The Night of the Full Moon: A Novel Set Against a Ww2 Background

By Glyn Woolley

This novel is set in the southern French town of Montauban, during the last six months of 1944. It is a love story between a young girl,Yvette ,and her farmer boyfriend Pascal. It is a story of a family caught up in the shadow of a monster, the German Das Reich 2nd SS armoured division and the background of the D-Day invasion.The full moons of joy and sadness combine in triumph and tragedy for both soldiers and civilians alike.

It tells of the difficulties of communication across the rugged landscape of the Correze, Cevennes and Auvergne; everybody battling with hunger, courage and determination to survive on slender threads of hope.

Above all it recounts the harsh times and lives of normal people in the face of love, and daily chances of death.
It reflects the guilt still felt today in France about Vichy and how could their own people behave with so much more cruelty than the the Germans.

It draws on real life characters of the maquis, SOE, the Das Reich, two German soldiers and Pascal who become separated only to meet again via unusual circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781728375823

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© 2022 Gerald Glyn Woolley. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/17/2022

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7581-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7582-3 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

T his story is set in the first six months of June 1944 in a small town in the south of France.

While the background structure is loosely based on General Lammerding of the second SS panzer division (Das Reich), the notable French resistance fighter Andre Malraux, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster (leader of the French section of Special Operations Executive) and Violet Szabo, (British agent) all other names are purely imaginary.

This is a novel that depicts the personal lives of the villagers of Montauban and how they were caught up in one of the most terrifying events that traumatised France following the German occupation of 1940. The liberation of France wasn’t a well-ordered sequence of events. It was a tale of factional conflicts, vicious vengeance, and reprisals – not always justified – and near anarchy in places, alongside the jubilation of freedom from occupation.

Feelings still run deep and people who lived through those times down there still don’t want to talk about them. Accusations that x or y was a collaborator during the war are still muttered behind hands. There is still much guilt today in France especially about Vichy and its role in condemning so many French men and women to deportation and death. We have learned that society is only skin deep and that everyone is capable of turning on his neighbour.

As with most novels, dates and narratives have been stretched to accommodate the story line but it remains a novel, a work of fiction of human relationships, choices and fateful decisions that we today never had to face but that lead to supreme sacrifices always in the belief that personal will can triumph over evil.

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COURTESY : MONTAUBAN

INFORMATION CENTRE

Montauban Town Square

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1     Soe England

Chapter 2     Montauban

Chapter 3     Pascal’s night -time adventure

Chapter 4     Cooling off

Chapter 5     Mission Briefing

Chapter 6     Two eggs on my plate

Chapter 7     Broken eggs

Chapter 8     No compromise

Chapter 9     Thorough search

Chapter 10   Sibling jealousy

Chapter 11   Rabbit girl

Chapter 12   Das Reich arrives

Chapter 13   Theresa intervenes

Chapter 14   Birthday

Chapter 15   Round up

Chapter 16   Bed bugs

Chapter 17   Paradise for Das Reich

Chapter 18   We are your friends

Chapter 19   Piano lessons

Chapter 20   Spitfire attack

Chapter 21   Sylvie’s practical advice

Chapter 22   You always remember the first

Chapter 23   Happy families

Chapter 24   Yvette and Wolfie Picnic

Chapter 25   Starvation now the enemy

Chapter 26   Le Débarquement

Chapter 27   Invitation to lunch

Chapter 28   Enough to eat

Chapter 29   Farmhouse supper

Chapter 30   Les sanglots longs, Des violons, De l’automne

Chapter 31   Claude and Jenny escape another search party

Chapter 32   Raid on the Pharmacy

Chapter 33   Terri’s secrets and a trap

Chapter 34   Mama can I love two men?

Chapter 35   Axle bearings

Chapter 36   A new friend comes with Wolfie

Chapter 37   Am I just a bit of fun?

