Dad's Secret War: France 1944

Production of "Dad's Secret War" has been made possible by... Additional support has been provided by... This ornate tin bread box contains the ingredients of an incredible World War II story.

The container and its artifacts were always off-limits, until a prying young son opened the lid on his father's top secret life.

I was curious, and as a 5-year-old, I decided that I wanted to get access to it.

So I snuck into it and lifted with my fingertips the rolled edge of it and popped it open, and I was stunned at what I saw.

Inside it were numbers of different passports of different countries with my dad's picture on each one of them, but a different name.

And there were codes, small pieces of paper in code.

There were silk maps.

There also was a .45 with four clips that was there.

There were many French documents, and they had my dad and a different name and his photograph, and they were coupons and stamps and IDs, and it fostered my curiosity to find out what the real story was.

Jean Claude Guiet came from a region in northeastern France about 15 miles from the Swiss border.

His home was roughly an hour and a half from Zurich, Switzerland.

Jean Claude's goal when he was young was to move to the United States.

My father was born in Belfort, and that's where his mother was from, a small village just south of Belfort.

Um, and so he was born as a French citizen and experienced most of his child-- early childhood in France.

My father's dream was to be an American.

That dream came true in the early 1930s, when Jean Claude's parents took jobs at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

They were returning to America to teach French.

My grandfather, Ren, headed the French Department for 35 years.

Ren and Jeanne met as exchange students when they were both at the University of Illinois, just after the end of World War I.

Jean Claude Guiet grew up in an academic environment in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The weather in New England was like his old home in eastern France.

In America, French remained the dominant language for the Guiet family.

In 1942, Jean Claude left home for college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When he was 17, he started Harvard and he was flunking out, and so he was really relieved when he got a draft notice in the mail in the winter in March of 1943.

Realizing a dream, Jean Claude Guiet became an American citizen in 1943.

Guiet enjoyed his early days in the Army in South Carolina.

And he loved basic.

Jean Claude wanted to be a paratrooper.

One day he was pulled off of the firing range and then immediately went to parachute school.

Jean Claude Guiet's stay at Fort Bragg in North Carolina was brief.

A new top secret organization had already pinpointed Guiet for a new role in World War II.

The Office of Strategic Services, led by an imaginative director named "Wild Bill" Donovan, was already working to bring chaos and death to the enemy in occupied Europe.

Guiet would eventually get to parachute back into his native France, just not as an American soldier.

Before he got a jump in, "Wild Bill" Donovan from Washington, D.C., sent a man down and picked him up.

And next thing he knew, he was on a train with a packed duffle and ended up in Washington, D.C., with a group called OSS that he had no idea what they were or what they were about.

The Office of Strategic Services, America's first ever centralized intelligence agency, sought out anyone with knowledge of France or the ability to speak flawless French.

All they wanted to do was to verify that his French was fluent and very passable, which it obviously was, and they signed him up.

The OSS put Jean Claude through grueling physical and mental instruction.

It included shooting, unarmed combat, guerrilla tactics, Morse code transmission, and covert communications.

They also made Jean Claude sign something called the Official Secrets Act.

He couldn't talk about anything he was doing.

Jean Claude's brother Peter had also joined the OSS.

The two had to pretend they didn't know each other as they went through rigorous instruction and training.

Some of the training was frightening and scary, and he was there for four months when he completed it.

My father's first training in America with OSS was an introductory course of shooting and knifing and demolition and wireless sending, Morse code encoding, decoding.

And that was hard.

Following graduation from the Office of Strategic Services, Jean Claude Guiet was handed a surprise.

The OSS had loaned the American to their British counterpart, the more established and ultra top secret spy and sabotage agency called Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E.

Jean Claude Guiet arrived in England in January 1944.

When he was attached and shipped over to England, and he was attached to S.O.E., they had two more years of experience of putting clandestine operators into foreign occupied lands, and about a third of these agents couldn't handle the training and had flunked out.

