World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseCommander Robert Meynier was the captain of the French Navy submarine Le Glorieux during WW2. He disobeyed his superior's orders to scuttle his vessel at Toulon, France and set sail out of the harbor. After sinking a German and an Italian submarine, he successfully brought the submarine to Casablanca, French Morocco. For that action, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He married Katiou Meynier, daughter of an influential politician related to the royal family of Annam. Having been relocated to Chongqing, China in 1943, he and his wife became Henri Giraud's intelligence chiefs in China and French Indochina, running an operation nicknamed the Meynier Group. The group provided, among other things, Japanese convoy movement information to the United States Navy, some of which resulted in successful attacks. In Jan 1945, for example, a lighthouse keeper loyal to Katiou Meynier reported the arrival of a Japanese convoy about 26 ships in size in Cam Ranh Bay, and she reported this to US Navy's Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization (SACO); acting on this information, on 12 Jan 1945 US Navy Task Force 38 launched a large-scale carrier attack that found no convoy in Cam Ranh Bay but sank 44 ships in the surrounding waters, including 12 Japanese Navy vessels. Political in-fighting between Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle slowly turned in de Gaulle's favor, which gradually made Giraud's intelligence network, thus the Meyniers, irrelevant, as de Gaulle had his own intelligence network in China, the French Military Mission, under the command of Ambassador and General Zivony Peshkov. Growing sick of politics and unable to improve the situation, the Meyniers held bitter-sweet emotions when they were recalled back to France per orders to de Gaulle in the summer of 1944.