Radio Londres became Charles de Gaulle's political mouthpiece, writes LIZZY DAVIESin Paris
EVERY EVENING at eight o'clock, while the Blitz was raining down on London and the Nazis were claiming Paris as their own, Franck Bauer took his position behind the microphone at the BBC. "Ici Londres. Les Francais parlent aux Francais,"he would say.
“This is London. The French talk to the French.” His words, broadcast from a little studio in the heart of allied territory, were sent across the channel and heard by supporters of the Resistance in every corner of wartime France, becoming ingrained in the memories of listeners as a message of solidarity and hope.
Now, more than six decades after they presented their final programme, the team of Frenchmen and women who fought the war of the airwaves against Nazism and collaboration are being remembered in their home country.
Last week, 90-year-old Bauer took part in a ceremony in south-western Paris to pay tribute to Charles de Gaulle’s political mouthpiece and unveil a plaque in memory of Radio Londres.
For Bauer, who was 21 when he was recruited by de Gaulle’s spokesman to join the ragtag team of Free French members turned DJs, it was a fitting commemoration for a service that played a pivotal role in keeping alive the morale of an occupied nation.
“Our role was very important, very important indeed,” he said.
“The role of information in the war was very important because we were listened to by millions of people every night. So I presume we were doing a pretty good job.”
Bauer had fled France in 1940, leaving his hometown of Troyes on bicycle and arriving in Liverpool on board a ship several days later.
He had not heard of the lofty military exile who had declared himself leader of the Free French Forces in London, but before long was working as a presenter on the radio station that broadcast de Gaulle’s speeches – most notably the appeal of June 18th, in which he urged his fellow countrymen to join the Resistance.
As well as spreading the general’s message of defiance, Radio Londres actively helped the Maquis, the resistance guerrillas in France, with a series of “personal messages” broadcast every night.
These sentences – coded intelligence advising on sabotage attacks or enemy positions – became a beloved fixture of listeners’ evenings. By June 1944, hundreds of messages were read out every evening.
“The postman has fallen asleep,” read one. “Grandma is eating our sweets,” said another.
On the eve of the D-Day landings in June 1944, a presenter read out Charles Trenet's adaptation of a Paul Verlaine poem, Chanson d'Automne (Autumn Song), to let the resistance know that Operation Overlord would soon begin.
Bauer has no regrets about fighting the war from behind a microphone and not on the front line. He is convinced Radio Londres did its bit in the war of communication against the Nazis’ Radio Paris and the Petainistes’ Radio Vichy.
"We had a slogan: 'Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est Allemand' [Radio Paris is lying, Radio Paris is German]," he recalled. – (Guardian service)