Jean Claude Guiet became one of S.O.E.

's best radio operators.

He could encode and decode messages quickly and accurately under extreme pressure.

What Jean Claude also learned was that radio operators were the first S.O.E.

agents to be captured, tortured and killed by the enemy.

Every agent was given a choice to take what they called an L pill with them, and the L pill stood for lethal.

It was potassium cyanide, and so you had the choice to either stand up to the torture if you were captured and resist all you could and give your last ounce of dedication and energy and courage until you were dead or you could take your L pill.

Training in Scotland and England focused on additional Morse code work, gathering intelligence and how to kill or maim your enemy.

All of Jean Claude Guiet's skills were needed immediately.

He would be joining three other S.O.E.

agents preparing for an upcoming top secret mission.

He was rushed through because they already had him assigned to this team from early on for the wireless operator, and that's what they wanted.

And before he knew what really was going on, he was signing his will.

It's part of the mystique of that individual that even throughout his whole life, he never told his family what he did.

The German army conquered France quickly in 1940.

The Nazis had an occupied zone in the north, west and east of the country.

In the central and southern part of France was the Vichy section, French who collaborated with the Germans.

There was no such thing as a formal French Resistance from 1940 into 1942.

Early opposition by civilians was unorganized, underground and in the shadows.

I was surprised in my research by just how little resistance there was at the beginning of the occupation.

At first, barely any -- anybody belonged to the French Resistance.

If you belonged to the French Resistance, it was a very nerve-wracking experience because you could be informed on at any moment, and many people were.

So what was the knock at the door?

You know, was it your neighbor?

Was it a German officer?

They didn't want to collaborate.

But they didn't want to resist.

It meant your death and the death of your family probably.

A hundred other people would be killed when the SS captured you or the Gestapo captured you.

[ Gunshots ] In the early days of World War II, with Europe occupied and the attack on Pearl Harbor still down the road for the United States, the British government, fighting alone, needed a way to hit back at the Germans.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill supported an idea of secret groups of specialized allied agents who would cause chaos in big cities, small villages in countries such as France.

Churchill's order for them was to set Europe ablaze.

The allies called it resistance.

The Germans branded it as terrorism.

The idea of the S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive, was basically to bring the battle to the Germans within occupied territory.

So it was Churchill who came up with the idea right after the total occupation of Europe, minus England, of course.

And he knew at this point that he had to play dirty and basically form this new -- this new organization called the Special Operations Executive by sending in secret agents within occupied territories to sabotage, create unrest, mess up communication.

Churchill was desperate to buy time, and he needed something that would slow the Nazis.

The term "set Europe ablaze" was to disrupt the Nazi regime.

The missions handed out by the British S.O.E.

would become much more targeted as the war progressed.

S.O.E.

agents' life-spans were measured in just weeks.

Planners called their missions suicide operations.

Jean Claude Guiet understood he was needed for his French language skills, but that he was also very expendable.

S.O.E.

radio men like Guiet were nicknamed piano players for their finger-tapping dexterity with the Morse code transmitter.

[ Morse code beeping ] The S.O.E.

was looking for people obviously that had language, definitely the language being French if you're going to be in French territory.

The S.O.E.

ran what they called circuits.

So Special Operations Executive would drop in various people by parachute or they would land in, you know, isolated fields in Normandy and Brittany and drop agents off.

Sometimes they dropped as many as five people at one time, sometimes just single agents.

How dangerous is it to be an S.O.E.

agent?

It is extremely dangerous.

If you are captured, you're going to be tortured.

Paris was a city with a smoldering purpose.

Signs in an alien tongue stood isolated.

An alien flag flapped in the breeze.

In France, the resistance began to fight back, starting early in 1943 and into 1944.

However, these civilian groups were operating independently.

There were many French political factions just out for themselves.

The mission of Jean Claude's small circuit of S.O.E.

agents was to change this.

That was because one of the most critical battles in world history was about to occur, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France.

