The Irish in the Resistance - Janie McCarthy

The Story of Janie McCarthy

‘Her place seems to have been a rendez-vous for helpers and a center to establish contacts every time the organisation was broken.’ -  Excerpt an American intelligence document

Paris, Spring 1943: Janie McCarthy was on the move again. Down five flights of stairs, out on to the rue Sainte-Anne, then right towards the metro. She was on her way to see two downed Allied airmen hiding in the north-west of the city. The stations were full of German soldiers, but she had already passed among them with an escaped pilot pretending that he couldn’t speak, or hear. That ploy had worked more than once, in fact, but she wouldn’t need it this time. She was alone, bringing food, news – and much-needed good cheer.

Light relief was welcome. The waiting had been torturous for American radio operator Sergeant (Sgt) Iva Lee Fegette (24) and his fellow fugitive Technical Sergeant (TSgt) William Whitman (22) since their aircraft crash-landed in a muddy field at Provins, some 76km east of Paris, in early December. They had been told to be patient, but three weeks had since gone by without any further word from the Resistance. When Janie McCarthy finally visited, it gave them hope, even when she informed them that conditions were not yet right for the airmen’s journey south. From there, they hoped to be guided over the Pyrenees on an escape line – or freedom trail – taking them into neutral Spain.

Janie McCarthy would return to see them several times and try to raise their spirits. As Sgt Fegette said of her later, ‘[Ms McCarthy] kept us laughing all [the] time’.

It is very unlikely that they told Janie any details of their ill-fated mission. It was better to say as little as possible. But we can keep pace alongside Sgt Fegette and TSgt Whitman through- out their dangerous journey because of the detailed accounts they gave after the war. It is instructive to do so because it also gives us an insight into how Janie McCarthy, an English teacher from Killarney, Co. Kerry, operated within a clandestine network that was only as strong as its weakest member.

The two men, members of the 303rd Bomber Group, had set off from Molesworth base in England on 12 December 1942 at 10.30 a.m. They were on a mission to attack the airfield at Romilly-sur-Seine in north-central France, but before they reached their target, around noon, German fighters knocked out two of the engines of their B-17 Wulfe Hound.

The aircraft lost altitude quickly. The crew followed procedure during the descent, releasing its bomb load to lighten the aircraft, destroying maps, equipment and other incrimi- nating papers. They must have been thinking the worst, but the pilot’s forced landing was textbook perfect. All ten crew crawled out uninjured as a French family waving a white flag ran towards them. Sgt Therrien, a French speaker, asked which direction they should take. Any direction but north, they were told. They took cover in nearby woods and decided their best chance of survival was to split up into pairs and start walking. They had no idea where they were, so set off with little more than hope and a regulation emergency ‘aids box’. It was packed with Horlicks tablets, chocolate, water purifier tablets, matches, a water bottle and an all-important compass. The kit also included a welcome supply of chewing gum: ‘Takes your mind off things,’ Sgt Fegette commented later.

The mind of the fugitive could settle on any number of terrifying things, but fear of capture must have been foremost in their thoughts that December day. As they made their way through a forest, the first people they encountered were woodcutters. They attempted to communicate through sign language, but to no avail. The evaders were put out by that, concerned the men might be supporters of the Germans. However, the woodcutters did not betray them; they had simply turned a blind eye.

Turning a blind eye was in itself a brave act because any- thing that might be construed as helping an Allied airmen could lead to arrest, torture, imprisonment and even death. Ordinary civilians had been sent to prison camps just for giving food or clothes to a fugitive soldier. Yet, on their six- month journey from that forest in occupied France to eventual safety in the UK, via Gibraltar, these two airmen met close to 100 people. All of them took enormous risks to help them.

Many were not even members of any organised resistance network, but ordinary people prepared to give an American a barn to sleep in, civilian clothes, cigarettes, a bath or some food. After a few days – and a near-encounter with a lorry full of Germans – the two men randomly met a man who, as they put it, ‘arranged the rest of their journey’. He was obviously in the Resistance or in touch with one of its networks. He made a telephone call to Paris and, shortly afterwards, the airmen were driven to a castle in the north of France where they were holed up for 54 days.

