from the apartment in Paris apartment of Countess Jean de Suzanette, was aghast at this display and cautioned Betty about her apparent lack of security. He need not have bothered: it was a subject constantly on Betty’s mind. They were eating – and celebrating late – precisely to avoid unwanted attention from outsiders. Clay Wilson watched Betty on one occasion talk to two visiting Luftwaffe officers in the courtyard below, the Germans entirely unaware that Bourblanc’s rafters were literally stuffed to the gills with watching Allied airmen, hearts in their mouths. Betty had the unenviable task of trying to make Bourblanc appear normal, accepting the random visits of passing German officers, no doubt interested in – and suspicious of – this expatriate American living alone in her 40-bedroom mansion in the remote Breton countryside, while trying to keep her visitors out-of-sight.

Sometimes such things worked to her advantage. Her friend Mme Marie-Jeannie Guilaine had formed a romantic relationship with the Chief Engineer of the Todt organization, who was working on the construction of the Atlantic Wall in Brittany, much to the chagrin of Georges Jouanjean, who concocted a plan to kidnap the man and spirit him away to England. His own arrest forestalled these ideas. Betty invited the two to dinner, hoping that her entertainment of a senior German officer would assuage any concerns the Germans might otherwise harbour about where the loyalties of this lone American might lie. This was always an uphill battle. “The Germans eventually began to suspect me because they could find no trace of allied agents who were known to have dropped by parachute in the vicinity” she told the press in 1945. “The fact that I was an American and that I remained alone in the castle naturally strengthened their suspicions.”

Betty was daily concerned that notwithstanding the remoteness of Bourblanc, she would be betrayed by those who knew of, or suspected, her resistance activities. In early June 1943 a young man and woman came to her door, uninvited. The man said that his name was M. Labattue, that he was a student of architecture and that he wanted to visit the château to study its architecture. He introduced the young woman as Maud Martin, who was English and wanted by the German authorities. Betty, suspicious, turned them away. The woman certainly wasn’t English, so why the subterfuge? The couple persisted, however, and during one visit she allowed them into the house, where they met Georges Jouanjean and Bob Pennec, both of whom happened to be visiting at the time. Everyone was on their guard, nevertheless, although information Betty passed on in conversation, such as that her husband Henri was currently serving with General de Larminat in the forces of Free France, was used against her during subsequent Gestapo interrogation. Although she was suspicious at the time, it was only in prison that she realized that Labattue and the women had indeed been on a fishing expedition, and that she was the catch. After the war, her evidence was used to convict the pair for treason. Labattue was in fact a 25-year old Abwehr informant by the name of Larboulette from the village of Pontrieux, seven miles from Plourivo, and his female friend was the wife of a prisoner of war in Germany. Suspicious of an American citizen living alone in France – it seems probable that Larboulette knew of Betty from her prominent life in Brittany before the war, or of Betty’s role as President of the local War Families Committee – they prepared a ham-fisted means to entrap and denounce her.

But the real reason for the events that took place at Bourblanc on 12 June 1943 was directly related to the Abwehr’s successful rounding up of the Pat O’Leary Line, a direct result of the perfidy of Roger Le Neveu. Louis Nouveau had been trapped in Le Neveu’s web of deceit and arrested at Tours on 13 February 1943. Over the next two months the Abwehr, using Le Neveu as bait, conducted a concerted campaign to roll-up the Pat Line in Brittany. Le Neveu knew Jouanjean, of course, and was fully aware of the role Betty had started to play at Bourblanc for the reseau. The first that Betty knew of the danger was the panicked arrival late the previous evening of Georges Jouanjean. The Germans were coming, he told her. He had escaped a trap only the previous day at his parent’s home in Carhaix, by leaping over the back fence. He had tried to warn others, but discovered that they, too, had been arrested. It looked as though the whole of the Pat Line réseau in Brittany had been burned. The enemy clearly knew everything about the réseau and their arrival at Bourblanc was imminent. He urged her to escape. He then made good his own departure. It is unlikely that Betty believed that her American citizenship would protect her this late in the war, but for better or worse she decided to stay. She had five evaders in the house, all from a single B-17 shot down by FW190s  near Plonevez du Faou, on 17 May 1943 returning from a mission over Lorient, and responsibilities to them and others that she couldn’t simply drop. That day she was busy making cakes – she was a talented pastry cook – for a communion service in Saint-Brieuc, and there was the evening meal to arrange for her guests. With her heart in her mouth she continued with her work. The following morning Jouanjean’s prediction proved correct, with the noisy arrival through the gate and down the lane that abuts the chateau of a company of armed German soldiers in trucks – she estimated about 100 helmeted men – at about 9 a.m.

