Target JFK: The Spy Who Killed Kennedy?

PART 1

BAZOOKA

1

The Commando

MAY 23, 1944

René Dussaq was worried. He watched concernedly in parachute harness, jump boots, and shock helmet as the plane’s crew decided what to do next. It was approximately 1:30 a.m. over Occupied France. Thirty-three years old, tall, and athletically lean on a muscled frame, he was the lone Joe—purposely so named and segregated for security—waiting to be dropped from a roaring, four-engined B-24 bomber, modified for such human insertions and war cargo deliveries. The big Liberator, painted black for night camouflage, was winging low in a moonless sky at five thousand feet in anticipation of getting code from below and then parachuting the Joe and containers and packages, mostly arms and explosives, to waiting resistance fighters. ¹

But the signals being beamed weren’t right.

We had great difficulty in identifying the [code letter] they were sending from the ground, he wrote in an after-action report.² Consequently, the bomber crew was stooging, flying a repeated circling pattern, uncertain of what to do next. They were over a large forest-surrounded clearing in a mountainous area of rural Central France. There was a river nearby and a village north in the distance. It was dangerous. They had been spotted by searchlights earlier as they’d snuck in low from the English Channel. Flak had been fired at them. Was the enemy still tracking? Nazi night-fighters were always a threat. The longer they stayed, the more likely they’d be discovered again by the wrong people. And what if the reception was a trap? The blinking red and white signal lights they were seeing below were suspect, and they couldn’t make contact with their S-phone, a wireless communication device specifically designed for the secret drops. Its signal passed narrowly between the plane and the ground and back, making detection hard for monitoring Germans who might be in the area.

But they’d been over the site too long.

Time was running out.

Since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dussaq had been trying to enter the fighting. A celebrated adventurer and lecturer in a television-less time when speaking events were prime entertainment, he’d tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps, the Navy, and Marine paratroops. He was a licensed pilot, dare-devil wing-walker, deep-sea diver, and treasure hunter. He’d knife-fought sharks for the movies, and jumped from insanely high perches like ship masts. But the services had balked. South American by birth, he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, which posed a potential security risk. Finally, the Army, desperate for bodies in the war emergency, took him as a grunt infantryman. It was important for me as a foreigner to try to prove myself to be as good as any American-born guy, he later said of his determination.³

Quickly, talent obvious, he had been picked to give motivational speeches to new recruits at South Carolina’s Camp Cross training facility and was noticed for his leadership abilities. Even if it was cleanup duty, he bagged more garbage than anyone else, said his second wife. With a resemblance to film star Gilbert Roland—the dashing Mexican-born actor he’d once doubled for in a high-dive pirate movie—he had a commanding voice, a sensational smile that gleamed brightest when he was challenged, and he used wit and humor in his lectures. It’s very disconcerting to a speaker when the audience is asleep, he’d chide exhausted recruits newly arrived at the camp.⁴ Naturalized on July 24, 1942, in nearby Spartanburg, South Carolina, he’d been recommended for Officers’ Training School, and, by early 1943, had become a lieutenant instructor with the soon-to-be famous 101st Screaming Eagles airborne division. Within months he was a standout paratrooper being eyed for recruitment by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the U.S.’s newly formed spy agency, forerunner of the CIA.

Lieutenant Dussaq [was] born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of a Cuban father and an Argentinean mother, wrote George K. Bowden, a top-ranking OSS official in Washington, to his counterparts in London who were looking for tough, quick-thinking agents to become clandestine airdropped operatives—the cream of Special Forces in today’s parlance. He was educated in France and Switzerland . . . speaks six foreign languages [and] could pass as any national except Anglo-Saxon . . . . He is a remarkable athlete [having mastered] boxing, wrestling, knife fighting, dueling, rowing . . . and a variety of unusual and hazardous work of a physical nature . . . . He is keen, adaptable . . . intelligent . . . and a dirty fighter conversant with jujitsu and the commando type of close combat fighting . . . . Waldo Logan [of Chicago’s Adventurer’s Club and backer of some of Dussaq’s earlier sea-borne expeditions] says that he is the only man he has ever known who is entirely without fear.⁵

