The lost SAS love story given a new lease of life

A few weeks after the 1944 D-Day landings, as allied troops continued their slow and bloody progress through the German lines, along the Brittany coast an altogether quieter war was just getting started.

At around 3am in the early hours of June 23, a small team of parachutists silently touched down in a field east of the town of Vannes, seven miles off course and far behind enemy lines. Led by Major Oswald Cary-Elwes, a dashing SAS commander, with his second-in-command Corporal Eric Mills and a team of three Frenchman, their task was to re-establish contact with scattered pockets of French resistance strewn all over Brittany. Following a German counter-offensive, there had been a worrying radio silence from them for days.

Secrecy was of the utmost importance. Cary-Elwes, the son of a champagne merchant who spoke impeccable French, was disguised in an ill-fitting suit and purported to be a shipping agent. Meanwhile, Mills, a far more conspicuous teetotal Yorkshireman who spoke not a word of French, was dressed as a peasant and pretended to be deaf and dumb as to not arouse any further suspicion.

To bolster the allied invasion plans in the run up to D-Day, the SAS had been dropping small teams across Brittany to help arm the French resistance and distract and disrupt the Nazi occupiers. Crucial to their operations were local agents de liaison, often French women in their teens, who carried secret messages in the tubes of their bicycle tyres and were adept at charming their way through German roadblocks.

Among them was Marie Krebs, codenamed Marie-Claire, a boat-builder’s daughter from Concarneau who was 19 when she joined the resistance and had been working tirelessly in advance of the SAS arrival. 

Courageous, charming and utterly unflappable, she became well known to many of the SAS commandos, including Major Cary-Elwes, for the ease with which she bypassed the enemy. She ended up falling in love with and marrying another SAS radio operator, called Georges Chamming’s. The pair married in a rushed ceremony in August 1944, shortly after her father had been killed by a German sniper during the liberation of Brittany, with Marie-Claire wearing a dress made from the silk of an old SAS parachute. 

Despite her years spent in the resistance risking execution or being sent to a concentration camp if caught, Marie-Claire’s father was the only man she witnessed die in the entire war. She later wrote of discovering his body: “A feeling that rose from my innermost being surged up within me, and I learnt then what real hatred was, a wild, uncontrollable hatred of war.” But that hatred, she stressed, was tempered with “an implacable determination to carry on the fight, until Nazism and all the poisonous ideologies like it were crushed”. 

Her story and the work she did with the SAS is celebrated in France. In 1964 she published her wartime memoir, I Chose the Storm, which proved a huge hit in her home country and led to her being awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur alongside a host of other accolades. But it was never told in English.

Then around 10 years ago, Marie-Claire contacted the daughter of Cary-Elwes, Clare Vining, and told her she would like her to translate her story. It is a labour of love that has taken a decade and one that both women have not lived to see come to fruition. Having completed an early draft of her translation, Clare Vining passed away in February 2020, aged 70, of a pulmonary embolism a week before lockdown struck. Meanwhile, Marie-Claire died in February this year, aged 98. 

This week an ambition voiced by both women prior to their deaths is finally realised as the book is published in English for the first time. “It means an awful lot to us,” says Clare’s younger sister, Catherine, who assisted with the final editing and translation of the book following her death. “I think it unlocks a lot of mysteries but it is also such a significant moment in the history of Europe and intersects with enormous world events. One of the things Marie-Claire said is they had a sense at that time history was being made and she wanted to be part of it. My father was the same.”

Until Marie-Claire first published her book in 1964, the family of Cary-Elwes (who retired as a lieutenant colonel) had little idea of his contribution to the war effort. Bound by duty, or Catherine suspects, a stubborn adherence to the Official Secrets Act, he refused to divulge almost anything about his wartime service. 

However, Marie-Claire’s book sheds new light on his remarkable involvement. Catherine, a 69-year-old artist and writer who lives in Oxford, was particularly struck by an early description in the book of her father, sporting a handlebar moustache, strolling down a country lane with a rifle slung across his shoulder. He was carefree despite the gravity of his mission, one which almost cost him his life. “We thought, this is not at all the father we knew,” she says. “That whole part of his life was a complete mystery to all of us.”

On the outbreak of war, Cary-Elwes had been serving as an officer in the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment and was posted first to Lagos as brigade major of the Nigerian Brigade. In 1942 he was posted to the 1st Army, which landed in North Africa and liberated Algeria. The following year he was recruited by Colonel Bill Stirling (brother of SAS founder David) to join the elite regiment. 

His mission in France in 1944 was codenamed Operation Lost. As well as establishing contact and helping rebuild the resistance, Cary-Elwes was also tasked with collecting maps of the ports in Brittany to examine whether future landings of troops further along the coast might be feasible.

It was exceedingly dangerous work, with Cary-Elwes and Mills passed between various families connected with the resistance who gave them food and shelter. A few weeks into their mission they were nearly captured when an enemy patrol happened across a farmhouse where they were hiding in the hayloft and opened fire. They only managed to escape after one of the patrolmen – who were all drunk – accidentally shot a fellow German instead.

They travelled either in the middle of the day (when the German occupiers were eating lunch) or at night – if in a car always with the headlights on as a code to passing RAF planes that they were part of the resistance and not to shoot.

As well as regaining contact with the main resistance figures, Cary-Elwes managed to resume deliveries of armaments and, it transpired, other unexpected essentials. According to Marie-Claire, he also telephoned his superiors in London requesting they send extra underwear, toiletries and lipstick to the female resistance fighters, who had told him they were running short. “Anything the women needed he got for them and so they were all very grateful to him,” Catherine says. “He was a gruff colonel but as soft as anything underneath.”

Once he had got hold of the requested maps, the pair were ordered back to London and told to follow the MI9 escape route for downed airmen, arranged by the resistance situated near Guingamp. 

At 3am they were collected by another young girl working for the resistance who led them across the heavily mined beach placing white handkerchiefs on every explosive laid across the path to show them the way. They were picked up by a motor gunboat and returned to Britain. Cary-Elwes even attended a party at the Dorchester that very evening. “I don’t think Bollinger ’28 has ever tasted so good,” he later remarked.

Operation Lost was far from the end of Cary-Elwes’s war. Two weeks later he parachuted back into Brittany and served in operations with 4th SAS in northern France and Belgium. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur, and was mentioned in despatches.

While reluctant to discuss his war experience with his family, he forged close bonds with those he served with – including Marie-Claire. He had hoped to meet her at an SAS reunion in France in 1994 for one final time but died of a stroke, aged 80, before he could. Instead, his daughters Clare and Catherine went in his place, and met the resistance heroine for the first time, alongside her husband, George Chamming’s, with whom she had three children.

“She was petite and had enormous fierce blue eyes,” Catherine recalls. “And she was a very definite sort of person. She spoke very clearly with clear ideas and told you exactly what was what. She was also very kind about my father.”

In November 1944, following the liberation of Brittany, Marie-Claire was invited to London alongside a delegation of resistance fighters. In her account of the trip, which has been translated by Catherine and also features in the new book, she recalls meeting local dignitaries and inspecting the damage of Nazi bombing raids.

She was struck, Catherine says, by the way the countries had come together to fight a common enemy and that is why, even towards the end of her life, she was so insistent that her story was translated for an English audience. 

As for the two families inextricably entwined with it, Catherine says, a bond has formed that will span the generations. 

I Chose the Storm by Marie Chamming’s (translated by Clare Vining) is published by Victory Books priced £18.99