At the first sound of commotion Yvonne Guillou, who was in a shed breaking up charcoal briquettes for the fire, ran inside, past Betty and upstairs, closely followed by a German, shouting at her to stop. Yvonne reached the attic and quickly hustled the five evaders into the corner tower that led to the hiding place in the false ceiling. She then hurried through the rooms, picking up the airmen’s dropped belongings, including their shoes which were lined up in the corridor, and placed them all in a wardrobe. Downstairs, the German officer was berating Betty about Yvonne. ‘How do I know where she is?’ Betty replied, inviting the men to carry out their own search, confident that the delay would have been more than sufficient for the guests to have been safely hidden. Eventually, the Germans found Yvonne hidden in a cupboard, knees tucked up to her chin. She explained to them in mock-fear that she was terrified of seeing so many Germans and had run away to hide.

With the soldiers fanning out across the house the German commander explained to Betty that they knew she was aiding allied fliers and agents, warning her that this was a serious criminal offence with the gravest consequences. Carrying on making her cakes, she calmly denied the accusation, and told him they could see for themselves there was no one in the house. The Germans conducted a systematic and thorough search of the property over the ensuing hours. Outside, armed soldiers prevented anyone entering the grounds, including Marianne Le Roux, the wife of the Plourivo butcher, who had arrived to pick a bouquet of flowers from Betty’s famed garden. Yvonne Le Blay was working in her father’s fields that morning, had seen the Germans arrive, and wisely stayed away, as did Louis Martin, the gardener. The external search extended to the Francois Prigent’s neighbouring farm, across which the path ran to Paimpol. But they found nothing. Inside Bourblanc, Betty could follow the course of the search by means of the loud tramp of German boots in various parts of the house. Her heart was in her mouth. She had recorded the names of all her visitors in a Visitor’s Book, which she had quickly stuffed under a pile on a coffee table. If it were discovered, and the Germans understood what it was, it would be all the evidence required to send her to the guillotine. At the officer’s request, she accompanied him to various rooms in the house. Walking into her bedroom, she was horrified to see evidence lying on her table, and thought her number was up. When Val Williams had first visited, he had left behind a number of London magazines, including a copy of the latest issue of LIFE, which had a photograph on the cover of a Waffen SS soldier. Two Germans with her casually picked it up and flicked through the pages, laughing at the photos of SS soldiers it contained. She was open-mouthed that not once did they stop to consider the date of publication, or question Betty as to how it had made its way from London to Plourivo.

Her heart still thumping, having returned to the kitchen, to make conversation, and perhaps to distract the German officer, she pointed to the stove and asked him whether he wanted to stay for lunch, commenting that ‘the carrots are cooked.’ There was a hidden barb in Betty’s remark, as the old French phrase Les carottes sont cuites also means ‘the game is up.’ In prison later, Betty was to be challenged about this comment. For whom were the carrots cooked: herself – for her undeniably misdeeds – or the Germans?

After several hours of barging and banging around the 40-bedroom chateau, the German officer told Betty that they were leaving, and that she was free to continue her affairs. But she didn’t believe them, certain from that moment – given the intensity of the search and the large number of troops deployed, with Jouanjean’s warning ringing in her ears – that her hours at Bourblanc were numbered. On the German’s departure she climbed the stairs that let up the turret from the kitchen to the attic, released the five evaders, and explained what had been going on. The five men were the surviving crewmen of 96th Bomb Group B-17 ‘Boot Hill’, shot down near Keranprès on 17 May. The men – First Lieutenant Louis Haltom (pilot); Staff Sergeant Roy Martin (side gunner); Technical Sergeant Glenn Wells (radio operator); Sergeant William Martin (side gunner) and Staff Sergeant Niles Loudenslager (side gunner) – had only been at Bourblanc for two days. They had been moved from the home of Madame Cellarié, escorted by an Oaktree courier, Lieutenant Claude Raoul-Duval, a Free-French Spitfire pilot shot down over Le Havre on 17 April, who now was helping MI9 while waiting to be returned to Britain as a ‘parcel’ himself. Betty warned them that the Germans were almost certain to return to arrest her, and gave them instructions about what to do should that happen. If no one came to collect them, they were to follow the track through the neighbouring farm to the railway line, and then follow it all the way back to Madame Emilie Cellarié’s house in Saint-Quay Portrieux, where the reseau d’évasion supporters would look after them.