The S.O.E.

and French Resistance would need to play a crucial role behind the scenes in central France in early June 1944, but they had to be brought together in their efforts.

This Special Operations Executive mission to unify the French Resistance was labeled Salesman II.

A couple of months before D-Day, a previous Salesman mission in Normandy, involving three other members of Jean Claude's new circuit, had failed.

It was broken up by the Gestapo and the team's radio operator was arrested.

4,000 ships, combat and landing craft, carry the war to the enemy by sea.

The Coast Guard, the Navy, the Air Forces land hundreds of thousands of British, Canadians, and Yanks on Hitler's doorstep.

This is the supreme moment of invasion.

Each hour and the enemy's hedgehog defenses are ahead.

On June 6, 1944, the allies invaded Normandy, France, to begin the eventual liberation of Western Europe from Nazi oppression.

After the D-Day landings were announced, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower called on the French Resistance, also known as the Maquis, to join the fight.

All patriots, men and women, young and old, have a part to play in the achievement of final victory.

To members of resistance movements, follow the instructions you have received.

Any German counterattack in Normandy would need the support of tanks and troops from all over Europe.

German divisions were ordered to head to the Normandy coast.

Salesman II's mission was to slow down one of Germany's top battle groups heading towards Normandy from southern France.

Bob Maloubier was one of the Special Operations assigned to the Salesman II circuit with Jean Claude Guiet.

All four Salesman II agents had specific roles for their upcoming mission in central France.

The team was also categorized as F section, the designation for France.

Everyone had only code names.

Everyone only knew each other through their code names and through their cover stories.

The obvious reasoning is that if someone was captured and tortured and cracked, then they would be able to spill truth about other agents.

French historian Eric Simon is one of the world's leading experts on the French Resistance Maquis and the S.O.E.

Salesman II team, which included one American, Jean Claude Guiet.

[ Morse code beeping ] He was the only new addition because the radio man on their last mission had been captured, tortured and killed.

Bob Maloubier was six months older than my father.

That was a one-man wrecking crew.

They sacrificed greatly for each other.

They protected each other.

But they were still distant because they knew that either one of them wasn't going to come back from some demolition, some ambush, some hike, some patrol.

These are citizen soldiers.

The third member of the team was a lady named Violette Szabo.

Liewer was her boss and team leader at that point.

Spent a lot of her childhood in France and was therefore fluent, knew her way around how to operate in France, et cetera.

She was witty, she was funny, she was a live wire.

Very optimistic, very hopeful, very buoyant character.

Great human spirit, great strength and courage, a really, really beautiful soul.

His teammates were a group of three veterans, agents who had done a previous mission in occupied France.

So they knew each other well.

He was the new person attached to the team.

He fit perfectly.

And he enjoyed each and every one of his teammates.

He was by far the youngest, having just turned 20 when he was doing this mission.

So the Salesman II team would be Bob Maloubier, S.O.E.

's top demolition expert and saboteur, born in France.

His code name was Paco.

Violette Szabo, the courier.

Beautiful, 22 years old, and 5'3" tall.

Born in Paris and moved to London at 11 years old.

Her code name was Corinne.

Philippe Liewer.

The mission's key organizer was born in Paris in 1911.

Liewer joined the S.O.E.

in 1942.

His code name was Major Staunton or Hamlet.

Jean Claude Guiet was the radio operator, the only American on the team, barely 20 years old.

Code name -- Virgile.

Wireless men were in big demand in part because they were so short-lived.

You have a three-, four-, five-week life expectancy.

There was a lot of turnover.

Captain.

How do you do?

The S.O.E.

and resistance network called for special weapons in World War II.

For example, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife was designed for very close and personal combat, quick and silent killing.

The muted Welrod pistol was also a favorite among Special Operations Executive agents.

Even today, the British won't admit their agents used the secret gun.

The Welrod was preferred for close-up assassinations and quiet ambushes.

