Pierre Yves Marie Hentic (2 April 1917 - 12 March 2004). codename "Maho", was a French intelligence agent, Resistance organiser, and army officer. He ran the air and sea operations of the Jade-Fitzroy and Jade-Amicol networks for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in France during World War II.
Hentic was born at 110 rue Orfila, 20th arrondissement of Paris to a Breton mother and an unknown father. He was educated at Saint-Nicolas d'Issy-les-Moulineaux. About the age of ten, he rejoined his mother, who worked for the Costa de Beauregard family. Placed with a foster family, he gained his primary school certificate and joined L'École de Pupilles de la Marine in Brest, a military-linked state school for orphans. He stayed on to train as an officer but in the changing 1930s was involved in left-wing agitation for which he was confined to crew quarters. Released to civilian life, he worked as a laboratory technician at Établissements Darrasses, a pharmaceutical company, and educated himself privately while campaigning for the young communists. His mother died in 1935. He was dissuaded from joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War by a Soviet friend. In 1936, he was conscripted into the 27th Chasseurs Alpins [Alpine hunters], where he met future resistance colleague Claude Lamirault. He returned to his laboratory work but was recalled to the Chasseurs Alpins on the outbreak of World War II. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Posted to the Franco-Italian border as a scout skier and then Norway, his unit suffered under Luftwaffe attacks in the north and he returned to France via Scotland. After the invasion of France, he went to Bordeaux and Marseille to continue the fight but when the armistice was signed he returned to his job at Établissements Darrasses. Keen to resist the Nazis, he learned about escapees to England on fishing boats from a cousin in Bretagne who laid plans before having to be sheltered by him when German customs found out. In February 1941, Lamirault's wife, Denise, told him of her husband's SIS mission and that he wanted Hentic by his side. He agreed. [1] [2] [4]
Lamirault's network was Jade-Fitzroy. After almost a year of activity, Hentic was arrested twice at the beginning of 1942; the first time was with Lamirault's brother-in-law, Bernard Rousselot, with whom he was to deliver a courier before being stopped and questioned ineffectively by German sentries; the second time he was driving alone, having earlier picked up Lamirault, but was stopped by two gendarmes who found a pair of Colt revolvers and British quality products in his suitcase, accusing him of burglary. He admitted being in the resistance, sensed their complicity and fled at speed. On the night of the 28 May, following Lamirault's suggestion to find horses to help extract a bogged-in British Lysanders that had just arrived, he was arrested at gunpoint by gendarmes. His attempted escape met with a rifle bullet past his ear. After imprisonment at Châteauroux he was transferred to Périgueux then Mauzac. At a Nazi tribunal, he was sentenced to twelve years' hard labour. He was released from prison on 16 November after the commencement of Operation Torch affected the outlook of military justice officers in the Vichy régime. Adolf Hitler dissolved the Armistice army ten days later. [1] : 77–84
On the night of 23 February 1943, notable for lapses by Lamirault, Hentic flew to England for three months' training in spotting, mark-up and encryption in addition to his parachute and radio transmitter training. He was dropped back into France on 27 May. He'd been given sole authority over the organisation of air and sea operations for Jade-Fitzroy and another SIS-led network, Jade-Amicol. As well as autonomy, he received a large budget and control of his own team of agents. Because of mistrust and personality differences between the leaders of Jade-Amicol on one side (Claude Arnould and particularly Philip Keun) and Lamirault on the other, Hentic was effectively a go-between, deciding when and how to satisfy each leader as he saw fit. His management was efficient: none of his agents was arrested during his own operations. Large documents were microfilmed and others sent as paper. Safe flights carrying intelligence, agents and rescued air-crew - typically using Lysanders and Hudsons - were completed on moonless nights, otherwise boats were rowed to small Royal Navy craft offshore. Between 27 May and 11 November, he made ten landings and over 20 parachute drops. Many evacuated Americans mentioned Hentic by his codename [noted as "Mao"] and lauded his efforts. Thereafter, "escape and evasion" training included details of Maho and other resisters. [1] : 90–93, 238–239, 404 [2] [4] [6] [7]
Arrests from the end of 1943 into 1944 permanently damaged the Jade-Fitzroy network. Hentic was arrested in February 1944 and interrogated over four days at "le repaire de Masuy" ["Masuy's bathtub"], 101 Avenue Henri-Martin; Masuy - real name Georges Delfanne - was a Belgian Nazi-collaborator known for brutal torture. He was moved to Fresnes Prison with regular visits to Rue des Saussaies for interrogation by the Gestapo. A red sign on his cell labelled him as "dangerous". He was transferred to Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp on 4 June, was isolated and then put on the train to Dachau on 18 JUne, where Lamirault was also sent. He was used as a construction labourer. [1] : 404 [2] [8] [9]
After the liberation of Dachau in May 1945, he rejoined the French army. He was the rank of commander in the British forces and captain in the French. In 1946, Hentic married Staten Island-resident Captain Dorothy A. Smith of the US Women's Army Corps, who had hand-written the reports during interviews of evacuated American airmen during the war and who later sought out the resisters to reimburse them. Also in 1946, Hentic was posted to Indochina; he learned that the British wanted to reward him for his service and gain information about French military deployment there, but his loyalty was wholly to France. He was sent on various missions as an airborne commando. Six years later, he was posted to Algeria where he trained paratroopers and reservists. He returned to France for medical reasons in 1962, retiring with the rank of colonel. He died in 2004. [1] : 470–471 [6] [7] [10]
Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur [11] 
Croix du combattant volontaire [11] 
Médaille de la Résistance française [11] 
Croix de guerre 1939-1945 [11] with 13 citations. [12] 
Croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures [11] 
Croix de la Valeur militaire [11] 
Order of the British Empire [12] 
Medal of Freedom with palm [12] 
Pierre Brossolette was a French journalist, left-wing politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II. He ran an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance at the Rue de la Pompe, before serving as a liaison officer in London, where he also was a radio anchor for the BBC. Arrested in Brittany as he was trying to reach the UK on a mission back from France alongside Émile Bollaert, Brossolette was taken into custody by the Sicherheitsdienst. He committed suicide by jumping out of a window at their headquarters on 84 Avenue Foch in Paris as he feared he would reveal the lengths of French Resistance networks under torture; he died of his wounds at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital later that day. In 2015, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon with national honours at the request of President François Hollande, alongside politician Jean Zay and fellow Resistance members Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz.
