Here’s the story of Dutch-Paris’s encounter with the legendary partisan leader Colonel Romans-Petit. He and his 4,800 partisans in the French Forces of the Interior rose up to wreak havoc in the German rear when the Allies landed at Normandy. From June 6 to July 12, 1944, they controlled a 2,000 square kilometer region in the Jura Mountains in eastern France, which they called the République de Montagne (Republic of the Mountains).

It just so happened that one of Dutch-Paris’s couriers, whom we’ll call Vermeer, was in Brussels on D-Day. The railway system fell apart almost immediately because of sabotage by resisters and requisitions by Germans, but Vermeer managed to make his way as far south as Lyon. From there, however, he had no hope of catching a train to Switzerland, so he started to walk. When maquisards (partisans) in the FFI stopped him, Vermeer asked to see their commander. They said he could, but it wouldn’t be easy and he’d have to wait in a hotel. A fire fight between the FFI and German troops delayed his departure. Finally he was taken in a car to an undisclosed location. They changed cars several times because of bomb craters in the road and other wartime inconveniences. The partisans delivered him to the gendarmes in the town of Nantua. By this time the local gendarmes had all declared their loyalty to the FFI. They put him up in a hotel for the night.

Vermeer was struck by the atmosphere in the region. He noted that there were no Germans to be seen, that the BBC Radio from London could be heard in the streets (it was a crime to listen to the BBC in occupied France); that young men in trucks were heading to the front singing patriotic French songs, and that official bulletins with news from the battle hung everywhere.
The next morning, his hosts blindfolded Vermeer and took him to talk to their commander, known then as Romans. He managed to convince them that he was not a spy but a bona fide resister on important business. While at the HQ Vermeer met an American liaison officer, to whom he gave the names and serial numbers of a group of American aviators who had been shot down near Arras and whom Dutch-Paris had just taken to Spain.

Vermeer was given safe passage and an escort out of maquis-held territory. Back in German-held territory, Vermeer got a lift from a journalist. He spent the entire time spinning a story about how pro-German he was. It worked well enough to get him to the Swiss border.

It wasn’t until after the war that Vermeer realized he’d been questioned by the famous Col. Romans-Petit himself.  In 1979 he visited Col. and Mrs Romans-Petit, who took him high up into the mountains to show him the site of the FFI HQ where he had been taken blindfolded 35 years earlier.