The number of small items used by the S.O.E.

to kill, wound or maim Germans in occupied France was endless, from special commando knives to guns that shot just a single bullet.

The one-shot Liberator pistol was used to capture a better weapon owned by a German.

Everything shot bullets.

Fountain pens.

A cigar with a 25-caliber bullet still in it.

Cigarettes with tiny bullets.

You pull the string between your teeth and the -- and it fires one shot.

As they were developing S.O.E., they would have agents put exploding bicycle air pumps that would snap on to the Nazis' bicycles.

And so they would go and they would find the Nazis in a cafe or a bar.

They'd switch out the pump and let the air out of a tire.

They would snap on their exploding pump, and the Nazi would come out from lunch or rest or coffee, whatever and see he had a flat tire, take it off and get his pump out and push it and he'd lose two hands.

Occupied Europe starts with resistance.

But it was really hard going to resist an occupying army that would kill a large number of people for any infraction of their decrees.

There are decrees here -- If a telephone line is cut, 50 people will be killed.

Well, do you really want to cut the telephone line?

Tiny spy gadgets.

Like very tiny cameras.

Cameras inside matchboxes, cameras inside a cigarette lighter.

And guns inside cigarette lighters.

Guns inside everything.

This was the top secret agent world that American Jean Claude Guiet was now a part of.

All Special Operations Executive activities were run out of this nondescript building in London, 64 Baker Street.

The building was called the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, its agents known as irregulars, a reference to characters in the Sherlock Holmes books.

The entire Salesman II four-person team was issued fake ID cards before departing for France.

They changed his name and used his original birth date, but changed the year and they aged him seven years on the forged ID so that he would have had the ability to have served in the French army early in the war, and therefore had been discharged, and he had forged discharge papers so that he was able to show those to the Nazis when he was stopped.

Immediately following the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, the S.O.E.

intended to drop the Salesman II team into central France to slow up German divisions ordered to counterattack the landing beaches in Normandy.

The mission would take the four agents to a part of south central France called the Limousin region.

The city of Limoges is -- The center is also called the capital of the Maquis only because of its geographical position.

We're not too far from Paris.

We're along these great train lines and just its geographical situation.

Their mission that the S.O.E.

team that he was on went in to do was very straightforward in a complex way.

They were to go into an area around Limoges in south central France and organize resistance groups that they knew were in existence.

That area was significant near Limoges because that's where the German troops from the south would pass through reinforcements to the Germans in Normandy.

Their mission was to form a civilian army, which would allow them to then organize resistance and slow down.

They needed to delay a troop called Das Reich, which was the 2nd Waffen-SS Armored Division with hundreds of Panzer tanks that would be rushed up to the Normandy beaches when the D-Day invasions occurred.

The mission was delay it for three days from reaching D-Day invasion beaches in Normandy.

Their main job was to try and help train the resistance in communication and explosive detonation, in assassination.

The area was a large geographical area and included six different departments of France, and each department had their own local Maquis or French resistance group.

That was a challenge for them to be able to have command control over.

What the Salesman team focused on was controlling the countryside, the small villages, supply routes.

The most critical job of the Salesman II team was to bring factions of resistance groups together to fight the Germans.

In 1944, Maquis groups in central France were too focused on their internal politics and not enough on defeating the Nazis.

The Salesman II mission began on the night of June 7th, one day after the landings in Normandy.

A darkly painted, American-built Consolidated B-24 Liberator four-engine bomber left a secret airfield in England bound for central France.

There was a full moon.

The plane was stripped down to lighten its load.

The four Special Operations Executive agents on board still did not know the others' real names.

Each was focused on their role in this vital mission.

In the early morning hours of June 8, 1944, the B-24's important cargo, including Jean Claude Guiet and his radio transmitter, was dropped at a very low altitude near a quiet and remote French village.

The team's mission to organize the French Resistance into a significant fighting force was off to an anxious start.

It was disorganized.

They didn't know who to trust, who not to trust.