It wasn’t true. Dussaq carefully hid his fears in order to defeat them. But few knew that. He’d publicly demonstrated steel nerves for the newsreels before arriving for special training in England. On the day before we shipped out of New York, wrote fellow fighter Bazata, Pathe News [one of the era’s large newsreel organizations] paid him $100 for standing on his hands on a ledge at the top of the Empire State Building [the city’s tallest at the time, windswept and acrophobic]. It created a bit of a scandal and was quickly hushed-up.⁶ The OSS was supposed to be secret and its members invisible—especially its special-ops parachutists. But Dussaq was his own man. In fact, he had almost exited OSS when its vetting officers indicated he had to be watched because of possible Nazi ties. On a pre-war trip to Chile, he’d listed for customs Nazi HQ as his primary residence. He had also disclosed in OSS interviews that it was possible his family in Santiago [Chile] had pro-Nazi tendencies.⁷ The address listing was surely a joke. As Bazata noted, his friend enjoyed tweaking questioners, especially self-important authorities. He was always smiling and would say incredibly negative things, with his big grin, about people who were standing right alongside him.⁸ But despite the fact that he had eventually been approved by OSS security, the inference and personal probing had privately irked him. Privacy, he’d complained, isn’t easy to come by.⁹ He prized it. And when he learned that his Screaming Eagles had been ordered overseas, he’d tried to stop his OSS transfer and rejoin. Getting in the fight quickly was still his primary aim.

What happened to bring him back to OSS is unclear. Records available give little clue. But the clandestine agency had strong influence in the White House and usually got what it wanted. By early fall 1943, he was in the British Isles training with Operation Jedburgh, OSS’s first commando-type special mission, and showing why he’d earned the nickname Human Fly.¹⁰ A fellow Jed trainee recalls that instead of properly exiting a practice parachute gondola five hundred feet up by the required method of dropping through its center Joe-hole—as he would have to do in the B-24 in which he was now flying—he’d decided to liven things up by taking a swan dive over the side. The sudden absence of his weight tilted the basket, unintentionally dumping his unprepared trainee partner who luckily, in the short time allotted, opened his chute but still landed badly. Stunned, remaining motionless on the ground [as] we all ran toward him, wrote the witness, the hapless partner regained his senses and, surprisingly, limped off without hard feelings. It was Bazata, tough to the core, who would become one of the most decorated Jeds.¹¹

As a jumper, he was by far the most experienced we had, writes Bazata, who regarded Dussaq almost as a mentor except that they were roughly the same age. For some reason [which] I never discovered . . . Dussaq had a very special status in O.S.S. He was allowed to be even further isolated within an already isolated group . . . . When the rest of us were supposed to be doing physical drills, he was never around. I learned that he could usually be found off in the woods, standing on his hands on a branch of a tree or simply communing with nature.¹² Dussaq’s father, Emilien Talewar Dussaq, in addition to being Cuban Consul in Geneva, Switzerland, was Sufi General Secretary, a world spiritual leadership position he’d been appointed to in 1922. Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, basically seeks union with God through, among other ways, ascetic harmony, such as meditation or food deprivation. Interestingly, ancient Samurai warriors also practiced asceticism as a way to toughness. Although René listed Catholicism, his mother’s religion, as his own on military forms, he revered his father and even bizarrely kept close a photo solely of Emilien’s bulging bicep—the upper arm a weightlifter might curlingly flex for the camera. He probably had the snapshot with him as he waited now to jump into Occupied France. Like his father, physical fitness was near religion to the son. Not that he needed conditioning, writes Bazata. The hand-standing acts, which he demonstrated frequently, proved this. For instance, when a dispute occurred at a rowdy Jed dinner celebration—attended by, among other dignitaries, General Omar Bradley, U.S. field commander on the upcoming D-Day—Dussaq stopped it by climbing on the table and walking its length on his hands, eight wineglasses held by their stems between his fingers. No one can argue when he’s dumbfounded.¹³

Not everybody, however, was impressed. Fellow Jedburghs, named for a Scottish town of medieval warriors known for their ferocity with axes, were a competitive bunch, mostly hell-for-leather talents like Bazata. Some resented Dussaq’s suave, aloof derring-do, especially because, infuriatingly, Dussaq, with his trademark pencil-thin mustache and confident Latin good looks, could back up his boasts. Brash . . . pushy and a showoff, was how some of the Jeds regarded him, according to Thomas L. Ensminger, author of Spies, Supplies and Moonlit Skies, in an email to me. The book details missions such as the one Dussaq was currently waiting to jump into. And when the British spy agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which conceived of and basically ran the multi-national Jedburgh operation (Jeds included French operatives and other nationals), evaluated Dussaq, its report said he was a very flamboyant, verbose, domineering personality, with little sympathy or tolerance for others. He is extremely self-centered, with a tendency to exhibitionism, and is unlikely to be capable of disinterested service . . . . His enthusiasm might well flag unless he could keep in the limelight.¹⁴

