In March 1942, de Baissac joined SOE in the same class of trainees as
Francis Suttill,
Harry Peulevé, and
Roger Landes. His leadership qualities were recognized, but he was also regarded as "volatile" and "stubborn." F Section leader
Maurice Buckmaster would later call him "the most difficult of my officers without any exception." De Baissac and his sister, Lise, shared the family characteristic of being "difficult but determined." In the words of SOE's official historian,
M.R.D. Foot, de Baissac was of "exceptional character" but "suffered no fool gladly." He was "an imposing man with the air of someone who expected to be obeyed."
First mission De Baissac's first mission began the night of 29/30 July 1942, when he and his wireless operator Harry Peulevé were parachuted blind (no welcoming party) from a
Halifax near
Nîmes, However, they were dropped from too low an altitude and landed badly. De Baissac sprained his ankle and Peulevé broke a leg. De Baissac left Peulevé (and his wireless) behind. After recovering from his injury, he continued on to
Bordeaux in late August to establish the Scientist network. His duties were defined as to prepare for sabotage operations against the blockade runners entering the port of Bordeaux carrying vital products such as rubber from
Southeast Asia for the use of
Nazi Germany. In the following months, de Baissac received additional personnel:
Roger Landes, (codenamed
Stanislas), a wireless operator, parachuted into France on the night of 31 Oct/1 November), and
Mary Herbert (codenamed
Marie-Louise), a courier, landed by boat on 3/4 November, and
Victor Charles Hayes, an explosives expert, arrived by parachute on 18/19 November 1942. A second wireless operator, Marcel Défense, arrived on 13 May 1943. with three new and better radios enabled Landes to locate radios at different locations and move from place to transmit and receive messages and thus run less risk of capture. De Baissac's sister Lise, stationed in Poitiers, was a liaison of Scientist with other networks. De Baissac's Scientist network and the Prosper network of
Francis Suttill, based in Paris, were the two most promising SOE networks in France. In Bordeaux, de Baissac quickly found success, building up two groups of resistors, potential saboteurs among the left-wing workers in the port of Bordeaux, and a larger group of rural resistors led by right-wing former French army officers. He also had contacts in Paris for liaison with Prosper. Each SOE network was supposed to operate independently with little contact between networks, an unrealized objective because of a shortage of wireless operators In December 1942 a commando raid,
Operation Frankton, carried out by
Royal Marines was launched against ships in Bordeaux port. Baissac was unaware of the plans for the raid and was poised to launch a similar mission to sink ships in the harbor. The commando raid was only partially successful and de Baissac was angry about the raid and had to cancel his plans for sabotaging the port because of increased German security. On 1 November 2011, a BBC
Timewatch television documentary called "
The Most Courageous Raid of WWII" was narrated by
Paddy Ashdown, a former
SBS officer. Ashdown described the lack of coordination among government agencies as "a Whitehall cock-up of major proportions." The loss of the opportunity for the commandos and de Baissac to work together to strike a harder blow against the Germans in a combined operation led to the setting up of an office in London with responsibility for avoiding inter-departmental rivalry and duplication. De Baissac continued to gather information about the coming and going of ships from Bordeaux and by fall 1943 blockade-running had largely been prevented. De Baissac returned to London on the night of 17/18 March 1943 in a
Lysander and parachuted back into France on 14 April. During his visit to London, de Baissac told SOE headquarters that he had a force of 3,000 to 4,000 men, mostly in Gascony, to resist the German occupation. With widespread anticipation of an allied invasion of France in 1943, SOE began delivering by air drop large quantities of arms and supplies to the resistors. By fall, the Scientist network reported that nearly 20,000 men scattered around southwestern France had been recruited by the resistance. In the words of the SOE's official historian,
M.R.D. Foot, the expansion was too rapid for the security of the network—and the Germans noticed.
Disaster On 23 June 1943, de Baissac had scheduled a meeting with Prosper leader Francis Suttill in Paris. Suttill didn't show up; he had been arrested by the Gestapo. What followed was the arrest of hundreds of French resisters and SOE agents and the destruction of most of SOE's activities in northern France. De Baissac requested or was ordered to return to England to avoid arrest and he and his sister, Lise, flew back by Lysander on the night of 16/17 August along with
Nicholas Bodington. Roger Landes, Vic Hayes, Marcel Défense, and Mary Herbert (pregnant with de Baissac's child) remained in Bordeaux to continue working. Landes was furious that de Baissac had taken his sister Lise with him to England and left Mary Herbert behind. De Baissac's most important French colleague,
André Grandclément, was a retired army colonel and a leader of the right-wing resistance organization, the
Organisation civile et militaire. In September 1943, Grandclément was arrested by the Germans and to protect his wife and secure his release was persuaded by the Germans to become a double agent. He betrayed the Scientist network, resulting in the capture of many of its people and the confiscation of most of the arms which had been parachuted in from England. Scientist was destroyed as an operating network. Landes fled France, crossing into Spain and eventually making it to England. Mary Herbert went into hiding, living in Lise de Baissac's former apartment in
Poitiers and giving birth to a daughter, Claudine, in December 1943. Hayes was arrested on 14 October and later died in German custody or was executed. Défense escaped to England, but later returned to France and was captured and executed.
Second mission De Baissac parachuted back into France the night of 10/11 February 1944 with the objective of reconstituting the Scientist network in southern
Normandy. (Unknown to De Baissac and the French Resistance, Normandy would be the landing site of
allied forces in the
D-Day invasion of France on 6 June 1944.) De Baissac's area of operations was south of a line reaching from
Avranches in the southwest to
Caen in the northeast. Recognizing that the area was too large to be supervised by a single person, he put
Jean Renaud-Dandicolle in charge of the north along with Mauritian
Maurice Larcher, a wireless operator. (Renaud-Dandicolle and Larcher were killed in a gun battle with the Germans in July.) De Baissac focused on more southerly areas and he was joined in early May by his sister Lise and wireless operator
Phyllis Latour. When he arrived in Normandy, de Baissac commented wryly about the resistance that "the secret army is so secret, I can't find it." Over the next three months he concentrated on building up resistance groups in various areas and supplying them with arms, identifying landing grounds for the arrival of supplies and, after D-Day, to be used by paratroopers and commandos. He forbade sabotage by the resistance groups he supplied and advised until D-Day by which time he had created an "efficient sabotage and small-scale guerilla organization." De Baissac reported that his resistance groups put more than 500 German vehicles out of action. His groups cut railway and telephone lines, and gathered intelligence on German troop dispositions and movements. On several occasions he was said to have participated in armed combat against German soldiers, notably on one occasion when he and a small group of men held off a German patrol attempting to capture parachuted arms destined for the resistance. While in France, de Baissac tied up loose ends and recommended compensation for his French associates. ==Later life==