Comet - A Resistance Network

They arrived in Paris on 15 February 1943 – and into the care of Janie McCarthy and other members of Comet, a resistance network dedicated to helping aviators find a path out of France and into neutral Spain.

 Janie McCarthy was born on 19 January 1885 to Margaret and Michael McCarthy, a shopkeeper on High Street and later New Street (Lower), Killarney. She went to school at the local Mercy Convent and was in her early twenties when her elder brother Joseph emigrated to New York in 1908. She didn’t follow him but, unusually for the time, instead struck out for Vannes in Brittany in northern France.

Work as an AuPair

She worked there as an au pair for the Meslier family, but also taught English. By 1911, she was advertising conversational lessons at moderate prices in the local papers. She had posts in a number of local schools and was clearly a gifted teacher. Less than a decade later, she was named Officier d’Académie, as part of the prestigious Palmes académiques, a national order given for distinguished service to education. This was unusual for a non-French person.

News of the award made the papers in France and at home. In February 1920, the Cork Examiner ran a photograph of her under the caption, ‘Talented Killarney Lady’. ‘She is Professor of English,’ the article read, ‘and the first lady in the United Kingdom to receive this distinction.

This young woman was already making a name for herself.

Three years later, she moved to Paris where she enrolled in the Sorbonne to study language and French civilisation. Given her academic credentials, it was not surprising that she would pursue further education. She rented a chambre de bonne, or maid’s room, at 64 rue Sainte-Anne, which put her at the centre of everything. The Opera House, the Comédie Française (the French national theatre), the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre museum were all within walking distance.

In the years that followed, she built up a wide network of connections through her teaching and taught the ‘sons and daughters of princes and kings of royal households of places as far away as Indo-China,’ one newspaper noted.

Her presence at the heart of Paris, coupled with her wide- ranging contacts, help to explain how she came into contact with resistance activity so early in the war. There were just three degrees of separation between Janie McCarthy and the man who established the Saint Jacques resistance network. She and Elisabeth Barbier were friends; Elisabeth knew Michel Louett, who in turn knew network founder Capt. Maurice Declos.

At first, Janie McCarthy might have thought the war was not going to last long. Paris, and France as a whole, settled into an uneasy normality during the so-called Phoney war (la drôle de guerre), from September 1939 to May 1940. There were little more than skirmishes between troops who, for the most part, stayed behind their respective defence lines. In May, however, any hope of a short war was shattered when German troops swept through the low countries. Millions of refugees from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg poured into Paris. Many took shelter in the Gare Montparnasse train station, a short walk across the River Seine from Janie McCarthy’s flat.

Drue Tartière

Drue Tartière, who would later work with Janie McCarthy in the Comet resistance network, worked near the station. She described the scene in detail: ‘The large, gray, dismal railroad station was a mass of misery. I saw grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their chil- dren, their husbands, and all reason for living. Some of these Belgian peasants would suddenly remember the many things they had been forced to leave undone on their property, the cattle untended, the dogs unfed, and then they would let out screams of rage and despair, which resounded through the big bare station.’

After the fall of France in June 1940, Parisians themselves flooded into the station in an unprecedented mass exodus from the city. Tartière was among them: ‘I noticed that as far as the eye could see the streets around the station were one mass of people with their belongings, trying to get on trains going anywhere out of Paris. The day was stifling, and there were panic, misery, and anxiety wherever one looked. On the road out of the city people were pushing baby carriages or pulling small carts, others were on loaded bicycles, and some were walking, carrying their children and their valises. Some were moving their families and possessions in wagons drawn by oxen. Farther on, we saw dead bodies on the side of the road, French men, women, and children who had been machine-gunned by German Stukas [dive bombers]. Cars were lying in ditches, overturned, and men and women stood near them, weeping.’

 Janie McCarthy decided to stay in Paris, even as many other Irish people joined the mass evacuation south. Ireland’s diplomatic representatives, Con Cremin and Seán Murphy, shut up the Irish legation office at the rue de Villejust in Paris and, with their secretary Ina Foley, travelled towards Tours. They were joined by Fr Travers, rector of the Irish College in Paris. He later returned to Paris and, with a janitor, kept a wartime vigil at the college, successfully batting off attempts to have the building requisitioned.