Whatever the truth of that evaluation—fact, prejudice, or British-American rivalry which often flared during World War II—Dussaq kept pressing for insertion into the war. And when a need arose, the Brits, who snatched him from the Jeds, didn’t hesitate to grant his wish. They needed his talents and skills badly. Upcoming Allied plans demanded it: in addition to the joint OSS-SOE Jedburgh missions, SOE had numerous other clandestine circuits already operating in Nazi-held France. The circuit Dussaq was assigned to was code-named Freelance, a small group of Brits. It, as the Jeds were, was to aid D-Day, the much-anticipated invasion of Europe upon which victory, Allied planners knew, crucially hinged. All these fighter insertions, like Dussaq, were to aid and train local Maquis, the French term for the Resistance. Fighters like Dussaq were to train the Maquisards, help terrorize the occupiers, and help destroy German-aiding industries commandeered in France. Especially, they were to slow down and hopefully stop Nazi reinforcements to the invasion front once the D-Day invasion began.

Freelance, which Dussaq was soon to join, was headed by the French- and German-speaking British Major John Farmer, codenamed Hubert. It included former Paris newspaper correspondent Nancy Wake, a gutsy, French-speaking New Zealand–born operative who the Gestapo labeled the White Mouse because of her illusiveness.¹⁵ Women, less threatening—and thus disarming to soldiers and others in authority—made good operatives in the right situations. Farmer, Wake, and others in the circuit were working with a charismatic Maquis leader code-named Gaspard. Strong-willed and physically imposing, Gaspard, whose real name was Emile Coulaudon, had been taken prisoner when the Nazis had invaded and quickly subdued France in 1940. But he had escaped back to his home city of Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, the mountainous region south of which Dussaq was now circling, and started a resistance against the occupiers who had surged to include thousands of fighters banded in small, scattered units throughout the province (or Department, as the French call their state-sized divisions).¹⁶

A quickly mustered draftee in the French Army, Col. Gaspard lacked serious military training, as well as weapons and supplies for his men. Nevertheless, under his inspirational leadership, his fighters had killed many Germans and, among other successes, had destroyed important liquid oxygen plants at historic Massiac, a place of ancient streets and churches, and burned to uselessness forty thousand tires stacked for the Germans at the large Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand. Thus, when Gaspard had requested help from London, the Freelance mission had been dispatched. And when Farmer had requested another operative—and quickly—Dussaq had been tapped.¹⁷ Now, waiting concernedly in the plane as the crew debated his fate, Dussaq decided he was not going to be denied.

The dispatcher may have told me that I should not jump, he later wrote for officials, conjuring a weak cover for what he had done. They were going to dump the supplies and move on, he explained. During the conversation that ensued . . . because of the noise in the plane . . . I just could not make myself understood . . . I am not quite sure that the dispatcher gave me the signal . . . but when they decided to make their run to drop the packages and opened the hatch, I was resolved to jump.¹⁸

There was no way they were going to stop him—orders or not.

He stepped to the noisy Joe Hole and disappeared.

2

I’ve Come for a Room

Besides the disorienting darkness of the night, Dussaq had leaped into a strong downwind, which had taken him many miles from the clearing where those who he was told were supposed to meet him should have been waiting. ¹ From briefings in London he knew generally where he was—somewhere amidst the forested lowland and river-carved gulleys of Central France near Mennetou-sur-Cher, so named because it was on the Cher River. It was well north of Vichy, seat of the collaboration government formed after France’s defeat. He may have landed near where, in 1924, as a precociously athletic fourteen-year-old, he had ventured while traveling in peacetime from Geneva to Paris, some 250 miles north, as assistant coxswain for the Swiss Olympic rowing team. ² But those were happier days. Occupied France was now thick with local Nazi-cooperating paramilitaries, known as Milici, who knew the countryside well, and often were more savage with prisoners than the Gestapo, who counted on them to help track the Maquis and its enablers like himself.

