Fighter: Stephen Grady aged 14, three years before he joined the French Resistance
The Nazi staff car screeched to a halt in the French countryside, yards away two terrified teenagers stood in front of a German fighter plane that had been brought down near their village the previous day.
‘Halt!’ snapped one of the four soldiers who confronted the boys. He pulled out a shiny pistol, his hand shaking with rage.
Stephen Grady, 16, had reason to be fearful. He was English, his father one of the Tommies who had stayed on at the end of World War I to marry a French girl.
He and his friend, Marcel Lombard, had planned only to take a few souvenirs from the Messerschmitt, but a sudden burst of patriotism had inspired Grady to smash the cockpit with a hammer before etching a message on the side of the fuselage with a screwdriver.
‘Long live the English airmen who shot down this filthy Kraut,’ it declared.
One of the Germans hit Grady hard across the head, sending him tumbling to the ground. ‘Stupid children, you will suffer for this,’ he barked.
Suffer they certainly would, but as Grady, now 87, reveals in a lyrical and haunting new autobiography, his cruel treatment by the Germans following his arrest on that June morning in 1941 had made him more determined to fight them as one of the youngest members of the French Resistance.
His bravery saw him awarded the Croix de Guerre later when Grady entered a world of deadly intrigue. It was far from the peaceful life he had known as a child in North-Eastern France between the wars.
His parents met while his father was fighting in France with the Royal Artillery. She ran a cafe in the village of Nieppe, close to the Belgian border. After the Armistice, he became a gardener for the Imperial War Graves Commission, tending to the plots in the military cemeteries in Nieppe.
At first, the graves of the fallen were marked by wooden crosses, eventually replaced by permanent headstones. Grady recalls how his father, with four children and a wife to support in their cramped house on the outskirts of the village, decided it was a shame to waste the old wood from the crosses.
‘My mother screamed to see my father stuffing the wooden crosses, some still caked with earth, into the stove. She begged him to stop, clicking the beads on her rosary, and worried we would all go to hell.’
They had no idea then that what awaited them in this world would be hell enough. When the Germans first arrived in Nieppe in spring 1940, they asked if there were any British nationals in the area. If found, they would be interned in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps, or worse.
Then 15, and barely from short trousers, Grady became the family breadwinner. He took over his father’s job in the cemeteries until his sabotage of the Messerschmitt sent him and Marcel Lombard to Lille, incarcerated in Loos Prison, the much feared, disease-ridden hellhole where murderers and debtors had been left to rot before the war.
‘I was put in a cell meant for just one prisoner with what looked like three scarecrows slouched on its stone floor. Each afternoon our mess tins were half filled with a liquid that looked like dirty bathwater and smelt a lot worse. Five haricot beans floated on the surface.
‘I learned to tussle like a beast for scraps and floor space, dreading that at any moment I might be dragged out for interrogation as my cell mates told me stories of people coming back to their cells with fingernails extracted, testicles crushed, eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.
Resisting: An American officer and a French partisan crouch behind an auto during a street fight in 1944
‘We often heard volleys of gunshots from the exercise yard and, after weeks of being panicked by every approaching footstep, I began to think that an appearance before a well-run firing squad might not be such a bad future after all.’
After three long months in Loos, Grady and Marcel were freed, thanks to the intervention of Jules Houcke, the mayor of Nieppe. Unbeknown to the Germans, he was a leading figure in a local Resistance organisation, named La Voix du Nord.
Determined to infiltrate the escape routes organised by the Resistance, the Germans had begun parachuting in agents posing as stranded Allied aircrew. The Voix du Nord organisation needed a native English speaker who could interview every airman seeking their assistance to determine whether they were the real thing.
Grady was 17 when he joined in October 1942, he had been to boarding school in Kent and often holidayed at his grandmother’s home in Ramsgate and was perfect for the task. He was ‘itching’ to start unmasking enemy airmen, but the reality of the work proved more distressing than he had imagined.
One‘Canadian’ airman did well at first, correctly identifying the year the Royal Canadian Air Force was founded, its motto and myriad other facts about his ‘homeland’ until Grady noticed the man’s right knee was jiggling throughout the interview.
‘He was gripping his thighs so tightly that his knuckles were white,’ he recalls.
‘“How do you become a member of the Caterpillar Club?”
‘“Perhaps it is a type of club for the people who are still learners to fly and have not yet got their wings?”
‘”Absolutely it is,” I told him, noting that his grammar was beginning to crumble under the strain. “Very good Lieutenant Eastwood. We’ll soon have you on your way back.”’
‘Long live the English airmen who shot down this filthy Kraut’
- What Stephen Brady wrote on a crashed Messerschmitt
Every Allied airman knew that the Caterpillar Club had men who had bailed out of an ailing aircraft. Grady reported his doubts to Mayor Houcke.
Later that day, as he tidied the borders in one of the cemeteries, he found himself preoccupied by thoughts of the fate that awaited ‘Eastwood’.
‘I knew that this man would have no white headstone in a military cemetery, no gracious resting place for his mother to visit. He would simply be made to disappear.’
Grady had his own safety to worry about. In autumn 1943, the Voix du Nord began working with the Sylvestre-Farmer Resistance network, established around Calais by the British Special Operations Executive. It was run by Michael Trotobas, a charismatic British officer known as ‘Capitaine Michel’.
