Jean Moulin - A Hero's Hero

Seventy years ago, on 14 February 1943, Jean Moulin landed from France at RAF Tangmere, near Chichester, in a Lysander from 161 'Special Duties' Squadron. This was not his first visit. He had previously impressed the aloof and distant de Gaulle when he visited him during the general's darkest days, on 25 October 1941. As a man of some stature the ex-Prefet of Chartres not only provided information about resistance in France, he also offered him a means to exploit and rally these diverse and relatively isolated resistants to his cause. At that time, a small minority of French people, anti-Nazis, Jews, Communists and anti-Petainistes amongst others, were creating their own resistance but they had no leader on the ground in France. De Gaulle, tucked away in London's Carlton Gardens, was an ethereal voice on the radio with pre-determined views about invading France with his Free French army. Moulin single-handedly convinced him that he had tens of thousands of parachutistes sur place ready to serve him but that if he didn't take the leadership reins, then the communists would. He was successful in his mission and when he returned to France as the official 'Delegate of the French National Committee to the Unoccupied Zone' his real work began.

The second time he came to visit General de Gaulle, a great deal had changed. The Germans had invaded the southern zone, the so-called zone libre, on 11 November 1942 and the mountainous and wooded areas of the south, perfectly suited to guerilla warfare, were now firmly under German military control. Jean Moulin flew into RAF Tangmere with a strategy to unite the disparate elements of the newly emergent Resistance movement and rehabilitate the political parties around de Gaulle. This was no mean task after the attentisme that had followed the Armistice Agreement of July 1940 and the rewriting of the immediate past and the jockeying for position that was now, inevitably, taking place. De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance was further compromised by the Allies' support for General Darlan in North Africa after the Allied landings in November 1942. With Petain in Vichy, Darlan in North Africa and a sulking de Gaulle in London, it was not at all clear who was to be crowned the sovereign leader of the French. When Darlan was assassinated, the USA and Roosevelt replaced him with General Giraud, a man untainted by even the slightest whiff of collaboration. De Gaulle's future depended on proving that Roosevelt's support for the newly appointed Giraud was misplaced and that only he, General de Gaulle, could speak for the whole of la belle France.

Fired up with the powerful notion of a united Resistance under the ex patriot general's leadership directed from London, Moulin and de Gaulle hammered out the idea of a single Resistance council. On 21 February Jean Moulin drafted the proposal for the new body, a Resistance council, which would encompass both zones and incorporate representatives from the different Resistance movements and the  estranged political parties. His first attempt to return to France with these precious instructions, took place on 24 February 1943. Due to fog, the Lysander, flown by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity, had to return to Tangmere, where it crash landed spectacularly. Miraculously, neither man was hurt despite the severity of the impact in a pea soup of a fog. A second attempt on 26 February also failed. It was not until 20 March that Moulin was finally set down near Roanne by 161 Squadron's Flight Lieutenant Bridger. Within weeks Moulin established the Conseil National de la Resistance.

It was a thankless task amongst the rivalries, vanities and hostilities of the different competing groups but it is a credit to Moulin that he was able to exploit all of these things to achieve his, and de Gaulle's, primary objective. The first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance [CNR] was held on 27 May 1943. His personal success was to be short lived. Less than a month later, Jean Moulin was arrested and brutally tortured by the notorious Klaus Barbie, dying shortly afterwards in a deportation car. The power struggles between the competing groups did not end with Moulin's death but de Gaulle's determination to shape France in his own image was given great credence by his sacrifice. When Andre Malraux spoke of him as being le chef d'un peuple de la nuit at the consecration ceremony for him at the Pantheon in December 1964, Moulin's legend, like the wily general's himself, was indelibly etched in the minds of all patriotic French men and women. On that bitterly cold winter's morning in Paris, he became a hero's hero. Vested in his bodily sacrifice was the resurrection of a nation. Despite Marcel Orphul's seminal film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitie', which showed the ugly underbelly of Resistance mythology, France has not looked back since and Moulin's legend lives on.

I was privileged last weekend, on the seventieth anniversary of Moulin's first attempt to return to France, to be invited to a commemoration of Jean Moulin's secret flights to and from RAF Tangmere,  by the Friends of Chartres, Les Amis des Jumelages de Chartres and Tangmere Military Aviation Museum. A moving Service of Remembrance was led by the Rev Canon Tim Schofield in the Museum Memorial Garden, attended by many with connections to SOE, the Resistance and 161 Squadron, as well as the Deputy Mayor of Chartres and the Mayor of Chichester. It was followed by a tour of the museum and later, an RAF Operations Room Re-enactment at the Bishop Otter Campus at the University of Chichester, where the actual centre of operations for RAF Tangmere had taken place during the war.

This was followed by an enlightening film made by Martyn Cox, who interviewed Jean Moulin's first pilot, the redoubtable Squadron Leader, Hugh Verity, in 2001, not long before his death. Martyn, who lives in France near Saint-Antonin, where Charlotte Gray was filmed, has interviewed many SOE agents, including the women who were the real 'Charlotte Grays'. Afterwards we had an extremely entertaining and enjoyable illustrated talk by Pete Pitman of the Tangmere Military Aviation Museum entitled 'A Day in the Life of a Pick-Up Pilot'. Remarkably, out of 410 Lysander sorties and 218 Hudson ones, they lost only six pilots and thirteen aircraft. Two of the pilots died trying to land in severe fog at Tangmere, which makes Hugh Verity's crash landing with Jean Moulin on the 24 February 1943 even more significant. Who knows what the history of the Resistance might have been had Verity not got his plane down eventually?

The afternoon finished with a superb panel of experts discussing both Moulin and the Resistance: Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary's College, University of London, and the author of 'France, The Dark Years'; Pete Pitman of RAF Tangmere; Harry Roderick "Rod" Kedward, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of 'Resistance in France' and 'In Search of the Maquis' amongst many others, and Mathew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester and the author of 'Resistance'. The day finished with a showing of that great Resistance film from 1969, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 'L'Armee des Ombres', starring the phenomenal Simone Signoret as the compromised resistant, Mathilde. The choice of film, which included a Lysander drop-off and pick-up, was a fitting tribute to a great Resistance hero and the men of the RAF who aided them. 

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