Almost exactly 80 years ago, Michel Hollard, a middle-aged member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at the hamlet of Bonnetot in Normandy. He did not know that he was about to save London from destruction by the Nazis. In fact, he was thoroughly baffled. He could not understand why the Germans were making slave labourers work on a construction site in the middle of nowhere.
In 1943, Bonnetot appeared to be without military significance. It is deep in the Normandy countryside, a place for making cream and cider, not war. Not being near the coast, it could not have been a part of a defensive line against the expected allied landing. Yet Hollard’s resistance network told him that the Germans were working at isolated sites like it in forests across northern France.
While I was staying in Normandy this summer, I became fascinated by the achievements of Hollard and his comrades. By ensuring that D-Day could go ahead, he helped bring the war and the Holocaust to an end.
And I had a moment of bafflement of my own. I did not understand why the British in general and Londoners and Jews in particular did not revere his memory.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Hollard was too old to fight. He took a job with a firm in Dijon manufacturing wood gas. The Germans were requisitioning petrol for the military, and his employer offered fuel from wood and charcoal to the owners of suitably adapted cars. Hollard realised he could use the excuse of sourcing wood supplies to escape restrictions on touring France. His father had been a leading member of France’s Protestant community. Hollard spent his family’s money on recruiting hotel managers, businessmen and railway employees, who could tell him about troop movements.
In August 1943, his agents’ information took him to Bonnetot. Hollard understood a trick known to every investigative journalist: if you look the part and walk into a place as if you have every right to be there, it’s amazing what you can get away with. Hollard dressed in blue overalls, found a wheelbarrow and walked past the sentries. He saw single-storey buildings connected by cement paths, with markings laying out the route for tracks. He bent down as if to tie a shoelace and took a compass bearing. After he made his way back home, he took out a map of northern France and southern England and saw that the tracks were pointing towards London.
By the autumn of 1943, Hollard and four comrades had cycled the byroads between Pas-de-Calais and Cherbourg and found more than 100 similar sites. They were to be launch pads for V1 flying bombs, the world’s first cruise missile.
His first attempt to warn the British did not end well. Brigadier Cartwright, the military attaché at the British embassy in Bern, was suspicious of the bedraggled figure who appeared before him. Maybe Hollard was a double agent, sent by the Germans to spread fake news, he reasoned. Cartwright told him coldly that His Majesty’s diplomatic service “did not deal with spies”. This wasn’t strictly true. Cartwright went off to run background checks with resistance sources.
Within a month, the British were both satisfied and terrified. They were receiving vague information about Hitler’s hopes for his Wunderwaffe, or wonder weapons. The sheaf of sketches brought by Hollard to the embassy in Bern proved that Britain, and especially London, was soon to be hit by a new generation of terrifying missiles.
The RAF responded accordingly and bombed the living daylights out of the targets. The V1 crews retreated to about 40 modest and better-camouflaged sites.
The V1 attack, such as it was, not only came six months later than planned in June 1944, it was nothing in comparison to the gigantic barrage of nearly 300 V1 bombs a day with which the Nazis hoped to pulverise London and strategic targets across the south of England. Crucially, the missile offensive was too late to stop D-Day.
Hollard did not make it through the war unscathed. He was betrayed, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp. But he survived and lived on into his nineties.
General Brian Horrocks, one of the highest-ranking officers in the British Army during the war, said Hollard was “literally the man who saved London”. In his introduction to the 1960 book Agent Extraordinary. The Story of Michael Hollard, DSO, Croix de Guerre, Horrocks made the unanswerable point that “many statues have been erected in London — the city he saved —to less deserving people”. That remains true today. When I walk around the capital, I see old monuments to generals from forgotten wars and modern monuments to the victims of fashionable causes, but nothing to honour a true hero.
With a bit of luck, we will soon undo the worst effects of Brexit and rejoin our friends and allies in Europe. That would be a good moment for the Foreign Office to suggest to the French embassy that London would like a statue to honour a man who showed that, even in a world that appears to crush the power of the individual, courage can still make all the difference.