The SOE F Section timeline lists the significant events in the history of Section F of the Special Operations Executive. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a clandestine organization of the United Kingdom during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. Section F was responsible for many of SOE's activities in France which was occupied by Nazi Germany.
Michel Hollard was a French engineer and member of the French Resistance who founded the espionage group Réseau AGIR during the Second World War.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the leader of the French Resistance network "Alliance", under the code name "Hérisson" ("Hedgehog") after the arrest of its former leader, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau (“Navarre”), during the German military administration in occupied France during World War II.
The Brutus Network was a French Resistance movement during World War II. It was founded in 1941 by Pierre Fourcaud, parachuted in France with instructions from Charles de Gaulle to set up an intelligence network, and other socialist members of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), from the Bouches-du-Rhône department in the Southern Zone, and led by Félix Gouin. As soon as July 1941, the network almost became the armed wing of the Comité d'action socialiste, of which Félix Gouin had been a co-founder, along with Daniel Mayer. The CAS delegate Eugène Thomas became the leader of the Brutus Network after the arrest of Pierre Fourcaud and the departure of his brother, Jean Fourcaud, for London.
André Girard was a French painter, poster-maker and Resistance worker. During the Second World War he founded and headed the CARTE network, also taking "Carte" as his personal codename.
Robert Alesch was a Catholic priest and collaborator with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
The Réseau AGIR was a World War II espionage group founded by French wartime resister Michel Hollard that provided decisive human intelligence on V-1 flying bomb facilities in the North of France. Thanks to Hollard's reports and information from his agents of the Réseau AGIR, the V1 launch sites located across North-Eastern Normandy to the Strait of Dover, were systematically bombed during Operation Crossbow.
Marcel Clech was a French agent in the French section of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. He was sent to France on three missions and worked as a wireless operator in three different networks before his arrest, and was executed at Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
Antoine Louis Avinin [aliases Albert Arnaud, Albert Anceau, Albert Audin, Talbert] was a French businessman, resistance fighter and politician.
The Jade-Amicol network was a French resistance network led by Claude Arnould and British officer Captain Philip Keun, created under the auspices of the British Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. It operated from 1940 to 1944.
Claude Louis Marie Joseph Arnould, also known as Colonel Arnould, Colonel Ollivier and other cryptonyms, was a French officer, intelligence agent, resistance leader, businessman and diplomat. During World War II, he was the co-leader of the Jade-Amicol resistance network under the auspices of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6.
Gerald Philip George Keun known as Philip Keun (sometimes"Kane") was a British-born soldier serving in the French Foreign Legion, the French Resistance and then as a captain in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He was co-leader of the Jade-Amicol network of the French resistance, which operated under the auspices of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6.
Jean Dupouy, was a French insurance agent, a Catholic activist and a member of the French Resistance. He was executed by the Nazis in 1944.
Antoine Dieuzayde was a French Basque Catholic priest and member of the French Resistance during World War II. He founded a camp for youth education in the Pyrenees and a Catholic youth centre in Bordeaux. He organised the reception of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and used his connexions to help resistance groups, particularly the Jade-Amicol network whose operations were centred in south-west France.
Claude Maurice Georges Lamirault was an army officer, French Resistance member and intelligence officer. He was the leader and joint founder of the Jade-Fitzroy resistance network with Pierre Hentic.
Gilberte Louise Champion was a Postes, télégraphes et téléphones (PTT) worker and a radio operator in the French resistance during World War II for the Jade-Fitzroy network under the auspices of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). She was captured, tortured and later transported to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen concentration camps.
The Jade-Fitzroy network was a World War II French Resistance network created by Claude Lamirault, supported by Pierre Hentic, under the overall control of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). It operated from 1941 to 1944.
Service Clarence was one of the most successful MI6 networks in Belgium during the Second World War.
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