And yet they had to go around the region and try to introduce themselves to individual groups of resisters and recruit them.

Not only recruit them, but teach the French civilians how to fight the Germans as a cohesive army.

They would train them in demolition and plastic and shaped charges and how to kill a guard who they wanted assassinated, which officers should be priority on the Nazi staff.

Their object was to get the Nazis beaten.

The factions in the French Resistance, whether communist, socialist, or loyal to Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, could settle their political fate after the Germans were finally beaten in France.

Sussac was the perfect place for an S.O.E.

team to work and hide, but that did not bring comfort to radio man Jean Claude Guiet.

Guiet sent top secret messages from France via these coded sheets of paper.

Out Station was now the village of Sussac.

Home Station was Baker Street in London.

The Germans really valued the information that they could extract from a wireless operator for the simple reason that the wireless operators knew every bit of information.

So he knew he was being hunted.

The average life expectancy of a S.O.E.

operator was a maximum of six weeks.

The Germans were closing in on central France from the south.

It was the main route to Normandy.

However, before continuing on to the landing beaches, German leadership wanted the French Resistance dealt with.

Thousands of communists leading resistance were operating in the forests and villages around Sussac, the new base for Jean Claude Guiet, Bob Maloubier, Philippe Liewer, and Violette Szabo.

When you go to these places, you enter a narrow roadway.

They're not like super highways.

They're small country roads and small bridges.

There is danger at every turn.

They rubbed up against Nazi soldiers and Vichy troops all the time.

Following their jump, the Salesman II team settled into their primary mission of organizing the French Maquis into one fighting force.

The four agents also began individual acts of sabotage to inflict damage on the German infrastructure along the road to Normandy.

There was a lot of transmission about troop movements, train schedules.

London would direct them saying, "We want you to blow up that building or train."

The BBC had various code messages that could be heard by the French Resistance.

[ Speaking French ] It was illegal to listen to a radio.

It was illegal to own a radio in France, but members of the French Resistance did have these radio sets, these secret sets.

The German 2nd SS Division, also known as the Das Reich, was feared for its brutality.

The division was made up of Hitler fanatics.

It already had a reputation for killing civilians, even women and children.

The 2nd SS was on its way from southern France to counterattack in Normandy, but en route they were told to eliminate any French Resistance in the Limoges area.

On June 8th, the 2nd SS Division found itself in Tulle, France, just south of the Salesman II's newly established base in tiny Sussac.

I think it's a reminder of, that you see these bullet holes, that town's history.

We knew that something of great importance and violence took place there.

On the morning of June 10, 1944, the Salesman II team suffered a significant setback in its overall mission.

That's when one of the team's S.O.E.

agents and the circuit's designated courier was captured just outside a village named Salon-la-Tour.

Once again, it was the German 2nd SS Division.

The Allies have just invaded France.

Everyone's paranoid, neurotic, things are blowing up everywhere.

And you see a 24-year-old young woman with a swarthy-looking French guy, and they look suspicious and you stop the car.

And they were stopped by Germans belonging to the 2nd SS Das Reich Division.

And the story goes that Violette Szabo ran across a field.

She had a Sten gun on her, and she ran.

And then she ended up, you know, being shot at.

Then she fired back and she was behind a tall tree and returned fire several times.

Philippe Liewer had planned to rescue Violette Szabo while she was en route from the prison to the nearby Gestapo headquarters in Limoges.

But before any plans were executed, Szabo was transferred to Gestapo headquarters in Paris.

She arrived at the infamous Avenue Foch.

Avenue Foch is right in the heart of Paris, so the gangsters moved in.

There were detectives that worked for the Gestapo, there were intelligence officers and they all moved into several buildings on Avenue Foch in the fall of 1940.

You had the most evil mass murderers in modern European history living on that one street.

It was the center of the SS and Gestapo activities in France.

It was where the French Resistance were tortured and brutalized and murdered more than anywhere else in France.

