The man who saved London

Sixty years ago, an amateur French spy, Michel Hollard, pulled off one of the great espionage coups of the Second World War. In doing so, he rescued our capital from ruin and probably cut short the war by several years. John Lichfield reports on new moves to commemorate him

Almost exactly 60 years ago, in November 1943, a bundle of rough sketches reached the British intelligence service MI6 that were to rescue London from destruction and change the course of the Second World War.

The drawings had been hurriedly copied from a master plan left in an overcoat pocket by a German engineer who lingered too long with his newspaper in the lavatory. They had been smuggled across the Franco-Swiss border by a French businessman with no espionage training, who was the single most enterprising, successful and courageous spy of the war - Michel Hollard.

Although Hollard was decorated in the late 1940s by both the British and French governments, his story has been largely forgotten in recent years - partly because he operated outside the recognised French resistance networks. For the 60th anniversary of his most significant exploit, and the 100th anniversary next year of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, his sons and a French historian are pushing for Hollard's achievements to be rediscovered and recognised.

A French, British and Swiss television film is under development. The French and British governments are under pressure to salute Hollard in some appropriate way during the centenary celebrations.

And rightly so. According to the late Lt-Gen Sir Brian Horrocks - a D-Day commander and later one of the first TV historians - Michel Hollard was "literally the man who saved London".

The sketches that reached MI6 in November 1943 showed a launch-pad for the world's first unmanned weapon, the V-1 flying bomb. They showed a launch site under construction in northern France that had, as its centrepiece, an inclined runway with guide rails that pointed directly at the British capital.

For six months, the British authorities had received vague information about a secret weapon that the Nazis were developing at Peenemünde in northern Germany. They had also received reports - from Michel Hollard - about mysterious sites under construction in north- western France.

The bundle of sketches, brought by Hollard across the Franco-Swiss border to the British embassy in Berne, were the last piece in an alarming jigsaw. They showed that Britain, and especially London, would shortly come under attack from a generation of appalling new weapons, codenamed by the Germans Vergeltungswaffen, or "revenge weapons".

The British reacted rapidly. From the end of December 1943, the 103 V-1 launch sites in France, in an arc from lower Normandy to the Pas de Calais, were repeatedly bombed by the RAF and destroyed or severely damaged.

A V-1 assault on England still occurred, the following June. The Germans built another 40 smaller, better-hidden launch sites, but these were soon overrun by the Allied invasion. The flying-bomb attack - intended as Hitler's trump card - came six months later than he had planned. It contained only a fraction of the vast barrage of V-1s - up to 300 missiles a day over a period of eight months - with which the Nazis had intended to pulverise London and other strategic targets in southern England.

The V-1 still generated something close to panic (more so than the original bombing Blitz on London in 1940-41). The flying bomb, or "doodlebug" - a sort of early-day cruise missile - was a fearful psychological, as well as high-explosive, weapon. Its motor was timed to stop in the general vicinity of its target. Londoners, their nerves frayed by four years of war, would listen to a V-1 droning overhead, praying that the engine would cut out and the bomb drop over the next street - any street but their own.

If knowledge of the V-1 sites had not reached Britain when it did, the attack on southern England could have been devastating. General Dwight D Eisenhower said in his memoirs that a full-scale V-1 assault would probably have "written off" the D-Day invasion in June 1944. That might have prolonged the conflict for several years. By leading to the successful development of the later V-2 rockets, and even, conceivably, German nuclear weapons, the V-1 could have changed the outcome of the war.

The discovery of the locations and purpose of the V-1 sites in France was one of the most strategically significant espionage coups of all time, brought off by one of the most unlikely spies of all time.

Michel Hollard was 46 in 1943: a wealthy and educated man, a son of the French Protestant bourgeoisie. He, like many Protestants, regarded himself as profoundly and patriotically French, and, at the same time, semi-detached from French society. In 1941, he had set up his own spying network, independent of the Allies and other resistance groups.

His organisation - called Agir, or "Act" - did not rely on parachute drops or risky wireless contact with the outside world. For more than two years, it was almost entirely funded by Hollard himself. He built up a web of amateur agents - hotel managers, businessmen and, especially, railwaymen - in important locations. He toured France collecting information, using his cover as a successful manufacturer of car engines that ran on charcoal.

In the space of three years, he made 49 trips into Switzerland by cycle and foot - crossing the heavily fortified Franco-Swiss border 98 times in all - to convey information on Nazi activities to the MI6 representative at the British embassy in Berne.

