Joël Le Tac
Joël Andre Le Tac (15 February 1918 – 8 October 2005) was a member of the Free French Forces (FFF) during the Second World War.
[1] The tiny fishing port in the southwestern corner of the Bay of Biscay was crowded with civilians and French and Polish troops trying to get away from German forces.
[3][1] Bergé was attached to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British organisation that had been created by Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940.
The SOE was formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements.
[6] Savanna was a mission to ambush and kill as many pilots as possible of the Kampfgeschwader 100, a German Pathfinder formation stationed at Meucon airfield which spearheaded night raids on Britain.
Initial planning called for men to be deployed from the sea, but this was changed to a parachute drop that inevitably involved the Royal Air Force (RAF).
Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff objected when he learned that "what one can only call assassins"[a] were to be parachuted while wearing civilian clothes.
[7] Eventually, the SOE's chief executive Gladwyn Jebb persuaded Portal that Savanna should go ahead,[8] but the operation had by then been delayed by some weeks.
[10] Bergé took the opportunity to slip into the unoccupied zone of France to meet the father of a girl who worked for General de Gaulle in London and whom he meant to marry.
[7] Bergé, Le Tac, and Adjutant Jean Forman got to a remote beach near Sables d'Olonne in the Vendee to rendezvous with the submarine HMS Tigris.
Appleyard paddled three miles to the shore and, in a desperate bid to make contact quickly, he ran up and down the shoreline shouting and waving his torch until, at last, he saw an answering flashlight.
Also, the men who returned to Britain brought with them a mass of valuable intelligence about aspects of everyday life under occupation: curfew rules, transport regulations, rations, prices and examples of identity papers.
[13] In May 1941, Forman returned to France for Operation Josephine B, a plan to break into a transformer station in Pessac, near Bordeaux, and destroy it with bombs and incendiaries.
[14] The party, who had been trained and equipped by SOE, including – just as for Savanna – at Station XVII under CV Clarke,[15][b] dropped by parachute into the Bordeaux region.
[14] Having missed their pick-up to return to Britain, Forman made his way to Paris where he met Le Tac – he had been given a couple of possible addresses before he left England.
[14] On the night of 7 June 1941, Forman climbed the perimeter wall and jumped down into the yard while carefully avoiding any contact with the high voltage cable.
In less than half an hour plastic explosive contained in boxes and connected to magnetic incendiary bombs was placed on each of the eight main transformers.
[8][17] LeTac and the rest of the Josephine party headed south and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and then made their way back to Britain via Gibraltar.
[20] On 14 October 1941 Joël Le Tac crossed by small boat with radio operator Comte de Kergorlay.
This gave the stability needed to carry the heavy, precious radio set and it allowed Le Tac to concentrate on navigation while de Kergorlay, who had no natural skill with boats, simply paddled.
As the pick-up boats approached the coastline at 2300 on 31 December 1941 the sky was suddenly filled with rockets, flares and anti-aircraft tracer ammunition.
When they made contact with a canoe from the shore, it contained Yves Le Tac and Fred Scamaroni [fr], they explained that the earlier pyrotechnics had simply been the Germans celebrating the New Year which came one hour before midnight by British time.
Would be travellers gathered at the Le Tac villa: Joël and Yves Le Tac, Forman (Operations Savanna and Josephine B), Labit (previously twice parachuted into France), Chenal (lieutenant of the French air force), Peulevé (intelligence agent of Austrian Jewish origin) and Paul Simon (head of the Valmy circuit).
[20][3] The Le Tac brothers and Peulevé went back to France in early February 1942 but disaster struck and they were all in German hands within a matter of days.
He was deported as Nacht und Nebel – Night and Fog – a statute that required all prisoners held for more than a few days to be handed over to the Gestapo in whose care they would be executed or transported to Germany while their friends and family would know nothing of their fate.