To make matters worse, not only had Dussaq parachuted in alone—a rarity—but he was one of the few Allied agents who did so in civilian clothes, thereby relinquishing crucial protections guaranteed combatants under the Geneva Convention.³ It’s not clear why he did not wear a uniform. Available documents indicate only that his request was granted.⁴ Maybe he or his handlers preferred stealth over protection? But if apprehended, he could be executed—and most probably would be—after being tortured for information. Neither the Germans nor Milici had shown any proclivity for mercy to terrorists and saboteurs, as they surely would view him.

He had with him one hundred thousand Francs as well as fake papers and a memorized scenario saying he was René’ Alexandre Dufayet, a Paris businessman. The money was mostly for Gaspard to help finance Maquis operations. His SOE codename was Anselme, to be used in radio communications back to London. His specific mission—to hook up with Freelance—was Druggist. If he missed the reception committee, his instructions advised him to get in touch with Samuel, code-name for an operative already functioning in the area. Samuel would be found through a safehouse at 16 Rue de la Republique, Chateauroux, a town on the Indre River, a source of the lower Cher.⁵ He had a secret code for contact—I’ve come for a room—Whose room?—François.’ But instead of Chateauroux, he decided to try and return to the drop clearing, a decision that turned out well as Chateauroux was much farther away. After a three-hour walk, he wrote, I was able to establish contact with the reception committee which was still looking for packages that had been dropped all over the place.⁶

He must have stayed the remainder of that night in or near Mennetou, a town of eight hundred, the first he mentions in his report. He wrote that by daybreak, alerted by the circling, indecisive plane the night before, an estimated five hundred German soldiers from a local garrison were detected surrounding a camp of thirty-three Maquis in woods nearby. The prognosis was grave. Their leader, Dussaq wrote, came to him and asked him to take charge. To his surprise, some in Mennetou, although sympathetic to the cause, did not want him aiding in this particular instance. My first realization that the Resistance in France was not as united as I had been led to believe came when the ex-mayor of Mennetou told me not to do it. These Maquis, the man hissed, were communists. I informed him . . . that I did not care a damn what they were, that the only thing that interested me was that Germans were there to be killed.⁷ As British SOE expert Marcus Binney writes, what happened next was the action of a quick-witted . . . impressive . . . soldier—Dussaq. Taking charge, Dussaq had the surrounded thirty-three quietly withdraw through a small, presumably hard-to-see river bed in the center of the woods. When the Germans finally realized what was happening, they opened fire with, as Dussaq later reported, no other result than the killing of some of their own men in the crossfire—six, according to an estimate attached to his report.⁸

With the Germans now stirred like hornets, he decided it was best to try to find the safehouse at Chateauroux, a lengthy journey south towards the mountainous Auvergne Region where Freelance, his immediate objective, was operating. He probably had help from the Maquis he’d rescued. The address on the Rue de la Republique was a local rooming house, and although he quickly, upon arrival, connected with two supposedly helpful local Maquis, it wasn’t long before things went haywire. The following day, he reports, he was rousted in his room by a Gestapo agent accompanied by a French police inspector and three gendarmes, possibly Milici. Had he been betrayed? They wanted to see his papers. Complying, he was told to accompany them to headquarters. His account of what happened next strangely lacks important details. Having received instructions in London never to go to any headquarters should [his papers when shown] incite suspicion, he writes, I was able to get the inspector alone in my room—how?—and to inform him that I would be compelled to kill him were he to insist on his plan to take me to the police station. I did not want to shoot him immediately for fear of alerting [the Gestapo agent] who was outside with the three gendarmes. Why were they outside? Gestapo agents weren’t usually so cooperative. And why hadn’t they found and confiscated his pistol? But the threat worked. The inspector, he writes, walked out of the room calling off the gendarmes and gave me the opportunity to escape through the window.⁹

Whatever the missing details, Dussaq was now unquestionably a known and hunted terrorist. The Gestapo and Milici—despite being coerced or duped and unsuspecting earlier—would certainly have given alarm, if not chase, once he had bolted. Did he run wildly down streets, ducking into alleys, his pursuers shouting and shooting behind? Had he made it to nearby woods, avoiding road blocks and angry German soldiers? The woods probably would have been his best avenue of escape. One can only speculate because after the bolting, the next sentence in his report is that by nightfall he made contact . . . with a Maquis group who aided him in a journey further south to a safehouse in Montlucon, a fairly large industrial and communications hub, crisscrossed by rail and auto roads in roughly the geographic center of France.

