Jeannette Guyot was already a “resister” of proven courage and experience when she was recruited for an espionage operation called “Operation Sussex” in northern France in 1944. She would go on to become one of the most decorated women of the Second World War.
Devised by General Dwight Eisenhower’s staff, Operation Sussex began before the Allied invasion of Normandy and continued until well after the bridgehead had been established. The purpose was to acquire both strategic and tactical intelligence of German troop dispositions north of the Loire, in particular those of German Panzer divisions and depots of essential enemy supplies, in order to stop reinforcements reaching northern France.
The operation was masterminded by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action. Unlike the “Jedburgh” operations run by the British Special Operations Executive, under which three-man teams were parachuted into France in uniform to arm and organise the French Resistance, the Sussex teams each comprised just two officers, one a radio operator. All were French and they wore civilian clothes. If captured, they would be tortured and shot as spies.
Moved from a desk job in General Charles de Gaulle’s London headquarters, Guyot was sent to Prae Wood House, St Albans, for training in intelligence gathering, in particular, recognition of German military formations and indications of their movements. After parachute training at Ringway Manchester Airport, she was ready to fly. Commissioned as a lieutenant, Guyot and Captain Georges Lassale formed one of two “pathfinder” teams selected to parachute ahead of the remaining 52 to find dropping zones, establish safe houses and prepare for their reception and deployment. Their “insertion” into France was not straightforward.
After a thorough check to ensure they had nothing about them relating to England, they were driven to Tempsford airfield, where a Halifax aircraft captained by Wing Commander Bob Hodges of 161 Squadron RAF was waiting. Hodges noticed that Guyot, who was petite, had kept her civilian shoes on inside her flying boots. He told her to take the whole outfit off and put it on again without the shoes. To keep them on when landing would mean an almost certain broken ankle.
Advertisement
The night’s mission was to drop 12 agents and 19 containers of weapons for the Resistance. Although the other drops were successful, Hodges could get no response from the dropping zone for Lassale and Guyot. After 40 minutes, they returned to Tempsford. Their next attempt was made on the night of February 8. At about 11.45pm, Lassale, Guyot and two other agents were dropped some 70 kilometres northwest of Châteauroux. Landing safely, they were met by a reception committee, but the two containers with back-up radio equipment, codes and lists of the secret BBC messages and passwords were not dropped. Luckily, the third container landed safely, but Pathfinder “Operation Calanque” — as their mission was codenamed — set off with only one radio and ten flashlights.
On arriving in Paris, Guyot visited her cousin, Madame Kiehl, who ran the Café de L’électricité in Montmartre, where she made contact with the Resistance before setting up her base for operations with Mme Andrée Goubillon, who owned the café. In an interview after the war, Madame Goubillon said: “I knew the work she had come to do and when she asked if I was ready to help her, I said ‘Yes’ without hesitation, even though the café was next to an office of the Gestapo.’ The Sussex agents used to rendezvous there using the password, “How’s my aunt, how’s my uncle?”
Over the next seven months, with the help of the second Pathfinder team, Lassale and Guyot found 22 drop zones between Alsace and Brittany, organised 17 drops of follow-up agents and established 100 safe houses. The intelligence gathered on German troop movements, including that of the formidable 2nd Das Reich SS Panzer Division from the south of France, proved invaluable.
In recognition of her contribution to the liberation, the French government appointed Guyot a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and awarded her the Croix de Guerre with Palm and the Medal of the Resistance. From the United States, she received the Distinguished Service Cross and from Britain the George Medal. Her citation for the British award stated that she had shown the highest qualities of initiative, daring and endurance. She had undertaken the most risky assignments, and her work and conduct had been beyond all praise.
After a dangerous war, Guyot, an elegant woman, settled down to a quiet life. She married Marcel Gaucher, whom she had met while he led one of the teams that followed her into France. She then crossed the river from where she was born in Chalon-sur-Saône to join her grandparents in the village of Sevrey, where she and her family lived for the rest of her life. Her husband predeceased her. She is survived by their son, Jean-Claude Gaucher, a former academic and businessman, and two married daughters, Michèle and Nicole. In the days after her death, it was reported that her family knew little of her exploits. She gave her decorations and medals to a granddaughter.
“She was imprisoned for three months, but resisted interrogation
Advertisement
Before the German occupation of the whole of France in November 1942, she had worked as a courier for the leader of the “Amarante” network smuggling people across the River Saône from the German-occupied north to the Vichy-controlled south of France. While strenuous efforts were made to keep the escape networks and the Resistance groups — or “réseaux” — separate in the interests of security, some links inevitably occurred. In August 1941, Guyot met Gilbert Renault, chief of the Paris-based “Confrérie Notre-Dame” réseau and became one of his liaison officers, working for the escape network.
In February 1942, she was arrested and imprisoned for three months at Chalon-sur-Saône, but she resisted interrogation. Nothing could be proved against her. She was released and immediately resumed escape work. Renault’s group was betrayed in June 1942 and many of its members arrested. Recognising how vulnerable she had become, she moved to Lyon and there met Jacques Robert, an agent of de Gaulle’s Free French intelligence operations. This gave her security of a kind, but when Germany occupied the whole of France in November 1942, she was flown to England where her third and most important wartime role began.
After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, she heard that her father, Jean-Marie, a timber merchant who had worked for the Resistance, had been deported to Germany and died in Bavaria. Her mother, Jeanne, was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, but survived. An only child, Guyot was devoted to her parents. She had their address on her when she was arrested in 1942, but was never sure whether it led to their arrest. She described this during her debriefing by British intelligence: one senses that it was the only time her voice faltered.
For many years after the war, surviving agents from Operation Sussex used to meet for a reunion dinner at Madame Goubillon’s café, which they renamed “Café du Network Sussex”. When Mme Goubillon died in the 1980s, the place became a piano bar, but a plaque explaining its wartime role was fixed to the wall.
Jeannette Gaucher, née Guyot, French résister and OSS agent, was born on February 26, 1919. She died on April 10, 2016, aged 97