Posted on 01/06/2009 9:54:36 PM PST by nickcarraway
It's the kind of stuff you'd find in a good spy novel. But St. Johnsbury native Paul Cyr not only lived the life of a secret agent and saboteur during World War II but lived to tell the tale — twice.
A member of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS — America's wartime intelligence agency — Cyr parachuted into Occupied France in 1944 with orders to arm members of the Resistance. Having outwitted the Germans and the Gestapo, a year later Cyr found himself in China where he led an OSS team that blew up a railway bridge over the Yellow River — a mission he recounted in the Saturday Evening Post.
Cyr's journey from St. Johnsbury high school student to wartime saboteur began in 1938 when he joined the 43rd Division of the National Guard. When the Guard was activated prior to Pearl Harbor, Cyr volunteered for the paratroopers but broke his leg in a practice jump. Undeterred, he volunteered for the OSS because he wanted to "raise hell with the enemy." While training troops at Fort Blanding, Fla., in the fall of 1943, his application to join Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan's cloak and dagger service was accepted. Like many combat veterans, Cyr never shared much about his wartime experience, even with his family. His son, Tom Cyr, said over the years he only gleaned bits and pieces about his dad's life as a spy and saboteur.
"If you asked him directly, he would respond to you but otherwise no, he wouldn't volunteer information," said Tom Cyr, who lives in Arizona.
Cyr's story can be pieced together from his family, books about the OSS, declassified documents and his first-person account in the Saturday Evening Post, "We Blew the Yellow River Bridge."
Members of the OSS underwent months of specialized training as well as extensive background checks before being sent overseas on their missions.
Cyr was assigned to a Jedburgh team based in England. The Jedburghs were three-member teams comprised of American, British and French operatives who were dropped behind German lines. Their mission was a combination of sabotage, intelligence gathering and arranging air drops of arms and supplies for the French Resistance. (The origin of the name Jedburgh is unclear. There is a Scottish town of Jedburgh; then again the name may have been randomly chosen from a list of code names.)
As a member of Jedburgh team George, Cyr, a captain, and two French officers parachuted into the Redan area of Brittany on the night of June 9, 1944. Their mission, according to the declassified OSS report, was to assist a British SAS (Special Airborne Service) commando team in establishing a base of operations. To that end, "George" was to enlist the help of the local resistance and to arrange for air drops of arms and supplies.
The declassified report contains several pages of wireless radio dispatches from behind German lines to London headquarters. The first coded report is dated June 11, 1944, five days after the D-Day landings along the Normandy coast:
"4,000 partisans must receive hundred Brens, 1,000 Stens, 1,000 battledress. Situation hot will explode if arms not received. Contacted Fernand send him previous request, urgent, has lost everything … need 1 million francs. Please we beg you send equipment immediately."
On June 18, there was this dispatch: "Maquis (resistance) very important but badly organized and without arms. Zone strategically important to assure cutting lines of communication Brittany and ensure supply operations in Moribihan. We are traveling in civilian clothes in Gestapo auto. We will keep liaison with SAS. SAS able to arm maquis sufficiently."
Between June 18 and 25, the SAS base at Dingson was attacked by heavy German forces but Cyr and his team escaped.
It wouldn't be the last time the Vermont native escaped capture. Cyr, who spoke French, could mingle among the civilian population. His fake French identity card bore his photo and the name Paul-Louis Cartier.
On the morning of June 28, German forces attacked team George and resistance members at a farm in the village of Saffre. The following after-action report describes in part that encounter:
"As Jerry machinegun fire started to register on our headquarters and men were being hit, the confusion was terrific… . At this Maquis we had found three American and two British pilots who were at this time with us. The group we led numbered from about 40 to 50 people. As we left the farm an FM gunner was killed. Captain Cyr took the gun and carried it to another position, where soon German trucks pulled up within 15 yards. Before the Germans could get out, we emptied three remaining magazines into their Jerry trucks, this being the last of our ammunition."
Later, in the village of La Roche-Blanche, partisans provide team George with a safe house and a place to hide their wireless radio. Following an Allied air attack on a nearby train, the village was overrun by German troops.
"While the police and milice (collaborators) were searching through the public places and houses, Captain Cyr and Lejeune hid in a small room of the Hotel Martin," according to the declassified team George report. "On another occasion some excitement was caused by some countrymen discovering entirely by accident, our radio and equipment which we had hidden in a ruined chapel. As we were packing up to move to another area, a Gestapo car drove up to the crossroads outside the door of our house. We could do nothing but stand on each side of the door, our fingers on the trigger."
In his book, "The Jedburghs," author and former U.S. Special Forces veteran Lt. Col. Will Irwin described another close call at a restaurant on the Loire River. "One day, however, Captain Cyr got into an argument with a Luftwaffe lieutenant, and the men again worried about the American's accent. After that, Cyr wore a bandage over his mouth and the two French Jeds told everyone that he had been wounded. This kept people from trying to get Cyr to talk, but it also made it difficult for him to eat."
During his several months in France, perhaps Cyr's most valuable contribution was passing on German fortification plans on the Brittany coast, including the U-boat base at St.-Nazaire, to Gen. George Patton's Third Army.
With the help of a member of the Resistance, Cyr made his way through German lines to Third Army headquarters in Normandy where the plans were turned over to Patton. Cyr also got help in return. Team George had been out of radio contact with London so Patton's headquarters arranged for a large air drop of money, arms and supplies for the partisans.
"On Friday night, Aug. 11, the parachute drop from London came. Twenty-five bombers arrived over the Loire Inferieure and dropped nearly six hundred containers filled with seventy-one tons of arms and supplies," Irwin wrote in "The Jedbughs." Overnight, the maquis battalions organized by Jedburgh team George became much stronger."