Chapter 38   Difficult questions

Chapter 39   News of Pascal

Chapter 40   You have to dream

Chapter 41   Betrayed

Chapter 42   A little baby boy for France

Chapter 43   Into the fire

Chapter 44   The news is out

Chapter 45   Sylvie no more

Chapter 46   The sabotage

Chapter 47   Exciting news

Chapter 48   Mosquito recsue

Chapter 49   Mission impossible

Chapter 50   The march to Normandy begins and Terri has trouble brewing

Chapter 51   Escape to the country

Chapter 52   Salvation

Chapter 53   Two Months Later

Chapter 54   Sunday October 1St 1944 The Full Moon Of Love Arises Again -99% Illuination

Aftermath

PREFACE

E verybody knows that the sun shines on the moon to illuminate it. When the moon is dark, the Moon is new, and the side of the Moon facing Earth is not illuminated by the Sun. As the Moon waxes (the amount of illuminated surface as seen from Earth is increasing), the lunar phases progress through new moon, crescent moon, first-quarter moon, and full moon. The Moon is then said to wane as it passes back to new moon.

Around each new moon and full moon, the sun, Earth, and moon arrange themselves more or less along a line in space. Then the pull on the tides increases, because the gravity of the sun reinforces the moon’s gravity. Thus, at new moon or full moon, the tide’s range is at its maximum. This is the spring tide: the highest (and lowest) tide. Spring tides are not named for the season. This is spring in the sense of jump, burst forth, rise. So, spring tides bring the most extreme high and low tides every month, and they always happen – every month – around full and new moon.

This was the crucial reason why the Normandy landings had to go on June 6 when the high tide was at its maximum. As an Allied cross-channel invasion loomed in 1944, Rommel, convinced that it would come at high tide, installed millions of steel cement, and wooden obstacles on the possible invasion beaches, positioned so they would be under water by mid-tide. But the Allies first observed Rommel’s obstacles from the air in mid-February 1944. Thereafter they seemed to grow like mushrooms … until by May there was an obstacle on every two or three yards of front. The obstacles came in a variety of shapes and sizes some with explosive mines on them. The Allies would certainly have liked to land at high tide, as Rommel expected, so their troops would have less beach to cross under fire. But the underwater obstacles changed that. The Allied planners now decided that initial landings must be soon after low tide so that demolition teams could blow up enough obstacles to open corridors through which the following landing craft could navigate to the beach. The tide also had to be rising, because the landing craft had to unload troops and then depart without danger of being stranded by a receding tide. There were also nontidal constraints. For secrecy, Allied forces had to cross the English Channel in darkness. But naval artillery needed about an hour of daylight to bombard the coast before the landings. Therefore, low tide had to coincide with first light, with the landings to begin one hour after. Airborne drops had to take place the night before, because the paratroopers had to land in darkness. But they also needed to see their targets, so there had to be a late-rising Moon. Only three days in June 1944 met all those requirements for D-Day, the invasion date: 5, 6, and 7 June.

A 6-meter (18feet) tidal range meant that water would rise at a rate of at least a meter per hour from 05:23 low tide with the beach and obstacles exposed to high tide at 10:12 am—perhaps rising even faster due to shallow-water effects. The times of low water and the speed of the tidal rise had to be known rather precisely, or there might not be enough time for the demolition teams to blow up a sufficient number of beach obstacles. Also, the low-water times were different at each of the five landing beaches (from west to east, they were code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword). Between Utah and Sword, separated by about 100 km, the difference was more than an hour. So, H-Hour, the landing time on each beach, would have to be staggered according to the tide predictions and night of a 100% full moon

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IMAGE 3 COURTESY OF CAEN HISTORY MUSEUM

