France Antelme - Missions To France

Missions To France

On his first mission to France, from November 1942 to March 1943, Antelme established contacts with political circles and leading French civil servants with a view to supplying the allied expeditionary forces with food and currency.

He was back in France in May that year, carrying messages from the British prime minister, Winston Churchill to former French prime ministers Édouard Herriot and Paul Reynaud, inviting them to come to England. The mission started well with the demolition of the locomotive turntables at Le Mans. But when his fellow SOE officer and associate, Francis Suttill, was arrested on June 23 and his PROSPER circuit destroyed, Antelme was on the run.

He managed to evade the Gestapo for a month, getting out by Lysander aircraft on July 20. He had failed to meet Herriot and Reynaud, but he learned that they were willing, though unable, to act. They were too well guarded for their extraction to be feasible. He nevertheless took back with him a valuable recruit — the well connected international lawyer, Maître W. J. Savy. (Savy later returned to France and provided the intelligence that led to the destruction by the Allies of 2,000 V1 rockets.)

While Antelme was in France, Noor Inayat Khan landed on June 17, 1943 as wireless operator to the PHONO circuit that he had set up. Antelme put Emile Garry in charge as sub-organiser for Francis Suttill's PROSPER circuit. Shortly after she arrived, PROSPER was betrayed and the Germans seized Suttill and his friends. Inayat Khan evaded capture, sending more than 20 messages on the run until she was betrayed by Garry's sister four months later and arrested in her apartment. Garry was captured shortly afterwards.