Clodagh Finn on untold stories of Irish WWII heroes who fought in the Resistance

Catherine later died but her friend survived and spoke about that final encounter in Ravensbrück camp whenever she got the chance. Indeed, Andrée, or Nadine to use her wartime alias, made it her business to keep alive the memory of her Irish friend, and all of those who helped Allied airmen escape fromoccupied Belgium.

In 2009, for example, she sought out co-author John Morgan during a commemorative trip to the French-Spanish border where a group of people were retracing the footsteps of those who had escaped along a wartime network of secret trails over the Pyrenees.

She spoke to him through tears, still distraught by the image of her friend, pale and thin with her once red long hair scattered around her.

It was the first time that John Morgan had heard Catherine Crean’s name but he began to wonder how many other ordinary Irish people had been involved in the resistance networks that sprang up around Europe to defeat Adolf Hitler.

Were there many other people like Catherine, a woman whose selfless courage had been forgotten at home?

It was a question that prompted 15 years of research. The result is this book which brings together, for the first time, the stories of some 60 Irish people who took enormous risks to resist fascism.

I met John in 2016 while researching Mary Elmes, a Corkwoman who helped to save some 420 children from deportation to Nazi gas chambers during WWII.

Like so many others, she was an ordinary person who found herself caught up in an extraordinary situation and put her life at risk to save others.

Although, as we both said at the time, there was nothing commonplace about the so-called ordinary people who acted with incalculable bravery when faced with the hideous and pervasive cruelty of the Nazi regime.

Together, we continued to seek out the stories of those people using, as a starting point, an excellent chapter on the Irish people in the Resistance written by historian David Murphy in 2009.

We sought the help of historians all over the world, trawled through archives, looked at old books, diaries and thousands of documents but what was most revealing — and poignant — was talking to family members about their relatives who often paid a very high price for helping others.

For instance, all Wexford woman Bridget Bolger did was give some food to a man on the run as he laid low in her apartment block in Neuilly-sur-Seine just outside Paris. Her neighbour, it seems, was the one involved in the Resistance; Bridget simply gave airman Olaf/Fred Hansen a bite to eat as he passed through the city before making it to safety along a freedom trail known as the Shelburn escape line, which operated in Brittany.

Yet, she and her French husband were both arrested. Bridget was released after a few days but her husband, Jean Chevallier, was sent to a concentration camp and never came home.

We know a little about their story because Bridget was later compensated by the American and British governments and commended for her bravery. Her grand-nephew, Dr Thomas Bolger, spent a number of years stitching together the snatches that survive in documents scattered across various archives.

Given the secret nature of resistance work, it’s remarkable there are any documentary traces at all, but thankfully there are. It was a singular thrill to find those references and flesh out the lives of people who have remained hidden for so long.

For instance, a mention of Kerrywoman Janie McCarthy, a formidable woman active in at least five resistance networks in Paris, is buried deep in the post-war testimony of American Sergeant Iva Fegette. He said she kept them laughing all the time while they were in hiding.

Another aviator, Sidney Casden, described her as a woman of “about 45-years-old, with greying hair. She is plump and teaches English.” She might not have found that the most flattering of descriptions, but it revealed Janie McCarthy’s strength — she was an inconspicuous middle-aged woman going about her secret business in a war fought by young men.

Even in the better-known stories, new details emerged. Samuel Beckett’s work in two resistance networks is well-documented, although a recently declassified document reveals how an overwhelming premonition of danger saved him from arrest. He got the feeling something was very wrong when he and his partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil were climbing the stairs to tell another resistance member that the network had been infiltrated.

On the strength of it, they turned back, not knowing then that German soldiers were lying in wait in his friend’s apartment.

The same sense of foreboding was experienced by Monica de Wichfeld, of Fermanagh and Denmark. Her instinct that her years of clandestine activity in the Danish Resistance were coming to an end proved to be correct. She was arrested and sentenced to death shortly afterwards.

While her sentence was commuted, she was deported and imprisoned. We were privileged to talk to her nephew, Christopher Massy-Beresford, and discover more about her hellish time in the prisons of Germany.

The name John Keany might not be well-known in his native Cork, but this captain of the Royal Irish Fusiliers deserves more recognition. When WWll broke out, he joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret army designed to “set Europe ablaze”, and was parachuted into occupied northern Italy in 1945.

His bravado shines through the account that was later written by his colleague Sergeant William Pickering, but there was another side to him which came to light in a deeply poignant letter held in the British National Archives at Kew.

After he was shot dead in a German ambush, the Italian woman who had hidden him on her farm wrote a heartrending letter of sympathy to Captain Keany’s mother. The woman, Luigia Biestro, wrote: “I would like this letter to bring a small measure of consolation to you in your grief. Your son lived in my house from the 5th to the 25th of February, and during this period I was fortunate enough to come close to him and to get to know his gentle goodness and his profoundly religious outlook.” She went on to say that she would visit his grave as soon as there was a break in the fighting.

That deep humanity permeates the stories of all of the Irish people who gathered intelligence, sheltered Jews, helped Allied soldiers, took up arms, broke codes, carried messages and/or committed acts of sabotage in the fight for democracy.

