ABSTRACT
Joël Le Tac, the member of the SAVANNAH team whom Geoffrey Appleyard had had to leave on the beach at St Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in April 1941, had got back to England via Spain in August after playing a key role in Operation JOSEPHINE B, an SOE-organised attack by a Gaullist team parachuted in to destroy the electrical transformers supplying the German and Italian submarine base at Bordeaux. The team, which had replaced a group of Polish parachutists who were originally briefed for the attack but were killed in a crashlanding of their aircraft, were initially daunted by the perimeter defences of the installation at Pessac, but when Le Tac joined them from Paris he quickly found a way round the difficulty. It was SOE’s first success in the field of industrial sabotage in France. It had now been decided that Le Tac should return by sea from Helford to build up an organisation through which further infiltrations and exfiltrations could be conducted by sea, primarily for the Free French ‘Service Action’ which de Gaulle’s secret service had set up as a counterpart to SOE and which, at this point, became part of a structure styled the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, or BCRA, under Passy.1
