Pierre Culioli

Culioli was born in Brest in 1914 and in 1938 married Ginette Dutems, a mayor's daughter from Mer who died in June 1940, a victim of a bombing raid. In appearance he was unprepossessing—a small, slight wiry man with a nervous manner, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a toothbrush moustache, allegedly grown in derision of Hitler's own.

He was the son and the grandson of French Army officers and himself became a regular French infantry lieutenant. He took part in the disastrous summer campaign of 1940, and was taken prisoner; however, he was soon repatriated on medical grounds and following his wife's death devoted himself to anti-Nazi activity in the middle Loire Valley.

Under Raymond Flower, SOE's first organiser in his neighbourhood, he came to run a sub-section of the vast Prosper network that reached from the Belgian border to the Atlantic coast. His group settled in the Sologne, where it was known as the Reseau Adolphe, the 'Adolph Network'. Culioli posed as a forestry official, and settled down in a woodland cottage near Romorantin, now Romorantin-Lanthenay, in the Loire Valley, with his cover 'wife' and fellow agent Yvonne Rudellat (Jacqueline), who acted as a courier. They ran an efficient small circuit, preparing for an expected major Allied landing in 1943.

In mid-June 1943 they received a pair of Canadian SOE officers, John Kenneth Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, and all four of them set off on 21 June, in a car driven by Culioli, to catch a train from Beaugency to Paris where they were to meet Francis Suttill, who was by then organising the Prosper network. In the town of Dhuizon they were stopped at a temporary check point. Between Culioli and Rudellat on the front seat of the car lay a parcel containing incriminating material: wireless telegraphy equipment brought by the Canadians and unencrypted messages addressed to members of the Prosper network by their code names. The parcel was disguised as a Red Cross parcel addressed to a fictitious prisoner of war. The Germans ordered the two Canadians out of the back of the car; two Germans got in and ordered Pierre to drive to the mairie. There Jacqueline and Pierre passed inspection of their papers; the parcel was queried but not inspected. They were given a laissez passer. They waited in the car outside in case the Canadians also got free. There were shouts for them to come back, so they shot off, Germans following in three cars. They came to a barricade near Braciuex (10 kilometres from Dhuizon) and drove straight at it. The Germans manning the block opened fire as they approached, shattering the windscreen. Jacqueline, who was looking out of the rear window for following Germans, was hit in the back of the head. Assuming Jacqueline was dead, Culioli, not having his suicide capsule, tried to kill himself by steering the car into a wall but it bounced off harmlessly. Culioli was uninjured but was subsequently shot in the leg by a German while trying to get killed resisting arrest.[1]

Culioli survived Buchenwald, and managed to escape from captivity whilst being transferred from one camp to another at the end of the war. [lower-alpha 1]

In 1947-49 Culioli became the innocent centre of a cause celebre; he was falsely accused of having betrayed the whole Prosper network which had been rolled up immediately after his arrest. This was on the strength of some information Culioli had given to the Germans, which had betrayed about half the supplies sent to the group. Found guilty at his first trial, Culioli was triumphantly acquitted at his second in 1949.

He never fully recovered from his spell in Buchenwald, or from his post war experiences. In 1950 he was the subject of a book written by Abbé Guillaume, La Sologne au temps de l'heroisme et de la trahison which served to clear his reputation as far as the general public was concerned, and he became viewed as a war hero. He died near Blois 8 August 1994.

• M. R. D. Foot SOE: an Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940-1946. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984 ISBN 978-0-7126-6585-8
• M. R. D. Foot, Obituary in The Independent newspaper, 5 September 1994.
• King, Stella, 'Jacqueline', Pioneer Heroine of the Resistance, Arms and Armour Press, 1989