Betty walked into the garden, worrying about how she could warn members of the reseau to look after the get the fliers and to get them away. At that moment Louis Martin, her gardener, returned, having seen the Germans leave. Betty had never told him about her special guests. 

I hesitated to tell him but I felt that I must risk it or the five pilots would be lost. I told him about them and what had occurred. I told him how to get in touch with one of the resistance members and sent word that the fliers must be taken away from the castle that night.

By this time Yvonne Le Bray’s brother had arrived, to see whether Betty was safe, and to warn her that the Germans were conducting a search in Plourivo. She quickly told him to arrange to take the five airmen to Saint-Quay-Portrieux, or warn helpers there to expect them. She was expecting to be arrested. She then dismissed Yvonne Guillou, who had been with her all morning, instructing her in no uncertain terms not to return.

Not long afterwards Betty, attempting to look nonchalant by sunbathing on a chair in the courtyard, heard the sound of a vehicle bumping up the driveway on the far side of the house, before stopping directly in front of the gates. Two officers alighted, the senior one being Captain Ferdinand Fischer, of the Saint-Brieuc Gestapo. Hearing the car approach (the drive is long, and loops around the property, protected by a high wall) the men in the attic promptly adopted the well-rehearsed hiding procedure. The two men politely asked Betty for permission to look over the house. After a thorough search (more diligent, Betty said, than that mornings’ door-clumping exercise) that again revealed nothing, the two Germans returned to the courtyard and asked her to accompany them to Saint-Brieuc for further questioning. She would only be away one night they told her, so she retrieved a toothbrush and dressing gown from her bedroom. She later told Gilbert Renault:

I went down with the Germans, they got me into their car, and we went out the avenue. We were already on the road to the village when Fischer said to me: “Madame de Mauduit, do you have your papers on you?”

She hadn’t, telling Fischer that she had not thought them necessary for such a short stay in Saint-Brieuc. The car duly turned around and returned to Bourblanc. By this time, however, the five evaders had descended the stairs and were in the process of leaving the house when they heard the Gestapo car returning. Rushing to a hedge at the front of the property, near the road, the men hid in a ditch until the car disappeared down the drive again, this time with Betty holding her identity papers, passport and money. Unfortunately, the men were without their shoes, unable in their haste to find out where Yvonne Guillou had hidden them. They remained in the ditch until dusk, after which they followed Betty’s instructions to the letter, reaching Saint-Quay-Portrieux 15 miles away under their own steam, albeit with some difficulty in their stockinged feet, at dawn the next morning.

Betty wasn’t initially mistreated by the Gestapo. That was to come later. She was in fact allowed a hot bath that night at Saint-Brieuc. But there was to be no short questioning followed by a quick release: it was clear from the outset that she was regarded as an enemy of the state, and was to be questioned intently with the purpose of revealing evidence about her work for the Pat Line. It was immediately clear to her when in Gestapo custody that she had been swept up with a large group of other Pat Line suspects, such as Georges Jouanjean’s mother. The Germans intended to keep them together during the interrogation process, to facilitate the cross-referencing of stories to make sure that the entire réseau was picked up. When the initial questioning was over, she and the others were transferred to the Saint-Jacques prison in Rennes on July 8. At Saint Jacques, as at other places that the Nazi state used for incarceration, torture was a standard method of the interrogation process.

There is little doubt that Betty was cruelly tortured. “The Germans again tried to make me disclose the identity and whereabouts of members of the resistance movement” she said in 1945. “When I protested that I did not know they beat me with a rubber hose until I thought most of my bones had been broken.” Gilbert Renault subsequently recorded that Betty ‘bore the scars’ of her time in this prison. When first interviewed by American journalists in April 1945 she said that the Germans “beat me five times in six months while I was wearing nothing but my night clothes.” A family friend, Marjorie Casey (née Mahoney), recalled that when she returned to the USA in 1945 she wore gloves to hide the damage done her hands by the removal of her fingernails. In addition to specific brutality of this kind, part of the Gestapo’s investigative process included starving and demeaning their prisoners. For the first 35-days at Rennes her diet was restricted to water and a fistful of poor-quality bread each day. She said that she had quipped with her guards. “It is O.K. with me, boys, I have been trying for years to get thin but I never had the courage to stick to a diet before.” During an interview on April 21, 1945, she joked that it wasn’t true that women ‘talked too much.’ She didn’t, and neither did other female résistants who were interrogated for incriminating information. “They put them in bathtubs of water… and held their heads under to make them talk and give away secrets. I know several women who drowned that way, but none of them talked.”