Violette Szabo was held in cell number 45 and tortured for seven weeks here at 84 Avenue Foch.

She was then sent to Germany.

Violette never talked.

To the frustration of German leadership, the Salesman II team had quickly unified French resistance groups into one force.

To deal with this, Nazi leadership in central France decided to violently punish the families of resistance fighters and local French civilians.

The Tulle massacre had already happened.

The Germans decided to ratchet up the level of death and destruction even more.

Another very small village not too far from Sussac, named Oradour-sur-Glane, was targeted.

It was a tactic of trying to get the resistance out of business because they were so efficient.

When the remaining members of the Salesman II team heard what had happened, they raced to Oradour-sur-Glane.

643 civilians in Oradour were dead.

The men were shot in barns.

450 women and children burned alive in this church.

The entire village, now preserved, was burned to the ground.

My father was one of the first to arrive, and he took four pictures of it, which are hard to look at to this day.

Then they ran back off to Sussac to the camp.

Those pictures were eventually released and were the first photographs of the actual massacre that the French civilians ever saw.

[ Man speaking French ] It's frozen in time.

Oradour-sur-Glane became the most notorious atrocity committed by the Germans in occupied France after D-Day.

When we were there in 2001, we were within 15 kilometers of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

And I said, "Dad, do you want to go?"

He looked at me and he said, "No.

Matter of fact, I'd like you to turn around."

Oradour-sur-Glane.

The massacres at Oradour and Tulle and dealing with S.O.E.

sabotage and resistance attacks had dramatically slowed the progress of the German 2nd SS Division.

[ Crossing bell dinging ] They were well behind schedule to counterattack the Allies in Normandy.

After the D-Day landing, Salesman II continued its mission of working with and reinforcing the French Resistance.

On June 25, 1944, they had a very large airdrop that my dad arranged.

It was the first daylight-time airdrop in Europe.

This turned out to be 860 containers from 72 planes.

Frequent supply drops sent from England became a specialty for the Salesman II team.

However, the drops also began attracting German attention, especially one day in July when parachutes decorated with the French flag's blue, white and red tricolors dropped from the sky.

They stood up in a line, standing at attention, singing, broke into song of the national anthem, "La Marseillaise."

And sure enough, the next day a troop of over 6,000 Nazis started to invade their region, doing a cleanup under direct orders from Hitler to clean up this rat's nest of resistance that they were.

And it turned into a huge battle.

That big fight began on July 17th and involved resistance fighters trained and supplied by the Salesman II team.

It became known as the Battle of Mont Gargan.

The resistance had the high ground on a 2,400-foot peak.

German soldiers and some 500 vehicles arrived in the valley, and a seven-day battle began.

342 Germans were killed.

Only 47 of the Maquis died.

It was an intense fight, one of the most important in the history of the resistance.

It was also a baptism under fire for Jean Claude Guiet.

The numbers can be 4,000 to 5,000 is what was estimated with a group of 500 French resisters, and he found himself by being de facto appointed by the French resisters because he was an American and because they assumed that he had all kinds of special training and combat experience, when in fact this was his first battle.

And if you look at a picture of my dad when he signed up with OSS in October of 1943 and you look at him nine months later in August in Limoges of '44, you cannot believe the age that occurred.

The Das Reich division was quickly using up its resources dealing with Jean Claude Guiet's S.O.E.

team and the local resistance.

Then you look at the type of demolition was done towards trains.

It was to completely cut off that -- the Atlantic Wall command from the rest of the country.

Trains were very important because tanks, like big Panzer tanks, were usually moved by flatcar trains.

Bob at some points would go out eight or nine times a night and blow up trains.

My father doing the same at that point.

The Limoges area was a cross section, and that's why it was so critically important.

It had two sets of rails running north-south from Paris to the south of France, and it had two sets of tracks running east-west.

The Salesman team, they shut down virtually 100% of the train traffic in about six weeks after their arrival.

