Meynier group

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The Meynier Group (alias: L'Etat-major ) was a Franco-Vietnamese spy network in Japanese- occupied French Indochina during the Second World War , which was headed by Robert Meynier and his wife Katiou Meynier from Chongqing, China .

founding

Robert Meynier (born 1906) was a successful submarine commander in the French Navy . In November 1942 he refused to carry out the Vichy Admiralty's order to submerge itself ; Instead, he broke out of the port of Toulon with his submarine Le Glorieux , fled to French North Africa , where he placed himself under the command of General Giraud . In May 1943, Giraud introduced him to the US Navy agent Milton E. Miles , who, together with the notorious Tai Li, ran the SACO (an American-Chinese secret service cooperation ) in Chongqing.

Commandant Meynier was especially important to the Allies because of his wife: "Princess" Katiou Meynier was the daughter of a Vietnamese nobleman and his French wife. Her uncle was the former Viceroy of Tonkin and a member of the Imperial Privy Council; she thus had access to the highest political and social circles in Vietnam. At the time her husband switched sides, however, she was in mainland France and was subsequently imprisoned. As part of a commando operation , she was freed from a prison camp in mid-1943 by American OSS agents, British SOE special units and French Resistance fighters , and several British and French were killed.

Robert Meynier had meanwhile recruited several French officers with Indochina experience as well as some Vietnamese colonial soldiers stationed in North Africa for the company. The group was trained by the OSS in Algiers and then brought to China via Washington (where they presumably received a code key ) in July 1943 . To deceive the allies, it was alleged that Robert Meynier was supposed to carry out a special OSS Navy mission in the Philippines. His wife followed him under the name Paula Martin as an alleged member of the Women's Army Corps , who was unable to speak due to a larynx (to hide her poor English). In Calcutta she was reunited with her husband, after which she went to China via " The Hump ". In August 1943, the group was assembled in Chongqing.

Giraudists against Gaullists

The power struggle between General Giraud and General de Gaulle , who both claimed supreme command over the Free French forces, continued despite the establishment of a joint government in exile . Both parties maintained their own intelligence services and agent networks, with the Gaullists supported by the British and the Giraudists by the Americans.

When the Meyniers arrived in Chongqing, they found that the Gaullists had already set up an official French military mission there under Zinovi Pechkoff (de Gaulle's representative at Chiang Kai-shek ) and his chief of staff, Colonel Louis Emblanc . Pechkoff asked Meynier to submit to him and to hand over the codes, which Meynier refused as a staunch Giraudist. There were now two competing French intelligence groups in the Far East, with Meynier being supported by the SACO under Tai Li and Miles.

The Meyniers recruited a number of Vietnamese living in southern China and made contact with their Vietnamese relatives and colonial officials in Hanoi they knew . A member of the Meynier group, the Catholic priest Père Bec , traveled across the land border to Tonkin and tried to track down crashed Allied pilots. Madame Meynier also managed to establish a connection with members of the Decoux administration, which ruled under Japanese military supervision. The Gaullist military mission then tried to discredit the Meyniers as Vichy sympathizers, but this backfired: In early 1944, Tai Li forced the military mission to close its communication channels to Indochina.

In Europe, however, de Gaulle had won the power struggle in November 1943; by April 1944 Giraud lost both all offices and his US support. Milton Miles, too, had meanwhile been recalled by OSS chief Donovan . The Meynier group was ultimately forced to submit to the military mission. De Gaulle, however, doubted her loyalty, especially Katiou Meynier was suspected of sympathizing with the Vietnamese independence movement because of her origin and contacts. The Gaullists and British also blamed the Meyniers for their losses during the liberation of the prisoners, because the OSS and Giraud had deliberately withheld information from them in the run-up to the mission in order to keep de Gaulle's intelligence service BCRA in the dark. Since General Eugène Mordant , who was stationed in Indochina, had also secretly defected at the beginning of 1944 and was now providing de Gaulle with information, he was no longer of any use for the much more ineffective Meynier group. In the summer of 1944, Robert Meynier was finally ordered to return to Europe.

Reporting of Japanese fleet movements

Due to the internal French power struggle, the Meynier group had made little progress in Indochina and obtained almost no usable information.

Three Japanese tankers burning in Cam Ranh Bay during the attack

However, she had brought a number of lighthouse keepers and port officials on her side, who informed her of Japanese fleet movements along the coast of Indochina. In the first days of January 1945 Katiou Meynier received the information that a large Japanese convoy with 26 ships had reached Cam Ranh Bay , where other ships were already anchoring. This message reached the US Pacific Command via SACO. The commander of the aircraft carrier fleet , Admiral Halsey , who was looking for targets for an already authorized advance into the South China Sea ( Operation Gratitude ), immediately took up the message enthusiastically. However, he wrongly assumed that the ships would be the remaining large Japanese warships, in fact they were "only" transport ships and their escorts. In the early morning of January 12th, American naval planes attacked the completely unprepared Japanese bases in southern Indochina and sank over 40 ships, including around 30 cargo ships.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ alamer.fr: Vice-amiral d'escadre Robert Henri Auguste Meynier (1906-1989)
  2. ^ Archimedes Patti : Why Viet Nam ?: Prelude to America's Albatross , University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, pp. 34/35
  3. ↑ a b c d Linda Kush: The Rice Paddy Navy: US Sailors Undercover in China , Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012, Chapter 18 ( Adventures with Pirates, a Princess, and a Priest )
  4. ^ Archimedes Patti: Why Viet Nam ?: Prelude to America's Albatross , University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, pp. 35-37.
  5. ^ Archimedes Patti: Why Viet Nam ?: Prelude to America's Albatross , University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, p. 36