During her time at Rennes she was tried by what she described as a ‘Gestapo court’, judged to have aided and abetted the enemies of the (German) state and, in accordance with Stülpnagel’s execution order, on October 20, 1943, was sentenced to death. It was probably the fact that no evaders had actually been found at Bourblanc, and no hard evidence presented that linked her to evaders – outside of the evidence of the two sets of informers, Le Neveu and Larboulette – that saved her life, for the sentence was soon after commuted to a period of imprisonment with hard labour. She was then sent, with other condemned prisoners, including a group of Pat Line résistants, to serve out her sentence at Angoulême, a prison which Renault described as having ‘a sad reputation’. She found herself there with Jouanjean, who had been caught in a trap in Paris on 18 June. It was at Angoulême, at the end of the year, that a message was smuggled to her to say that the five evaders in Bourblanc at the time of her arrest had all safely reached Britain. She described it as the only Christmas present she needed.

At some time in the New Year of 1944 Betty de Mauduit was transferred to Paris, this time to Fort de Romainville, a prison that served as a holding centre for the dispatch of prisoners into the nacht und nebel of the Reich’s Konzentrationslager (KZ) system. During her time in Paris she was allowed occasional visitors, one of whom was Marie-Jeannie Guilaine, to whom she gave responsibility for managing Bourblanc in her and Henri’s absence. Her imminent return looked less and less likely, with every passing day. On the morning of Thursday June 8, 1944, Betty joined a group of 50 women at the Gare de l'Est in Paris. They were loaded into an SNCF passenger carriage, with screened windows, the train taking them the short, half-day journey to Saarbrucken. From here they were driven by truck to the local Gestapo holding camp, Erweitertes Polizeigefängnis Neue Bremm. They waited here until they were transferred to Ravensbrück, although at no time during the journey did any of them have any idea as to where they were being sent. Neue Bremm was a particularly brutal place, where the murder, torture and starvation of prisoners was a matter of inconsequential routine. Betty and the remaining 48 deportees remained there until 21 June, when they were loaded onto a crowded cattle truck en route to Ravensbrück – no passenger carriage this time – reaching the notorious women’s KZ two days later. The journey was difficult, but with only 49 women in the carriage they each had space to sit and sleep on the floor. Lavatory facilities consisted of a bucket in one corner. A hunk of stale bread constituted their rations for the journey.

On arrival at Ravensbrück she was given the number 43,064. The shock of climbing out of the railway wagon and entering the camp was enormous. In her wildest imaginings she had never expected to enter such a hell-hole. “Conditions at this horror camp were unspeakable and unprintable” she told her liberators in 1945:

Upon arrival, I was forced along with the group of women with whom I had come to the camp to strip completely naked in front of the laughing German guards. Absolutely everything, including my wedding ring, was taken away from me. I was given the striped uniform that I was still wearing when our camp was liberated by the American troops a short time ago. We were given just a dress and the jacket, no underclothes, no stockings or anything else.

Every little comfort the women had brought with them from their Parisian prison, including scraps of food they had carefully hoarded, was taken from them. Before they entered the place it was not possible to conceive of the actual horrors of having to live in a place like this: such things were whispered about, but disbelieved and dismissed by those who had no experience of them. In an instant, watching the skeletal inmates hobbling in front of her, hounded by the plump kapos with their whips and canes, and the smell of death and decay, Betty knew with a rushing sensation where she was. She was in a death camp. The rumours had been true. The full horror of her predicament came only when her head was shaved. But others, around her, were clearly surviving. So could she. She had come as a French prisoner (and continues to be recorded as such), but wanted to assert her American identity, perhaps believing that she stood a better chance of surviving if she did so. She made friends with some Polish women, one of whom stitched the letters ‘U.S.A.’ onto the inverted red triangle that denoted her status as a political prisoner. She wanted to stand out, despite the fact that another North American at Ravensbrück, a sister of Elizabeth Arden, who was treated as a prominente, with special privileges, warned her not to stand out. Betty was wide-eyed, standing in her filthy prison clothes, at this vision of a ‘beautifully coiffed American… [not wearing Ravensbrück prison uniform], with a starched white collar.’

