Joël Letac

Joël Andre Letac (15 February 1918 – 8 October 2005) was a member of the Free French Forces (FFF) during the Second World War.

Letac played a prominent role in Operation Savanna and then in Operation Josephine B. He set up the Overcloud network in Brittany and carried out a number of operations. Letac, along with members of his family, were captured, interrogated and imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps.

He served in a French UN battalion during the Korean War.

He later had a career as a journalist and as a politician.

Joël Letac was born 15 February 1918 in Paris.

In 1939, Letac was studying law. Just after the outbreak of war, on 16 September, while he was preparing for the entrance examination for the School of Engineering at Versailles, he was mobilized. He requested, and was granted, a transfer to an infantry platoon as a reserve officer.

When France fell to the German advance, he refused the armistice and with some friends, including Henri Karcher (), went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The tiny fishing port in the southwestern corner of the Bay of Biscay was crowded with civilians and French and Polish troops trying to get away from German forces. Here, the fishermen used their sardine boats to ferry passengers through heavy seas to any of a number of larger vessels that had gathered there. On 24 June, Letac boarded the cargo vessel Baron Nairn.

Arriving in Liverpool, Letac joined the Free French Forces and was soon assigned to Captain Georges Bergé. Bergé was attached to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British organisation that had been created by Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940. The SOE was formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements.

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