page_title: Réseau AGIR
section_title: V-1 espionage
hierarchical_section_title: Réseau AGIR / V-1 espionage
caption_attribution_description: English: A World War II map shows the two areas where the Germans were setting up their secret "V" weapons to bombard England (right, center). These are the areas in which the Royal Air Force and 8th Air Force heavy bombers concentrated their bombs in order to knock out the weapons -- part of the pre-invasion plan. This event was given the operational code name Crossbow during World War II. The grouping (left, center) is the site of the Invasion of Normandy.
context_page_description: The Réseau AGIR was a World War II espionage group founded by French wartime resister Michel Hollard that provided decisive human intelligence on V-1 flying bomb facilities in the North of France. Thanks to Hollard's reports and information from his agents of the Réseau AGIR, the V1 launch sites located across North-Eastern Normandy to the Strait of Dover, were systematically bombed during Operation Crossbow.
context_section_description: Daudemard, an AGIR railway engineer at Rouen reported in July 1943 unusual constructions in Upper Normandy. Michel Hollard's report of September 1943 to the British Secret Intelligence Service identified six V-1 flying bomb facilities: "Bonnetot le Faubourg [sic], Auffay [sic], Totes, Ribeaucourt, Maison Ponthieu and Bois Carré".
  AGIR prepared a more detailed report in October about Bois Carré, which is located 1.4 km east of Yvrench, that claimed it had "a concrete platform with the center axis pointing directly to London". AGIR reconnoitered 104 V-1 facilities and helped pinpointing the Watten bunker, the first V-2 launching site.
  AGIR also provided sketches of V-1 launching sites such as one by André Comps of Bois-Carré. It was labeled "Yvrench B²" to deceive the Germans. "B" stands for "Bois" in French and "2" stands for the square root which in French is "Carré", hence Bois-Carré. Hollard had the site infiltrated by Comps, who worked as a drafter and copied "the blueprints"— a copy of the compass swinging building blueprint and the Bois-Carré sketch were published in 1978.
  At the same time, André Bouguet, SNCF station director and AGIR informant, noticed transports that led north via Rouen. The destination of these transports was the Auffay train station. With the help of René Bourdon, the station manager there, and his assistant Pierre Carteron, Hollard was able to penetrate a shed of the local sugar factory in which the transported V-1 were stored, hidden under a tarpaulin and made precise dimensional sketches of the devices. The S.I.S. found an astonishing resemblance to Danish Lt-Colonel Hasager Christiansen's sketch that he had made of an aircraft that crashed on Bornholm on 22 August 1943.
  Thanks to Hollard's reports and information from his agents of the Réseau AGIR, the V1 launch sites located in the North of France, across North-Eastern Normandy to the Strait of Dover, were systematically bombed by the Royal Air Force between mid-December 1943 and March-end 1944, as a part of the Operation Crossbow. Nine V1 sites were destroyed, 35 badly damaged and partially damaged another 25 out of the 104. As a result, the Germans changed their strategy and started building lighter and more camouflaged positions.
  In his book Crusade in Europe General Eisenhower wrote that had the Germans been able to develop their weapons six months earlier and to target Britain's south coast, Operation Overlord would have been near impossible, or not at all possible. Winston Churchill, in Triumph and Tragedy also paid tribute to the sources of the British intelligence and reckoned that "Our intelligence had played a vital part. The size and performance and the intended scale of attack were known to us in excellent time [...] The launching sites and the storage caverns were found, enabling our fighters to delay the attack and mitigate its violence."
caption: World War II map showing the two areas where the Germans were setting up their secret V-1, V-2 and V-3 weapons to bombard London. This sites were systematically bombed during the Operation Crossbow.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:04:18 17:27:36", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4049", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1881", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1440"}