MAP OF BEACHES. To show problems of tides

NIGHT%20OF%20THE%20FULL%20MOON.jpg

NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON

La Nuit de la Pleine `lune

ONE

Panic

"W here is the saboteur" asked the German Officer pointing his Luger 9mm pistol at Yvette’s head. She could see the lightening zig zag flashes on the mans’ lapel tunic and the skull and crossbones insignia on his cap. This was the SS officer in charge of traffic movements for the Das Reich division in Montauban. The trembling schoolgirl smiled at him We are just out for a cycling ride and know nothing about saboteurs or trains. He looked at her friend Terri who was older but much prettier even than Yvette with long blond hair done in pig tails making her look much younger than she was. If you don’t tell me then ten men from the town will be shot Even if we knew them and told you then you would probably shoot them anyway, said Terri. The SS officer glowered and summoned a soldier over and said, take these two away and shoot them The soldier looked aghast, much as he was a hardened veteran of the Eastern front, this was beyond his resolve. If you do that, you will be hunted down by the allies and hung for a war crime, after all they have just landed in France. There are witnesses all around Yvette said pointing to the French railway workers nearby desperately trying to free the axels of the low loaders with Tiger tanks aboard. Hauptmann-Furhrer, let them go, we have much work to do and wasting lives won’t get it done quicker. said the soldier. Now it was the soldiers turn to face the gun in his face. How dare you question me? Just then a senior officer came up. what’s going on here? He asked. Hauptman saluted and said Herr Oberfuhrer, these are two saboteurs who I want shot don’t be stupid said the SS Colonel these are only innocent schoolgirls, and we have Americans to fight. Let’s see how brave you are when we meet them." The officer holstered his pistol and soldier told them to stop the panic, to get on their bikes and vanish. Little did they know what Terri and Yvette had done during the night.

One

SOE ENGLAND

ENGLAND, 6 JANUARY 1944

A leksander finished his supper and went to the briefing room. It was cold. It was January 1944, and Aleksander Buckingham was in the final stages of his SOE training at Beaulieu in the New Forest where he had learnt all the tradecraft associated with survival behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Europe. The agents were trained in planting explosives, burglary, forgery, sabotage radio operations, Morse code, and silent killing with bare hands, wire, rope, and even ordinary household items like kitchen scissors.

More unusual techniques included planting bombs inside dead rats. Other spy gadgets, now housed in the Beaulieu Museum, included a compass and map hidden in a hairbrush and a lethal blade concealed in a shoelace.

SOE, or Special Organisation Executive, was formed by Churchill in June 1940 as a clandestine army charged with setting Europe alight through acts of sabotage of trains, bridges, and communication installations. Sometimes, but rarely, they were charged with assassination of leading Nazi leaders. But after the murder of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, the reprisals exacted by the Germans at Lidice were regarded as too high a price to pay, and SOE activities were then more focused on a lower level. Aleksander had already done his gruelling commando training at Arisaig in Scotland and parachute training in Cheshire and by now was waiting for his first assignment. Born of a Polish father and a French mother, he was fluent in French and German. His parents had escaped first to France and then England before the war and were now living quietly in Chelmsford Essex. They knew nothing of their son’s work, and he could not tell them or even hint to them at what he was doing—although his mother, like all mothers, kept anxiously prodding him for information. He had not seen them for eighteen months and was only allowed to write once a month that he was alive and well. Tonight, he was brushing up on his personal life in preparation for his meeting the next day with Maurice Buckmaster, head of F section, which handled nearly four hundred agents throughout the war. Maurice spoke French fluently so Aleksander’s premonition was that the meeting would have something to do with France.

Two

MONTAUBAN

FRANCE, 6 JANUARY 1944

86 PER CENT FULL MOON

T he sleepy rural town of Montauban is a commune in the Tarn-et-Garonne department in Southern France. On the border between the hills of Bas-Quercy and the rich alluvial plains of the Garonne and Tarn, there is an important road junction and busy market town. The pink bricks give the town its character typical of the region. It is the capital of the department and lies fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles) north of Toulouse. Montauban was the most populated town in Tarn-et-Garonne and the sixth most populated of Occitanic behind Toulouse, Montpellier, Nimes, Perpignan, and Béziers. The beautiful river of the Tarn with its deep gorges flows 350 kilometers to join the Garonne flowing down to Bordeaux.

Yves lived with his sister, Yvette, and their mother, Francoise, in a little house at 2 Rue de Palisse near the centre south of the river and five minutes’ walk from the railway station. Their father, Fabrice, had been captured when the French army surrendered in 1940 and was a prisoner of war in Germany. Francois only had the occasional heavily censored postcard permitted by the Germans each month to say he was well. Madelaine Bezier baked bread in the bakery next door, great big roundels almost a metre across. The owner, Jacques, had been shot by the Germans some years earlier in 1941 for trying to escape from his barn where arms were being stored. Madam Bezier always believed he had been betrayed out of spite by a woman whom he promised to marry then ditched. Madelaine assumed his role and baked every day when there was flour available. Madelaine was a good-looking woman in her early thirties, maybe even beautiful some would say. Yves, 16, helped in the local garage while his elder sister, 19, helped in the local infant school and the hospital. Life had been quiet in this corner of France; the Germans were polite and paid for their food and did nothing to trouble them—they left that to the Gendarmes and the dreaded Milice, a political organisation created in 1943 by Marshall Petain to help combat the growing resistance movements. Montauban was in the zone libre, or demilitarised zone, under control by the Vichy regime, so the area was relatively quiet so that the Germans could free up their panzer divisions for the invasion of Russia. Marechal Petain placed in charge of Vichy was doing the Germans’ dirty work and was far more brutal to his own Frenchman than were the Germans. He introduced the laws against the Jews just after the Germans invaded. Each enlisted member of the Milice had to swear an oath to the head of state, Marechal Petain: I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection, and against Jewish leprosy.