Betty was to spend only two months at Ravensbrück, for on 12 September she was transferred to the care of Buchenwald KZ, with the number 4010. Buchenwald had recently established a new work group (‘Kommando’) in Leipzig supporting the Hugo-Schneider-Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG) arms company’s factory, making ‘Panzerfaust’ anti-tank weapons and artillery shells for the war effort. Effectively slave labour, she and the other women in the Kommando was forced into a production line making artillery shells, labouring on 12-hour shifts. The work was ‘extremely painful’ as one account has it, ‘especially in view of the cruel lack of food suffered by the women prisoners.’ The most she could expect to eat each day was a fistful of dry or mouldy black bread and a bowl of watery soup, occasionally supplemented by part-share of a shrivelled potato. Home was the neighbouring Schoenfeld barracks, where the head-shaven women were crammed together on bunks, 6,000 living, near-dead and dying crammed together without consideration for basic humanity. There were no medical facilities, the ‘hospital’ merely a place where the sick went to die. Toilet facilities were primitive. The kapos – their prison overseers – whipped, beat and mistreated them. Camp discipline was meted out in a cascading form of punishments which prisoners were promoted to disciplinary roles which gave them more food, and therefore hope of survival, if they kept discipline – by any ferocious means – among their starving, exhausted, humiliated compatriots.

That the war was reaching its denouement was obvious to all the inmates of Schoenfeld as 1945 began. The question was whether any of them would survive to savour liberty once more. Betty and her fellow prisoners rejoiced at the sounds of the phenomenal aerial bombing of the city in February, careless of whether this might result also in their own deaths. The enemy were at last reaping the whirlwind, they considered, and justice was being meted out by the avenging angels of the USAAF by day and the RAF by night. On the days and nights when no bombs rained down from the skies, the prisoners despondently asked themselves what the Allies were doing. But the approach of the Allied armies was something even the Germans could not hide from their prisoners. With the rapid approach of Paton’s Third Army, on 13 April 1945, the women’s subcamp in Leipzig was cleared by frantic Germans and the internees, as was the case with many camps, were sent on a death march away from the evidence of their incarceration. The benighted prisoners wandered for a week, half-starved, directionless, the SS guards trying pathetically to avoid both Americans from the West and Soviets from the East. As the sights and sounds of war had come ever closer – Leipzig had been heavily bombed on 20 and 23 February 1944 during the ‘Big Week’ attacks by the USAAF and RAF – Betty’s primary concern was that the Germans would slaughter them all, either to shut the mouths forever of those who could testify against them for their misdeeds, or merely out of spite. Indeed, they were able to witness the burning of parts of the male camp at Thekla, and incineration of those inmates unable to walk. “I could see the men's hospital from our camp” she said later. “Shortly before the Germans left, they set fire to that hospital in which were bedridden men who could not escape. Screams that I will never forget came from that hospital. Our stomachs were turned by the smell of burning flesh.”

Fearful that the Germans would come after me, I ran into the typhoid ward of our own hospital and hid there with 265 other women. I feigned sickness and they were in such a hurry to get going that they did not bother to examine me. That saved my life. Six terribly burnt men who had managed to crawl out of the other hospital reached us and confirmed that they had been locked inside the building before it was set on fire by the Germans.

We hid for 18 hours in the typhoid ward. Suddenly I heard an American voice swearing with wrath at the sight of the burned out hospital.

It was the vanguard of General Patton’s army. Men of the 69th Infantry Division were suddenly everywhere, Betty and her mainly Polish compatriots staring in wide-eyed amazement at the well-fed and well-dressed specimens of humanity before them. “When we saw the American vanguard arrive, we could not believe our eyes!” she recalled. “And maybe it was our imagination, but, these Americans, we thought that they were the most beautiful men we had ever seen!” The first American she met was Private Eddie Miller of New York, of the 69th Division. “He gave me this dollar bill as a souvenir” Betty added, fastening it to the lapel of her striped prison uniform.