Cyr and team George made a second mission to France in September 1944 working with other Jedburgh teams and with the free French Forces of the Interior, or FFI, in the area of La Rochelle and St.-Nazaire.
Next stop China
Cyr's job as a secret agent and saboteur wasn't over. Having survived the Germans, the OSS sent Cyr, now a major, to fight the Japanese in China.
In a story reminiscent of the 1957 movie, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," Cyr was put in charge of an OSS team to arm and train Chinese guerillas. Their objective was blowing a railway bridge over the Yellow River near Kaifeng in central China.
On May 22, 1945, Cyr and team Jackal parachuted 350 miles behind the Japanese lines.
"This was the first time anybody had tried to parachute into enemy territory from this base, and what the pilots knew of this target didn't fill them with happiness and confidence," Cyr recounted in "We Blew the Yellow River Bridge," which appeared in the March 23, 1946, edition of the Saturday Evening Post. "The hottest ack-ack (anti-aircraft fire) in all the China-Burma-India Theater had been reported around the Yellow River bridge. There were 1,500 Japs at the northern end with plenty of guns. There were guns along the bridge and there were more Japs at the southern end."
Cyr and his team dropped into enemy territory without detection but one team member suffered a broken ankle and the canister containing their weapons was smashed on impact leaving the men armed with only pistols.
Avoiding detection by the Japanese often required imagination. In making arrangements to fly his comrade with the broken ankle out of China, Cyr passed under the very eyes of the enemy hidden inside a horse-drawn bride's cart. Armed with two pistols, Cyr made his way past the Japanese.
Cyr's mission required the training of Chinese partisans. "I trained thirty-five men for rails and twenty-five for bridges," Cyr wrote. "We made 1,000 rails charges of TNT and made many more with Chinese guncotton, with old wicks for fuses, when we ran out of our own material."
The three-mile bridge across the Yellow River was considered a key target to disrupt Japanese troop and supply movements. On the night of Aug. 9, 1945, Cyr's team Jackal and their Chinese allies set their plan in motion.
"Soon after dark on August ninth our river men crawled down through the grass to their hidden boats and loaded the demolition charges aboard, with 100-foot fuses which would burn, even under water, for twenty-five minutes," Cyr wrote.
He continued: "Agile as monkeys, the saboteurs swarmed up the bridge supports, passing seventy-two packets of explosives from one to another quickly and noiselessly."
The fuses were lit and Cyr and his team waited.
"We didn't have an electric detonator for exact timing but we got the train just the same. It puffed onto the bridge just as we reached the bank. The locomotive was almost across when all hell broke loose. Six cars crumbled and the locomotive slid back into the hole where the inshore pier had been. The other cars were stopped right over another mined pier, in perfect position. Jap soldiers were everywhere, nineteen carloads of them. As they screamed and scolded and asked questions about the delay, the second charge went off, then another and another. The rest of the train, the soldiers, and that whole section of bridge vanished into the swirling river."
The number of Japanese dead as the result of Cyr's action was estimated at 1,800.
On the same day the bridge was blown, the second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese homeland, destroying the city of Nagasaki.
Cyr's wife, Donna, recalled her husband as being fearless, loyal and imbued with a lot of perseverance. Married in 1943, she said that her husband kept much of his wartime adventures secret.
"He really did not talk about that much," said Donna Cyr, herself a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, the post-war successor agency to the OSS. "We found out about reading the Saturday Evening Post and reading Esquire."
The very fact that Cyr survived the war still impresses his son, Tom Cyr.
"He didn't have much fear, I'll tell you," he said. "You can't do any more than risk your life. He fully expected to die in France let alone in China."
Tom Cyr also recalled how his father escaped the clutches of the Gestapo, which placed a bounty on his head in hopes a French collaborator would turn him in.
Cyr's heroism on two fronts wasn't forgotten, He was recognized by the French government, which awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. From his own country, he received the Distinguished Service Cross.
The village of La Roche-Blanche didn't forget Cyr and team George either.
While he was holed up in the ruins of the Saint-Michel Chapel, Cyr etched these words that were uncovered at the end of the war: "Mother of God, pray for us, protect us and give us the necessary strength to accomplish our mission." It was signed P.C. (alias Paul-Louis Cartier) American-Captain, Officer.
In 1990, Cyr returned to La Roche-Blanche to be honored by the village that sheltered him. His wife and family were guests of honor at a 1995 ceremony, a year after Cyr's death.
For his service in China, Cyr received the Bronze Star for meritorious service. In 1975, the Republic of China conferred upon him the Order of Cloud and Banner.
Following the war, Cyr moved to Gary, Ind., the hometown of his wife. He entered politics, losing a bid for a congressional seat. For a time, he worked as an aide to Sen. Homer Capehart, R-Ind., and then took a job with the Federal Energy Administration. He also maintained ties to his former OSS colleagues, including CIA Director William Colby and Gen. John Singlaub.
He died at his retirement home in South Carolina in 1994 at the age of 73.
Cyr was one of two native Vermonters to serve in the OSS. The other was Steve Sysko of Springfield, who served behind enemy lines in Thailand.
Contact Bruce Edwards at bruce.edwards@rutlandherald.com.
St. Johnsbury native Maj. Paul Cyr (left) and his Office of Strategic Services team Jackal sit on board a C-47 as they prepare for a mission in Japanese-occupied China in 1945. Cyr’s team blew up a railway bridge across the Yellow River as a train passed over, killing an estimated 1,800 Japanese troops.
I wonder how the Yellow River got its name...
Great Book On this and other exploits by John K.Singlaub “Hazardous Duty”
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