When Murphy returned to Paris briefly in late August 1940, he described a city that had a ‘very empty air’. The pop- ulation had dropped to just 1.4 million, according to a census taken on 12 August, down from 2.8 million in 1936. There was a heavy German presence, though: several first-class hotels had been requisitioned – from the Continental to the Ritz – and there were large numbers of German soldiers and officers on the Champs-Élysées.

Irish Legation

The Irish legation, however, was just as they had left it, with a tricolour flying outside, as Murphy explained in a con- fidential report addressed to Joseph P. Walshe, secretary of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, dated 27 August 1940. He went on to say that several Irish people had requested advice or Irish papers to avoid any difficulties with the German authorities.

It’s not clear if many, or indeed any of those managed to secure an Irish passport before the Germans began an internment campaign a few weeks later. In September, more than 100 Irish holders of British passports were interned at a military barracks in Saint Denis, a suburb north of Paris. Several Irish people were also held at a military fort in Besançon in the east of France. Helene Lee-Lynch, a 67-year-old English teacher from Whitegate in Cork, was among them. She had been in France for more than 40 years and, like many of the 2,000 or so Irish people in France, still had a British passport. While most others were released quickly, news of Miss Lee-Lynch’s detention in September 1940 did not reach her family until the following August, according to a report in the Irish Press. They made immediate, and ultimately successful, calls on the Irish legation in France to have her released.

So, for Janie McCarthy, her Irish passport was a blessing. Not only did it protect her from detention, but it also left her free to visit the barracks weekly and bring food and clothes to internees. Those mercy missions were not an organised act of resistance, but they were an early indication that she was planning to play an active role as the war unfolded.

Meanwhile, the nascent resistance movement began to slowly take shape. The Saint Jacques network – named after the founder’s alias – started the tentative process of sounding out people who would be prepared to help and, if the circum- stances demanded it, join in the fighting.

They set out a clear vision of the mission ahead. One of its primary aims was to gather as much information as possible on enemy activity and on the willingness of the local population to resist in the strategically important area from the Cherbourg peninsula in Normandy to the Belgian border.

There was also a need to organise anti-enemy propaganda as the Germans were masters at putting their own spin on events. The network would need writers, artists and printers to publish pamphlets and newspapers, and courageous volunteers to distribute them. Later, they would enlist pho- tographers and engravers to make fake identity papers.

 It also needed saboteurs who would secretly damage or interfere with as many enemy military posts and as much equipment as they could. Those working in German factories would later be instructed in how to put machinery out of com- mission or damage products.

For now, though, the focus was on intelligence-gathering. The new résistantes, Mme Barbier and Janie McCarthy, were joined by two others – Danish citizen Natacha Boeg and Frenchman Jean Albert-Sorel – as they embarked on their first mission: to gather and collate information on the movements of enemy troops.

Janie McCarthy was tasked with gathering as much intel- ligence on enemy rail traffic as possible, so she travelled north by train, two or three times a week, to collect information on troop movements and enemy installations.

She made an unlikely résistante. One surviving photo- graph, taken in 1920, shows a young woman half-smiling at the camera. She’s wearing a stylish blouse with a statement collar and her hair is neatly pinned up at the ears in a kind of faux bob.

There is no known photo of her during the war years, but we have this pen-picture from bombardier lieutenant Sidney Casden, whom she helped in 1943: She is ‘about forty-five years old, with greying hair. She is plump and teaches English’. She might not have considered that description a compliment, but it highlights Janie’s hidden strength – she was an inconspicuous middle-aged woman in the thick of a war being fought mostly by young men.

'The Irish in the Resistance' by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan, published by Gill Books, is available here:

 https://linktr.ee/irishintheresistance

Read More

• Irelands Luckiest Charm: The Irish Penny
• Joseph Cordner: An Early Irish Aviator
• Whit Sunday: Irelands Unluckiest Day