Henri, who had been fighting in France the previous year as part of a Free French Special Air Service unit, and who had taken back Bourblanc from the Germans, had told members of a BBC reporting team advancing with the forward troops, to look out for Betty. All he knew was that she would be, if still alive, in a KZ ‘somewhere in Germany’. In Leipzig, Betty was horrified – and angry – to discover that when she first presented herself to the American authorities, the American Military Police did not believe she was an American, perhaps considering that she was a chancer who had decided to claim citizenship in order to receive better treatment. She could even, they thought, have been a spy. It was almost too much for Betty, having by now suffered 22-months of severe deprivation as a prisoner of the Nazi regime. All she could do was loudly profess her innocence and her identity. For several bizarre days in Leipzig she was detained by the 69th Division as a potential imposter. She was astonished when a Chaplain brought her some aspirin, to help her calm down, as she raged at the inequity of her imprisonment. “Listen, I've been in prison for two years!” He replied by asking whether she had any papers to prove this claim. Her fury now knew no bounds. “Do you do not know what it is to be arrested by the Germans?” she shouted at the hapless man. “They do not even leave you your gold teeth!”

It was soon after this that, by an extraordinary chance, one of the BBC journalists whom Henri had briefed, stumbled upon her, locked in a room in the same hotel in Leipzig in which he was billeted. He was able to vouch for her, and she was released. On 24 April 1945, accompanied by a French Army officer, she flew on the floor of an American transport plane to Paris, for a joyful reunion with Henri in their apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes. As the plane banked over the City of Light, the pilots having invited her into the cockpit, Betty could see it was largely undamaged, and the tears began to flow. The nightmare was over.

A painting of Betty after her return, by her painter friend Andre Dignimon. The painting hangs today in the Mairie in Plourivo

Sources

The numbered Escape and Evasion reports in NARA for some of the evaders who stayed at Bourblanc are: EE41 1/Lt Robert E Biggs; EE45 2/Lt Robert E Kylius; EE46 T/Sgt Claiborne W Wilson; EE59 1/Lt Edward J Spevak; EE60 Sgt Allen M Fitzgerald; EE74 T/Sgt Herman L Marshall; EE75 2/Lt Donald L Nichols; EE76 1/Lt Louis T Haltom; EE77 S/Sgt Roy A Martin; EE78 Sgt William C Martin; EE79 T/Sgt Glen Wells; EE80 S/Sgt Niles G Loudenslager.

Margaret Rossiter’s files on Betty are in the “Women in the Resistance” Papers, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Library), Name Files, Box 3 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scl-rossiter.

Details of Betty’s deportation to Ravensbrück are online at the Fondation pour la memoire de la Deportation http://www.bddm.org

A description of French women résistants arriving as prisoners at Ravensbrück a few months before Betty arrived is in Sarah Helm’s admirable If this is a Woman.

Gwen Strauss’ brilliant The Nine (2021) tells the story of nine other prisoners at HASAG and their extraordinary escape from a similar (the same?) forced march at the end of the war.

Keith Janes, whose father was rescued by the Pat O’Leary Line, has written detailed accounts of two of the three reseaux that helped feed Bourblanc, They Came from Burgundy (the Bourgogne Line) and Express Delivery, about the Shelburn Line that operated from Plage Bonaparte in 1944.

Betty’s thin resistance file – GR 16P343263 – is in the French Defense Historical Center, 1, rue de Solférino 75700 Paris. She was extensively interviewed by Gilbert Renault after the war, her story appearing as a chapter in Rémy’s La maison d’Alphonse. Remy’s two-volume History of the Resistance in Brittany is journalistic in places but otherwise gives a strong flavour to the nature of underground operations in Brittany. Gordon Carter, a successful Pat Line evader (helped by Georges Jouanjean in December 1942) who later settled in Brittany, marrying his passeur, wrote an article in 2002, with Michel Bernard and Yves de Sagazan, published in French by the with the title The Résistance in Goëlo at Bourblanc. Georges Jouanjean’s story is contained in his unpublished memoirs, War and Its Bitterness. Roger Huguen’s Par les nuits les plus longues (Saint-Brieuc, 1986) is an indispensable guide to the resistance – in its many forms – in Brittany. A range of newspapers recounted Betty’s interviews and story in 1945 and 1946, available on www.newspapers.com.

The story of Betty’s evidence against Larboulette is contained in a newspaper article in the newspaper Ouest- France, October 9, 1946.

Acknowledgements

Professor Richard Berrong, Kent State University, USA; Mme. Jeanne Renn; M. Emile and Mme. Maxine Philippot, Bourblanc; M. Georges Le Gorju; Mme. Micheline Le Tréou; Hannah Watson; The Mairie, Plourivo; Mrs Majorie Casey; Centre Historique de Archives, Ministère Des Armées, Paris; Musée de la Résistance en Argoat; Keith Janes.

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