Power Cut

Power Cut

At the beginning of November 1943, the GAMEKEEPER team received intelligence that a large gathering of German officers was to take place in the Palais du Justice later that week. With that in mind Commander Robyn Blake, the commander of GAMEKEEPER covered as the town magistrate Simone Dubois, called a meeting of the SOE team and the senior members of the Maquis du Calvados. The meeting was to be in their usual meeting place of the back room of the Café David. David, known to all as Yogi, was also the French commander of the Maquis. The other members of the four-woman Special Operations Executive (SOE) team were also present, Captain Kim Jollands aka Marie Demont was Robyn’s second in command as well as the medic and sabotage expert, Lieutenant Irene Rose aka Monique Michelet was the wireless operator and Lieutenant Jayne Harding aka Paulette Defraine and was the team's paymaster and in charge of the parachute drops.

Robyn brought the meeting to order. ‘The reason I have called this meeting tonight is due to a bit of information the Colonel let slip to me this afternoon. On Friday evening there is to be a large gathering of Boche officers in the Palais for a planning meeting.

‘Now I think we should disrupt that gathering and get them to cancel it at very short notice. What does everyone think?’

‘What have you in mind Simone?’ asked Kim.

‘I have had a couple of ideas. We can not kill or injure the officers in an obvious way. One idea is that we get Monique to lace the bread they will use with some of her special ingredients. That will keep them occupied for a few days.’

Irene thought for a second, ‘Yes I can do that easily. I am due to sabotage the bread for the Garrison soon. Can we put some of the ingredients in the other food as then it won’t be traced to the bakery?’

‘Yogi?’ asked Robyn.

‘No problem as I have been tasked with supplying the rest of the food and drink. The food will be eaten before the meeting starts’

‘Bon. Now, what about breaking up the meeting as soon as it starts? Has anyone any ideas?’

It was Kim that spoke up. ‘How about destroying the electricity substation outside of town so that the whole town is blacked out. With no power or lights, they cannot continue.’

‘I like it, Marie. But how do we destroy the substation without it being an obvious attack.’

‘Simple we unlock the substation with the keys that Jean-Paul has, and we can short the circuits using some metal and bingo we have a Guy Fawkes night right here and the Boche will be in the dark. That way the Boche will think the blackout would have been caused by a short circuit and contact the electricity company to repair the substation and Jean-Paul is the man here for the electricity company. So he can help us sabotage the substation in just the right place that makes it easy for an expert to repair but also not obvious that it was sabotage.’

Robyn looked at her second in command and friend and contemplated the idea. It was a good one and with the local electricity company man in the Maquis, it also made sense to use an expert to do the deed. But he would need an escort to protect him from any enemy patrols. ‘Jean-Paul how easy will the fix be once the Boche have contacted you?’

‘I should have it repaired in about an hour. Longer if you want and at night I can take until morning if necessary.’

‘I suspect the Boche will call your boss immediately, and then they contact you. That will take time. Long enough for you to get home before you get called.’

‘My telephone will have a fault that night, so they will have to send someone. I am the only one with the keys for the substation as well.

‘Bon. Let’s put the plan into action with Marie in command and I suggest she takes a team of four as protection. Marie, I suggest they should be from your sabotage platoon of the Special Duties Company.’

‘Oui, Simone. Can I suggest that we start planning now as we only have a couple of days,’ suggested Kim.

‘Of course. Find somewhere quiet and gather your team. I leave it in your hands.’

The next night Kim and Jean-Paul carried out a dry run of the mission without the protection element and found there would be no problems to blackout the town for real the next night. The repairs would be a couple of fuses and some new wires. Jean-Paul described to Kim how he would make it look like an accidental fusing due to substandard materials caused by the war. This was extremely plausible to the Germans, as since late 1942, the Germans had been facing numerous mechanical breakdowns supposedly caused by poor materials but actually caused on the SOE teams orders for deliberate subtle sabotage.

In the bakery, as predicted, a large of order of bread was ordered for the meeting and early on Friday morning, the bread was being made in readiness for the meeting complete with Irene’s special ingredient that would cause severe stomach problems including diarrhoea. As Irene added an extra large dose of the ingredient she thought ‘This will keep them occupied for a few days.’ 

The bread was delivered to the Palais with the rest of the food, some of which had also been doctored with Irene’s Little Helper as she called it. The team hoped that the Germans staff laying out and serving the food and drink would be blamed. At 7pm Kim and her team stealthily slipped out of town so that the power would be cut at precisely 8:30 just as the meeting was due to start and also the time that the weaker constitutions among the attendees would start to suffer for the poisoning of the food. They arrived at the substation about a kilometre outside of the town just before 8 o’clock and settled down in the bushes to wait. 

As she lay there, Kim thought about her colleagues and how close all of them had become in the two and half years since they had got together as Arisaig on the All Arms Commando course of their training. Since then they had locked horns with the Gestapo in Saint-Omer causing a major civil war between the Gestapo in France and the Gestapo in Berlin when they rescued Judith Storm, who was the former Secretary to the American Ambassador to France. They had also destroyed that particular Gestapo headquarters. Before deploying on GAMEKEEPER, the team had been sent back to Arisaig to weed out a German spy trying to get into SOE. Again they had been successful, but she remembered Robyn’s reaction after she had killed the spy. Robyn had been violently sick after what would have been classed as murder in any other set of circumstances. She was found of Robyn, whom she considered not only to be a friend but her sister. She often spent evenings in Robyn’s house in Le Visham talking about things in general and Robyn’s girlfriend, Lisanne, who was a family liaison officer in SOE working in the same section as the GAMEKEEPER team.

She was disturbed from her thoughts when one of the guard team nudged her and whispered it was 8:25. Kim looked at her own watch and nodded. It was time to black the town they lived in for the good of France. With heavily shrouded torches, Jean-Paul opened the gates to the substation and led Kim to the actual substation fuse box. Whilst Kim held the torch, Jean-Paul opened the fuse box and started to play with the wires. All of a sudden there was a flash and a smell of acrid smoke. ‘There Marie, there is now a power cut in town.’ 

‘Bon. Let's lock up and get out of here before any nosey Boche come and investigate.’ the locked the fuse box and the gates to the substation and were back in town inside 15 minutes and sure enough there was not a light on in the whole town. The sabotage team went to their respective homes and waited.

Just thirty minutes later Jean-Paul was ‘woken’ from his feigned sleep by his telephone and it was his supervisor telling him that there was a power cut and could he check the substation outside of town. ‘I will do it the morning otherwise I will be arrested for breaking curfew,’ he said into the speaker.

‘This is on the orders of the Commandant. They want the power back on as soon as possible.’

‘Oui,’ Jean-Paul reluctantly,’ I will go and see. If it is too bad, it will have to wait until morning as I can’t do complicated repairs in a blackout even with a torch.’ Of course, he knew it was a simple fix, but he would go out as requested and say it would have to wait until the morning when he could see.

By this time in the various billets used by the German officers, the toilets were in constant use as Irene’s Little Helper did its bit to help Allies.