Paratrooper prince helped to liberate France and was tortured in Indochina
Prince Michel of Bourbon-parma, who has died aged 92, was a scion of one of Europe’s oldest royal families who trained as an Allied paratrooper during World War II and helped liberate Nazioccupied France. He later suffered 10 months of torture by the Viet Minh during a postwar assignment in French Indochina.
Prince Michel, who received decorations from France, Britain and the United States for his military valour, was a businessman who, for a time, worked for Zodiac Nautic, the company that created the Zodiac rigid inflatable boat, initially meant for military use but now a favourite of rescue workers and sailing buffs worldwide.
He also was a liaison between French companies seeking government contracts in
Iran until the shah was overthrown during the Islamic revolution of 1979.
He was born in Paris and was an adolescent when he arrived with his family in New York in 1940, just ahead of the Nazi occupation of France. His mother worked in a millinery on 57th Street to make ends meet. Kicked out of a Jesuit school for disobedience – defending a younger brother from a priest who was beating him – the restless Prince Michel persuaded his father to let him join the US Army at 17. ‘‘I told my father I had to kick Hitler out of France,’’ he once said.
He was sent to officer candidate school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
‘‘After the ceremony, a man approached and asked if I’d like to join the OSS,’’ he later said, referring to the wartime precursor of the CIA. ‘‘He said I’d do a lot of travelling and probably see action soon. I asked about the pay, and he told me it was double what I was making then. I said ‘I’m in’.’’
The man was William Casey, who headed the OSS’ European Secret Intelligence Branch and was seeking people with language skills. Casey later became CIA director.
Michel received training in covert operations – ‘‘guns, knives and everything else’’, he said. ‘‘For a 17-year-old boy it was a game. I was enjoying myself and I was good at it.’’
He was then shipped to England and was assigned to Operation Jedburgh, a clandestine action in which the OSS and British special forces combined to parachute agents behind Nazi lines in occupied France. They became know as ‘‘the Jeds’’, and their missions were hazardous. As the prince later put it, 80 per cent of them ‘‘just disappeared’’.
On June 8, 1944, two days after the invasion of Normandy, the prince was part of a threeman sabotage team working alongside French resistance fighters. They blew up train tracks and electrical towers, planted bombs in cow dung on roads on which the Nazis would drive, and developed a miniature bomb that
‘‘For a 17-year-old boy it was a game. I was enjoying myself and I was good at it.’’ Prince Michel on life as a wartime commando
would go off in toilets, triggered by the flushing handle.
The three stole a German army vehicle and drove toward the German front-line headquarters, where they were confronted by Major-general Botho Henning Elster. They told him the Allies had 20,000 crack troops nearby and that US and Royal Air Force bombers were ready to bombard the Germans into surrender. It was a total bluff, but Elster surrendered on September 16, 1944, handing himself and 19,500 of his men over to the US Army and French resistance.
Elster’s surrender without consulting Hitler was a turning point in the war, according to historians, allowing the Allies to push through to the Rhine and Berlin.
Prince Michel was subsequently sent by the French authorities to what was then French Indochina, from which the Japanese were retreating as the nationalists of Ho Chi Minh were on the rise. He was dropped from an American bomber into the rice paddies of Hue in August 1945, in broad daylight. He was immediately captured and imprisoned him until June the following year.
He and his fellow captives were once put before a firing squad, which fired a volley. The bullets were blanks, and the firing squad and local villagers burst into laughter. Those villagers were encouraged to stone the prisoners or beat them with sticks. Prince Michel recalled that one of his comrades who tried to escape was eaten by a tiger. He was eventually released after France reached a temporary ceasefire with Ho.
Michel Marie Xavier Valdemar Georges Robert Karl Aymard of Bourbon-parma traced his lineage through the house of Bourbon, which was founded in the 10th century. His mother, Princess Margrethe, was a granddaughter of Denmark’s King Christian IX. His father was a propane gas manufacturer and a descendant of the Danish, Austrian and Romanian royal families. Michel’s second cousin was Prince Philip Mountbatten, later the Duke of Edinburgh. He attended Philip’s wedding to Princess Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey in 1947 after being freed from Indochina.
After embarking on a postwar business career, he divided his time between a home in Palm Beach and one in France, and took up motor racing. In 1964, driving a Ferrari 250 GTO, he finished second in the Tour de France automobile race, and competed twice at Le Mans.
As a spectator at a Formula 1 race in Monaco in 1967, Prince Michel ran on to the track to pull injured Italian driver Lorenzo Bandini from his burning car. Bandini died three days later. The prince then helped lead efforts to improve safety at racetracks.
His first marriage, to Princess Yolande de Broglie-revel, ended in divorce. In 2003, he married Princess Maria Pia of Savoy, a daughter of King Umberto II of Italy and the ex-wife of Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia.
Prince Michel had five children with his first wife, two of whom died before him, and a daughter from another relationship. –