Pierre Louis Le Chêne LdH

CdG CDG may refer to: Transport * Charles de Gaulle Airport (IATA code), Paris, France * Chandigarh railway station * ComfortDelGro, a Singaporean multinational land transport company * Shandong Airlines (ICAO code), based in Shandong, China * French ...

MBE Mbe may refer to: * Mbé, a town in the Republic of the Congo * Mbe Mountains Community Forest, in Nigeria * Mbe language, a language of Nigeria * Mbe' language, language of Cameroon * ''mbe'', ISO 639 code for the extinct Molala language Molal ...

(14 June 1900 – 1979) was a British-born French

Special Operations Executive The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British World War II organisation. It was officially formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, from the amalgamation of three existing secret organisations. Its pu ...

agent during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Early life

Le Chêne was born in

Brixton Brixton is a district in south London, part of the London Borough of Lambeth, England. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. Brixton experienced a rapid rise in population during the 19th ce ...

in 1900, the son of Achille Henry Le Chêne, a London-born civil servant in HM Customs service, and Louise Mélanie Ragot, born in

Réunion Réunion (; french: La Réunion, ; previously ''Île Bourbon''; rcf, label= Reunionese Creole, La Rényon) is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas department and region of France. It is located approximately east of the island ...

.''1881 England Census''''1911 England Census'' In 1922, his parents retired and moved to France. Le Chêne worked for a while at the American Express Travel Agency in Nice and Monte Carlo, where he married a Frenchwoman. During the German invasion in 1940 Pierre, his older brother

Henri Henri is an Estonian, Finnish, French, German and Luxembourgish form of the masculine given name Henry (given name), Henry. People with this given name ; French noblemen :'' See the 'List_of_rulers_named_Henry#France, List of rulers named Henry ...

, and his sister-in-law Marie-Thérèse, left France for England on the last boat leaving from

Bayonne Bayonne (; eu, Baiona ; oc, label= Gascon, Baiona ; es, Bayona) is a city in Southwestern France near the Spanish border. It is a commune and one of two subprefectures in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine re ...

. He served in the

London Fire Brigade The London Fire Brigade (LFB) is the fire and rescue service for London, the capital of the United Kingdom. It was formed by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act 1865, under the leadership of superintendent Eyre Massey Shaw. It has 5,992staff, in ...

. He then volunteered to join the

in the footsteps of his brother

and sister-in-law Marie-Thérèse. On the night of 30 April/1 May 1942 he was parachuted near

Loches Loches () is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department, central France. It is situated southeast of Tours by road, on the left bank of the river Indre. History Loches (the Roman ''Leucae'') grew up around a monastery founded about 500 by St. ...

to assist

Edward Zeff Edward Zeff MBE Croix de Guerre (1904–1974) was a British agent of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Early life Edward Zeff was born to Jewish parents in Brighton on 22 April 1904. He was educated at York Place Ele ...

in the

Lyon Lyon,, ; Occitan: ''Lion'', hist. ''Lionés'' also spelled in English as Lyons, is the third-largest city and second-largest metropolitan area of France. It is located at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône, to the northwest of t ...

s area, as a radio operator of the SPRUCE network, successively headed by

Georges Duboudin Georges Duboudin (1907–1945) was a French Special Operations Executive agent during the Second World War. Early years Émile Georges Jean Duboudin was born in France on 23 May 1907, the son of George and Adelna Duboudin. He married an English ...

and Robert Boiteux. He worked there for six months, often changing his place of transmission. In October and November 1942 several radio operators were arrested, and Le Chêne remained the only radio operator in the sector, however on 9 November 1942 he was located by a German radio-direction van, having transmitted well beyond the safe period, and was arrested by French police accompanied by Gestapo agents. He was taken to the police station in Lyons for two weeks, then handed over to the

Sicherheitsdienst ' (, ''Security Service''), full title ' (Security Service of the ''Reichsführer-SS''), or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization ...

headquarters in Avenue Foch in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

, then moved to

Fresnes prison Fresnes Prison ('' French Centre pénitentiaire de Fresnes'') is the second largest prison in France, located in the town of Fresnes, Val-de-Marne, south of Paris. It comprises a large men's prison (''maison d'arrêt'') of about 1200 cells, a smal ...

. He was the first British officer to be interrogated by the notorious SS Captain

Klaus Barbie Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was a German operative of the SS and SD who worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners—primari ...

, head of the

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...

in Lyons, but did not betray anyone.Nick van der Bijl, ''British Military Intelligence: Objects from the Military Intelligence Museum'', Amberley Publishing Limited, 2017 In 1943/1944 he remained in solitary confinement to 10 months, then deported to

Mauthausen concentration camp Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria, Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with List of subcamps of Mauthausen, nearly 100 further ...

, where he was subjected to the notorious “ stairs of death” in which prisoners were forced to climb 186 steps while carrying a 50 kg block of granite, leading to many deaths. After 10 months he was transferred to Gusen I where he endured even worse physical and mental torment: sorting internees for the gas chamber, mass executions, and accumulation of corpses. When he was liberated by the Americans on 6 May 1945 he weighed only 38 kg and was ill with typhoid. He was brought back to England and spent 10 months in convalescence.

Post-war

He returned to France in 1946 and opened a hotel in

Sainte-Menehould Sainte-Menehould (; german: Sankt Mathilde) is a commune in the Marne department in north-eastern France. The 18th-century French playwright Charles-Georges Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingey (1727–1800) died in Sainte-Ménéhould. It was the su ...

in collaboration with his brother Henri and sister-in-law Marie-Thérèse, and later another hotel in the French Jura. In 1964, he filed for compensation under the Anglo-German Compensation Agreement of 9 June 1964. He died in 1979, and his widow, Evelyn, subsequently added his French Resistance medals to her long-term loan of his other medals and items to the Military Intelligence Museum in

Chicksands Chicksands is a village in the Central Bedfordshire district of Bedfordshire, England, and part of the civil parish of Campton and Chicksands, whose population in 2007 was estimated to be 2,510. By the 2011 census the figure was accurately placed ...

Bedfordshire Bedfordshire (; abbreviated Beds) is a ceremonial county in the East of England. The county has been administered by three unitary authorities, Borough of Bedford, Central Bedfordshire and Borough of Luton, since Bedfordshire County Council wa ...

Early life

Post-war

Awards

References

Further reading