The commune (as the French call such municipalities), which started as a medieval fortress for the Duchy of Bourbon, featured, among other historical sites, a fourteenth century castle on a cliff overlooking the headwaters of the Cher, which was in higher country than Chateauroux. In 1988, Dussaq told a magazine writer about another of his escapes from the Gestapo by jumping from a train into a river.¹⁰ He gives no other details. Was this on his trip south to Montlucon? It’s possible. Questions aside, when he arrived, the picaresque city was, in its more industrialized areas, now important to the Nazis for help in tire production. A large Dunlop factory there produced synthetic rubber. The Germans had little natural rubber, and depended on such facilities to supply its war machine, especially tires for aircraft. In January 1943, workers rioted in Montlucon in protest of a nationwide Nazi order deporting able-bodied Frenchmen to Germany for forced labor. Many young Montlucon males escaped the roundup and joined the local Maquis. Once part of the Resistance, they returned to sabotage the forced Nazi industry and, in reprisal, were being avidly pursued. Dussaq was therefore entering a hotbed of resistance and retaliation.

Each time I escaped, Dussaq told a newspaper reporter in 1949, I assumed a new identity with falsified papers which would slow down the tracing efforts of the Nazis.¹¹ Thus, it was probably not very long, once he’d taken residence in the safehouse of a Madame Renard, that he got himself a new name—the second of seven identity changes he claimed he would make while in occupied France. He probably had help from the local underground. As a fifteen-year-old, he was a Swiss tennis star, and, at seventeen, the Cuban national champion.¹² One of his opponents in international matches was the famous French net ace René Lacoste, nicknamed the Crocodile for his tenacity on the court. Lacoste would later become internationally known for his Alligator shirts. (I still wear them.) The name [therefore, when he had to pick one] came immediately to mind, he told a reporter in 1995.¹³ So by at least June 3, 1944—the date stamped on a French identity card I found at his house—he had become Alexandre René Lacoste, supposedly a teacher from Saint Santin, a town further south, the direction he soon hoped to be headed. With an undergraduate degree in letters and sciences, a master in Latin languages—both from the College of Geneva, in Switzerland—and attendance at, if not graduation from, Havana University Law School, he was well prepared to pose as an instructor or scholar.¹⁴

By June 6, 1944—the momentous D-Day invasion at Normandy—he had been undercover in the country for more than two weeks, and in Montlucon, probably one of those two weeks. What he did in Montlucon is mostly unknown. There is scant information available, but it appears it was while there that he experienced one of his most brutal personal World War II episodes—the grisly killing of a Gestapo officer who was torturing him. Years later he would recall the incident variously, and sometimes with conflicting details, to specific listeners: a colleague, two different newspaper reporters, and scriptwriters for CBS radio—the prevailing public media at the time.¹⁵ In essence, the following is what he related: he was arrested because he was suspected of being Jewish. He protested that he was a Catholic, which is true—at least by birth. He was taken to Gestapo offices, and—according to the CBS radio script—while under torture, he agreed to sign a confession for being a spy with the Maquis and participating in a recent ambush of German soldiers. In the radio script, written in early 1947—not long after what happened—the Nazi interrogator, a vicious major, is whipping him across the face and back with a belt when Dussaq apparently caves and asks for a pen. But when it is handed to him, instead of signing, he plunges it into his torturer’s throat and escapes in the bloody chaos.

The script was never aired because Dussaq himself nixed it. According to Western Union cables I found at his house, he had been promised script approval by producers but it didn’t happen. Regret to inform you, he wrote CBS, unable to release radio script for broadcast. Curiously, the desperate killing does not appear in any official document I’ve seen. Was it fabricated for fame or fortune? Obviously, he was nixing both benefits with his Western Union cable, so that doesn’t seem right. Throughout his life, evidence indicates, René appeared uninterested in fame or money—or at least, for whatever reason, wanted to keep his exploits private. I prefer experience to riches, he would tell his second wife, Charlotte, a blonde actress and drama coach for Paramount Pictures. He rejected movie offers to dramatize his life, she said.