He had a reputation for organising audacious but highly effective missions, like the first one involving Stephen Grady. This mission aimed to transport a lorry-load of Sten guns back to Nieppe, which had been airdropped by the RAF near the village of Ransart, 45 miles away.
Covering them with layers of turnips and straw, Grady lay on top of this deadly cargo, appearing for all the world like a farm labourer guarding his crop. He had his own Sten gun to hand as they made their perilous night-time passage through
territory bristling with the enemy, but it was never needed. The arms were delivered safely to a local barn shortly before daylight.
Capitaine Michel was only 11 years Grady’s senior, but following this success he took an avuncular interest in him, offering practical tips on matters such as the best way to shoot a man dead.
‘“Two shots, no more, no less,” he said. “One to the stomach and one to the heart. Even if you miss with the second, the first will kill him in the end. And don’t look at his face.”
‘I nodded, pretending that I had conversations like this every day,’ says Grady.
The Capitaine was equally vocal on the subject of evading capture. ‘“I should rather die in battle, taking a bunch of Jerries with me, than in some windowless room, having the life slowly squeezed out of me by a couple of spineless b*****ds wielding nutcrackers. Better to die in silence than to live and talk.”’
Gardens of Stone: My Boyhood in the French Resistance by Stephen Grady
He proved true to his word following the arrest of one of his agents in August 1943. When the information tortured out of him led the Germans to Capitaine Michel’s apartment in Lille, he refused to surrender, killing one would-be captor and injuring another before shooting himself.
Grady avenged his mentor’s death in March 1944 on his most dangerous mission of all — the assassination of a German soldier called Hans, who was sleeping with the daughter of a cafe owner in the nearby village of Steenwerck. Hans was heard boasting that he knew the identities of several members of the Resistance and could get them executed.
Entering the empty cafe early one evening, Grady was disconcerted to find Hans in the kitchen, very clearly off duty. ‘I was expecting him to be in khaki uniform with a scarlet swastika armband around his bicep,’ he remembers. ‘Instead, he was in shirtsleeves and a pair of pleated corduroy trousers.
‘I pulled the trigger twice, at point-blank range. He screamed in a far-off voice and glared at me, his eyes full of shock and rage. I didn’t expect the gun to be so loud.
‘I was just standing there holding it and then his eyes disappeared into his head and he went straight down. I felt no elation, no warmth in my belly at the thought of having killed a Kraut. I just felt numb and hollow inside.’
In the weeks that followed, Grady experienced feelings of ‘aching sadness’, but the summer of 1944 brought fresh anger towards the Germans, who were countering attempts at sabotage with increasingly despicable tactics. One night, Grady and a colleague placed nails across a main road, puncturing the tyres of a convoy of lorries and putting it out of action for a week.
‘In retaliation, the enemy soldiers used their rifle butts to shove everyone in the houses along the main road out of bed, making old men and women crawl along in their nightshirts, their hands and knees raw and bleeding as they were forced to pick up our nails,’ he recalls. ‘By some miracle, no one was shot.’
The Voix du Nord organisation’s final push against the German occupation at the end of August had grimmer consequences.
Using the smuggled weapons for which Capitaine Michel had sacrificed his life, they managed to take 150 German soldiers captive. The enemy responded by sending in the SS. ‘They drove a large group of townspeople in front of them,’ says Grady. ‘They were people we knew — shopkeepers and school friends, their faces contorted with terror. A human barricade.’
Under heavy German fire, Grady and his comrade Jean Sonneville managed to escape across the rooftops of Nieppe and into a car workshop, where they spent the night hiding in the inspection pit.
‘I had two grenades and handed one to Jean. Panting, we exchanged glances. I could see that he knew what to do if we were discovered. I would not be taken alive.
‘Next morning, half-dead with cold, we crawled out of our pit and found a new hiding place in the garage roof. There we remained for another 24 hours. Sporadic gunfire crackled in the distance. And then there was silence. We could hear birds singing. The Germans had gone.’
They emerged to find more than 40 of their friends and neighbours had been killed by Germans fleeing the British troops who liberated Nieppe soon afterwards.
As the war ended, when Mayor Houcke told the British about Grady’s contribution to the Resistance, one of their commanding officers secured him a commission in the Intelligence Corps. His father’s death following a motorbike accident soon after put paid to his dreams of a life in the Army.
His mother begged him to stay in Nieppe and look after the family, and he agreed. He continued tending the war graves, eventually becoming Director of all Commonwealth War Grave Commission cemeteries in France before retiring in 1984.
Today, Grady lives in Greece. ‘Nothing helps memories linger as much as fear, and I lived in terrible fear when I was growing up,’ he says. ‘Fear of being caught by the Germans, fear of being tortured by their police. Fear so intense I have never been able to obliterate it.’
It’s perhaps for this reason that he has remained lifelong friends with Marcel Lombard, who still lives only a stone’s throw from Nieppe.
‘In the end, it is only Marcel who can really understand,’ he says of their enduring bond. ‘He and I have shared so much together. In Loos Prison, in Nieppe, and in the glintingly sombre years since that summer’s day when I scrawled a slogan on the side of a Messerschmitt, and the bottom fell out of our world.’
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