Pierre de Vomécourt

Pierre de Crevoisier de Vomécourt (1 January 1906, Chassey-lès-Montbozon, Haute-Saône-1986) was, during the Second World War, a Special Operations Executive agent, who founded and headed SOE's first Resistance network in occupied France, the AUTOGIRO network.

Life

His father died at the front in the first year of the First World War, when Pierre was only eight. His brothers Jean and Philippe (1907–1964) also worked for the Resistance.

Pierre was educated in England, and escaped from France to England in 1940, where he tried in vain to join the Free French Forces as a saboteur. He then met the leaders of SOE, and was recruited into their F section for training, under the codename Lucas. On the night of 10/11 May 1941 he was parachuted onto his brother Philippe's property as one of the first agents to land in occupied France. His only reception committee was his radio operator, Georges Bégué, who had been in position for some days. The three brothers divided up zones among themselves - while Jean chose to intervene in eastern France and Philippe in south-western France, Pierre intervened in the north and set up a network, called AUTOGIRO, based in Paris. He used up a large part of his personal fortune to fund the network's initial activity, looking for safe houses for arms caches, 'dead letterboxes', and depots for arms that would be parachuted in. A second radio operator sent to him was arrested in the meantime.

In December 1941 Pierre met Mathilde Carré (nicknamed La Chatte, i.e. the She-Cat), who made him believe she had succeeded in escaping the German round-up of the INTERALLIÉ network (in reality, it had been her that led to most of the arrests and she was now working for the German Abwehr) and that she had access to a radio operator who had also escaped the arrests (in reality, it was the Germans who sent INTERALLIÉ's radio messages and thus, in an operation called funkspiel, were able to deceive London). Pierre saw the opportunity of at last establishing contact with London, and she accepted (in reality Pierre's messages were sent and received under the complete control of Feldwebel Hugo Bleicher.

In January 1942, several anomalies made Pierre concerned. In a conversation with Mathilde, he came to recognise her double-crossing. On the night of 26/27 February that year, he and Mathilde returned to England by boat and, during their stay in London, Pierre persuaded general Brooke of the necessity of supplying the Resistance with radio operators. On 1 April he was parachuted back into France, again onto Philippe's land, and restarted his Paris activities under the new codename Sylvain, but was arrested on 25 April. In prison he was beaten by Georges Delfanne (alias Christian Masuy), then handed over to Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr, less brutal but more subtle and thus more dangerous. He and several of his companions were tried together, and he succeeded in convincing the tribunal to treat them as prisoners of war and not as terrorists, thus avoiding their execution. He was imprisoned in Colditz Castle, where he remained until being freed on 15 April 1945. After the war, he became a consultant in west Paris.

Sources

• Michael Richard Daniell Foot, SOE in France. An account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940-1944, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966, 1968 ; Whitehall History Publishing, in association with Frank Cass, 2004.
• (French) Benjamin Cowburn, Sans cape ni épée, Gallimard, 1958.