morning the Focke-Wulfs came back, with a full array of strafing, fragmentation bombs, incendiaries, and high- explosives.
That afternoon, the time approached for the planned Mosquito attack. Mortar shells again ripped into the courtyard. SAS troops moved close in and fired their Piats. It all went swimmingly. The Germans pulled back into the school. But no Mosquitoes. The only planes in the air were Focke-Wulfs and Heinkels. There was nothing to do but keep down and wait.
During the night, Coriolan brought heartening news: First, the Maquis had breached the defenses of the German garrison in Ussel, and the garrison had then surrendered. Second, the more powerful garrisons at Tulle and Brive, besieged by Patrick's forces and Hubert's remaining companies, had agreed to surrender — but with a condition. They'd been promised that an American officer would accept their surrender.
That meant Singlaub, who set out in a
As soon as the ceremony was over, Hubert and Singlaub climbed into the
There optimism remained low, despite the surrender of three German garrisons. The Luftwaffe was strafing everything that moved (Singlaub and Hubert had to hike the final few kilometers into town), and Luftwaffe bombs had turned much of Egletons into rubble, most notably the barn they had been using as a PC. Even so, Tony Dennau, their radioman, had stayed at his post in a corner of the building, sending messages to London even as the barn took direct hits. In the walls and ceiling all around him were numerous shrapnel scars.
Dominique was at Antoine's command post down the street. And so, surprisingly, was Antoine, a tough little guy with a commanding, intelligent voice. When Singlaub arrived, Antoine and his staff were all atwitter with rumors that the troops of the Tulle garrison had not surrendered, but had broken free and were on the way to break the siege at Egletons, threatening the Free French forces' rear.
Though Singlaub carefully explained that he had been present when the entire Tulle garrison had surrendered, that information did not satisfy Antoine, who was in the process of sending teams from his already tightly strained companies out along the road to Tulle to establish ambush positions.
Meanwhile, Coriolan had arrived with news that the German relief column was finally moving out of Clermont-Ferrand-2,000 heavily armed men in 150 trucks, defended by a pair of armored cars with automatic weapons.
Tulle, it should be noted, was west of Egletons, while Clermont-Ferrand was cast. Diluting the strength of the forces in Egletons chasing phantom Germans could make the situation in Egletons perilous. Even more important, a terrific opportunity was presenting itself to ambush the relief column on the road between Ussel and Egletons. Antoinc's troops were essential to add strength to that effort and to maintain pressure on the Egletons garrison. But Antoine would have none of that. It was an article of faith that Germans from Tulle were on the way to attack his rear. He would stop them.
By nightfall, the town was quiet. Dominique and Wauthier had left to set up ambushes on the highway. The civilians were abandoning the town, and carrying with them the Maquis wounded. Remaining behind, for the moment, were Singlaub and Dennau, and the remnants of Hubert's and Antoine's troops. But as soon as all the civilians had been reported out of danger, Singlaub ordered the FTP and AS forces to fall back into the forest. Though he knew Dominique and Wauthier would damage the German relief column, there was no way they were strong enough to stop them with the forces at their disposal.
Singlaub and Dennau grabbed their codebooks, their radio, a few emergency rations, their bundles of one- hundred-franc notes, and some spare Sten gun magazines and marched with the Maquis through the still-burning streets of Egletons. Soon they were passing through upland pastures and then forest trails. As they hiked through the darkness, they could just hear the distant rumble of land mines and the rattle of heavy machine guns — Dominique and Wauthier ruining the Germans' evening.
The, next day, Singlaub linked up with Dominique and Wauthier in a ruined church. The ambushes, as expected, had not stopped the Germans, but had delayed them. And they had knocked out an armored car and six trucks, and killed at least twenty-five enemy soldiers.
The relief column arrived in Egletons at dawn, loaded up the entire garrison onto the trucks, and rumbled off to Tulle, where they hoped to do the same thing. But of course they were a day late for that. Then they turned back toward Clermont-Ferrand.
That afternoon, eight camouflaged Mosquitoes showed up (the war's most beautiful warplanes), and elegantly swooped and dived, dropping bombs that flattened the school buildings. But the horses were out of the barn. The Ecole Professionelle had been emptied of Germans.
They were disappointingly late, but by then, the capture of the Correze garrisons, the siege of Egletons, the sabotage, the surrender of thousands of troops along with the seizure of their weapons, and the aggressive ambushes on the highways, had put the fire out of the Germans in Correze. The area was effectively liberated — not that there was a letup during the next weeks.
Route 89 was kept open, in the expectation that the German First Army Group still garrisoned in southwest France would continue to use it as an avenue of escape. Dominique and Singlaub trained Antoine's and Hubert's troops in the use of the captured weapons, while sending out demolition teams to destroy the bridges on the side roads. Hubert's ambushes along the highway continued.
Hubert, meanwhile, came up with a scheme to use a fleet of trucks and scout cars he had captured to create a mobile attack force that would harass the retreating German columns to the north, between Correze and the Loire, and keep them too occupied to pose a danger to Patton on the other side of the river. The Free French command authorized this plan, even though Hubert had not yet received the arms shipment he had long ago requested (thousands of tons of munitions, officially destined for the Maquis, sat in warehouses in England, a typical wartime foulup; Maquis demands during the uprising were so many and so pressing that the distribution system cracked under the strain). Hubert had to strip some of his ambush teams of weapons in order to equip his mobile force. Dominique and Singlaub helped by getting hold of a fast 1939 front-wheel-drive Citroen and setting off on a series of lightning reconnaissance missions for him. The Germans staggered their convoys to protect them against Allied air attacks, but they staggered them at predictable intervals. The Jeds simply waited for an interval and then cruised blithely between them. The results were gratifying. Hubert's force made life hell for the Germans for weeks.
Antoine's FTP, meanwhile, pulled out of the war to devote themselves to the political fight that would break out after the German surrender. The Communists took over the town of Tulle, with its arms factory, and got the factory running again (they had to force the technicians and engineers to work for them). The commissars above Antoine wanted weapons for the revolution they hoped to ignite after the war. That was more important than further participation in the liberation of France.
On September 26, with Paris and most of France liberated, Team James returned to England for further assignments. For Jack Singlaub, that was to mean a mission to Southeast Asia — a story for another time.
Jack Singlaub's Jedburgh experience is certainly a compelling yarn, but it offers more than that. The story offers a model for the elements of unconventional warfare, as well as for the skills needed by special forces soldiers. It's one of the primary texts in what might be called the Special Forces Bible.
These are some of the more outstanding elements and skills it illustrates:
• The special soldier can expect to operate in arcas deep beyond the official lines of battle, where the zones controlled by one side or the other may be indistinct, or even meaningless. Likewise, he may have a hard time telling good guys from bad guys, and the official names or political pedigree of a leader, group, or faction may also not tell him much about who and what he is facing.
• He can expect to operate in a high-threat, high-stress environment, with little or no support from his