But such a killing perhaps explains Dussaq’s extreme defensive behavior when he was finally contacted in Montlucon by Freelance operatives sent to fetch him. As the historic D-Day landings on Normandy commenced, intrepid Nancy Wake, following a harrowing two-day car journey evading Germans, Milici, and trigger-happy Maquis (who, she wrote, shot first and asked questions later), finally arrived to fetch him at Madame Renard’s safehouse. After a tense few moments convincing the madame that she was with the resistance, Wake writes, [Madame Renard] laughed and led me into the kitchen. She called to ‘Anselme,’ who came out of a cupboard pointing a Colt .45 clutched in his hand. We looked at each other in astonishment. It was René Dussaq, whom I had met during my training in England. He was also one of the men who had kissed me goodbye when I left on my mission. He was to become known as Bazooka.¹⁶

3

The Redoubt

The two-day trip south to Freelance’s headquarters in Chaudes-Aigues, an ancient mountain town known for its therapeutic hot springs, was tense. Dussaq nearly passed out when I said we would be going by car, writes Wake. He sat in the back with his Colt at the ready, while I was in the front with the driver, a couple of Sten guns [British submachine guns] and half a dozen grenades. ¹

They drove on roads rising into the giant Central Massif rift of mountain plateaus towering above the Mediterranean lowlands of southern central France. Chaudes-Aigues, in the Cantal department, sat near the winding Truyere River, which meandered forcefully one hundred miles from the high ground down through a picturesque landscape of rocky ravines, shimmering lakes, deer-filled forests—and dangerous, trigger-happy fighters, friend and foe alike.

Even a swan can be deadly.

But they arrived unscathed.

General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, estimated the value of the French Resistance during the war as the equivalent of 15 divisions, writes British historian-journalist Alexander Werth. The general added, they hastened victory by two months²—a tall accolade. They did so primarily by attacking the Germans in coordination with the massive D-Day invasion. The attacks either delayed or stopped German reinforcements from going north and helping repulse the Allies. Part of that action was a plan championed primarily by the French to form redoubts, or fortresses of fighters—preferably elevated in high ground—from which the Resistance could launch major attacks against the enemy. It was into this network of budding redoubts that Dussaq arrived with Wake and her driver.

Apparently Dussaq thought of himself as the vanguard of an Allied paratroop force that would soon be coming. (Planners rarely gave the big picture to operatives, unless the information, which might be extracted through torture, was essential for success. Sometimes they even gave false information to the operative in case it might be extracted.) On arrival, says a Freelance history, he briefed Freelance boss Maj. Farmer (Hubert) that his mission was to act as liaison officer between the Maquis and any American parachute troops that might be sent to the area. As a second duty he was to find, when requested [presumably by London], landing grounds for airborne troops. And thirdly, [he was] to act as weapons instructor.³ His hosts were quickly impressed with his ability to speak French like a native. He presented the local Chaudes-Aigues commander, Henri Fournier, with a Colt .45 pistol, which, according to Fournier’s wife, was much coveted by her husband.⁴

Dussaq’s arrival had to be welcome news to Gaspard (Emile Coulaudon), the overall Resistance leader in the region who had his headquarters on a mountain plateau near Chaudes-Aigues. That plateau was Mont Mouchet, one of the larger former, and now leveled, volcanic peaks that jutted throughout the southern Auvergne province. With news of the D-Day landings, Resistance leaders, including Gaspard, had sent out an urgent call for recruits to bolster the Maquis. Liberation was at hand! They needed every available man. The response had been overwhelming. By the time Dussaq appeared, potential new fighters from throughout the region were streaming into the redoubt. The Germans couldn’t help but be aware of the buildup and had begun small, ominous probing attacks. An enemy assault was brewing.

Gaspard was undeterred. He appears to have regarded Dussaq as proof that substantial Allied help was on its way—something he’d been requesting for months, and which he thought, rightly or wrongly, had been promised to him.⁵ His largely novice troops, armed with mostly Allied-supplied light weapons, like Sten guns, grenades, and pistols, were very much in need of heavier firepower, hopefully tanks and air support, and professional training such as Dussaq, a specialist in weapons and ambush, could provide.

