King's Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, Britain

medal, ribbon and brooch bar (See) MODEL OMD 341

King's Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom awarded to Lieutenant Ernest Richard Charles Gimpel (1912-1973). The medal is unnamed. Charles Gimpel was born at Vaucresson (Seine et Oise), France in 1912. He was the son of the noted art dealer Rene Gimpel, who was also a member of the French Resistance and who died at Neuengamme concentration camp. Charles Gimpel served with the French Army during the Battle of France, was wounded and taken prisoner at the end of June 1940. In August, he escaped from the hospital where he was being held and reached Vichy in the unoccupied Zone. He then moved to Marseille where he began to collect intelligence until he was arrested by the Vichy authorities in October 1941. However, he escaped in December and remained at large until he finally found a berth on a vessel engaged on a clandestine sea operation in September 1942. He landed at Gibraltar on 9 September 1942 and arrived in London later that month. Gimpel was then recruited into the BCRA (the Free French intelligence service) and given training by SOE during July and August 1943. As 'Cercle' (his field name), the assistant to Andre Boulloche, General de Gaulle's military representative for the region designated 'P', Gimpel was parachuted back into France, near Lyon, in December 1943. He was subsequently arrested in Paris in January 1944 and, after brutal interrogation, was sent to the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and, finally, Flossenberg. It was from this last camp that he was repatriated in 1945. Gimpel, who later married a member of the FANY who worked for SOE's RF Section, died in 1973. The Department of Exhibits and Firearms holds Gimpel's uniforms and medals, including his King's Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom and his Legion d'Honneur, together with other associated material. (Ref: EPH 1762-1763; OMD 4202-4210; UNI 9797; UNI 10868-10869). The Department of Documents has a collection of papers relating to his service with the French Army (May - August 1940), the French Resistance in the Marseille area (August 1940 - September 1942) and his incarceration in Flossenberg Concentration camp (February 1944 - May 1945) comprising a ts memoir (9pp) describing his service with the French Army, the award of his Croix de Guerre and a period of convalescence in a hospital in Niort (May - August 1940), an ms account (7pp) of a Resistance sabotage operation on the Renault works at Billancourt in June 1944 (undated), correspondence including a reference for Medecin Capitaine A Legeais who was a fellow prisoner at Flossenberg (1942 - 1947), draft ts and ms newspaper and magazine articles (1940s), a certificate awarded to Gimpel's wife, Commander Kay Moore, for her Medaille de la Reconnaissance (November 1945) and a notice regarding his transfer to the Army reserve (March 1948): together with an ms note with a secret message dropped from a prison transport by his father, Rene Gimpel in July 1944.(Ref: 03/25/1).