Marcel Clech
French spy (1905–1944)
Marcel Rémy Clech (1905 – 1944) was a French agent in the French section of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. He was sent to France on three missions and worked as a wireless operator in three different networks before his arrest, and was executed at Mauthausen Concentration Camp.
Clech was born in Brittany and worked as a taxi driver in Brittany before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II as a wireless operator. He participated in three missions: the first was aborted after coming under fire; the second involved assisting in the landing of SOE agents in France, after which he worked with the Monkepuzzle network; and the third mission saw him work as a radio operator for the Inventor network. The network was betrayed, and Clech was arrested and later executed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. He was posthumously awarded the Médaille de la Résistance, and is commemorated at The Valençay SOE Memorial in France and Brookwood Memorial in Surrey.
Early life
Marcel Rémy Clech was born in Brittany on 11 October 1905. He lived in London working as a taxi driver.
World War II
He joined the Special Operations Executive, section F, as a wireless operator. He was commissioned as Lieutenant in the British Army on the general list
First mission
On 1 August 1940 a motorboat attempted to land three French agents: Clech, Tilly, and Victor Bernard at Carentec in Brittany but had to abort the mission after coming under fire and returned to England.
“Marcel Clech” enters the record as french spy (1905–1944). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Marcel, Clech and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marcel Clech” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.