Claude de Baissac

Claude Denis Boucherville de Baissac, DSO and bar, CdeG, known as Claude de Baissac or by his codename David (born 28 February 1907, Curepipe, Mauritius; died 22 December 1974) was a Mauritian of French descent who became an agent in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He organised the important French Resistance network SCIENTIST, in southwest France from August 1942 to March 1943 and in Brittany from February 1944 onwards. His elder sister Lise was also an SOE agent.

Claude Denis Boucherville de Baissac
Born(1907-02-28)February 28, 1907
DiedDecember 22, 1974(1974-12-22) (aged 67)
NationalityFrance
Other names
  • Claude de Baissac
  • David
Known forFrench Resistance

World War II

His first mission came on 30 July 1942, when he and his radio operator Harry Peulevé were parachuted in from a Halifax near Nîmes to set up and head the SCIENTIST network. However, they were dropped from too low an altitude and landed badly – de Baissac broke his ankle and Peulevé was so badly hurt he had to return to England.

In the following months, de Baissac developed the SCIENTIST network in the Bordeaux region, receiving reinforcements in the form of Roger Landes (codenamed Stanislas, his new radio operator, dropped on 2 November) and Mary Herbert (codenamed Marie-Louise, his liaison officer, landed by boat on 8 November). Certain resistance group concentrated their efforts for a joint attack on the submarine pens in the port and other operations in the Landes countryside.

As explained by Paddy Ashdown in a BBC Timewatch documentary, due to "a Whitehall cock-up of major proportions", de Baissac was preparing to take explosives on board German ships in the harbour of Bordeaux when he heard explosions from the partly successful Operation Frankton. Had the Royal Marines of Operation Frankton cooperated with de Baissac, they could have jointly dealt a stronger blow, but SOE's policy of secrecy even from other parts of the British Forces prevented this.[1]

De Baissac worked closely with Francis Suttill and his Prosper-PHYSICIAN network in Paris, before briefly returning to London on the night of 17/18 March 1943 in a Lysander[2] to announce that the network had 11,000 men at its disposal.

In May 1943, Suttill warned de Baissac that he thought Henri Déricourt, a member of SCIENTIST, was working for the Germans just before de Baissac was parachuted back in at the full moon with new instructions. The parachute drops of men and supplied intensified, but on 23 June the Gestapo captured Suttill and hundreds of other agents and Resistance workers from Prosper-PHYSICIAN and other networks and attached groups. The SCIENTIST network was caught up in PHYSICIAN's fall and on the night of 16/17 August, Claude, Lise and Nicholas Bodington returned to England by Lysander, with Roger Landes (Aristide) replacing Claude at the head of SCIENTIST until November 1943.

In February 1944 de Baissac was parachuted into Mayenne with an all-Mauritian team made up of his sister Lise, captain Jean-Marie Renaud-Danticolle (codenamed René) and the radio operator Maurice Louis Larcher (code named Vladimir). His new mission was to amalgamate, arm and energise the Resistance groups in the region stretching from Caen to Laval. When D-Day came, he joined George Starr and his WHEELWRIGHT network in the south-west.

Family

After the war he and Mary Herbert married.

Medals/Honours
  • UK: DSO
  • France: Knight of the Légion d'honneur; Croix de guerre 1939-1945
gollark: I only have 19 (one nine) (9 (mod 10)) days to fix it.
gollark: OH BEE imminent certificate expiry.
gollark: What if Turing machine which loops forever iff the algorithm for determining whether an arbitrary Turing machine halts says it halts?
gollark: Or, well, can be described quite simply.
gollark: The proof of the halting problem being impossible is pretty simple.

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.
  • Guy Penaud, Histoire secrète de la Résistance dans le Sud-Ouest, Éditions Sud-Ouest, 1993

References
  1. "The Most Courageous Raid of WWII". BBC. Retrieved 1 November 2011.
  2. Hugh Verity, We landed by moonlight (as the book does not give a precise date for his return to France, Claude de Baissac must have been parachuted in)
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