In many cases, their heroic work has passed below the radar. The Irish in the Resistance is our attempt to bring them out of the shadows at last.

• The Irish in the Resistance. The untold stories of the ordinary heroes who resisted Hitler by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan is published by Gill Books, €19.99

The Irish in the Resistance: An extract:

‘AT GIBRALTAR [MARY] BOARDED A FELUCCA WITH A STRONG SMELL OF SARDINES AND AN UNUSUAL HEAD OF STEAM.’ SQUADRON LEADER BERYL E. ESCOTT

October 1944: Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, received a letter to say that one of his agents, Mary Herbert, had ‘gone to ground good and proper’. Nobody knew where she was, but she was said to be ‘extremely well, in no need of money, and comfortable’. The letter-writer, from the
section’s administration office, went on to say that attempts were being made to get her address, before dropping the bombshell: ‘I was also told that she produced a baby last November!’

Mary Katherine Herbert, courier for the resistance network Scientist, had indeed ‘produced’ a baby. A little girl Claudine (which was also her mother’s fieldname) was in fact born in early December 1943 in a nursing home outside Bordeaux at a time when the Germans had infiltrated several circuits, arresting agents and many of their French contacts. Becoming a new mother in an occupied country in wartime was difficult enough, but Mary Herbert also had to fabricate a new cover story that explained the presence of her baby daughter. And she had to find a place to stay. She made contact with friends in Poitiers and, believing it to be relatively safe, travelled north to stay in the flat of Lise de Baissac, a fellow SOE agent who had recently been called back to London.

Once installed in Lise’s flat, she went to the black market, bought ration books and false identity papers for herself and her infant. She was now Madame Marie-Louise Vernier, a French widow (and new mother) from Alexandria in Egypt.

Then, the unthinkable happened. On 18 February 1944, the Gestapo swept through her apartment block at 19 bis rue Boncenne in the early hours of the morning, arresting several residents, including her. They came to the door while she was feeding her infant. Without giving it a second thought, they separated her from her baby and took her to Gestapo head- quarters in Poitiers. They assumed she was Lise de Baissac. Lise was sister to Claude de Baissac, SOE agent and leader of Scientist circuit, who also happened to be the father of Mary’s baby. Brother and sister had been recalled to London in 1943 after a number of breaches in their respective networks. It turned out that a member of the network had given away the location of several arms dumps and other information that led to the early morning swoop.

While Mary was taken away, her baby was put into the care of French Social Services – although she wasn’t aware of that at the time. In any case, the most pressing issue now was making the Gestapo believe her cover story. Like many SOE recruits, she was a gifted linguist. She spoke French, Italian, Spanish, German and Arabic, which she had learned while studying for a diploma at the University of Cairo before the war. That stood to her as she explained to her interrogators that her ‘queer accent’ in French was because she spoke English, French, Spanish, Italian and Arabic when she was in Egypt. That ‘was enough to upset anyone’s pronunciation’, she said. They continued to question her before putting her into solitary confinement. There was no chair to sit on, only a stone slab that served as a blanket-less bed. She stuck rigidly to her story and was so convincing that the Gestapo released her two months later in April 1944. As she had argued herself, how likely was it that a woman who had just given birth could be an active agent? After her release, she spent a frantic few days trying to track down her baby. She eventually found her, well-cared-for, at a convent orphanage.

After their reunion, she relied on the friends she had made through Lise de Baissac in Poitiers to help her find a safe place to live with her child. She also knew two elderly sisters who arranged for her to hide out on a farm in the countryside outside Poitiers. When Mary Herbert had set out for France some 18 months before, she might have considered the risk of incarceration, but she could hardly have foreseen that she would be jailed just after giving birth. The SOE had contingency plans for myriad eventualities, but motherhood was not one of them. That seems clear from the organisation’s reaction to news of Mary’s baby, the only one born to the 39 female SOE agents in France. Security in F Section didn’t want anything to do with it and, as one document said, it was ‘passing the baby’ on to leader Colonel Buckmaster to ‘clear up’.

It was impossible to predict what might happen on the ground, or how those sent there would deal with it. Mary Herbert had been among the first agents to be trained and sent to France. When she joined the SOE in March 1942, her CV already held a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

Born in Ireland on 1 October 1903 to Ethel (née Rodger) and Brigadier General Edmund Herbert, Mary was very well educated and travelled widely. She studied at the University of Cairo and was a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art (University College London). In her twenties and thirties, she acted as an escort to orphaned children who were emigrating to Australia. After that, she moved to Poland to work in passport control at the British Embassy in Warsaw. Then, she returned to London to take up a job as a civilian translator at the Air Ministry.

Her ease with languages – she later added Russian to an already-impressive list – meant she was a perfect fit for SOE work. She joined the WAAF in September 1941. Her request to join the SOE was accepted the following March. Squadron leader Beryl E. Escott offered this description: ‘At thirty-nine, she was quite tall (5ft 7in, 1.7m), slim, with short fair hair, pale face and, as far as SOE was concerned, [she had] the gift of being inconspicuous. She was also highly intelligent, patriotic and very religious.’ While her trainers thought she showed promise, they were concerned that she was ‘too fragile for resistance work’.

She proved to be the opposite.