He was finally arrested in February 1944, brutally tortured and sent to a concentration camp. He survived, and lived to the grand age of 97. His personal reticence - and the fact that he was not part of the official machinery of la Résistance that was mythologised in the post-war years - have allowed Hollard and his achievements to slip back into undeserved obscurity.

A French historian and journalist, Jean-Pierre Richardot, is now developing plans for a television film and accompanying documentary to tell Hollard's story. "Michel Hollard was one of the great figures of recent French history, one of the greatest French resistance heroes; one of the most effective, but also one of the most self-effacing," Richardot said. "It would be wrong to say that he has been ignored. What he did was recognised after the war by the French, and especially the British, and has sometimes been recalled since. But his saga is not known as it surely deserves to be known."

Hollard's son, Vincent Hollard, 74, now a leading French businessman, himself played a part in resistance activities during the war as a boy of 14 and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He said: "There were many heroes in the war, many men who behaved with inconceivable courage. And yet there were few heroes who acted so completely alone as my papa, so completely according to what his own conscience and his own bones told him to do.

"My father could not bear the German occupation, physically, viscerally. He decided to help the British whether the British wanted the help or not. In the end he was so prized by the British that the post-war French authorities came to see him as a British agent, rather than a Resistance hero.

"In any case, the 'official truth' of the post-war years preferred to dwell on what General de Gaulle's own intelligence and Resistance networks had done. My father did not demand recognition. He was never a talkative man."

Hollard did talk, at length, in the late 1950s to a British journalist called George Martelli. The resulting book - Agent Extraordinary - was published by Collins in 1960. The book, out of print for many years, has a dated, stiff-lipped jauntiness, but it gives a remarkably detailed account of Hollard's wartime career.

For two years, Hollard and his network provided the British with the fine detail of German military and industrial activities in France. In the summer of 1943, one of Hollard's agents, a railway engineer in Rouen, reported that a series of unusually complex building sites had sprung up all over Upper Normandy.

Hollard went to Rouen, disguised himself as a Protestant pastor and persuaded a pompous local official to give him a list of the building sites. Hollard told the official that he wanted to ensure the moral welfare of the conscripted French labourers and showed him a briefcase full of tracts with titles such as "Christian Marriage" and "The Scourge of Disease".

Hollard then disguised himself as a labourer and went to one of the sites at Auffay, just north of Rouen. He strolled in pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. At the edge of the site he found a wide strip of concrete and a blue string stretching into the distance. He noted the direction of the string, and when he returned to Paris, calculated that the concrete strip and the string were pointing towards London.

When Hollard reached Berne several days later, after another of his hazardous trips across the Swiss border, the MI6 representative showed little interest in the Normandy building works. His bosses in London took a different view. They sent a message telling Hollard to put all his energy into exploring the new sites.

Hollard's network mapped scores of works all over Normandy and the Pas de Calais. One of his agents managed to get a job as a site draughtsman and copied a master plan while his German boss followed his morning ritual of visiting the latrines with his newspaper. It was these sketches, showing a launch ramp and blast-proof missile store, which finally persuaded British intelligence of the imminent V1 menace.

A week or so later Hollard - once again tipped off by railwaymen - returned to the village of Auffay and copied the rough dimensions of a V-1 missile stored in pieces in packing cases in the station goods-shed.

Two weeks later, the RAF began to bomb the Auffay site and more than 100 others. Three months later, on 5 February 1944, Michel Hollard and three of his senior agents (including yet another railway official) were arrested at a bar near the Gare du Nord in Paris.

Hollard's son Vincent, despite the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and other awards given to his father after the war, believes that the story of the Agir network has been unjustly neglected, especially in France. "There is so much talk these days of 'the Froggies' and how yellow and ungrateful we are supposed to be," he says. "I shall not die in peace until I feel that my father, and all the people who worked with him, some of whose names we will never know, are given their due recognition."

Apart from his film projects, Jean-Pierre Richardot is pushing the British and French governments to find a suitable way to remember Hollard next year. One idea, supported by the French foreign ministry, is that the Eurostar company should be persuaded to name one of its Paris-London high-speed trains after London's saviour. As the French rail operator SNCF is the leading shareholder in Eurostar and Hollard's network was helped by so many rail workers, this would be an appropriate choice.

In any event, Lt-Gen Sir Brian Horrocks's words about Michel Hollard in his introduction to George Martelli's book remain as true today as they were in 1960. "It seems to me that many statues have been erected in London - the city he saved - to less deserving people."