Claude Marie Marc 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 was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France during World War II.
He flew back to England when his network was betrayed, but returned to action in Normandy from February to August 1944, carrying out sabotage missions against the Germans after the D-Day invasion of France by the allies.
[1] Prior to World War II, de Baissac was employed by a mica mining company on Madagascar and at an advertising agency in Paris.
[3][4] In March 1942, de Baissac joined SOE in the same class of trainees as Francis Suttill, Harry Peulevé, and Roger Landes.
"[9] 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.
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.
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.
[16] 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.
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.
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.
[19] Roger Landes, Vic Hayes, Marcel Défense, and Mary Herbert (pregnant with de Baissac's child) remained in Bordeaux to continue working.
[20] 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.
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.
[24] 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.)
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.
[26] De Baissac's operations were carried out in an environment in which German soldiers were present in large numbers as they attempted to repel the invading allied forces.
The Germans commandeered the ground floor of the school, but de Baissac's people continued to operate out of a back room of the same building.
[5] In September 1944, Claude and Lise de Baissac were back in France, now liberated from German control, as part of the Judex mission which aimed to locate lost and captured SOE agents and the French people who had helped them.