Dussaq wrote, I was introduced to a Colonel Thomas who was the commanding officer of the [redoubt at nearby Fridefont], a village which was part of the overall Mont Mouchet network, and immediately told to train his men in all the weapons they had, and in their tactical use . . . The lack of trained cadre [experienced key personnel] was pitiful. Even those who had been appointed company commander had not the training necessary for such a job. Furthermore, the majority of ‘Maquisards’ had joined the Maquis to hide from the Germans [the implication being they were not there to fight], and it was rather difficult to change them from the hunted into the hunter.⁶

He estimated the total number of Maquis in and around the redoubt to be seven thousand men and growing—but with a much smaller number, perhaps two thousand to three thousand, equipped and few trained to fight any kind of major engagement. Having received information that the Germans were preparing to attack [in force], I did all in my power [along with the others in Freelance] to convince [the leaders, including Thomas and Gaspard] that it was suicide to try and maintain such a large group of men in one single spot with the types of weapons they had. They were sitting ducks. He urged breaking the troops up into small and mobile hit-and-run guerilla bands where they would be less vulnerable, and their light arms could be better utilized. But Gaspard, who continued to insist that all they needed were tanks and cannons [and aviation support] . . . to defend their position, would not budge.⁷

It appears Gaspard still believed substantial reinforcements were on the way.

Alas—with the exception of periodic small arms drops by Allied air—they were not. Only a few days after Dussaq had arrived the Germans attacked on June 10, in the first of several devastating offensives that forever in that region of France would be remembered as the heroic Battle of Mont Mouchet. It was heroic because this rag-tag bunch of inexperienced anti-occupiers, led by a tiny core of professional fighters, held their ground basically until ammunition for their meager weapons ran out. Then they fell back to smaller redoubts in the area, eventually being routed and scattered. However, because they held on as long as they did, and kept an entire German Division, if not more, from going north to Normandy at a crucial time, they incurred a special wrath from the enemy who, in savage retaliation during the roughly two-week, on and off, conflict, massacred and mutilated dead and injured Maquis, and innocent French civilians, including women and children.

It was one of the major unheralded battles of World War II—and in Europe, one of the nastiest.

And Dussaq was in the middle of it.

Even to this day, information on the battle is hard to acquire. It is mostly in French and much is disputed because of the remoteness of the battle and politics involved. When it began, with a coordinated attack by approximately ten thousand Germans⁸ with artillery, tanks, and armored cars against perhaps three thousand Maquis on Mont Mouchet, Dussaq was in nearby Fridefont, a few mountainsides away, training new recruits. From our headquarters we could hear the sound of the battle raging, writes Nancy Wake. We could offer no assistance . . . The nature of the terrain between our position and the Maquis under attack made it impossible.⁹ As Freelance’s radio operator, Denis Rake, a heroic but controversial soldier,¹⁰ sent coded messages to London begging for airborne help. Wake, for her part, was handing out British army boots to new recruits who were then passed to head trainer Dussaq, who all day long and far into the night would be instructing them on how to use our weapons.¹¹

The ill-equipped defenders in the battle were magnificent, writes Wake. They consistently inflicted 4 to 10 percent more casualties on the Germans than the Germans did on the Maquis.¹² But it wasn’t enough. By nightfall, Gaspar ordered a withdrawal to Chaudes-Aigues, perhaps only ten miles away as the crow flies, but much longer in actuality as anyone traversing between the two had to go up and down mountains and across rivers and lakes in the ravines, dangerously exposed. Dussaq, he writes in his after-action report, took a company of men to Clavieres, a small mountainside village used as an outpost by the Maquis, to cover the withdrawal of the main body. He must have been involved in considerable fighting because, he recalls, we sustained the loss of some 40 men, 25 missing and 15 certainly dead.¹³ It was probably during this time that he acquired the name Capt. Bazooka.

Among the supplies periodically airdropped to the area by the Allies were the new American anti-tank rocket launchers nicknamed Bazooka. They were shoulder-fired and resembled a long pipe. A popular Arkansas comedian of the day, Bob Burns, had, as part of his country music routine, an instrument that resembled the tubular weapon. He called it a Bazooka. The army adopted the comical name. Apparently, the Maquis had been having trouble using theirs. Dussaq writes that during the first Mont Mouchet attack I heard severe criticism of our anti-tank weapons, the bazooka. I had the opportunity of showing [that the weapon] could easily stop any enemy armored car, with the result that from then on [they called him] ‘Capt. Bazooka.’¹⁴

If not during the retreat, it’s possible he had received the nickname several days later. Three days after the [evacuation], he wrote, "we ambushed at the Pont du Garabit [a towering railway bridge over