No wonder Gendarmes and Milice were so anti-Jewish and were the ones who did the dirty work of betraying and arresting their compatriots, often settling old scores in the process. After the Allied invasion, most Milice tried to escape to Germany, pleading safety from their German masters, but the Germans disowned them.

Then in November 1942, the zone libre was invaded by the Germans who saw a threat from the Allied landings in North Africa. The Germans rolled into Montauban with horse-drawn carts with company reservists and older men. Yves watched from the garage with a quizzical look and said to his patron Bernard, Are these the men who conquered France in 1940? They don’t look like supermen. Their uniforms are old and dirty, and they have poor, tired farm horses.

Bernard said nothing at first then added, Well, I guess they don’t need more than a handful of old men to guard this town. After all, there is nothing here. But it is common knowledge that the Allies will land, so it’s more to suppress the French resistance. Tell your sister and mother not to provoke them. They will not harm us if we leave them alone.

It was the subject of intense discussion at dinner that evening. The soup as usual was potato and cabbage with thirty grams of chicken—there was suddenly no food in the shops as it had all been requisitioned for the Germans, and Madam Bezier had no more coupons left that week anyway. Still, they had ample fresh bread and apples from the orchard at the back of the house.

Will we still be able to visit Father Antoin? Father Antoin was the village priest in Tulle, about 180 kilometers away, and a cousin of Madam Bezier. He was the godfather to Yves and Yvette and saw the children from time to time on the holidays. He was very kind and bought them sweets when they arrived by train. But it was a long hot journey in the summer requiring a change of trains at Brive.

Maybe not, said Francoise. I am sure there will be a crackdown by the Germans. Although most of the recent arrivals will be re-enforcing the garrison at Bordeaux and not many will stay here. But it is not safe to travel anywhere since the STO was introduced in June 1940.

The STO was a French government initiation created by Vichy to enforce every young male over the age of 18 and every young single female over the age of 21 to go and do forced labour in Germany. In return for every three French people sent, one French POW would be released, but any young person travelling in France was likely to be seized by the French authorities and taken away, so it was not safe to travel. Nothing happened if you stayed at home and just went about your daily life. All that was to change two months later. But for the moment, life went on, and apart form a bit more harassment from the Gendarmes and a stricter curfew, nothing had changed.

One of Yves’s best friends was Paul, and he was the same age and went to the same school in the village. Paul’s father, Raoul, worked at the station in the signal box and was in charge of controlling the entire network from Montauban down to Toulouse and north to Brive. He was also responsible for doing all the shunting in the sidings and sorting out the train timetables; there were four BR52 2-10-0 steam locomotives in the sidings, two of them kept continuously in steam in case others broke down and were needed by the military. This locomotive was the workhorse of the German and French railways, built with solder instead of rivets to save weight, and over six thousand were made. Hans, his German guard, and Raoul were on a reserve list so, as such, had not been sent away to Germany, but he knew everything that was going on with regard to traffic movements and the German military. Paul told Yves that nothing extraordinary was happening; the Germans had arrived by road and there were no train movements on the timetable. Everybody must remain calm, said Paul. "And I’m sure that if anything is going to happen, my father will know it before anybody

YVETTE AND PASCAL

Yvette was Yves sister and liked playing the piano, she was quite well advanced for her age taking lessons every week from Maria who lived a few houses away in the same street; she could play quite well and often she was practicing and playing traditional old French songs but also Chopin and Beethoven despite the disapproval of her teacher who said that she should not be playing