Jean Claude Guiet's smarts and proficiency in French saved him many times during his time in France with the S.O.E., as did the expert work of those at Special Operations Executive on Baker Street, who created Salesman II's fake identity cards and documents.

There were many close encounters for the American.

He heard a German convoy driving along the road, and he knew there was no place to run.

The Nazi commander says, "Well, let me see your papers.

And what's your name?"

And so my father told him it was Claude Jean Guyot, his cover name, and pulled out his French ID card that had been forged in London.

They asked for some other documents that he had with him, and he presented them and they gave it a look and said, "Okay, that's fine."

All the training provided by the Salesman II team was finally paying off for the French Resistance in central France following D-Day.

An organized fighting force of 10,000 men, women and children had been established.

What the French civilians needed was a structure, and once Liewer had central command of it, he could orchestrate complex maneuvers of hitting a train, pivoting, hitting a different train, blowing up a couple of bridges on the way, and then attacking the barracks.

The resistance had finally come together to fight the Germans and not each other.

A major victory for the resistance came with the taking of Limoges, ground zero for the Maquis in central France.

The Germans surrendered the city to the local French resistance and the Salesman II's S.O.E.

team on August 21, 1944, some four days before Paris was liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and America's 4th Infantry Division.

[ Cheering ] [ Bell tolls ] [ Triumphant music playing ] Following the liberation of Limoges in an open square just steps from the prison that once held Violette Szabo, Jean Claude Guiet, Bob Maloubier and Philippe Liewer were awarded medals pinned on by the French.

After the liberation of Limoges and the harassing attacks on the 2nd SS Division ended, Salesman II's mission was complete.

There was time for a short celebration before the remaining three Salesman II agents headed in different directions.

Jean Claude Guiet's time in Europe as an S.O.E.

agent with the Salesman II circuit was over.

The mission has been closed down.

They immediately drove into Paris.

He had just a few days to be with Bob Maloubier, who had a family home in Paris.

They celebrated.

They had a wonderful time along with Philippe Liewer.

So three out of four of the team members survived that mission.

London gave him his choice to go home to Northampton, Massachusetts, for a two-week Christmas break.

He said, "Send me home."

And he never got a chance to say goodbye to either Bob or Phil Liewer.

For their captured Salesman II teammate Violette Szabo, the end came in Germany.

After leaving Paris in a dirty and overcrowded train car, Szabo arrived at a women's-only prison facility in northern Germany.

She was taken out on the 5th of February 1945 at Ravensbruck.

She was 24 years old, and they shot her in the back of the head.

[ Gunshots ] Violette Szabo's name remains legendary in special-agent circles.

The 2nd SS Panzer Division finally arrived in Normandy on June 12th, six days too late to help stop the Allied invasion.

Their time spent murdering and terrorizing the civilian population around Limoges also factored into the failure of Das Reich.

My father felt that the Salesman II mission that he was on exceeded the wildest hopes and dreams of Baker Street and the team members.

They hoped to delay the arrival of Das Reich by three days.

It was a shell of a remnant that actually arrived at Normandy, and so they did their job.

According to other leaders, the actions that they had in the Limoges area were responsible for probably shortening the war by three to five months, which is a very significant achievement.

[ Cheering ] Every S.O.E.

agent I ever met would automatically say, "I was only doing my job.

The real heroes were the guys on the landing craft on D-Day."

The Salesman II team and the French Resistance are celebrated to this day in central France.

A museum in Limoges displays the tools of the S.O.E.

and resistance trade.

Photos and artifacts document a time when an American and three French special agents dropped into the Sussac area, rallied the French Resistance, and in the process helped save the D-Day landings in Normandy.

It was a heavy price to pay for freedom in France.

Twice a year the schools let out and they celebrate the S.O.E., and they go to monuments and they put flowers and they have speeches and ribbons, and they've learned their history.

A history brought to light by a curious son determined to learn more about his father's own role in World War II.

So the tin bread box was the foundation of the first idea that there was something more to my father.

He was something different.

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