INTRODUCTION

The Dawn of the Resistance

From a Spark to a Flame

On 18 June 1940, General Charles de Gaulle stepped in front of a microphone at the BBC in London and delivered a rousing speech, urging the French to resist Nazi forces. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and will not be extinguished,’ the self-appointed leader of the French in exile said.

His rallying call would later be credited with providing the spark that ignited a resistance movement not only in France but anywhere the Third Reich had boots on the ground. Few heard his speech, but news of it spread. People responded in myriad ways, depending on their circumstances.

Among them, some 50-plus Irish men and women would, over the course of the war, risk their lives to resist Nazi occupation. For the most part, they were ordinary people – governesses, teachers, gardeners, housewives, priests and nuns – who found themselves in an extraordinary situation and took incalculable risks to help another human being in difficulty.

Some took up arms; others gathered intelligence, sheltered fugitives, hid Jews, carried messages, committed acts of sabotage or parachuted behind enemy lines. Some of them even died for the Resistance.

Yet, few are remembered, with the exception of writer and playwright Samuel Beckett, who famously returned to France from a holiday in Ireland the day after war was declared on 3 September 1939. ‘You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded,’ he said. His work as a translator and intelligence-gatherer who went to the ‘edge of daring’ for the Gloria SMH resistance network is well known. When the network was blown in 1943, he narrowly escaped arrest and fled to the south of France where he, again, joined a resistance cell.

The heroic work of many others, though, has passed under the radar. Ordinary heroes such as Janie McCarthy, a teacher from Killarney, Co. Kerry, who joined at least five different networks during the war. She was introduced to the Resistance by her friend and student Elisabeth Barbier, one of the relatively few French people to hear General de Gaulle’s broadcast live. Barbier was so inspired by his passionate words that she resolved, there and then, ‘to do something’, even though scoliosis often confined her to achaise longue. She enlisted Janie McCarthy’s help, which explains how a teacher in Paris came to join one of the earliest resistance networks to establish contact with London.

General de Gaulle’s spirited message gave hope at a time when morale was at an all-time low. The lightning assault by German troops on north-west Europe had been rapid and devastating. The impenetrable fortifications of the Maginot Line, built in north-eastern France after World War I to prevent just such an attack, proved useless. Instead, the Germans pushed through the tough, forested terrain of the Ardennes.

Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands had all fallen. If the extraordinary evacuation of Dunkirk in northern France had not taken place a few weeks earlier, some 330,000 Allied French, Belgian and English troops might have been lost too. On 10 June, the French government fled Paris and, four days later, the Germans entered the city unopposed.

Demoralisation was complete. Although not for General de Gaulle, a junior French government minister and general who evacuated to England in early June 1940 to garner Bri