18. The High Cost Paid by Spies for Information
Operation Sussex spies tracked the movements of the Panzer Lehr Division, one of Germany’s best formations. Between air strikes called down from the skies and sabotage by Resistance operatives on the ground, the division was prevented from arriving on time to thwart the Allied landings on June 6th, 1944. Sussex spies continued to track the Panzer Lehr until late July, when it was virtually annihilated in Operation Cobra, the Allied breakout from Normandy. As Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, put it: “As long as we had the Sussex teams ahead of us it was like we had a brightly lit path, but beyond it was like advancing into a dark tunnel“. It was a highly hazardous existence, however, with potential doom at any moment. Such was the fate of Evyelyne Clopet. After she parachuted into Nazi-held territory, her Sussex team set up an intelligence-gathering network in central France.
The spies contacted Resistance agents, and connected them with Allied intelligence. By early August, information supplied by Sussex spies had helped the Allied break through German defenses, burst out of Normandy, and storm through France en route to eventual victory. Clopet would not live to see the final triumph, however. On August 8th, she and five other Sussex spies, disguised as laborers, were stopped at a roadblock in a stolen German army truck. Discovered among their possessions were clandestine radio transmitters and equipment. One Sussex agent jumped off the truck and managed to escape amidst a hail of gunfire. Clopet and the others were captured, however. All were savagely interrogated by the Germans, tortured, and eventually shot. Martyred at age twenty two, Clopet’s name was inscribed in war memorials in Casablanca, Loir-et-Cher, and the Tempsford Memorial in Bedfordshire. A street in her hometown of Pornic is also named after her.
